← The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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I'm Howard Mackler. I spent my career building companies that help businesses solve problems. Now I built super sure because I think business insurance is broken. Some brokers hand you a policy, collect their commission and disappear until renewal. Your business runs all year and so are the gaps and the risks for companies with 25 or more employees. Whether you're the owner, CFO or HR manager, super sure is built for you. We're licensed in all 50 states covering business, insurance and employee benefits. We with year round support for you and your team. You can go to supershore.com and use the Fine Print Facts tool which translates your current policy into plain English so you see what's covered and what's not. The business Value Calculator helps you estimate what your company is worth so you know what actually needs protecting. Go to super sure.com all your policies in one place. Go to super sure.com that's supersure.com you can thank me later.
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Paid for by Super Sure Insurance Agency, llc, a licensed insurance agency. This episode is brought to you by Starbucks.
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That is fire.
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Whoa, that's good. This might be the drink of the summer. Okay, I like this one too. I'm rocking with it. Okay, try it for yourself. Starbucks refreshers concentrates are coming home. Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours. Hi everybody. I hope you find this week's lecture in interesting, compelling and useful. I've also written and posted a diatribe against the climate change apocalypse mongers outlining the true ecological significance of industrial carbon dioxide production. It's not what you think. It's certainly not what you've been told. Anyways, check it out if you're interested. I think it's one of the better journalism pieces that I've written. I have been writing a bit lately, so I think that's a good thing. I hope you agree. Note the essay. The diatribe is available on X at Jordan B. Peterson and on my blog. If you sign up to my newsletter, you'll get notified of these essays early. You can do that@jordanb.peterson.com on with the show it. Thank you all. So I want to talk to you tonight about the the last part of the story of of Moses and the Israelites after the Commandments. And I'll I want to do that because. The story of the of Moses and the Israelites is an archetypal story. And what that means is that it's a story that has been stripped to its essence. The essence of the story is a story that is always happening. That's how it's true. It's true in that it happened and it's always happening, and it will continue to happen. And that's a very interesting form of truth. That's the truth of the eternal narrative. It's the truth of the story of the individual and man and God, always and forever. That's a good way of thinking about it. Now, there's a particular reason that Moses gets the commandments, and this is perhaps how they should be most deeply understood. After the Israelites are led away from tyranny and across the chaos of the Red Sea, they enter the desert, where they wander for three generations, 40 years, and it's not that long a trip, not geographically, but the duration of their wanderings indicate that the eternal truth, that if you're lost, it can take you forever to get to where you're headed. Right. It reflects also the fact that the fact of their sojourn in the desert also reflects something that's very much worth knowing. It's a crucial realization in relationship to individual and social psychology. We all face the threat of tyranny. That's why the story of Moses is a universal and eternal, eternally true story. Every person has to contend with the reality of tyranny and slavery. So, for example, you might be the slave of your habits, or the slave of your presumptions, or the slave of your pride, or the slave of your appetites. Those are all forces that tyrannize over you, but that you enable with your slavish habits. That's a good way of thinking about it. You might be a tyrant in your marriage, you might be a tyrant in your workplace. You might be a tyrant in your utterances on X. You might be a tyrant to your children. You might live under a political tyranny, and you have to contend with the fact of your own proclivity to slavish conduct. And so the landscape of tyranny and slavery is the landscape that everyone by necessity traverses. And the genuine leader, which is what Moses is, is the. Is the man who learns to stand up against the forces of tyranny, and who forever leads those who are enslaved away from the tyrant, across the sea of chaos, into the desert and toward the promised land. And the reason for that is, is that we're always moving to some destination that we desire. That's the journey of life, is to move from the state or condition that we presently occupy to the next highest mountaintop, and then after that to the mountaintop above that, and then past that to the mountaintop, past that and so on, until the journey comes to an end. And then you might ask as well, why do you cross the Red Sea before you enter the desert after freeing yourself from tyranny? And the answer is, well, when you're under the thumb of a tyrant, you're dependent and infantile and slavish and possessed of a false certainty. But when you abandon that or move beyond it and that all falls apart, you don't instantaneously find yourself with the habits of a free and responsible person. You find yourself in the chaos. That's the inevitable bloody aftermath of the collapse of a tyranny. And then in a period of chaos and confusion that can last for decades or lifetimes in the aftermath of that. And if you want to know why people are willing to be the slaves even of their own tyranny, one answer to that is that they're very loath to experience the Red Sea chaos and the sojourn in the desert lost. That's the inevitable consequence of moving beyond even the foolish assumptions of a tyrannical state. Sometimes before you move from bad to better, you move from bad to worse. And the fact that you can move from bad to worse before moving to better is one of the things that forever keeps you locked in the kingdom of what's undesirable. It's a great mystery, right? Because it's a very curious thing that it's unlikely that people will stand up against tyranny or reject even in the microcosm of their own life, within the confines of their own mind, within the strictures of their own marriage. If you understand that when you leave tyranny, you're lost, then you understand why people are afraid to move forward even beyond that which is not desirable or acceptable to them. And Moses is the person who leads. He's the embodiment of the spirit that forever leads people away from tyranny, across the Red Sea, and then through the lost desert. Now, what happens in the desert is that the Israelites lose faith. And what does that mean? Well, it means that when you're lost, it's easy for you to despair, to lose the faith in the future. That's a necessary precondition of the commitment to move forward, even to lose faith in the goodness of not only being, but also of transformation itself. A cataclysmic loss of faith. And the lost Israelites lose faith continually and in consequence. And they have the habits of fractious slaves. And because they were slaves for so long, they no longer know how to take responsibility for themselves. They're not integrated psychologically. They're not mature, they're immature, they're infantile, they can't regulate their own behavior. They're hedonistic, they're desirous of power. And they fight amongst themselves because they don't have the experience or the good sense or the wisdom or even the desire to adopt responsibility for regulating their own conduct. And that's part of the attraction of the hedonism that makes itself manifest in the story that I'll talk to you about tonight. And instead of stepping forward to take responsibility so that they can adjudicate their own conflicts, they call upon Moses to act as their judge. And that's how fractious, infantile, dependent slaves rekindle tyranny around them. And so they ask Moses to sit as judge. And he's already somewhat contemptuous of them because they're so faithless and hedonistic and immature and puerile and whiny and impossible to lead and pining for the tyranny and irresponsible. And he agrees to sit as judge. And the the Israelites bring their troubles to him from dawn till midnight for a decade. And all he does is hear their squabbles and adjudicate their disputes like the father of fighting siblings. Imagine your favorite lecture. Dial that up on Max, put that on steroids, and then add some cinematic elements to it. That's the best way I could describe a Peterson Academy lecture. I went to college because I had to. I go to Peterson Academy because I want to. I'm still paying off College from 10 years ago. And I'm also still questioning the value that I got out of college. In traditional universities, a lot of times it's just pretty dry. They don't bring the same energy as the professors at Peterson Academy. It is a completely different experience to learn from somebody who actually wants to teach you. If you've been on the fence about this, this is the time that thing that's calling to you, you won't have
