← The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
You Cannot Avoid Having a God. Here Is What That Actually Means.
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Every Style, Every Home hi everybody, welcome to the release of the second lecture for my extensive tour archives. We've been working late at night when my symptoms recede enough so that I can finally concentrate to make this release a possibility. At the same time, recently I've been able to write a little bit and I'm working on three essays which I hope to finish and release in the near future. One deals with climate lies propagated by the socialists and the leftists. Another deals with the issue of the Alphabet Mafia and the associated pride movement, and the final one deals with the so called rape gangs in the uk, asking whether the terminology rape gang, which is definitely an improvement over grooming gang, is sufficient to accurately describe the magnitude of the crimes that are being committed. In any case, working on these now, hoping to contribute something to the ongoing public debate about these crucially important issues, I'm unhappy with my silence, however necessitated it might be by the conditions of my illness. I'd like to get back to. To my work, you know. Anyways, that's the update. Thanks for your time and attention and I hope you enjoy listening to this second lecture as much as I enjoyed delivering it. Bye bye. Thank you very much. It's very good of you to come. I'm looking forward to tonight. What does it mean that we wrestle with God? Well, Tammy made some introductory comments. You. One of the things I've learned from writing the book that this tour is promoting, let's say, or discussing, is that what God is in some manner is a matter of definition. So here's a definition. Your God is whatever you put first, that's a definition. And you might ask, well, why do you have to put something first? And the answer is, well, do you put one foot in front of the other when you go somewhere? And I really mean that specifically because in order to do anything, you make that thing first. If you can't do that, then you're confused and aimless. And I suppose that's something too. But it's not productive and it's anxiety provoking because anxiety actually signals that you're not aimed in a single direction. That's its technical definition. It's a good way of thinking about it. So you have to put something first. You put something first with every glance that you take because there is a myriad of things that you could focus your attention on. But when you focus, you focus on one thing. And you focus on one thing. For a reason. The highest reason that you could focus on one thing would be God. That's a good way of thinking about it. And something is going to occupy that position of priority. Let me give you an example. We've actually been experimenting with this idea with large language models. So, you know, they're like the models that you see now coming out in computer platforms like ChatGPT or Elon Musk's Crocodile. I used to ask my students, for example, in my classes why they. Why they were handing in an essay, why they were writing a test. And people's answers differed in depth depending on how well they had thought things through. Which is in some ways equivalent to saying depending on how conscious they were. Why are you here in this class? Well, I need to take the class to, to get a grade. Well, why do you need to get a grade? Well, I need to pass the course. Why do you need to pass the course? Well, I have to get my degree. Well, why do you want to get your degree? Well, people would start to stumble at that point. But why do you want to get your degree. Well, I want to get a job. I want to. I need to make some money. It's not a great answer because there's lots of ways of making money, right? So it's starting to get somewhat loose. But that's the next aim. Let's say, well, why do you think you should get a job and make money? Well, to live. But you can live on handouts. For example, you could live on social services. Why would you get a job? Well, I want to be a good citizen. Well, why do you care about that? Well, I want to be a good person. Well, how is it that you're a good person? You see, what you're doing in some ways is in. In a series of questions like that, you're. You're leading people to either the apex of their value structure or to. Or downward to its foundation. You can use either metaphor, and you might say that the highest value or the most foundational value in that broadening hierarchy of values is also equivalent to God. One of the things I've learned by walking through the biblical corpus is that each of the stories that's associated with the characterization of God is a snapshot or a dramatization of another aspect of what should be put in the highest place. Once you understand that you inevitably put something in the highest place, no matter how fractionated that might be, no matter how confused you are, once you understand that you have to put something in the highest place, even to perceive, even to look, then the next question becomes, well, what, if anything, can be properly put in that place? And I would say that's been the eternal question that's faced the human race since we became conscious. What is it that should be put in the highest place? The story I'm going to tell you tonight, which is Story of Cain and Abel, is a brilliant exposition of that problem. It's a very short story. It's really about 12 to 15 lines long, depending on what you count. There's nothing to it in terms of length, and yet it's inexhaustible in its significance. And that's a very interesting fact as well. You might ask yourself how stories like that can be so dense. And