Why Your Resentment Is a Choice

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

Episode: Why Your Resentment Is a Choice
Date: August 9, 2026
Host: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

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Episode Overview

In this solo episode, Dr. Jordan Peterson explores the fundamental nature of resentment, human maturity, personal aim, and social relationships—both from the perspective of daily life (through the example of a first date) and through deep philosophical and biblical analysis. Dr. Peterson argues that resentment is not a passive emotional state, but a choice arising from our aims, intentions, and personal sacrifices (or lack thereof). He links individual choices to broader cultural and spiritual health, using stories from Genesis, personality psychology, and reflections on Western values.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Importance of Aim and Attention

• Attention as a Reflection of Aim ([05:47], [13:01], [20:05]):
  • Peterson uses the metaphor of a first date to discuss how the direction of one’s attention reveals underlying aims—whether for genuine relationship, friendship, or short-term gratification.
  • Quote: "With every glance you take, you serve a master...your perceptions serve your aims." ([26:40])
• Advice for Social Anxiety ([09:04]):
  • Focus on the other person to reduce anxiety, as self-consciousness and anxiety are functionally identical in social situations.

2. Mating Strategies and Human Maturity

• Biological Perspective on Mating ([15:44]):
  • Humans are a “low reproduction rate, high investment” species—leading to pair-bonding and multi-generational investment in offspring.
• Short-Term vs. Long-Term Strategies ([20:30], [23:50]):
  • Short-term mating for immediate gratification is contrasted with the pursuit of genuine companionship or love, shaping both behavior and long-term outcomes.

3. The “Dark Tetrad” and Psychological Immaturity

• Dark Personality Traits ([33:40], [38:52]):
  • Peterson outlines narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism as the “dark tetrad”. These traits underlie exploitative, short-term strategies and are characteristic of emotional immaturity.
  • Quote: "A two year old wants what he or she wants no matter what right now...If that proclivity [for immediate gratification] is evident after the age of four, it tends to be very stable and permanent." ([24:35], [28:50])
• Link to Resentment:
  • A life governed by immature aims and the “dark tetrad” leads to the development of resentment and destructive outcomes.

4. Biblical Analysis: Cain & Abel as Archetypes of Aim

• Resentment as a Chosen Spirit ([44:16], [53:11]):
  • Through the story of Cain and Abel, Peterson illustrates how Cain’s bitterness was the result of choosing not to aim high, making “second-rate sacrifices,” and then “inviting in” resentment as a companion.
  • Quote: "To sin is to miss the target. Sin crouches at your door, the temptation to miss the target, and you invited it in." ([53:11])
• Resentment’s Creative Union:
  • Habitually brooding on resentment fosters a dangerous, self-destructive alliance with it, escalating from self-pity to aggression and beyond.

5. The Proper Aim: Love, Sacrifice, and Upward Aspiration

• Defining Mature Love and Reciprocity ([70:09], [71:13]):
  • Mature aims in relationships involve seeking someone to love and support, balancing protection and encouragement—mirroring the biblical view of love (maternal and paternal).
• Sacrifice as the Foundation of Community ([75:05], [76:05]):
  • True sacrifice and work—offering one's best for others and future generations—form the basis of a healthy society and individual meaning.
  • Quote: "Work is the sacrifice of the moment to the community and the future." ([75:53])

6. The Danger of Abdicating Responsibility

• The Call for Sacrificial Responsibility ([77:16]):
  • Societies that neglect self-sacrifice invite tyranny; responsibility must be willingly assumed to maintain freedom and prosperity.
  • Quote: "All the responsibility that you do not take upon yourself will be taken from you by tyrants and used against you." ([77:53])

7. Creation, Logos, and the Image of God

• Logos and Human Dignity ([80:10], [82:08]):
  • Possibility is likened to deep water—out of which order and meaning are created through the human capacity for responsible action (Logos).
  • Quote: "The Logos that inhabits you, which is the spirit that's made in the image of God, is the consciousness within you that wrestles...with possibility and brings forth order in consequence." ([80:33])
• Individual Value and Societal Structure:
  • The Western idea of intrinsic human value is rooted in the belief that personal aim—and thus societal order—depends on each individual.

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• "[If] the world is unfolding for you as a place of dreadful misery...you might want to ask just what the hell is it you're aiming at?" ([26:40])
• "Your character is your aim across time." ([61:26])
• "The alternative is worse because the pathway to hell is paved with lies and hell itself is the dominion of the lie." ([87:04])
• "If there's 10 people in a city who still tell the truth, that's enough to save the city from destruction. That's how important it is to say what you have to say." ([90:13])

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Listener Q&A Highlights

Wrestling with God ([84:35]–[92:55])

• Question: Is there something specific you’ve wrestled with God about?
  • Peterson reflects that every act of truthful speech is a “wrestling match,” weighing words and striving to hit the mark of truth.

Forgiveness and Letting Go ([93:32]–[99:28])

• Question: How do you forgive great wrongs without becoming a martyr?
  • Forgiveness requires confession, repentance, and atonement. True repair involves honest self-examination, responsibility, and, if needed, developing an understanding of evil commensurate with the depth of injury.

Raising Children Without a Personal Relationship With God ([99:34]–[103:22])

• Question: How can parents raise children in church if they themselves aren’t religious?
  • Provide children with the foundational stories of the West. Even without personal faith, participation in tradition and community equips them for full cultural citizenship.

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction and Purpose – [00:30]–[02:06]
• First Date as Metaphor for Attention and Aim – [05:08]–[13:03]
• Biology of Mating & Human Maturity – [13:03]–[19:20]
• Short-Term Mating and the Dark Tetrad – [20:30]–[43:05]
• Cain and Abel, and the Invitation of Resentment – [44:16]–[57:18]
• Love, Sacrifice, and Proper Aim – [69:58]–[77:00]
• Societal Implications & Western Tradition – [77:16]–[83:01]
• Q&A: Wrestling with God, Forgiveness, Raising Children – [84:35]–[103:22]

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Conclusion

Dr. Jordan Peterson’s central message is that resentment, far from being an inevitable product of life’s hardships, is a choice born from immature, short-sighted aims and repeated failure to make proper sacrifices. Each moment presents a battle between inviting in the spirit of resentment or aspiring upward—towards love, responsibility, and the creative impulse of the Logos. Our choices then shape not just our personalities, but our communities and cultures. The path to meaning, maturity, and genuine social harmony lies in consciously aiming high, offering our best, and honestly confronting the truth—both in ordinary relationships and grand societal contexts.

Transcript

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[Jordan Peterson]

Hi everybody. This is the eighth consecutive week of releases from my extensive tour archives. We've been gratified to see that this return to the form that I initially relied on when I started using YouTube is still capable of reaching people. More capable perhaps than it was in the beginning. We're attaining combined views and listens across YouTube and the audio channels of about half a million people a week. So that's very satisfying and gratifying. And thank you to all of you who are listening consistently. I also spent a lot of time this week contemplating Peterson Academy ads. We have a wonderful advertising team and have worked on developing cut lines and assessing graphic images and realized this week that we're really reaching millions of people with these advertisements. Far more in some ways than we reach with the lectures from Peterson Academy. And it's an opportunity for us to send a cultural message in imagistic form to a huge audience of people. And so we've been concentrating on developing themes of patriotism and respect for the west and gratitude for our philosophical tradition and a hope harsher and more dramatic view of Christianity that I think is more accurate than the kind of naive sentimentality that often accompanies Christian messaging. And so it's been extremely interesting to think that through philosophically and to work on the Peterson Academy advertisements.

Bye.

Bye.

So I've been writing the introduction to my this book. It's 95% done. It actually turned into three books because took longer to go through the material that I thought it might. And so that's good. I was writing the intro today, the introduction, which is the hardest thing to do really, I would say, and I started thinking about how to communicate the relationship between the transcendent and the immediate, between our realm, you might say, in this spiritual realm, how to communicate that so that it's entirely, entirely comprehensible. And it seems to me that this is something that's now necessary. I mean, I think we're at the point in our technological cultural development where we can't believe. We can't just believe nothing. That doesn't work. You can't make your way through life believing in nothing. Life is too difficult for you to sustain yourself without bitterness and resentment, without hopelessness, without Succumbing to anxiety if you believe in nothing. But you can't just believe like someone believes in Santa Claus either. You have to, you have to be deeper than that. And I think we have to be deeper than that now because we're too dangerous to be shallow. And I think everyone can feel that we have amazing tools at our disposal, but they're very, very dangerous. And so we have to be as wise as we are technologically proficient. And we're pretty technologically proficient and we're not very wise. And that's not a good combination. And that's why things are shaking. And they've been shaking for quite a while. They've really been shaking, I would say, since the end of the Second World War when we developed the atomic technologies that led to the, to the nuclear bombs, to the fission bomb and the fusion bomb. World destroying technologies. And those aren't the only technologies of that sort that we've developed. The birth control pill is a world shattering technology. The computer chip is a world shattering technology. The large language models we just developed this year, they have the same nature. So we're going to take a look at the background of things tonight. And we're going to start by investigating what's going on behind the scenes in a relatively everyday manner. This introductory chapter that I'm writing, I

started with a description of someone. I imagined a man. So I'm a man. I imagine a man on a first

date and a busy restaurant. Typical situation of excitement and anticipation and nervousness.