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an answer for it unless you enroll and see for yourself you have the
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opportunity to investigate that calling. Now, you could understand that if you performed that role, as perhaps you do in your positions of responsibility as parents and in the broader community, that in order to render a judgment that holds, you have to abide by the principles of natural justice. That's a good way of thinking about it. So if I'm sitting as a psychotherapist and I'm speaking to two married individuals who are having a conflict and I'm listening to their plaints in order for me to mediate between them so that they can come together without further tension and turmoil, I have to render a judgment. Let's say, if I'm acting in the role of Moses in that situation, I have to render a judgment that they actually both find not only acceptable, but perhaps even desirable, which is a very difficult thing to manage. A judge whose judgment stands isn't someone who forces either party to abide by an arbitrary dictate, but someone who mediates the conflict such that both parties who are disagreeing view the new arrangement as preferable to the previous arrangement and to the conflict. And even perhaps, if the judgment isn't perfect, it will stand if they themselves can't come up with a better solution. And so now imagine Moses becomes the master of such judgment. And he does that for a generation. He builds up a tremendous amount of implicit knowledge about the structure of social, psychological and social order itself, and that sets the stage. Now, his father in law, Jethro, comes to him during this time and says something of extraordinary importance for the entire history of Western civilization and likely the world. He says, you can't continue to do this. And Moses says, why not? And he says, well, first of all, you're wearing yourself out. You're taking responsibility for 100,000 people or more, and no one can bear that burden and survive. And so it's not good for you, and it can't sustain itself. And so that's not acceptable. It's certainly not ideal, and it's not even acceptable. And then Jethro says, but it's worse than that, what you're doing, because by mediating the Israelites disputes for them, you take away from them the necessity for their own maturation and development. You leave them as slaves, and you're setting yourself up again as a pharaoh in the desert. And so he tells Moses, in essence, that the man who's supposed to be the prophet of God is being tempted by the. By the offer of power, and that that's a spiritual danger to him and a catastrophe for the Israelites, even though they might be happy about it, because it means they wouldn't have to bear any responsibility for determining their own way forward. And so Jethro tells Moses to have the people divide themselves into groups of 10 and to appoint from within that group of 10 the best person to represent that group, and then to gather the representatives together in groups of 10 and have them elect a representative of representatives, and to do that all the way up in groups of 10 and 50, up to the level of 10 thousands, and for them to mediate their disputes in accordance with that hierarchy. So if you and your wife can't get along, you can go to the local representative of 10 and perhaps he can render a judgment. And if he's unable to solve the problem, then he can bump it up the new hierarchy of distributed responsibility to his representative. And if that doesn't work, then it can go up the chain of command another level. And if it goes all the way up to the ten thousands and it can't be mediated, then Moses, who's the prophet of God, can step in and only then can he render a judgment. And that's. That is the erection of a distributed hierarchy of responsibility as the alternative to the tyrant and the slave. And that's the model for your country. Right. And that model only works if people take responsibility at every single level of the hierarchy. And to the degree that they take responsibility, they don't need a tyrant and they're not slaves. And that means that the absence of tyranny in your country and the absence of slavery is not a consequence of the fact that you have rights, but a reflection of the fact that you bear the responsibility for governing yourself. Right? Right. And the politicians who wish to turn Nepality into a nanny state that does nothing but cater to hedonistic infants should remember that all that does is call forth the spirit of tyranny. Right. And that's what happens in this story. So Moses is well prepared for the revelation of the law because he's put himself in a position to understand the structure of the law by rendering judgment in a professional capacity for. For many, many years, for thousands and thousands of hours. And he receives the revelation of the Ten Commandments. And the Ten Commandments are the law. And you might ask yourself, well, what is the law? And you could say, well, it's the word received from on high, and there's truth in that. But it's an incomplete truth because the law is also a reflection of the customs and the behaviors of the people, of any people who've managed to organize a mature self and a collective community that functions as a consensual structure across time. So imagine that as you mature, you move away from the demand that every one of your instinctive whims be gratified now to the realization that at times you have to forego what's of immediate value so that you can thrive and develop over the medium and long run. And so as you mature, you substitute your narrow self bound to the moment. You substitute for that the iteration of your future self out into the decades of your adulthood, and you make the sacrifices of your whim in the present that increase the probability of your future well being and continued growth. That's part of maturation. But that's not the only part of maturation. The other part of maturation is that you learn to take turns, let's say when you're somewhere between two and four and learning to be a social creature or a communal creature. And what that means is that you sacrifice your immediate demands for the sake of the reciprocal relationship with others. And then you could imagine that the pattern of sacrifice that serves you as an individual best in the future and you as an individual in communal relationship with other people is the same pattern. And that's the pattern of maturity. And that pattern of future sacrifice and communal maturity is the essence of the behavioral patterns of a sustainable, productive, hospitable and generous society. And there's nothing about that that's morally relative. It's very unlikely that that situation, balanced that well, will emerge. Just as unlikely as it is that you'll attain a continual state of productive and generous harmony within the confines of your marriage or your family. But that doesn't mean that that state has no existence. And it doesn't mean that the pattern of that existence is arbitrary. Quite the contrary. It means that the harmony that prevails between your current self and your future self and you as an isolated individual and everyone else is a. Is the straight, narrow path that leads up Jacob's ladder to the kingdom of God. That's what it means symbolically, right? And that's built into the structure of. That's built into the structure of reality itself. And the law that comes to Moses is an explicit representation of that underlying reality. And Moses has access to it. First because he sits as judge, and second, because in a burst of revelatory intuition, he can make explicit what up till then has only been implicit ritual and custom. The emergence of the law is the description of the customs and rituals that unite a society and that constitute maturity. And that's what Moses offers his people straight from the lips of God. It takes Moses 40 days to journey up the mountain and to confer with God and to receive the revelation and to descend. And during that time the state falls into the hands of Aaron. And Aaron is Moses political wings. So when Moses is called upon to be a leader, which happens when he encounters the burning bush, which is a symbol of life, it's a symbol of life and its transformations, he objects to the call telling God that he's not the right man for the job because he's incapable of speaking in a manner that is attractive to the public. And God says to Moses two things. Nothing is impossible when it comes to God. And second, that Moses inadequacy is no excuse for his failure to adopt the responsibility of leadership. And so. And that's the case for all of us, because you might think, not me, but.