I would say, well, it's a consequence of a variety of factors. A very old story. And the story of Cain and Abel is a very old story, at least multiple thousands of years old, and likely older than that, because the older a story is, the higher the likelihood that it's even older than that, because the farther back you go in time, the less rapidly things change. So something If a story is 10,000 years old, it's probably 50,000 years old, right? I mean, it vanishes into the sands of time. So you can't be sure, but. But you can be reasonably sure. What is it? What happens when people tell stories across a very long period of time? A lot of people observe a lot of people, and they compress that into an account of the fundamental elements of the human drama. And then they tell that in a manner that if remembered, has to be memorable, right? So it has to attract the attention of its listeners, and then it has to be remembered, and then it has to be remembered and transmitted across the centuries. Let's say that's a very long period of time. So then you could imagine as well that not only is a story that's abstracted and foundational and remembered, compelling and interesting, but it also modifies itself so that it fits in the psyche. That's a good way of thinking about. Adapts itself across time so that it can be remembered. And so it reflects the structure of memory itself. And you could imagine, even if you're biologically oriented, let's say, that our memory is adapted to remember what's important. And so a story that fits in the structure of memory is going to be a story that only concentrates on what's important because everything else will get forgotten. No one will pay attention to it. It'll just drift away. Now, a highly abstract story, like the story of Cain and Abel is memorable, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we understand it. Now, that's not necessarily precisely a problem. You go to lots of movies that you don't necessarily understand. You do lots of things you don't understand. You probably don't really understand why you put up a Christmas tree, for example. Well, it's a very old ritual, right? And it predates Christianity, that ritual. And it isn't obviously linked in any way to Christianity. And yet it's something we do in celebration of Christmas. And I'm just telling you that not to pick on you because you don't know why you put up a Christmas tree and everyone else is doing it isn't a good answer. But it's to celebrate rebirth, right? It's to celebrate the birth of the light, which is why you decorate the tree with light. The tree is the tree of life. The crucifix is a representation of the tree of life. Those things are all tangled together in that ritual. And we're act. We act that out even though we don't necessarily understand it and it's meaningful. To us, even though we don't necessarily know why. And so, like our dreams can contain more information than we understand our stories, the stories that we tell and the stories that we live by contain. Can contain wisdom that we don't fully realize. I mean, if we fully realized all wisdom, we would be omniscient. We certainly don't understand ourselves and we don't understand the drama that we're involved in, even though we acted out and represented an image and in drama and in a narrative, in story. And then as we do that, as we act it out and we represent it and we come to tell it, we do come to develop more and more understanding. And I would say in the 20th century, there's actually been substantial progress in making the meaning of the deep myths upon which our culture is founded more conscious. Now, what I would say enlightenment minds tend to equate myth with falsehood and superstition. But that's a big mistake because it fails to grapple with the centrality of the story. You can be cynical and you can say we're compelled by stories because they're entertaining. But that's a foolish observation, because the mystery is why they're entertaining, right? Because to say something like a story is entertaining. Entertaining enough so your children will torture you to tell them stories, right? Entertaining enough so that you'll pay to go see them, right? Gripping enough so you'll even go to pay them. You'll even pay to go see them if they take the form of horror or if they're upsetting, right? And compelling enough so that children can learn and be engaged in the learning process. If what they're learning is encapsulated in a story, they don't have to struggle with that. It grips them and compels them. A story is a very important thing, and a story is an abstraction. We tend to think of story as fiction and fiction as the opposite of fact. But that's not very wise. I mean, think about it this way. You know, you've read some shallow books in your life, no doubt, and seen some movies that were basically tripe. And sometimes there's a place for that because maybe you've worked hard all day or all week or for a year, and, you know, you're at home and you're tired and you just want to put on, like, Barbie and zone out for an hour and a half, right? You're not interested in wrestling with God, let's say, at that moment. But you know perfectly well that what you're watching is shallow. And you don't do it necessarily with any pride. It's just, it's a form of, of effortless relaxation. But then you also know that now and then you read something, a work of fiction or you watch a movie, another work of fiction, and it strikes you very deeply, which is an interesting metaphor. You know that you're moved and you're moved deeply. Something stirs within you. There's something to the story that's compelling and transformative. It might make you tear up, it might even change the way you look at the