Nothing out of the ordinary,

except insofar as everything's out of the ordinary. If you, if you think about it, if you think about it sufficiently,

Imagine

that the scene is set in a restaurant that's extremely. It's busy and noisy and the young man comes in waiting to see the woman that he's invited out for an evening. And maybe they've met online and they decided to meet at this restaurant. And so he sees her at the table. His initial impression, we'll say, is positive. He sits down and they start to. Well, they start to what?

They start to talk.

They start to dance the way people do when they're talking. If you're attending to someone, when you're

talking to them, you tend to match

your movements with them.

Depressed mothers don't do that with their babies. If you film videotape mothers who aren't

depressed with their babies and are depressed with their babies, and you speed up

the films, you can see that the

mothers who aren't depressed dance as they're

communicating with the babies, the baby moves, the mother moves. There's a continual back and forth exchange of information, but also bodily maneuvering that characterizes an attentive relationship. And you'll notice perhaps if you're sitting with someone and you're talking to them and you're listening, more importantly, you're listening

much more importantly, that you'll unconsciously mimic

their posture and you'll adjust their, your rate of movement to theirs.

You start to dance.

When a couple dances together, that's actually

one of the things they're checking each other out for. It's like, are you capable of adjusting

yourself in real time to the movements and subtle offerings of someone else?

That's what's being evaluated.

That's what children do when they meet each other in a playground and they decide whether they can play. They send some signals back and forth

and they see if they can get

into a communicative dance. And if they can do that, then

they can scaffold off that and begin to play. And we're doing that sort of thing all the time.

And the couple who are just encountering each other in the restaurant are undertaking to do that. And they're evaluating each other while that is occurring. Now, while they're doing that, they have

to solve another problem.

It's a very complicated problem. So imagine they're in the restaurant. Imagine it's a very busy place, noisy, a lot of background activity, kitchen noises, maybe there's a DJ. There's 30 other couples or families or groups of friends sitting there and they're all buzzing away, talking and chatting. And so there's like 40 conversations going on, plus the

activity of the waiters and the waitresses and the music. Now what you have to do in

a situation like that is you have to filter all that out and attend to the person that you're sitting with.

Now that's very complicated thing to do. It's an amazing thing. You can do it at all.

Now you can imagine that you're sitting there and well, maybe you're nervous. Then you might ask why. But imagine you're nervous. Your attention is distracted. You're distracted by self conscious thoughts that often happens. You're wondering what the person thinks of you. You're wondering if they think you're attractive. You're wondering if you're impressing them. You're wondering what you should say next. You're wondering how to make the best display of yourself while doing that. You're focusing on yourself and not them. And while you're doing that, if you're Focusing on yourself, you're going to be anxious because it turns out that there's no difference in a social situation between focusing on yourself and being anxious. There's no difference between self consciousness and anxiety. That's why when the scales fall from Adam and Eve's eyes in the garden of paradise, they become aware of their nakedness. And that precipitates. That's part of what precipitates the fall. To become self conscious is to be miserable. It's to descend. And that's a very useful thing to know. And so one of the things you could take away from this talk tonight if you, you tend to be a socially anxious person, is that the next time you're anxious, pay more attention to the person you're with. Don't pay less attention to yourself. That doesn't work because as soon as you start thinking that you should pay less attention to yourself, you're just thinking about yourself and then you get anxious. But you can really, really increase the amount of attention you're paying to the other person. And if you do that, which is a hospitable thing to do by the way, then your anxiety will decrease and then, well, then you might imagine too that you could get distracted by the conversations of the people around you, right? And so your attention might wander so that you are eavesdropping on the table next to you or two tables away, or you hear the music or your, your attention is fragmented and as a consequence of that, you, you lose the thread of the conversation and you step out of sync with the person you're communicating with. That sets up some awkwardnesses in the conversation. You maybe have to ask the person to repeat what they said or you misunderstand something and then you say something foolish and the melody of the, the through line of the conversation starts to get disrupted and the dance is, the dance becomes awkward. You're stepping on each other's toes and that's a consequence of the fragmentation of your attention. What's it called?

Peterson Academy.

Peterson Academy. Peterson Academy. It's called Peterson Academy, Peterson Academ. If you want an actual education with hand selected professors from top universities around the world, bringing the best professors together,

making sure they're not censored in any

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remuneration and appreciation they deserve.

And you were true to your word. You gave me absolute intellectual autonomy. I have had it through every course.

We figure we can offer people a high quality university level education for under $2,000.

Well, congratulations, Jordan. It's honestly brilliant. Can't wait to enroll myself. I'll be doing that straight after this.

Fangio.

What does it mean to attend?

That's where things get strange.

What does it mean to attend? Why are you attending?

That's the first question.

What the hell are you doing there?

Right.

Because you can be sure that the person you're with wants to know that and you want to know that too. And so let's take apart why you're there. You're there. Let's, let's, let's presume this. I'll tell you something about human social and sexual patterns. We'll approach this from the biological perspective in the. Most animals reproduce sexually. There's, there's complicated reasons for that. It's not strictly necessary. There are animals that can essentially clone themselves. It's not a good strategy. Sexual reproduction is a much better strategy, which is why virtually all species. Species are sexually dimorphic. Dimorphic. Two sexes, right? Two, Right, Right. There are various types of sexual strategies in the animal kingdom. Reproduction strategies. That's a better way of thinking about. On the one end of the distribution of sexual strategies are low investment, high reproduction rate strategies.

Puffballs have that strategy. I don't know if you know the

mushroom that's a puffball, it dries and if you step on it, it puffs out what looks like smoke, but which is actually like hundreds of millions of spores, an immense number of them, and they just float on the wind and they land anywhere. And Even if there's 100 million of them, there's actually more produced. They all die except one on average. And so we maintain our number of puffballs, but we don't end up knee deep in them, which is what would happen if the success rate was higher. That's a high reproduction rate, low investment strategy. On the other end of the distribution are human beings, as it turns out, we're low reproduction rate, high investment strategy reproducers. And so what does that mean? Well, it means you don't have very many kids. I don't know what the world record for number of children for a woman is. It's something like 70. Right? Right. It's a lot. It's a very rare woman who has 70. Very, very.

Right.

The upper end for men is much higher, but for women it's 70. But that, but that's not the typical number of children. Obviously the typical number of children, well, historically was

2 on average because the human population was very stable for a very long period of time.

In the last hundred years, as we become 200, as we become Wealthier

[Moderator]

Our.

[Jordan Peterson]

The rate of survival of our children has increased dramatically.

But it was quite dismal for a long time.

Even so, we didn't have very many children. It's nine months of pregnancy. It's quite difficult. The human infant is very, very dependent

when it's first born.

There's a variety of reasons for that. We have very large heads.

It's hard for the heads to pass through the pelvic structure. Women's pelvic structure is very carefully balanced.

It's her hips are wide enough so the baby can pass through but narrow enough so she can still run. And that's a very tight competition. And one of the ways we finesse that is that our infants are born about a year younger than they might be for a mammal of approximately our size. And our infants heads are compressible.

Often a baby after just after it's born has a, like a cone shaped

head because the skull's compressible. It's a very narrow passageway into life and it's a consequence in part of our cortical evolution, the expansion of our brain.

And the price we pay for that

is not only trouble in childbirth, let's say, and the requirement for our infants to be born in essentially a quasi fetal state, you know, as opposed to say the, a baby calf that can stand up and walk within minutes after it's born. Human infant is basically immobile for six months and barely mobile for nine and can't walk at all for till about 12 months and then can't take care of itself till it's 40. And.

And so they take a lot of investment.

And it's not just a single generation of investment. It's a multi generational investment. That's part of the reason why we're a longer lived species. Because there's some utility from a reproductive.