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But.
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And you might have a list of reasons why not you. But none of those reasons suffice, not least because the abandonment of that responsibility, even in the face of your own inadequacy, is the pathway to slavery and tyranny. And so. When Moses leaves, so this is when God vanishes, right? Because Moses is the prophetic voice. When Moses leaves, the fractious slaves conspire with the political voice to regress into a state of materialistic hedonism. That's what the worship of the golden calf signifies. So a calf is a form of a calf in a. In a tribal community, in a nomadic tribal community of herders, wealth is flock, and a calf is a symbol of stored value. Do you have a calf? You have something to eat? Do you have a calf? You have something to offer your guests. It's wealth. A golden calf is wealth as such. And the worship of the golden calf is the worship of material wealth. It's the worship of the treasure that rusts on earth, the worship of the treasure that moths can destroy, and not the worship of the treasure that's properly stored in heaven that nothing earthly can demolish. Right? The worship of the golden calf that emerges as a consequence of the absence of the divine word mediated through Moses, is accompanied by orgiastic, hedonistic celebration. Because Moses returns to find the Israelites not only worshiping an idol, which is the idol of materialistic wealth, but also dancing drunkenly naked in a manner that makes them the laughing stock of their enemies. And if you can't see the relevance of that situation to the current state of the west, then you're part of the problem and not part of the solution. So Moses is enraged as a consequence of the faithlessness of his people. Now you have to understand, too, that the Israelites conspire with Aaron to bring about this state of worship. And what that means is that the political voice, unmoored from its concordance with the divine will, serve as the handmaid of the materialist, hedonist, materialistic hedonism of the masses, right? That's the danger of an unbridled populism, right? It's consensus to the whim, unmoored by religious respect for tradition and upward aim. And it's also the invitation to tyranny. Because just as the slavish Israelites attempted to transform Moses into the pharaoh, being unwilling as they were to bear the responsibility for their own life, so the hedonistic materialists of the golden calf worship look to Aaron to become the tyrant that has to regulate everyone if they insist upon acting like impulsive toddlers, right? Moses is enraged by what's happened and by the faithlessness of his people. And this is also reflective of something that happens politically. So you could imagine that as the mob degenerates into hedonism and materialism, the rulers called upon to bear the responsibility that the infantile rabble has abdicated, become increasingly contemptuous of them and more and more likely to tyrannize over them in a manner that is reflective of nothing but the power that's granted to them by the abdication of responsibility. And so there's a vicious spiral, right? As the populace degenerates into short term immature materialist hedonism and the rulers gather up all the responsibility and use it as power, they become simultaneously contemptuous of the people they're called upon to regulate and treat them worse and worse. And that's the spiral between hedonism and tyranny that demolishes the state and produces hell, right? Always. Always now too, God Moses demolishes the tablets in a fit of pique and maybe as a manifestation of his proclivity to use excess force, which is Moses temptation. Because the temptation to power is always the temptation of the person who's called to lead. And it's the temptation of power that's actually Moses Achilles heel and the eventual reason why he's forbidden to enter the promised land. There's another meaning of the dashing of the tablets. It's the demolition of the divine presence. And what that means is that as individuals and societies degenerate into an immature and infantile power mad materialistic hedonism, their ability to attend to their divine voice of adventure and truth that calls them force, calls them forth, and the willingness and capacity to attend to the dictates of their own conscience becomes muddied and unclear. In the Gospels, Christ tells those who search for the sins of others to take the beam out of their own eye, the log, before searching for the dust mote in the eye of their neighbor. And it's a reflection of the same idea that as you practice what is immature and narrowly self serving, instead of aiming upward and sacrificing responsibly your ability to maintain contact with the divine instinct that moves you properly forward is damaged and possibly beyond repair. And even in the aftermath of your foolishness, if you repent and atone, it's not necessarily the case that you'll be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together. And what happens in the Exodus story is that the Israelites get a second set of commandments, but this time they're written by man and not God. And that's an indication of the fact, twofold fact, that God has decided to recede into the distance as a consequence of the faithlessness and sin of the Israelites and a consequence of the fact that the secondary covenant that's thereby generated by even Moses, the prophet of God, is of secondary value compared to the genuine voice of adventure and calling and conscience that speaks to everyone from within that would guide them properly even in the absence of law, if they refused to pervert their own vision. Right? God tells the Israelites at the same time, well, first of all, he threatens to destroy them, which he does quite with some stunning regularity. And that's a characteristic of the Old Testament God that makes the atheist materialists of the modern age into prideful critics of the spirit of the Old Testament, claiming as they might that no good God would act in such a way. And it's an absolute mystery to me that in the aftermath of the bloody and catastrophic 20th century, where we saw the dismal descent of states of massive states like Nazi Germany and Maoist China and Soviet Socialist Soviet Union into abysses of hell, that anyone would dare to claim that the wages of sin weren't death. Because that's exactly what happened there. And that's evidence in its purest form that when people abdicate the responsibility for their own self governance and erect a tyrant as a replacement for the divine order that would properly guide them, that the necessary and inevitable consequence of that is the opening up of the abyss of hell and everyone's descent into it. And that is a reality that threatens continually. That's portrayed in the Old Testament corpus as the inevitable consequences of departure from the straight, narrow path. And there's nothing about that, however terrible that might be, that isn't 100% true. It's like walk off the path not only at your peril, but at the peril of everyone you love and everything you hold dear. Right? And you people in the United States have remembered that well for some 250 years. And God help us all if you forget it. Moses maintains faith with God, and that means that the fate of the Israelites themselves is now dependent on the unmarred relationship between one man and the divine pathway forward. And that's a terrifying state. But there's a psychological truth that's embedded in it as