world if the story is deep enough. And we do presume that great literature has that capability. And it does have that capability. I mean, I was, I've been struck to the core by, well, by many things I've read, but I would say there's a cardinal dozen books that I've read that really changed the way that I looked at everything. For me, Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist, sort of top of that list, his books, the Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground. The Devils are unbelievably compelling works of fiction. And they're deep now. They're not fact. So does that mean they're not true? And they aren't true in a way because the events that Dostoevsky details, for example, in Crime and Punishment, never happened. Or wait or did, or is that accurate? It's not that easy to tell what's happening. It's not that easy to tell what's happening. You know, you know this, you know this. If you're married or in a long term relationship, you know perfectly well that you can exchange a few casual words with your wife or husband and feel things moving underneath the surface, right? And you can exchange the wrong words casually about nothing and, and not be able to look each other in the eye for a week, right? Because something, something in that exchange moved. Something that was way under the surface. And maybe it's something under the surface you bloody well both know. And the last thing you want to do is admit it or talk about it, right? And so, and then you might say to your wife, well, what's wrong? And she says, well, nothing. And you both know that that's a lie and you know that the exchange pointed to something deep. You know that it's part of a much a story that has not yet been told and that maybe needs to be told. And so maybe you delve into that and you try to get to the bottom of it. And it's, it's pretty awful, you know, to sort out exactly what was said and what wasn't said in a situation like that, so called. Peterson Academy. Peterson Academy. Peterson Academy. It's called Peterson Academy. Peterson Academy. 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 way, giving them the audience and the 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, If you're a great storyteller, what you do is you watch a lot of different people act in a lot of different situations and you start to extract out regularities of, of action and attention. So if you go see an action adventure movie, like a James Bond movie, let's say what you get is a distillation of romantic adventure, right? Everything that isn't romantic or adventurous is edited out. And you might say, well, that's unrealistic. It's like, well, not exactly. It's not exactly unrealistic. It's more like hyper realistic. It's like the writer and the filmmaker decided to watch a thousand people and pull out the most exciting elements of their life, the most exciting and romantic elements of their life, you might say, and then amalgamate all those into something that's super romantic and super exciting to get to the core of what constitutes romantic adventure itself. And then you're pretty interested in that. You'll go watch that movie partly to be entertained, but also partly, maybe to live the life you haven't lived. That's a good way of thinking about it. But also maybe to get to the core of what constitutes a romantic adventure to learn. And so it's a distillation. Now here's a question for you. Is an abstraction more or less real than the thing that it's abstracted from?
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Right?
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Because if you make this fact fiction separation, you say fiction is falsehood. It's not true. It never happened. You're left with a problem that you could make the same criticism of abstraction per se. Like we abstract out numbers, for example, from. From a multitude of different amalgamations to fruit, to cars, two people. What's common across them is two. And you might say, well, that's less real. Two as a number is less real than the things it represents. But I would say, well, why are you so sure? About that. Because if you can manipulate the abstractions, you're more powerful than you are if you manipulate the actual things, the abstractions, in some ways you could make a case that the abstractions are more real. You could make a case that they're hyper real. Words are abstractions and yet they have motive force in the world. What's the reason? What's the possible rationale for presuming that an abstraction isn't real? Well, a great story is an abstraction. A story about a great man is an abstraction about what it is about men that make them great. And a story about the greatest of all possible men would be the ultimate abstraction of greatness itself. And why, how is that not real? You might say, well, it's not about anybody in particular. Well, it might depend on how great the man was, right? How well that man played out that pattern. It could be about someone in particular, could be about a genuinely great man who acts out or embodies or incarnates the pattern of greatness. As such, say it's about you too, insofar as there have been. There have been times in your life where you made that pattern manifest. We understand these things because we understand, for example, if we're men, that we can be fathers. And being a father is to participate in a pattern. And we know perfectly well that we can be better or worse fathers. And we generally even know if we are being better or worse fathers. And so we understand that the abstraction represents a mode of being. And it's something that we can participate and should participate in and don't participate in. Well, to our great loss and also the loss of