I'm speaking purely biologically, you understand, there's

some utility in having grandparents around because the problem of raising children is so difficult that it has to be borne by a number of closely related people over a very long period of time. Very long period of time. And we are pair bonding, we're a pair bonding species for the same reason that the burden of an infant and the opportunity, the burden and opportunity of infant is such that if it's borne by only the mother, the chances of cataclysmic failure are much, much, much, much higher. And so we tilt towards pair bonding. So we're high investment, low reproducing species, the long lifespan, very dependent children.

Our children require a lot of investment.

[Advertiser]

However,

[Jordan Peterson]

within the domain of human beings, there are low investment. There are people who adopt low investment mating strategies and high investment mating strategies. Low investment mating strategy is. It's a hedonistic strategy. It's a one night stand strategy. And you might ask, well, what's your point?

The point of attention, let's say, well,

you're sitting in your restaurant, you're having dinner with the person you invited out, what's your strategy and how do you direct your attention in consequence of that strategy? And that is the question. Because you direct your attention in consequence of your aim. Okay, so let's imagine that your aim

is

short term mating strategy.

Right?

One night stand.

Alright?

So you're going to direct your attention and you're going to organize your actions in keeping with that goal.

Well, how are you going to do that exactly? We know the goal you're serving now. Well, do we? What goal are you serving exactly?

Well, you might say you're trying to

get what you want. It's like that's one way of thinking about it.

Depends on how you define you. You're trying to get what a fraction

of you wants, let's say you're trying

to get what a desire of yours wants. So what you're doing, if you're pursuing a short term mating strategy, you want to get the girl in bed as fast as possible, let's say, is that you're reducing who you are to that immediate demand, to that narrow demand for immediate self gratification. So that's the you that's having the conversation. Okay, so there could be all sorts of other yous that might be there. You might be lonely, so you're looking for a companion. You might be lonely and serious, in which case you're not only looking for a companion, but you're looking. We'll step out of the sexual realm for a moment. You're looking for a friend and a friend. Think about a friend from the perspective of a child. A friend is someone you that you can play a game with but that you want to repeat the game with many times. That's a friend. And so if you're lonesome and you're adopting a companionate strategy, you're going to be looking to make a friend that you can play with. And that would be the dinner, but that would. But with whom the game would go well enough so that. Well, she would like to repeat the game. That would be the second date, let's say. And that the what would spiral up out of that would be a sequence of games. Let's Say, and that sequence of games would be a relationship. And in principle that might move towards. Well then again, it depends on your aim. Move towards what? Steady dating, living together, marriage. Those are very different aims and they're going to. The consequence of those different aims is going to direct your attention and your action accordingly. Right now, all that sitting there in that dinner right at the beginning. Well, let's say that you're not, you don't want the responsibility or opportunity of a long term relationship. Long term committed relationship, which is the awkward terminology we use to replace the much shorter and to the point term marriage. You're not looking for marriage. Well, what are you looking for? Well, in the extreme you're looking for short term sensual gratification. And that's what's directing your attention. So the you that's there is the part of you that wants short term gratification. Okay, well what is that part like? Well, it's hedonistically oriented, obviously, because the goal is sex and sex is pleasure.

And

it can easily become pleasure at the cost of the person you're with. And it can also easily become pleasure at, at your cost insofar as you are inadvertently sacrificing the possibility of long term stable, committed marriage to the demands of the immediate moment. And so by switching to a short term mating strategy, so to speak, not only are you already utilizing the other person as a tool for the gratification of your immediate desires, but you're also doing the same thing. That impulse is also doing the same thing to the broader you.

Right?

It's not. You can understand that more deeply if you think about the difference between a two year old and a mature adult. A two year old wants what he or she wants no matter what right now. And you can see that when 2 year olds have temper tantrums, which they do quite often, or university students for that matter, increasingly, and because they haven't matured past that point, because our culture is pathologized enough now so that that often happens. And so that pattern of immature demand for immediate gratification is maintained far past its due date because that should really disappear by about the age of four. And if it doesn't disappear by the age of four, it tends not to disappear. And so part of what you're doing when you're a parent, if you have any sense, is that you're enticing and disciplining your child towards the substitution of a medium to long term orientation in time and a communal orientation, one that takes other people into account for in exchange for what they want for themselves right now. And what you want for yourself right now is a more instinctive way of approaching the world. Your drive, so to speak. Your desires are part and parcel of what you bring into the world. And if you're ruled by them, you're ruled by whim. And you might think that if you're engaging in short term mating strategies, you're pursuing what you want. What you want. But what you don't understand is that you're actually serving a master who's a hedonistic fragment of your total self. And you're doing that. In doing that, you sacrifice the possibility of communal relationship and you sacrifice your own future. Okay, so how do we know this?

Think.

Well, that's. You can say that all you want. You're just, you know, making what you're making a value judgment about the manner in which people conduct themselves sexually. Yeah, yes, I'm definitely doing that. Why am I doing that? On what grounds am I doing that? Well, we actually know as psychologists something about the people who default to short term mating strategies. Oh, let me tell you that story, kind of. And here's the reason I'm telling you this. It's like with every glance you take, you serve a master. Right now you might not know what that master is, you might not want to know, but there is no avoiding that. It's built into the structure of perception itself. Your perceptions serve your aims. And that's really something to know. If the world is unfolding for you as a place of dreadful misery, if the world is unfolding for you as a valueless, hopeless, obstacle ridden, cluttered, friendless pathway forward, you might want to ask just what the hell is it you're aiming at? Your aim is short term sexual gratification. Okay, so what do we know about that? Well, here's one thing we know. One of the most reliable markers of criminal proclivity in adolescence is early multiple partner sexual experience. So that's been known for 50, 60 years. Independent of moral judgment, it's a clinical marker for antisocial personality for childhood conduct disorder. So that's interesting to know.

It's a reflection of a person's proclivity

to use themselves and other people as instruments of short term gratification.

Right.

So it's also a sign of a radical kind of maturity immaturity. It's also very stable.

As I said.

If that proclivity is evident

after the

age of four, it tends to be very stable and permanent. And it characterizes most toddlers. It's characteristic of immaturity I want what I want now and look the hell out if you're in my way. Now that's not such a problem if the person you're dealing with is two because they're this high, right.

And they're not very dangerous.

Although two year olds are the most violent human beings, they've been grouped together. You can group children together in groups of different ages and by far the most violent group is 2 year olds. So but again, they're small and they can't do each other much damage. So, and most of those, some of the two year olds are more violent than others. But even the violent ones tend to be socialized by the age of four. Not all of them. The ones that aren't, the violent 2 year olds that aren't socialized by the age of 4, the they tend to towards a lifetime criminal path.

So, okay, so what else do we know about short term mating strategies?

In the 1960s, psychologists started to develop what eventually became the technologies that produced the large language models that have come out in recent months. What large language models do is analyze the statistical relationship between words or sets of words. And so what does that mean? Well, imagine that you read a thousand books, and in those books the word good appeared, and multiple times in most books, and then there was some reasonable probability that with good other words would appear in close proximity. So if you were talking about what was good, you might talk about what was beautiful, you might talk about what was evil. If good shows up, some other words are likely to show up. It's like when you're analyzing a word per se, like what makes a word? Cat, C, A T, that's a word. CIT isn't a word. CIT is more of a word than C, qt.

Why?

Well, because the pattern of consonant, vowel, consonant is much more common among words than the pattern. Consonant, consonant, consonant. There are statistical regularities between letters, between words, between groups of words, between sentences, between paragraphs, between concepts that can be mapped at all levels. So maybe a paragraph about the beautiful is more likely statistically to be followed by a paragraph about the beautiful. These large language models, they map all those relationships, billions of parameters. They map out the domain of statistical conceptual similarity and difference. They're maps of meaning, really. Psychologists started to use very primitive technologies like that 50 years ago and they started to map out the domain of personality. If you're, if you smile, imagine you're happy. If you're happy, it turns out you're statistically more likely to be talkative. If you're anxious, you're statistically more likely to be frustrated. If you're agreeable. If you're nice, you're statistically more likely to be welcoming. If you're. If you're combative and competitive, you're statistically more likely to be to say no. If you're interested in ideas, you're statistically more likely to read fiction. If you're dutiful, you're more likely to be patriotic. If you take all of the descriptors that you could use to describe human personality and you analyze the relationships between the descriptors, you can see that they clump into five dimensions.

Extraversion is one.

Neuroticism, that's the proclivity to experience negative emotion, that's another. If you experience one negative emotion, you're statistically more likely to experience all of negative emotions. Agreeableness, that's kind of the maternal dimension. Conscientiousness, that makes you orderly and industrious. Openness, that's the creativity dimension. That was all mapped out. When that mapping was occurring, the evaluative

words were thrown out.