well, which is that it's akin to the realization that the pathway forward specified by the Christian sacrifice is the hoisting of the cross of ultimate responsibility onto the shoulders of the individuals who are true followers of the spirit of divinity. It's the same idea. And that means everyone, right? Because these stories represent human beings as such. And so the fact that Moses maintains his connection with the divine even in the presence of the corruption of his people, and that that's sufficient to guide the world properly forward, is a model for the manner in which you're to conduct your life, to stand up against tyranny and slavery, insofar as you're capable of doing that within the confines of your own life and thereby become the light on the hill that guides other people properly upward, right? And that's the same. That's the same idea as the voluntary acceptance of the responsibility of the distributed responsibility of the state. That's the alternative to tyranny and slavery. Those are the same ideas. Now, as a reward for Moses faithfulness, God reveals himself even more fully to his prophet. And he hides Moses in the cleft of a rock and shields him and walks by and allows Moses to get a glimpse of his back. And the back of something is where it's already been. And the idea there is that as Moses deepens his relationship with the Spirit that calls him forward as leader, his ability to apprehend the manifestations of the divine in the workings of the world increases and deepens to the point where it's virtually unbearable. But that his intrinsic goodness and willingness to make the sacrifices necessary to transform as a leader protects him against the destruction that would otherwise visit him when exposed too cataclysmically to the divine fire itself. Moses sets up the Tabernacle, which is the church around which the community is founded, on the edge of the Israelite encampments. Because they've departed so badly from their relationship, their covenantal relationship with God. And he continues his dialogue with the Spirit that guides him. And in consequence of that, and the Israelites forthright decision to repent and to return to the proper path, God relents and either emerges to lead the Israelites again or sends an angel to guide them. If it's the angel or God himself, it's a worthy replacement for the secondary tablets. And it's an indication of the fact that even in the aftermath of egregious error, meditation on upward aim and willingness to confess, repent and atone can reestablish the relationship between the spirit of adventure calling and conscience that serves as the alternative to subjugation to a tyrant. Right? And this is a good thing to know in your own life, because it means that even if you've lost your way and are in the desert, wandering blindly and hopelessly and ridden with anxiety and in a contentious and fractious and faithless mood, if you make the sacrifices necessary to put yourself back together and approach the problem with sufficient humility, and that would be a humility proportionate to the magnitude of your sins, unfortunately, then you have the offer for you to retain the relationship with the even, what would you say, divine forces of instinct that would otherwise lead you forward properly, you have the option of re establishing that relationship. And that's a wonderful thing to understand because it means that even when. If and when you wander, which is a certainty that there is still the possibility of return to the straight and narrow path. And so the Israelites continue their voyage forward. Onward into the desert. But their bad habits reemerge. And. Despite the fact that they're provided with sufficient sustenance as they move forward, the manna from heaven, which is spiritual food, and the quails, which are, which represent food as such in its material form, the sustenance of the Israelites being the balance between wisdom and corporal nourishment that are necessary preconditions for life. The Israelites are provided with sufficient sustenance spiritually and materially. But they begin to. They begin to cultivate their own desires. They fall prey to the sin of hedonistic gluttony. And they start to complain that the sufficiency with which they've been provided was inadequate. They come to despise the manna and the quails and to demand even a return to the tyranny of Egypt so that they can enjoy a more diverse plethora of hedonistically enjoyable pleasure. They cultivate their own desires. They're ungrateful to be provided with what's strictly and appropriately necessary. And so they fall prey again to the pull of this immature demand for immediate gratification. And the punishment that God brings forward is twofold. The first is that he provides them with so many, with so much food in the form of quails that it's literally stacked three feet high as far as they can see and coming out of their nostrils. And so the Consequence of their cultivation of their narcissistic desire is the production of a surfite that's so overwhelming that it destroys appetite itself. That's what we're doing with pornography. After the excess plague of the quails comes a genuine plague. And the Israelites not only perish in large numbers as a consequence of their reversion to ingratitude and immaturity, hedonistic gluttony, but they also move further into the desert. And what's the consequence of that? They encounter a drought. Now, Christ describes himself as the living water, and the image of the drought in the biblical corpus has a twofold meaning. It's the emergent sterility of the environment. You remember in the Lion King, most of you have seen that when Scar emerges to rule, the landscape parches and all the provision disappears. And what that means is that when the state deteriorates, the natural resources vanish. And the reason for that is there's no such thing as a natural resource. There's the provision of what's necessary as a consequence of the establishment of the state that's functional enough to provide everyone within it what's sufficient, including water. For most of human history, it's been impossible for people to get access to clean water because water is not a natural resource if you have a large population. It takes a tremendous amount of organization to structure society such that a sufficient degree of technological expertise, that's true, can be devoted to the problem of the provision of water, and so that water can be distributed without corruption, without enslavement, and without excess cost. And you might think that that's a technological issue with the technological solution, but it's not. It's a moral issue with a moral solution. Because if the state organizes itself in accordance with the principles that we already described, which is the adoption of maximal responsibility by the individuals within the state, by their sacrifice of their current whims to the benefit of their future selves into the community, then the state organizes itself so that even the deserts can bloom. And that's a moral effort and not a technological effort, even though the technological effort can aid the moral effort if the foundation is laid properly, which is what's happened again in your country in the main. Now, the Israelites are very upset because they've gone deeper into the desert and because they've corrupted their state to the point where they can't determine how to provision themselves with water. And so they get whiny and fractious and complaining and victimy and bitter and miserable, and they go whine to