our children. We can abstract out stories. And great storytellers abstract out great stories. And the greatest stories we abstract out are myths. They're religious stories, and they're hyper true. They're not true like ordinary truth is true. They're true in a way that reveals to you what truth itself is. That's a strange way of thinking about things. Well, here's a hypothesis. I think it's true. I think the scientific data suggests this. By the way, I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture that in order to even perceive, you have to prioritize, right? To prioritize means to value. So if I. If you're out on a first date with a. With a woman that. And you want the date to go well, and you're in a busy restaurant, there's 50 conversations going on around you and you could attend to any of them, but you don't. You, you, you, you. You eliminate from consciousness, all the con, all the conversations you could be attending to, even the one that you could be having with yourself in your own mind, you ignore that and you prioritize what it is that she's saying and how she's acting and you elevate that above everything else, right? And you do that because you're, well, God only knows what your reason is. But you know, it could be you're going to have a reason, right? And it could be the reason you're all thinking of, or it could be, or it could be a higher order reason because maybe you're a serious person and you're looking for a long term relationship and the way that you're going to structure your attention while you are listening is going to reflect that aim. And she's going to be watching you like a hawk also depending on what it is she's aiming at, to see just exactly how it is that you're directing your attention moment to moment in that interaction, right? And if you both are out for nothing but a night of fun, well, the conversation is going to go one way. And if you're actually looking for someone to share the rest of your life with and you think the possibility is there in that moment, then you're going to interact and attend and focus your attention and prioritize in a completely different way. And all of that is going to be dependent on what it is that you're aiming for. And that aim is actually going to structure the way that that person makes themselves manifest to you. And that's something to know too, because one of the things you could hypothesize this is a terrifying notion, is that people make themselves real to you in direct relationship to your aim. And I think it's worse than that. I think that the world does that. Now we kind of know this even as scientists of perception, because your senses are actually navigation equipment, right? The reason you have senses is so that you can move from one place to another successfully. And so when you, and when you're moving from one place to another, you have an aim. The aim is to get to the next place, right? To get to the promised land archetypally, to get to the best place possible in the short variations of that or over the long run, right? And when you make that aim, then the world lays itself out for you. This is how your perceptual systems work as a pathway to that end, accompanied by obstacles that make you, that produce negative emotion and facilitators or tools, affordances that produce positive emotion. So the Facts of the world make themselves manifest to you in relationship to your aim. And the emotional valence of things is determined by the relationship between those facts and where it is that you're headed. And so that's an amazing thing to know because one of the things it suggests is that if the world keeps kicking you in the face, it's possible that your aim is wrong. And so one of the. Well, it's either that or God made an arbitrary world that's designed to torture you, right? And that is the story of Cain and Abel, because that's Cain's conclusion, right? And so we'll delve into that. And so that's an exciting possibility. And then another hypothesis that you might derive from that set of notions is that the aim that would reveal the beauty of the world, the beauty and the significance of the world to you in the highest degree, that aim, there's no difference between that aim and aiming at God. That's a definition. So you can imagine that you could organize your perceptions so that the best of all possible worlds could make itself manifest to you. Right? Hypothetically. Imagine that was hypothetically the case and that a certain aim would have to go along with that. Well, I can give you an example of that. So one of the insistences in the gospel text is that you should treat other people as you would like to be treated. It's actually quite a complex moral directive because it doesn't mean be nice to other people. Because you know perfectly well sometimes nice isn't what you need. You need a slap on the side of the head. You know, you need to run into the obstacle you deserve to run into. You know perfectly well if you have children and you love them, that just doing what makes them happy right now is not the right thing to do. You want to take your son or your daughter and you want to think, I want this person to thrive in the world, and their behavior at the moment is not in accordance with that aim, and they need a certain degree of correction. And if I was that child and someone who loved me was interacting with me, they would stop me if I was erring, right? So treating people as you would like to be treated doesn't imply that you should go out of your way never to make them uncomfortable emotionally. It means you should put yourself in that. In their position. You should assume that what you're trying to do is to help them live in the world in a manner that reveals the