Good and evil. They didn't include those words.

And the reason for that was that

if they include evaluative words, good, evil, criminal, non criminal, where there was a clear value judgment, the whole statistical model tended to collapse into something like good versus evil.

And that was very helpful. So they threw that out.

Now the problem, sorry, this is a roundabout way of getting to the point, but I have to walk you through it. The consequence of that was that the models of personality that we derived didn't flesh out our understanding of so called psychopathology. Abnormal behavior, antisocial behavior, troublesome, pathological, narcissistic, self sabotaging, socially undermining behavior. If you throw at the evaluative words, you can't map that quite as well. So what happened once we established the map of normative personality is that some psychologists started to study the evaluative dimension. The bad actors and their analysis of how what was antisocial and self serving made itself manifested manifest, revealed initially three dimensions. Narcissism. So if you're narcissistic, you want attention, but you don't want to do any of the work that would be necessary to validly obtain it. You know, if you're a good guy, you're going to get attention from your family and your community because you're productive and generous. That's a good start. You're reliable, honest, productive and generous. You can fake that, you can claim status that you don't deserve. You can draw attention to Yourself, you can capitalize on that attention without making

any of the relevant sacrifices.

And if you do that, then you're narcissistic. So that's one dimension. Another dimension is Machiavellian.

Back to the date.

Well, first of all, if you're narcissistic in the date, you're not going to be listening much to your date. You're going to be talking a lot about why you're so great and how much attention you deserve. And you're going to be checking that other person out pretty hard to see if they're granting you the attention you deserve. And if you're a man doing that, you can often pull the wool over your date's eyes, especially if she's young and naive. Because narcissists mimic competence. Young women who have some wisdom are looking for competent men, but they assess competence with confidence. And narcissists mimic confidence.

Right.

Which is why, you know, there's a trope, romantic Hollywood trope, that the girls like the bad boys. Well, why?

Because they look confident, and the girls confuse that with competence. And that's the narcissistic game.

It's one element of the narcissistic game. If you're ruled by the spirit of narcissism and you're on a date, then you're going to use the date as a stage where you can display your hypothetical virtues so that you can garner attention.

Machiavellianism is another one of these dark traits. What do you do if you're a Machiavellian?

That's what a con man does. Or a used car salesman. You know, like you go to a used car lot. Maybe you go to a store. Not a store you'd go to twice. And the person sees you as a means to an end. And the end would be, we'll have your money, thank you very much. Which is fine if there's some service returned for the money, because then it's a fair exchange. But the Machiavellian thinks, if you're enough of a sucker so that I can talk you into opening your wallet, then I should have your money because you're too dumb to use it. And so that's a hell of a way of evaluating a social situation. And so for a Machiavellian in a conversation, you're just something to be manipulated with words to deliver the goods.

That's Machiavellian manipulation.

Right.

And a good Machiavellian will watch you so they can tell you what you want to hear, so they can direct you to go where they want you to go now in the case of

the date, and you're the unfortunate target

of the Machiavellian, if that's going to be into sexual exchange as rapidly as

possible, that's the example we're using, Machiavellian.

That's not all. There's another dimension that goes along with this psychopathy.

And what's a psychopath?

Well, you know what a psychopath is because you go to movies and the psychopaths you see in movies are usually narcissistic and Machiavellian too, because that's what makes them charming.

Right?

And they're very cold blooded and they want just exactly what they want from you right now, regardless of the cost to them or to you. Why to them, being a psychopath is actually not a very good strategy. Lots of psychopaths end up in prison. If you interact with a psychopath a couple of times and it doesn't work out so well for you, which is kind of the point, you tend to remember that. And so if you have the option, as you move forward, you avoid that person. And so psychopaths are often wandering itinerants. And the reason for that is because they have to move from community to community, because they burn their bridges and everybody knows who the hell they are and so they have to move on. And that's the kind of wandering con man, that's the origin of the wandering con man archetype. Right. If you're going to screw everybody, so to speak, in your social circle, then you have to make trucks for new territory. So what's a psychopath technically? A predatory parasite. So what does that mean? Predatory means

whatever you have that can be mine, thank you very much.

That's the predatory aspect. The parasitical element is more subtle, it's more long term. Someone with a parasitical lifestyle will manipulate you by whatever means necessary so they can live without effort off the fruits of your labor.

Right.

So that's the parasitical element. And the real criminal types, 1% of the criminals are responsible for 65% of the crimes, by the way. The real dark criminal types tend towards the psychopathic. You know, you get the odd person in prison who did something spectacularly stupid once and you know that's not okay. But that's way different than the repeating pattern that characterizes the personality whose traits I'm enumerating now. So that was called the dark triad and people studied that. First person to study this really was

a guy named Dale Paulus at the University of British Columbia, and he studied the dark triad For a number of years.

Then he started figuring out what it was associated with. Short term mating strategies. Right, so that's entertaining. Then you might think, well, let's add

another layer just for amusement.

Turned out that didn't exhaust the network of meaning on the dark side of the personality in the personality realm. Didn't exhaust the full manifestation of what was dark in the personality realm. As the research into the dark triad progressed and more and more questions were asked about just exactly what this pattern of behavior, just exactly how this pattern of behavior could be characterized, another term entered the diagnostic lexicon. Sadism. Sadism, the positive delight in the suffering of others. That's the dark tetrad, right? A lovely tetrad. Striving for undeserved attention with no reciprocity. Using language in action instrumentally to gain a narrow end. Predatory and parasitical orientation. Plus, if I can hurt you, so much the better.

How much of that spirit said in the date?

So these are the things that lurk behind

everything we do at every moment of our lives.

That's on the dark side of things, right? So I said, your aim determines your pattern of attention, right? Your aim determines your pattern of attention. So if you're aiming at

short term

hedonic self gratification, then the spirit that you've invited in to direct your attention and orchestrate your actions is the spirit that's at the core of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy and sadism. And you might say, well, that's a dark spirit indeed, right?

That's a psychoanalytic, now

conceptual descent into the underworld under human interactions, right? That's the character behind the scenes. You might ask yourself, well, how do you become that spirit? And the answer to that is

you invited in. I'll give you an example of that.

In the story of Cain and Abel. It's the second biblical story. It occurs after Adam and Eve are

expelled from the garden of paradise for the sin of pride.

God tells Adam and Eve that they're going to have to work now because they've fallen the way of thinking of. Here's a way of thinking about that. You can work in your life or you can play in your life. Let's say, when do you play? Well, you play when you play with others when they want to play with you. You play when you're pursuing something good and communal joyfully. You work when. You work brutally

in the aftermath of

an error that has made your life

much worse than it might have otherwise been.

You could say, that's an error.

Of pride.

You bite off more than you can chew. You end up in a situation where you have to toil madly to rescue you yourself from the hole that you dug. There's a insistence in the Judeo Christian ethical pantheon that suffering enters the life with. Enters life with sin. It's a hard idea to swallow, given the omnipresence of death, let's say, and the reality of pain. But if you understand that story in the manner that I just described, then you also understand very rapidly that a lot of the very difficult work that you have to do and a lot of the suffering that befalls you is a consequence not so much of the structure of existence itself, but of your proclivity to cause for yourself because of misdirected aim, way more trouble than you would actually have to have. And that's what happens to Adam and Eve, and that's why they have to struggle forward. Work is established as the pattern of life in that story. And then Eve gives birth to Cain and Abel. They're the first two human beings, really. Speaking biblically, Adam and Eve are made by God, they don't count. Cain and Abel are the first two human beings. They're the first two. They're the brothers, the first brothers who emerge in the profane world of history, right? They establish two patterns, very deep patterns, two opposed patterns. Cain, Abel, Abel aims up and he brings his best to the table.

That's a good thing to think about

in relationship to the date. The man who's there with the woman that he has an interest in could aim up and bring his best to the table. That's one strategy Cain, by contrast, offers. What's second rate? Well, you can understand that in the confines of your own life, you could imagine that. First of all, you could imagine aiming up or not. That's easy to imagine. Sometimes you're aiming up and sometimes you're not. And then even independent of that to some degree, is how much sacrificial effort you're willing to put into the attempt, right? Because you could imagine at the best times of your life that you were all in. You put your best on the table, you hit it with everything you had. And perhaps if you were fortunate, the consequence of that was that you had some success commensurate with your effort. Or alternatively, you could take the variant route and you could pull the wool over your eyes and eyes of your fellow men and God himself, and you could bring what was second rate to the table, presuming that the ease that that allows, if the effort was successful, would Justify the deception. And that's what people do who bring what's second rate to the table. They. Make the prideful presumption that the offering of what is less than is best will be sufficient. And it's a foolish notion, because a moment's reflection informs everyone that life is far too challenging and difficult for anything but everything. You have to be enough. And so what happens to Cain is that he fails. And he could fail and learn, because you can fail and learn. And then the next time you don't fail quite as much, or maybe even you partially succeed, and you can keep doing that. You have to do that. You do that if you have some humility, right, because you note your failure. You presume that maybe, you know, you've got some sorting out to do. You make the sacrifice necessary to sort

yourself out, and you start walking, however

awkwardly and poorly, uphill. Cain doesn't do that.