Moses, because they always turn to Moses when times are tough. And they ask God, ask Moses to intercede with God so that the water can flow once again. And so Moses goes and has a chat with God, and he intercedes on behalf of the Israelites, even though he's not very happy with them. And God says to Moses something very specific. He says. He specifies a location, a rocky location in the desert. And he tells Moses to go to that location with his people and speak to the rocks and ask them to bring forth water. And Moses listens, and he tells the Israelites, and they follow them, follow him to the place of rocks. And Moses, with Aaron, takes out his staff, which is a symbol of his authority and a tool of coercion, force and power. And he hits the rocks with his. With the rod of tradition, thus using force when he's called upon by the divine itself to offer even to the rocks, an invitation and not a command. And the consequence of that is that the rocks do indeed bring forth water. But God tells Moses that as a consequence of his disobedience, despite the fact that he's led the Israelites for his whole life away from tyranny, across the Red Sea and through the desert for 40 years, that he will die before he enters the Promised Land. And here's the reason. If you use force when you're called upon to use invitation, you will corrupt the state and you will fail to lead your people to the Promised Land. And that includes you, right? And we've seen plenty of that, too. So it's worse than that. Because not only does is Moses now forbidden to enter the Promised Land, even though he can see it in front of him, Aaron dies. And what that means is that the state itself is in peril when it turns to force, when invitation will suffice, right? All policy based on force is bad policy. Right? It undermines trust, and it's the gateway to tyranny. Aaron dies worse. Previous to this, in the desert, before the episode with the rocks, there's a rebellion in the desert, and it's led by a man named Korah. And the rebellion is extremely interesting. So the Israelites are all fractious and whiny and resentful and hedonistic and materialistic and faithless and without courage. And Korah comes along and he offers them a revolution. And this is how he justifies the revolution. He tells Moses and Aaron that what they claim as divine authority is nothing other than their use of arbitrary power. Right? It's exactly the same refrain you hear now this is exactly the refrain that you hear from your so called institutions of higher learning that insist that all manifestations of your culture, male ambition, marriage, family, patriarchal community, business, state and government, are nothing but the manifestations of power. And that that power is arbitrary, oppressive and victimizing. And all of those who don't have, who aren't basking in success, are not failing in consequence of their own unwillingness to make the necessary sacrifices, but virtuous victims of arbitrary power. And that's what Torah tells the Israelites. Now the thing is, his accusation is justified to some degree because the primary temptation of Moses is the use of force. Right early in his life, when he sees one of his Hebrew brothers, when he's an adolescent in Egypt slayed or beaten by an Egyptian aristocrat, he kills the Egyptian, that's why he has to flee from Egypt. Moses has a proclivity to use force. And this is the eternal temptation of the leader. And so when Korah emerges to tell the fractious Israelites that the reason they're followers and Moses is a leader is because he's the oppressive, oppressive tyrant of power, there's an element of truth in the accusation that's sufficient to give it credibility. And that's another indication of the terrible sin that Moses makes manifest when he misuses his authority. Because he has this power granted to him not by power, but by his alliance with the underlying structure of the moral world itself. And when he uses force when it's not required, he validates the revolutionary tendencies of the usurpers and puts the state in danger. Now, the counter position to the notion that Moses is nothing but a wielder of power, an objection to which he an accusation to which he objects. I've never taken anything for my services. Is the counter proposition that it's of unbelievable convenience to those who fail to make the proper sacrifices, like Cain, who become bitter and resentful in consequence of their inevitable failure, who degenerate into a homicidal vengefulness as a consequence of their misery, and who strive to destroy the notion of success itself. It enables those that spirit to take possession of people while they simultaneously make the claim that everything they do as oppressed victims is moral. That demolishes the notion of success itself and constitutes one eternal threat to the integrity of the functional state. And that's what's happening now too. Moses is replaced. Moses and Aaron are replaced by Caleb and Joshua. And Caleb means loyal follower and dog, and Joshua is the same name as Jesus. And Joshua means acting in the salvific spirit of God. The Old Testament stories are attempting at this point to formulate a conceptualization of the leader whose nature surpasses even Moses. And the initial foray into that conceptualization is the hypothesis that the joint combination of Joshua and Caleb is the appropriate replacement for Moses and Aaron. Now, Joshua and Caleb were given a task as scouts by Moses when he was on the brink of the promised land. He sent scouts out into Canaan, which is the promised land already inhabited, to scope out the territory and to report. And the scouts come back and they divide themselves into two camps. One camp is allied with Joshua and Caleb, and the other camp is allied with the faithless scouts. And the faithless scouts report of the future that it's a land inhabited by giants who cannot be defeated, and that the best pathway forward for the Israelites is to turn back in terror and flee. And that's what you're being told about your future. Right. And there's no doubt, there's no doubt that the state of your future is already inhabited by the pathologized descendants of Canaan, because that's always the case. But the insistence in the Old Testament stories is that you are required to maintain faith in the ability of the human spirit to prevail even in the face of the worst possible obstacles, if it is guided by the Spirit that's capable of standing up against tyranny and freeing the slaves. And that's what Joshua and Caleb report. And so they. They observe the future and they tell the Israelites that with faith and goodwill, with the proper sacrifices and upward aim, but that the chosen people of God can move into the future with courage and faith and make of it the place of the land of milk and honey and the place of life more abundant. And that's how we're called upon to conceptualize the future as a function of our courageous faith. Right. And that's what Joshua and Caleb do, and they're allowed to cross the River Jordan and to lead the Israelites into the promised land. And that's a description of the attitude that's the opposite of cynicism, but is not naivety that you're called upon to make manifest in relationship to the future. And as you can tell, the faithless scouts who tell the Israelites to free in terror, fail to enter the promised land and invite them to return to tyranny, which is exactly the offer that's on the table to you at the moment. Right? Right. The future is nothing but climate apocalypse. Right. Give us all the power.