beauty and the significance of the world to them. And then you should decide how it is that you would Interact with them so that that was possible. So that became increasingly possible. And then you might say, well, imagine you did that to everyone you came in contact with. There's immense emphasis, for example in the Old Testament on hospitality. It's a sacred duty, hospitality. Well, you invite people to your house and you're generous and you're productive. So your house is well apportioned and you're generous and you share everything you have and you do that wholeheartedly and in a genuinely generous spirit. Well, imagine that you're hospitable in everything you do, which is the same thing. It's an earlier version of treating other people like you would want to be treated. Imagine you do that with everyone you meet, all the time, with every word and gesture. Well, then you might say, well, what's going to be the consequence to you? Well, you know, now and then someone's going to take advantage of you. But I would say to their own detriment, it's not a reasonable way of reacting to someone who's being productive and generous. People who do that, their reputation suffers very, very rapidly. Everyone understands and notices. No one wants them around, no one wants to cooperate with them or trade with them. And it's impossible to build a productive relationship. But if you're the sort of so now and then, you know, you may encounter someone who's going to play a short term manipulative game with you. If you are productive and generous. But by and large, especially if you're good at doing it, especially say when people are suffering or lost and you can offer them a hand and it's genuine, they're going to remember that. And there's a lot of people in the world that aren't you, like 8 billion of them. And you're going to interact with at least a thousand of them in some real detail in your life. You could store up goodwill in their hearts, you know, and then what would happen if a thousand people are happy with you, what's your life going to be like? Especially if you went out of your way, you know, and most people, this is God's honest truth. We know this scientifically as well as practically. Almost everyone who's vaguely sane has a ledger. You know, if someone does a favor for you, there's part of you that thinks, you know, some reciprocation is in order. Right? That's the basis of the turnabout that makes fair play. It's the definition of fair play. It's certainly something you want in a marriage, is that, you know, I mean, not like you're exactly keeping track, because that's petty. Ready? But there is an expectation that kindness should be met with kindness and vice versa. And then you could imagine so that if you were productive and generous even to a fault, not that you should allow yourself to be taken advantage of. That's not what I mean. But if you're productive and generous to a fault, and you made that manifest to a thousand people, the probability that that would return to you in spades is exceptionally high. So the reason I'm telling you that is because, for example, that's one of the injunctions in the Sermon on the Mount, that you should aim high and then you should treat other people like you would want to be treated well. Why? Well, because that's the aim that will best reveal the pathway, the golden pathway forward to you. It's absolutely the most practical possible. It's interesting advice because it's practical as hell, but it's also deep. It's theologically sound. It essentially means that if you aim up and you act generously and productively and you're wholehearted about that, the Jacob's ladder makes its appearance, right? And you can start ascending the. What would you say, the endless spiral upward to the place that gets better and better, right? And that's a game that improves as you play it. That's a good definition of the kingdom of heaven. Now, it's certainly something that characterizes a very deep friendship, for example, because a friendship can become, if it's well played, let's say, or marriage can become better and better across time, richer and deeper across time. And so one of the things you see in the biblical corpus is that there's a characterization of whatever God is as the thing that should be put in the place of highest value, right? It's something that you establish a relationship with in some ways. And you see this in the story of Cain and Abel. And so we'll talk about that story directly. Now, I'll give you a little setup to this story because you need to know what happened up to this point. Now, Cain and Abel are actually the first two human beings, right? Because Adam and Eve, they're made by God. And so they're not born. They're not ordinary people. They're born in paradise. They're the eternal primordial ancestors, Cain and Abel, they're born in profane history, right? So from the perspective of the biblical narrative, history begins with the fall of Adam and Eve. And it means something like. It means a lot of things, but it means something like the dawn of Self consciousness among human beings. It means many things, but that's one of the things it means self conscious. Human beings realize that there's a future. That's part of being self conscious. You're self conscious and you know yourself as a bounded entity in time. You know your borders and your. And you know what you are and what you aren't. But you also know, I mean, you know yourself in place, sorry, in space. You know your borders, your bodily borders, and you know yourself in time. You know that you were born at some point and that you're going to age and there'll be a time when you aren't. And so human beings are conscious as no other animal is, of the entirety