He

gets resentful instead. And he gets resentful enough to call out God. Now, people do this all the time. And it's understandable, you know, there'll be times in your life, for example, where something dreadful happens. Someone you love becomes seriously ill, for example, and seems entirely unfair, perhaps I'm not making a suggestion that it isn't in this case. And you're so upset, disheartened by that, that you lose faith. Not only do you lose faith in yourself and in existence, but you see within you emerge a strong proclivity to shake your hand at the sky and curse. And

that's what happens to Cain, although

with much less provocation, right? He's bitter because he made second rate sacrifices and they were rejected. He's not bitter because life itself has

an element of arbitrariness and misery associated with it.

And so he has a little chat

with God, because that's the sort of guy Cain is.

It's not his fault that he isn't proceeding happily in the world like his undeserving, successful brother Abel. It's, well, whose fault is it? Well, obviously the Creator of all things. And so he has it out with God. And he says, essentially, I'm paraphrasing the story as a consequence of familiarizing myself with multiple translations. He says something like, what sort of cosmos did you create? Here I'm breaking myself in half, which is a complete lie, trying to get ahead, and nothing's working out for me, and I've got my brother and no matter where he goes, the sun shines on him and everything's perfectly bloody delightful. It's like, how do you account for that. That's the spirit of resentment orienting his aim. And God says, if you did well, you'd be accepted. That's actually kind of a definition, you know, it's an interesting definition because the impetus there is that if things aren't working out for you in the most fundamental sense, that's on you. Now, you might think that's a pretty dreadful judgment. Like, yeah, it's not as dreadful as the alternative. Because if you're miserable because the cosmos itself is structured badly and set against you, well, you must. So just throw in the towel now. But if it turns out that there's some stupid thing you're doing, no matter how trivial, that's tilted you in a direction that you shouldn't be going, and you could be on your knees with sufficient humility to discover it, there might be the possibility that you could set it right and start wandering uphill instead of farther down. And that's essentially what God suggests to Cain. But he's already possessed, so to speak, as we'll see, and that's just not going anywhere. And so. And then God says something even worse to him, and that's not so good, because what's already been said is not good. He says to him, if you did

well, you'd be accepted, and you've brought

what's insufficient to the table. And that accounts for your misery. And more than that, sin crouches at

your door like a predatory, sexually aroused animal, and you've invited it in to

have its way with you. It's a brutal metaphor, and it's very interesting one. So sin is an archery term. It has to do with aim. To sin is to miss the target. Three different languages. Greek is hamartia. It means to miss the center of the target. It means you can miss by not aiming, or you can miss by not being skillful, or can miss by aiming in the wrong direction or not at not aiming at all. To sin means to miss the target. Sin crouches at your door, the temptation to miss the target, and you invited it in. So what does that mean? It's not like you're possessed exactly by the spirit of resentment. It's not like it visited you by some accident while you were unaware. For something like that, to gain control of your aim, you have to open the door and invite it in. And so that's what God tells Cain. It's your you're miserable in account of your failure, but you're resentful and bitter and unhappy because you invited that spirit to take possession of you. And then it's worse than that even, because it's not exactly possession. You know, you might think, well, you're kind of naive and you don't know what you're doing. And you open the door and something comes in, so to speak. And now it's in you. And that's the. You know, it's got you. And in a sense you're innocent in proportion to your naivety. But that isn't what God tells Cain. He says, you invited it in to have its way with you. It's a sexual metaphor. And what it means is that God accuses Cain of inviting in the spirit of resentment and entering into a creative relationship with it. Brooding on it. Brooding on it, Right, Brooding on resentment. People do this all the time. They're angry, they're unhappy. They fantasize. They fantasize about revenge. They fantasize about how the world has treated them brutally. They fantasize about what they could do to all those people who did them wrong if they only had the opportunity. They dwell on that. They revel in it. They brood on it maybe for thousands of hours. If you ever wonder how someone gets to the point when they're 15 that they can take a high powered automatic rifle and shoot up in elementary school, that's how. A couple of thousand of hours, couple thousand hours of brooding and you'll end up in one hell of a dark place, right? And so that's the pattern of Cain. And God tells Cain all that. And you can bet that doesn't make him very happy because it's exactly the last thing he wants to hear.

All right?

Your failure is to be laid at your own feet. You've multiplied your failure by the invitation you offered to sin, which you conspired with to magnify your bitterness. And that's all on you.

So what happens to Cain? He kills Abel, right?

He destroys his own ideal. And he does that to shake his fist at God.

And Cain says, my punishment is more

than I can bear. Which is always the case for someone who destroys his own ideal. Because how are you going to live without an ideal? You've got nothing to aim at. You've got no pathway forward. You've severed your tie with everything that could give you hope. You're done. But that isn't where the story ends. Cain's descendants become genocidal, right? And so that's a story of how, what would you say, second rate sacrifices open the door to a creative union with sin that expands into fratricidal murder and morphs into the genocidal impulse. And the next story is

the flood,

right

back to the restaurant. Well, now we've opened a door, right?

We can see

the background of the

forces that are directing the attention of the participants in the dinner. If I want nothing more than what something low in me demands, this second I'm going to direct my attention in accordance with that aim. And that aim is a reflection of what I've allowed to possess me. And that's a manifestation of the Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic sadism that I've brooded over and allowed to take possession of me sufficiently to justify my manipulative aims.

That.

Battle with temptation that's going on inside you every time you move your eyes. You can imagine this, imagine this, imagine this. So maybe your date is wearing something provocative, somewhat provocative, and your eyes slip down from her face to her to her displayed breasts and she says something like, my eyes are up here now you know that. So that can be a game on her part and she can be provoking that response and she can be playing the same manipulative game that you're playing. Although in the sexual situation it's less likely for women to do that because they pay a much higher cost for sex. And so in that particular domain they're less likely. Women are less likely to engage in short term mating strategies because the cost for them is way, way higher than that. Doesn't mean that women aren't characterized by their own set of proclivities and temptations. But they vary with sex.

Imagine the couple goes dancing right now and the woman is evaluating the man. And what's she evaluating him for?

Well, let's assume for a moment that her aim is higher and that she'd

actually like to find a decent man

and who is pursuing a longer term goal, who's communally oriented, who is not willing to sacrifice his future self for his whim, predicated hedonic desires in the present. Well, how does she evaluate that? Well, she's going to evaluate in the dance to some degree because one thing she's going to find out is whether her partner has the self control, discipline, maturity, aim to keep his damn hands to himself or at least to proceed with next stage exploration in a manner that's voluntary, playful, awake, wise, cautious and not too precipitous. And that's all being evaluated in the exchange of movements that characterizes a dance. And all of that's a reflection of. It's an attempt to use the interaction of the moment to assess the nature of the spirit that Characterizes the people in the dance. That's what we're doing when we try to get to know each other. Can I trust you? That's really what I'm trying to figure out. Can I trust you? Can we play together reciprocally and productively across a long span of time?

Right.

Are you mature enough to take your turn at bat and then to give me mine? Right to dance in this way that's mutually beneficial across time. Particularly relevant if you want to establish a marriage. Because it's an infinitely repeating game that at least has to be stable. And with God's grace, you might say, can be a game that improves as it's played, which is the ideal situation. That's the ideal friendships, the ideal relationship. If that's the sort of relationship you want. That aim is going to dominate your patterns of attention and action right from the beginning. And when people are evaluating each other for first impressions, they're trying to get a snapshot of the person's character. Your character is your aim across time. That's a good way of thinking about it. We really want to know what someone's aim is across time. Because that's how we understand them. That's how we evaluate them. That's also how we understand ourself. When you go watch a movie,

what

you're seeing is the revelation of the character's aim across time, right? So you see the person in a variety of different situations, in a variety of different snapshots of aim. And you infer from that their overarching aim. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? That's the evaluation you're making. Let's say in the typical movie, is this a hero or a villain? And you extract that realization by watching how his character manifests itself in different situations. His patterns of attention, his patterns of action. And you do that. You might say you do that. So you could figure out who to. Who to cheer for. But that bears examination too, because cheer for means something like admire, right? You admire the hero. If your head's screwed on straight in a movie, admire. What do you do with someone you admire? Admiration is the instinct to imitate. And so if you go see a movie and you watch the hero and you realize he's a hero, and he makes himself manifest on the screen as a hero, and you admire that pattern, that's an impetus to imitate. And what you're attempting to do, this is why you want to go to the movie to begin with, is you want to figure out how to embody that spirit. That's what fiction does. Fiction presents you with a sequence of spirits to embody. And the dramatist characterizes the aim of the hero. What's the aim of the hero? That's the question that the stories of the Bible are trying to tell. What's the characterization of the proper aim? I outlined already the nature of the improper aim, let's say, just in relationship to the date.