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Right.
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That's not how the people of this generation will enter the promised land, right? Caleb is faithful and loyal. His name means faithfulness and loyalty. It also means, it means dog. And the dog that Caleb embodies is loyalty, faithfulness and optimistic voyaging forward. And Joshua is the type of Christ that leads forever towards the heavenly Jerusalem. That's how the story lays itself out. And then it does something stunningly remarkable in its further investigation of the characterization of the Spirit that must make itself manifest for the promised land to be occupied. The Israelites become even more fractious and immature and whiny and contemptible than they ever have been, right on the very cusp of their movement to the place that's been promised to them. And God is at his wit's end and decides in a fit of just retribution, to take the annoying, miserable, victimy, whiny, complainy, faithless, immature Israelites who are already having a pretty miserable time of it in their self imposed terror and cowardice. And he visits a plague of poisonous snakes upon them. And you might say, well, why would a good God do that? And the answer is, there is no situation so dire that some stupid son of a bitch can't make it worse, right? And I mean that. And that's why hell is a bottomless pit. And even if your material circumstances are dire, you can be absolutely sure that your reversion to a faithless, hedonistic, power mad immaturity will do nothing but open up a new pit of hell underneath the hell that you're already occupying, and that you can continue that farm, you can continue that in a manner that literally has no end, right? Which is why hell is a bottomless pit. And so that's what happens, is the Israelites fall apart and more misery makes itself manifest. And so the snakes bite them a lot, which is exactly what they deserve. And they eventually get to the point where instead of conducting themselves so that even more snakes appear, which is what the Pharaoh did, by the way, when he was called upon to repent, they decide that they've had enough yet again. They call themselves to order and they go to Moses and they say to him, we know you have a pipeline to the divine. Do you think you could find it in your heart to have a chat with God and get him to call off the snakes? And Moses says, I'll see what I can do. And so he has a chat with God. And God says something extraordinarily strange. He says, he doesn't say, all right, I'm pretty sick of these people. But they put themselves Together yet again. And I kind of like you, so, you know, I'll call off the snakes, which is the most straightforward way out of the conundrum. And also something akin to what's happened previously when God and the Israelites are having a scrap. But that isn't what happens. And it's partly because the story is now setting the pathway for the adoption of a new mode of being in the promised land, the mode of being that's characterized by the emergence of Joshua as the new leader. God says to Moses, take your brazen, your bronze items. Take the bronze items of your people and cast a staff and put a serpent on it and plant it in the ground so that all the Israelites can see it. So this is a substantial sculpture so that all the Israelites can see it. And if they come and gaze upon it, they will be immune to the poison of the serpents. Okay, what does that mean? The first thing it means is the same thing that the symbol of the physician has meant for 3000 years. Right? Because the symbol of the physician is a staff with a serpent wrapped around it. And that's the Asclepius symbol of healing. And it's a representation of the snake and tree motif that's also characteristic of Moses staff, because in the story of Moses, when he encounters the magicians of the Egyptian court, Moses throws his staff upon the ground. That's tradition. It transforms itself into chaos. That's the serpent. And Moses is the master of order and chaos. And the Egyptian magicians duplicate the feet, throwing their staffs to the ground, turning them into serpents. And the serpent from Moses staff eats all the serpents of the Egyptian magicians, which indicates that the real thing is more than the match for the propagandistic magic of the corrupt court. Right. All that's echoed in the image of the serpent on the staff. There's an idea associated with healing that comes from the grebs embodied in the word pharmakon, which is the source of the word pharmacy. And pharmacon means poison and cure. And what it means is a little bit of what poisons you, cures you. And what that means is that you grow and develop in proportion to your ability to face the things that terrify you. Right. And that's what Moses calls upon his people to do, inspired by the word of God, not to become the inhabitants of a. Of a landscape devoid of threat and safe, like infants are safe in the home, but to become masters of even what's poisonous so that they can be immune to what to the worst things that can possibly be thrown at them, which is what you do when you encourage your children to develop like they should develop. Right. Competence, not safety. That's what encouragement means. And that's what happens symbolically when God calls upon the Israelites to face what terrifies them so they can become immune to the poison, even of their own sins. Right. All right, we'll cap that off. That's a development of the theme of Joshua, who bears the same name as Christ. Now, thousands of years later, Christ himself says something exceptionally mysterious and virtually incomprehensible that relates back to the brazen serpent, to the idea of the pharmacon, to the notion that a little bit of poison redeems you if it's administered voluntarily. He says, unless I be lifted up, unless I be lifted up like the serpent in the desert, no man can be redeemed. Now, that's an unbelievably strange thing for anyone to say. First of all, the notion that Christ would associate himself with a crucified serpent is strange enough in itself, but the illusion itself is very difficult to comprehend unless you understand it, in which case it becomes deep beyond comprehension in a manner that's as close to miraculous as anything I've ever seen in print. What does it mean? One of the oldest stories we have is the story of the encounter with the dragon. Mesopotamian creation myth talks about creation as the encounter with the serpent of chaos. The story of St. George is the story of the man who confronts the dragon that threatens the state and frees the treasure that the dragon guards. What's the theme? Confront what is terrifying and find what is redeeming. That's the story of human development. That's the story of the movement up Jacob's ladder. That's the story of the ascent to the city on the hill. That's the story of taking your light out from under the bushel that hides it and revealing it to the world. That's the story of courage and adventure and truth. It's the redemptive story. Why does Christ assimilate himself to the serpent? The Israelites are called upon to look forthrightly and voluntarily at that which poisons them. Christ's life is a hydra of serpents. Why? Because it's an archetypal tragedy. What does that mean? It's a distillation of catastrophe itself. Imagine