What might be the proper aim? We could start with something that's essentially indistinguishable from maturity. Okay, so when you're a toddler, an

infant, you, your mode of being in the world is very instinctively predicated. You know this if you have two year olds, because two year olds are fascinating creatures because they're, they're sort of all in every moment. They're exciting to be around. Although it's quite tiring. They are unbelievably happy when they're happy.

One of the things that was painful about being a parent was I found

myself stopping my children from being so damned happy all the time.

Why?

Because they run around and they're really noisy and they cause all sorts of trouble and they exhaust themselves and they get hurt and so you're always calming them down.

It's like don't be quite that happy. Right.

And positive emotion is associated with impulsivity and so it actually does need to be not so much inhibited. That's not the right, that's not the right approach. Regulated. Regulated in relationship to what? Well, a child might impulsively grab the spoon from like say a two year. You've got a two year old child and a one year old child and the two year old impulsively grabs the spoon from the one year old and they do that in a fit of enthusiasm. But it's not a good strategy because if you grab other people's stuff, they don't like you. And so it's a bad long term strategy. And so one of the things you're doing with your kids is you're telling them, don't let your momentary enthusiasms motivate you to act in a manner that other people find undesirable. Well, why is that arbitrary? It's like not if you want them to have friends.

Right?

Because the definition, having a friend means that you've entered into a reciprocal relationship. Right? A child, children actually can't really have friends till they're about three. And the reason for that is they're actually not, you know, it varies to some degree, but the reason for that is they're actually not capable of reciprocity until they're three, they can't take turns. You can put two year olds together in a room and if you're not paying attention, you think they're playing together, but they're not. They're playing side by side. Each child is playing their own game. When a child hits the age of three, they can start what, what three year olds will do like a boy and a girl, let's say they'll get together and they'll have a little negotiation

like you have with your wife all

the time, about how to play house.

And the boy will ask the girl,

or vice versa, do you want to play house? And that's the first invitation. And in order for the play to occur, the answer has to be yes. It has to be voluntary. Children who force other children to play their games don't have friends. They're just bullies and they're not popular. And it's not a good strategy. And it's not a good strategy because it doesn't work out very well for the bullies. There's no reciprocity in it. It won't sustain itself. The other kids will try to get away. And if your kid is a bullying, is an impulsive bully, adults won't have anything to do with him either. And then he won't learn anything. Because adults, you know, they know things. That's what makes them adults. And if the adults around your child don't like your child, it's like your child's in for a dismal time. And so they have to. Children have to learn to integrate their impulses in a manner that allows for the expression of those instincts in accordance with reciprocity with other people and in relationship to the long term. You can't do something that you want today that's going to cost you tomorrow. You can't do that all the time because you end up paying, doing nothing but paying tomorrow for your, for today's idiocy. You know, that sort of defines teenagehood in some ways, right? Teenagehood is the state of paying today for yesterday's idiocies. And hopefully as you mature, you stop doing that, right? And there's a sacrifice in that you sacrifice your immaturity. And there's, there's no real difference between that and cortical maturation, psychophysiologically speaking. So as you mature, the newer and more sophisticated parts of your brain mature, the parts of your brain that are capable of regulating your behavior in relationship to other people, your friends, your family, the broader community, all of those things. And Also regulating what you do now in relationship to what you need to do tomorrow and next week and next month and next year and five years down the road, you might say, in some ways, the more mature you are, the longer a span of time across which you calculate the consequences of your behavior and the broader the range of people across which you calculate your impact. And so, you know, if you're starting the process of maturation, you know, maybe you get yourself to the point where you can plan a week ahead and you can take care of yourself. And maybe if you push it and you mature further, then you can plan a year ahead and you can. You can start to take care of your wife. And maybe if you get that together to some degree, the two of you can plan five years ahead and you can take care of your kids, right? And so you're. You can see that you're establishing a kind of harmony of function across multiple levels of community and time. And that's a good way of defining the target of maturation. The.

Okay, now imagine you're back in the

date and you decide that

you're tired of being alone. You're looking for someone to what?

To what? Let's say your aim is high, so

what are you looking for?

Now, because your aim is high, you're looking for someone to love and vice versa. And so what does it mean to love someone? Well, it means to. It means to care for them. It doesn't mean to protect them and make them secure precisely because that's not good enough. If you love someone, you care for them, you offer them security and predictability. You're honest with them, but you also encourage them. You can see the love that you might have for a child, if it's optimized, is there's a certain amount of protection that goes along with that, because children need a certain amount of shelter. But a fair bit of that is,

you know, get the hell out there. Get out there in the world and push yourself and develop yourself and dance

on the edge so that you become who you can become. And it's the balance of those two things that's sort of the balance of the maternal and the paternal. By the way, that balance between security and encouragement, that's like the essence of love. That's a good way of thinking about it. That's one of the characterizations of God in the Old and New Testament, right? So you could think about that as a spirit.

That's like the spirit we talked about

already, except on the other side of the universe, so to speak, that you could invite in and have possess you, right? And that's what you're called upon to do. That's the essence. That's one of the ways that the essence of religious practice can be conceptualized. How so you're in your date, you're at your date and you decide that you want to find someone to love. And then that directs your actions and your attention. Because now at the date, the frame of reference that you're using to elicit the words you speak and the glances you take and the pattern of dancing, the pattern of attention is that this could be someone I could love. Well, that's going to be a very different date. Now obviously, if you're wise, that initial investigation is tentative and you look for a dance like response and the possibility of that love expands as the relationship develops. But it's important to get the aim right at the beginning.

That's why this is a leap, maybe it's worth making.

Now there's an insistence in the biblical corpus that the firstborn is to be sacrificed to God.

Right?

Dedicated to God.

Why?

Well, because how you establish your aim determines how things go. Right. And so when you undertake something, if you want to do it properly, you aim at what's highest right at the beginning. Right, right. What's highest? Well, one of the ways we characterize this, you know, if, if the short term mating strategy that's associated with the dark tetrad is exploitation for self for narrowly self centered hedonic purposes, then love would be the opposite of that. I mean something obviously in and of itself. We talked about that a little bit. Security, predictability, an honest relationship, honest words, forthright actions, no deception, encouragement. And you know, if you were aiming high, you'd think if you could stand yourself that that's what you'd want for yourself. Right? So it's, it's funny because you might think that if you are doing nothing but manipulating someone to get them to crawl in bed with you as soon as quick possible, you're being selfish. But it's a very strange use of the word self because it's not any better for you than it is for them. If you were being properly selfish, you'd search with every glance for everything that was best for you as well as for them. And that's a real optimization. Aiming up and treating the other person as if they're you. Right? That's the great commandment to do both of those. That's the commandment that Christ posits as the source of the ten commandments that are handed to Moses Themselves.

[Advertiser]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Upward aim, radical reciprocity. Right. And that's the opposite of the spirit of bitter exploitation. And that's operating in the background while you're up to date too, as it is operating in the background with everything you do and every word you utter. And that's the underlying religious landscape. Now that spirit that aims up, I'll characterize it some other ways.

It's the spirit towards which proper sacrifice is directed. These are definitions. That's what happens in the story of Cain and Abel.

Abel offers his sacrifices upward.

Well, if you're going to establish a

long term, beneficial, reciprocal relationship with someone you love, you have to offer what's best in order to manage that. And you have to sacrifice everything that interferes to pursue that goal. That's also why there's such emphasis in, on sacrifice in the biblical corpus, is because there's no difference between sacrifice and work. And the work you engage in towards an end is the sacrifices that you make in relation to that aim. And that's the pattern of your life. Human life is sacrificial because we work. There's no difference between work and sacrifice.

Right.

Work is the sacrifice of the moment to the community and the future.

Right?

Right. So what's the highest form of sacrifice? Well, that's the other mystery that the biblical stories attempt to unfold. In the final analysis, the offering is child and self.

Right.

That's why Abraham is called upon to sacrifice his son. Everything is to be given up to what's highest. And the pattern of the crucifixion is self sacrifice. And the crucifixion itself is the combination of, of the sacrifice of son and self.

Right.

It's an exemplification of the highest conceivable form of sacrifice. And what does it represent? It means everything is to be offered up in service to what's properly highest. That's the core of community. That's why in town, based on the European model, which is in turn based on the Judeo Christian model, you have a cathedral at the center of the town or church in the shape of a cross.

[Moderator]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's the place of self sacrifice, the cross. There's an altar in the church and the altar is the place of sacrifice. Why? Because community is founded on sacrifice.

Right.

And then the question is, what's the highest form of sacrifice? Well, we walked through that already. It's the willingness to offer your best. Well, what's the core of your best with everything you are?

Right, right. And that's the.

What does that mean a society that's pro. That's predicated on the spirit of voluntary self sacrifice does not require a tyrant to govern itself.

[Advertiser]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's something to know. And so one of the things you might ask yourself

when the tyrant's looming like now, is to what degree do you make manifest the sacrifice that no longer requires the hand of the tyrant? And that's literally the sacrifice of everything.

[Moderator]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's the willingness.

It's very straightforward. All the responsibility that you do not

take upon yourself will be taken from you by tyrants and used against you.

Right. In your country.

I'm a Canadian.

I've watched your country a lot. Your country knew this better than any country that's ever been. I would say the reason that you have been so stunningly free and prosperous for so long, even though that's threatened now, is because your country was predicated on that sacrificial responsibility.

Right.

And you weren't inhabitants of the land of Cain. Because one of the things that's remarkable

about your country, and I've been in

many countries, is that you people actually admire genuine success.

Now, there's variability in that. There's no shortage of resentment even in your culture. But all things considered, this was the shining city on the hill where the spirit of Abel was celebrated. Right?

[Advertiser]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And look what happened. Look at the miracles that took place as a consequence of that. The freest and richest and fairest nation that was ever established, established not on the basis of the rights that every fool now clamors to have. What would you say, respected and regarded, but on the responsibilities that made the citizens of the United States neither slaves nor tyrants. Right. And that's a reflection, and we'll stop with this. This is another characterization of God. In the opening chapters of Genesis, God is presented as the spirit of Logos that broods upon the waters prior to the emergence of the order. That's good. These waters, it's a mystery because the waters are there before creation occurs. And so a critical reader will be stumped by the order of affairs. But water in the biblical context, in the initial act of creation, it isn't water in the sense that we understand water. Now, the word is actually tohu va bohu. And in Hebrew, that word means something like confusion and possibility.

Right.

And it's presented as water because possibility is deep, like water is deep. And possibility gives rise to form, like water bears form and water out of water, life emerges. And out of possibility, creation emerges. And what do I mean by that?

Possibility is what you confront when you wake up in the morning

it's what you can wrestle into the shape of the world as a consequence of your decisions during the day. The Logos that inhabits you, which is the spirit that's made in the image of God, is the consciousness within you that wrestles like God himself at the beginning of time with possibility and brings forth order in consequence. The order that's good if the aim is upward, if the aim is towards love and the effort is undertaken in the spirit of truth, the order created is good or very good. That's what you do if you're a good father in the confines of your home. You establish a little walled garden. That's what paradise is, a walled garden. Right. Where everyone. A walled garden that keeps everyone secure and encourages them to the point where they can play forever, so to speak. The same idea is walking with God. There's an insistence in Genesis 1 that human beings are made in the image of that Creator. And there's an insistence that that creative spirit is the same spirit that bears the cross of catastrophe up the hill of suffering. And what does that mean? It means that insofar as you bear the responsibility for the world on your shoulders, that you're participating as an image of God in. In the creation of the order.

That's good.

That's what that all means.

Right.

And the idea that you have intrinsic value, which is the idea that your society is predicated upon right, made in the image of God with inviolable rights and responsibilities that transcend even the state. This isn't a gift from the government. It's not a gift from other people. It's a reflection of your intrinsic nature. Why? Because your aim is the. Because the world depends on your aim, that's why. That's true. And that's a terrible thing to know. And now you know it. Thank you very much.

[Moderator]

Well,

[Jordan Peterson]

thank you for putting up with that. All right, Mick, way we go.

[Moderator]

Is it working now? It's working now. Thanks for the claps. The two people.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, thanks.

[Moderator]

That's not that. I didn't mean to ask for that accidentally.

[Jordan Peterson]

I didn't know if I get from the restaurant to heaven and hell and back, yeah,

[Moderator]

every day, basically. Okay. I've chosen some questions we have. I have been told we have 17 minutes. So we're going to get through as many questions as we can, which, knowing dad will be one. Okay, So a bunch of people wanted this question, and I'm curious about it, too. It was. Is there something specific that you've wrestled with God about? Something that comes to mind.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, dear yes, It's a hard question to answer because it's true all the

time, you know, I mean, one thing

I do, for example, when I'm speaking on stage is

weigh the words, you know?

So what's the aim?

While my aim in part is to get somewhere further, right, further in my

investigation because it's a communal enterprise, my aim is also to take everybody along with me.

That's a challenge.

So that's ridiculously entertaining.

It's, it's.

It's. It's like juggling plates or it's more like juggling fire, really, but. And so that's a wrestling match. You can.

You can come to learn that

[Advertiser]

you

[Jordan Peterson]

wrestle with God when you speak.

Your aim with your words. Your words are arrows that should be striking the center of the target.

And you can feel that. You can.

And you can really learn to. You can really learn to feel that. The words that are true put the foundation that is firm under your feet.

The words that are false fragment you and allow you to be washed away when the storms come.

And you can feel that with every word.

It's a terrifying thing to learn because

the first thing you learn is that

almost everything you say is a lie. And that's a terrifying thing to learn. When God banishes.

No, banishment.

When God bars the way to Adam and Eve, bars the way to paradise from Adam and Eve. That story is often interpreted as God banishing Adam and Eve because of their sin. But that's not exactly right, you see. That's not exactly right. Adam and Eve are outside paradise because of their pride. They bit off more than they could chew. And. And now they're alienated from God because pride alienates people from God. Now there's a pathway back to God, so to speak. Pathway back to the paradise, back to the kingdom of heaven. That's another way of thinking about it. But the pathway is barred by a sword that. By terrible monsters. Cherubim. And by a sword that is on fire that turns every which way.

Well, why?

Well, what's a sword that turns every which way? Well, it's a blade. And what does a blade do? Well, a blade slices and cuts. And what does something on fire do? It burns. And. And so what does a burning blade do? It cuts and burns. And what does a burning blade that turns every which way do?

It cuts and burns.

No matter. It cuts and burns everything away. What do you mean everything? Everything not fit to be in paradise. So you pay attention to your words and you learn 95% of what you say is a Lie, all that has to go. And so that's a terrible thing to understand. The alternative is worse because the pathway to hell is paved with lies and hell itself is the dominion of the lie. And you might say, well, I don't believe that. It's like, first of all, that's only

because you don't have any idea what you're talking about.

And second, you can make the case in a manner that's not the least theological. A totalitarian state isn't freedom loving innocence striving toward the light, dominated by the brute Hitler or Stalin. One man can't control 20 million people. A totalitarian state is the state that exists when every single person in the state, bar none, lies about absolutely everything, all the time to themselves and to everyone else.

And that's hell.

And if that's not hell enough for you, it's like, well, you know, have it your way. Have it your way.

You know, when God comes to Abraham

and tells him that he's going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, he tells Abraham

that if, well, Abraham makes a bargain with God.

And he says, well, I don't think you should destroy the cities regardless of their sin. And God says, yeah, I think they think it's time to lay some waste. And Abraham says, what if there's innocent people in the city? And God says, well, yeah, I don't think there is. And Abraham says, well, what if I find 40? And God says, Hey, 40, no problem. If you can find 40, I'll spare the city. And Abraham, who's kind of pushy, says, well, how about 30? And God says, okay. And I think Abraham bargains him down to 10. If there's 10 people who tell the truth in the city, then it'll escape destruction. Well, what does that story mean? You're called upon to be one of the 10, right? That's what that story means. It means more than that.

It means if there's 10 people in

a city who still tell the truth, that's enough to save the city from destruction.

[Advertiser]

Right?

[Jordan Peterson]

That's how important it is to say what you have to say.

You want that hammered home?