that you had a hundred people tell you the worst thing that had ever happened to them in their life, and then you gathered all those terrible things, which is what occurs, for example, in the story Of Job, you gathered all those terrible things and you visited that fate on one person. That would be the archetypal tragedy. What's the archetypal tragedy? What's the tragedy? A terrible thing befalls someone. What if he's a criminal? Well, then it's not so tragic. Maybe then it's justice. A terrible thing befalls someone innocent. The worst set of possible things befalls the person who is most innocent. The archetypal tragedy. What's the worst thing? Death. No. Pain and death. No. Prolonged pain and death at the hands of a tyrant. No. Prolonged pain and death. Young at the hands of a tyrant delivered by the mob, betrayed by young, your friends in the presence of your mother, accompanied by the betrayal of your acolytes, well occupied by an imperial force, despite doing nothing but working for the good. And simultaneously be known for doing so even by those that persecute you. Right. Faced that. The transformation of the story of the brazen serpent into the meta tragedy of Christianity is the insistence that redemption is to be found by confronting the sum total of all that's terrified. The story of Christ is a meta tragedy and it doesn't end with death. Because painful and undeserved death at the hands of a treacherous mob is not the worst thing that can happen to you. The worst thing that can happen to you is that plus a full fledged encounter with the forces of malevolence itself. That happens to Christ when he encounters Satan in the desert after the Holy Spirit descends upon him. And it happens when he harrows hell after his death. And so the calling of Christianity, which is the crucifix at the center of the community is the calling to the followers of the divine to confront not only everything that terrifies them about life, but the deepest and most abysmal spirit of evil itself. In the belief that that courageous confrontation will invigorate and defend and make the forthright and courageous and open eyed disciple immune from the poison of the serpent. Right. And that's the story and the principle upon which the free states of the west are predicated. Right. And that's the story of the last third of Exodus. Thank you very much. Thank you, everyone. All right, my dear. Hello there. That was awesome. Oh, thank you, dear. That was awesome. Yeah. Thank you.
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Yeah.
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Thank you, story. Yes. Well, thank you all for listening to that. I'm sorry to inflict it on you. It's a crazy story. Yeah. God. I think the reason that the meaning of those stories is so stark and clear now is because the patterns that the biblical stories refer to have always been present. They're the patterns of life. But things are happening so fast now that you can see it unfolding. Right. As the rate of transformation in our culture accelerates, the patterns are dancing. Patterns that might have taken centuries to move are now dancing within weeks. And you can see the realm of the spirits reemerge. That's really the case, and it's a terrifying thing. So hang on to your hats, people, and get your houses in order. Right. Question number one, Dr. Peterson. In what way does love expand consciousness? Well, you become what you aim at. So that's why you're called upon in the foundational stories of the west to turn your attention, to turn your eyes upward to the highest that you can imagine. Because in the effort to align yourself with that highest goal, you'll transform yourself into the carrier of that spirit, and you'll become your deepest self. The promise in Genesis 1 is that human beings are made in the image of God, but we obscure that reflection with our presumption and pride. The great commandment that underlies the Ten Commandments is that you are to love the God that is one with all your heart and all your soul, and to conceptualize and attend to and act in relationship to others as if they were you. A vertical orientation and a horizontal orientation, that's the spirit of love. And love is the desire that all things flourish. And so you want to allow this spirit that has that aim to possess you. And that's the goal of religious practice, is to invite that spirit, spirit to possess you. Now, what does that mean? Well, imagine that you decided to. Practice devoutly the love that led you to your marriage. We know that people are enticed into partnership as a consequence of love. We know that the foundation of our relationship with our children and our parents is love. We know that in the first throes of a romantic relationship that love is offered as a gift. But you might imagine that it's incumbent upon you to make the fostering and nurturance of that love a religious duty, and that if you practice that, it would your ability to inhabit that realm would expand. Now, what would that mean? It would mean that you would remember when you were interacting with your wife or your children or your parents, that you would remember that you loved them, and you would remember what that implied. And what it would imply is that you would interact with them in a manner that would be best for them insofar as you were capable of that, insofar as that was commensurate with your understanding, but that that would be Your aim. And if that was your aim, you would see the world in accordance with that aim. And your deviation from that aim would make its appearance to you as error, as error that you could correct. Or as desired response from the target of your love. And you could learn from that error perceived in relationship to your aim, how to rectify your attention and action so that the spirit of love was ever more present. And that would be a consequence of you gathering information that is offered to you in consequence of your aim. But that's not all. You become what you practice. Imagine that a challenge emerges and that there's two ways you can respond to it. One is resentfully and with the mien of a victim, as if the challenge has been arbitrarily imposed on you by an unjust tyrant. Alternatively, you could face that challenge with faith and hope, like Caleb and Joshua. And you could construe it as the dragon that guards it as of yet unrevealed treasure. And you could embody the spirit of St. George and move forward in strength to grapple with the challenge. What happens if you do that? Everything changes. Psychophysiological analysis of stress response indicates that the difference in those two patterns of response is so profound that it makes itself manifest in neurological activity, psychophysiological patterning, muscular movement, blood flow, hormonal preparation and cellular transformation all the way down to the genetic level. When you approach a new situation in a given spirit, the spirit in which you approach the situation manifests itself as a physiological pattern. And that transforms the way genes themselves code for proteins. If you practice love, you change yourself physiologically all the way down to the molecular level. And you free, you release from. From the domain of implicit physiological potential the you that would be, what it could be if it was the purest possible manifestation of love.
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Right?
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That's possible. And you know that. You see the people around you and you die for this. You see the people around you clearly at their best, clearly at their best when they're motivated by love. And if you're spiteful and resentful and bitter and miserable and you're shaking your fist at God, the sight of that love might burn you to the core and further embitter you. But you know in your deepest heart of hearts that if you could live anywhere, that's where you would live. And so the religious call is a call to live like that. And it isn't a call to believe in that. It's a call to do that. Because that's the deepest form of belief. And to practice it what's the purpose, what's the purpose of prayer? God, grant me the wisdom to have the humility to transform myself into the man who could properly love his wife and children. That's a prayer that will be answered. How does one find a connection to God without following an organized religion? I desire relationship to God, but I am unconvinced by organized religions. Well, I'll say something rude to begin with. If you're capable of finding the path to God by yourself, why don't you go to church and help the lost church? I mean, because. Because that's the claim. That's the, that's the claim you're making. You're saying you, you are sufficient unto yourself to find the divine pathway forward. If that's true, then why not revitalize the institutions while you're at it? And if you can't do that, then maybe your first presumption was wrong and maybe you should go to. Maybe you could go to the church that's composed of people no worse than you and you could participate with them in aiming up and you could rectify the errors of the community and your own errors in relationship to what's highest simultaneously. Right? I would also say that the endpoint of the presumption that you alone can find the divine path is no different from the insistence of the postmodernists that what they feel is the final definition of reality. Those are the same thing. Right. I don't want to get too like, high and mighty about that, you know, because it's certainly the same thing I thought when I left the church when I was a teenager. And it's the same thing that so many people who've left the organized stream of religion think it's understandable and it's built into our rebellious enlightenment, demented Protestant, Luciferian culture. And so the fact, and I'm not singling out the Protestants, it's a deviant stream of what would heretical Protestantism. That's a way of thinking about it, right? The notion that we can define ourselves, we have to step forward communally. So it's incumbent upon you to participate in the process of communal organization because that's part of the manner in which you approach the divine. It's not a solitary pursuit. You can't. Buddha knew that. Buddha was offered the opportunity to enter the realm of the gods and to remain in nirvana. And he abandoned that offer, which was genuine and hard earned, because he determined that he would not step into paradise unless he could take everyone with him. Right? And maybe that's because there is no paradise for you alone. Right. How could that be paradise? An eternity of you alone? That sounds a lot like hell. What has been your biggest hurdle in bridging the theology science cultural gap? Pride and lies. The pride. Pride in relationship to the first question, let's say, because I thought when I was 13 and perplexed about the apparent paradoxical relationship between evolutionary theories and biblical accounts of creation, that I knew enough to dispense with the entire religious tradition of the Western world. Well, what's that pride, obviously. What kind of pride? The pride of the Luciferian intellectual. Like 100% that. And. I escaped from that to the degree that I have escaped, because I came to understand, first, that I knew nothing and second, that I truly knew nothing about evil itself, even though I became unshakably convinced of its existence. And it was my investigation into the structure of hell that eradicated my Luciferian pride. I came to understand when I was about 23 that virtually everything I said was a performance and a lie, 95% of it. And I understood that. As a consequence of my developing understanding of the misapprehensions that led to the development of totalitarian states. I was very curious about the relationship between individual misconduct, of the sort that enabled people to remain silent when atrocities were being committed, of the sort that allowed people to luxuriate in the opportunity to exact their sadistic revenge, and my own pride and presumption. And I aimed at eradicating that. And the consequence of that was the dawning of my understanding that I was an actor and a fraud, that I said most of what I said to win arguments, to instrumentally manipulate, to be the smartest person in the room, to ensure that my intellect was celebrated and to delight in the victory I obtained over others. And I learned that speaking words oriented by that aim made me weak, contemptible, desperate and dangerous. And that on those few occasions when I strived instead to say instead only what I believe to be true, that the ground under my feet came back together and that I was thereby climbing uphill. And I learned to watch my words and burn off 95% of what was encumbering me. Right. So that was the obstacle, you might say. Yeah. What Was the obstacle? 95% of who I was. That was the obstacle. Look, when God throws Adam and Eve out of paradise for the sin of pride and presumption, he bars the gates with a sword that is on fire, that turns every which way. A sword that turns every which way is one that you cannot avoid. It burns and it cuts and what does it burn away and cut? Everything that isn't fit to be in paradise. It's highly probable that that's a lot of you. And so you might say that a vision of God is equivalent to a trial by fire, the trial by fire of hell in direct proportion to the magnitude of your sins. Yeah. Well, there's an impediment for you. When Abraham proceeds on his voyage uphill, animated by the spirit of adventure, he's called upon to make sacrifices in sequence commensurate with the expanding field of opportunity that reveals itself in front of him. Until he transforms himself so completely by his willingness to undertake even the ultimate sacrifice that he's awarded a new name. Right. That's equivalent to a death in rebirth and to movement toward the establishment of an earthly paradise. But it requires a succession of sacrifice that culminates in the sacrifice of everything and the transformation of identity that's so complete that it's as if you become born anew. Which is what happens to Abraham and Jacob. Right. And Christ when baptized. Yeah. And all those who are visited and then abide by the call of the Holy Spirit. Terrible. Right? That's the terrible swift sword. Yeah. That's why when Christ comes back at the end of time, or why the Spirit that makes itself manifest when the end times reveal themselves, Christ comes back with a sword in his mouth and he separates the sheep from the goats. And there's a lot more goats than sheep. And that's a psychological warning and a sociological warning. And it's a terrifying vision into the understructure of reality itself. Cain is doomed because he doesn't offer his best. That means that insofar as you haven't offered your best, All that is within you that has not been the offering of the best is. Dude, that's a terrible thing to know, but it's the sort of thing that can scare you straight. And it's wisdom that says the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. So aim up, because there's no better place to aim. But it's also aim up or else. Right? Really? And on those happy notes. Thank you very much, everybody.