You look at the story of Jonah. Jonah is called upon by God to utter the words of the of truth

that will redeem the city of his

enemies, Nineveh and Job. Jonah thinks, yeah, I don't think so. I'm not going to the city of my enemies, 150,000 of them, to tell them God is outraged and that they're in trouble. I just assume they were wiped out anyways, and there's 150,000 people, 150,000 of them, like one of me. So he does what any sensible person would do, hypothetically, and makes tracks in the opposite direction, jumps on a boat and gets the hell out of there. And unfortunately, God is not so easily thwarted. And the ship is enveloped by a storm. And what that means is that if you run away when you have something to say, then the ship that bears you will be threatened. That's what that means. And so the sailors are concerned about this occurrence. And they decide there's probably someone on board who isn't right with their God. And they cast lots. And they choose Jonah as the victim of interrogation. And he's asleep. Because that's what people do when they flee from their conscience, is they fall into unconsciousness so that they don't have to contend with the reality of their refusal. And they wake them up and they say, well, the ship's in peril and the waves are rising, and we think, maybe you're not exactly right with your God. And Jonah says, matter of fact, I was told to do something, and that's the voice of conscience, by the way, and I didn't. And the sailors say, well, who's your God? Because they're thinking it's like God of the local cavern or something. And Jonah says, well, he created the heavens and the earth. And the sailors think, well, you probably shouldn't piss him off then.

And

he tells them to throw them. Throw them overboard, because he knows there's no hope. And the sailors try mightily to reach the shore, but they can't, because God's not so easily thwarted. So they throw Joan overboard. And, you know, the story could end there. Because what that story means is that if you flee from the dictates of your conscience, if you refuse to bring forth the words that you're called upon to say, then you put the ship of state in peril, and you'll end up in. And your own life will end up threatened. And you might think, well, that's pretty damn dismal. And it's like, that's not nearly bad enough. That isn't even.

That's just where it starts.

Because the beast from hell itself comes up and takes Jonah and its jaws and pulls him down to the bottom of things, where he's. Where he lies for three days, right? In hell. Because that's the next thing that happens if you're quiet when you're told. When you're called upon to speak, right? And so, No, we'll leave it at that.

[Moderator]

Okay, we got two in. How do you forgive someone that's wronged you greatly without becoming a martyr and continuing to let them have a negative impact on your life?

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, forgiveness is,

forgiveness is a very complicated matter. You know, if you're

pursuing the religious path in the traditional Judeo Christian manner, when you ask God for forgiveness, you confess, repent and atone, right?

What does confess mean? Well, look, if you, if you, you

and I have had a scrap about something and I feel betrayed and I want to set things right, I want to find out like, well, what's the story here? What happened? And if I have any sense, I'm going to confess my part in it too, right? Because if there's something that's standing between us, it'd be convenient if it was just you, but there's a reasonable probability. Well, there's some probability that it was just me, right. And if I don't want to replicate the mistake, I want might want to find that out. It was a very useful thing to know. If you're fighting with your wife or your husband, it's like, what's probably them, but it might be you. And so why bother finding out? Well, because then you don't have to be stupid again, right? So you want to confess. Here's what I think happened. And you know, if you're, if you have a real dispute with someone and they just tell you exactly what happened, like honestly, you're 80% of the way to repairing the relationship right there. Like often what you want to know from someone is do they at least understand what the hell happened? Right? And then, and, but, but then let's assume that, I don't know, we have a scrap and we decide it's like 60% you and 40% me. And so then what do we do? It's like, well, I figure out what I have to offer you to. I have to indicate that I'm sorry, that's the repentance, then I have to atone for it. It's like, well, what, what do I need to do to set things right? And that's kind of a two pronged issue. It's like, well, what do I have to do so I feel I can forgive myself, right? Because you, you hold yourself accountable if you have any sense. And then I have to figure out, well, what do you need so that we can put this behind us? And then we have to negotiate that and then you put it behind you, and then you have a friend instead of an enemy, and that's a good deal. Unless you want to collect enemies. And that's, that's not wise. One enemy is a lot of enemies, but, you know, five or six and you're pretty much done.

And so

that's the process of forgiveness. It's very, very complicated. Now you might say, well, someone did me wrong long ago and I need to let go. That's, that's different. That's a different. I mean, that's, that's you. You can't have the repentance or the atonement then on the part of that person. Maybe they're no longer alive, for example. Then usually what you have to do is, well, you have to figure out what you contributed to it the same way that you would if you were actually discussing it with someone. And then you have to understand what it was that brings up a state of affairs like that about, so that when you move forward into the future, you're not likely to fall prey to

the same circumstance because otherwise it'll just haunt you.

It haunts you partly because you're set up so that once you fall into a pit, once, anytime you approach the territory defined by that pit, you're going to be apprehensive.

If you haven't figured out a way

of navigating around that obstacle, the obstacle

signals threat to you forever. Forever. It'll never go away. It'll never go away.

And so you can clean all that up, but you have to do a very careful analysis. I'll give you an example of that. So often soldiers who suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, it's always often conceptualized, by the way, as a severe moral injury that they often develop PTSD because, not because of something terrible that happened to them, but because of something terrible they saw themselves do.

Right?

Because you can be a naive, you know, corn fed Iowan and end up in a foreign land in a very dreadful circumstance and watch yourself do something absolutely ungodly and really enjoy it. And then you'll understand very rapidly that you know absolutely nothing about yourself or the depth of the soul or the nature of human beings.

And your attempt to live forward in

that state of ignorance will be indistinguishable from trauma. And then you might say, well, how do you recover from that? And the answer is you develop a philosophy of evil that's as deep as your sin. That's how. Yeah, and then maybe you can forgive yourself because you can see your capacity for the commission of sadistic atrocity, you know, in the light of the eternal battle between good and evil that characterizes the cosmic Landscape. It's something like that, you know? And the atheist types think, well, no, it's like if you think that you've never dealt with someone who's had a severe moral injury, because if you ever have, you'll find out very soon that the landscape of good and evil is a lot more real than you might think. And if you don't know that, you should be on your knees every second of your bloody life thanking God that that terrible knowledge has not been yet revealed to you. And. Yeah, that's for sure.

[Moderator]

One more sure. Even though I was told not to do that. Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, I'll be quick.

[Moderator]

Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

Find a quick one if you can.

[Moderator]

Okay. This is kind of a cute one. We'll see if we can keep it cute. My wife and I are having our first kid in four weeks. Congratulations. Neither of us have a relationship with God, but want to raise our kids in church. Please give your advice.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, you can do a good thing badly.

Yeah, I mean that.

I mean that.

Look, look, it's very much in keeping

with what we talked about tonight.

It's.

Regardless of the state of your religious

belief or lack thereof, you can make the decision to place your child in a situation where he or she can learn the fundamental stories of our culture. And you can't be a citizen of the west without knowing those fundamental stories.

Those are the same thing. Like inhabiting that narrative world and being a citizen of the west. Those are the same thing.

And so you can provide them with that. And every single person this will include, your own children have to wrestle with God within the confines of their own soul. And you can facilitate that process by educating them in the traditions of your people, so to speak. And so go to church and listen and see if you can learn and participate in the community. And if the church isn't everything you think it could or should be, then you can work to rectify that. And that's a useful thing to do, too. And, you know, I didn't bring my kids to church when they were kids, and that was a mistake.

[Moderator]

There was one time we went to church. Mom brought us to church and we went to a church in Toronto. And they're all woke. They're really woke now. But this was like 15 years ago. I think I was in grade six. And they started the Lord's Prayer with our mother, Father, who art in heaven, and we just got up and left. Now that was our. That was our experience with church growing up.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right. Well, and, you know, you could say, too. And. And I certainly would have been likely to think that way at that time, that if you go to a church and it's woke, then you should leave. And that might be the case unless they're all like that, in which case you're in some trouble. But the alternative strategy is to take back the territory, right? And if you don't, well, all of

you, all of you have to think about this in relationship to your duty to your community.

Because part of the reason that the WOKE mob has prevailed is because the responsible people abdicated their responsibility.

And so why are the school boards

full of woke of confused WOKE activists? Well, because they took the job. And so there you have it.

And if you want to do something

about that, think what should be done. It's like, take the job, right?

And so.

And that's the only way out of this mess. So it's the same on the church front. You know, you have a responsibility to rebuild. Well, what are you going to do? You're either going to rebuild the damaged

institutions of your community or you're going to abandon them. Those are your options.

And if you abandon them, well, then what? Then what do you have?

You're in the desert then.

And the idol worshipers come calling pretty quickly when you're lost in the desert, as you can see if you look. And on that cheery note,

thank you, everyone.

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