of our span of life. And there's a tragedy that goes along with that, because being self conscious in that manner means that we're aware of our own finitude and our mortality in a way that other animals aren't. We're aware of our own vulnerability. Like zebras are perfectly happy grazing where there's lions. If the lions are asleep, well, it's not very bright. The zebras should be getting together and thinking, why don't we just go stomp those lions while they're sleeping? And there won't be any problem with lions in the future. But the zebras think to the degree they think sleeping lions, they're no problem. They don't think about the future lions, right? Those are completely different creatures. But not us. Like, no matter how calm you are in the present, there's something you have to worry about in the future. And that's because you're conscious of the future. You're conscious of your extension across time. That's part of what makes you self conscious. And Adam and Eve, well, there's, in the story of Adam and Eve, they become self conscious. They know they're naked, the scales fall from their eyes. They become aware of themselves. And the consequence of that there are many. But one of the consequences is they have to work. Now this is an unbelievably profound. Realization and characterization. What does work mean? Well, let's say we could distinguish it from play might have a productive end, but it's enjoyable right now, right? If you're playing, you're not exactly sacrificing anything, right? If you're playing, if you're enjoying yourself, you're doing what you want in the moment. Well, what's the opposite of play? Work. Or more accurately, the work you have to do? Well, why do you have to do it and why do you work and what Is it about human beings that makes us work unlike other creatures? And the answer to that is, well, we're aware of the future. And so what have we learned to do? Well, we've learned to work. Well, what do you do when you work? You sacrifice the present to the future, right? That's like the definition of delayed gratification. If you want to be gratified right now, you get what you want right now. If you're going to work and store and save and toil and labor, what you're doing is you're sacrificing the pleasures of the moment for your long term continued security and opportunity. Or more than that, More than that. Because it's not just about you, right? If you're working, you're also working for your family, you're working for others. And so it isn't just your medium to long term security and opportunity. It's the medium to long term security and stability and opportunity of your family and those you love. And you sacrifice the present to that. Okay, now we've done something useful. We've drawn a relationship, We've established a relationship between work and sacrifice. And that's useful because once you know that connection, you can understand much of what happens, especially in the most archaic stories in the Bible, because they're all about sacrifice. Okay, so let's try to bring that down to earth. You have to sacrifice. Well, why? Well, let's say you just pursued the pleasures of the moment. Well, then you sacrifice the future for the present, right? To do anything, you give up a multitude of other things that you could be doing, right? So the human mode of existence is sacrificial, and that's in some ways why work enters the world. Now, God condemns Adam and Eve to work, and that's partly a consequence of their pride. They sin and that's why they fall out of paradise. And one of the things you might ask yourself is if your work is utterly miserable, how much of that is a consequence of the mistakes in perception that you make and keep on making? You know, I know people have to do difficult things to get by, but there isn't. Exactly. Just because things are difficult doesn't necessarily mean that they're intolerable and embittering. It might depend on what attitude you bring to bear on the sacrifices that you have to make. And so another mystery might be once the human race had established the fact that work was necessary and work was sacrificial, that a question immediately emerged which was, well, what work works best? Which is the same thing as Saying what sacrifice is most pleasing to God? It's the same thing. What pattern of sacrifice do you have to engage in to maximize the return in the future? All things considered for you and the people that you love in consequence of giving something up or investing now, Right? You have to do that. You're going to sacrifice one way or another. Okay, we accept that. Now the question is, what pattern of sacrifice is most effective? The entire biblical corpus is an attempt to answer that question. Right? It's a continual investigation into the covenantal relationship between the spirit of being itself and humanity. So what does that mean? Well, look, think about what you're doing when you work, because the gratification is deferred. You don't get what it is that you're working for right now. You're saving up for the future. You're basically engaging in a contractual relationship. Your assumption is, is that if you put in the time and effort now, there'll be a return at some point in the future. There's no difference between that and a contract. It's the same idea. And that's why the relationship with God in the Old Testament is construed as covenantal. It's a deal. It's a deal you make. The deal is you put in your time. The payoff is you benefit in consequence. So that brings up another question. How do you best guarantee the proper future return as a consequence of your work? And that's a perfectly practical question. That's exactly the question that's addressed in the story of Cain and Abel. So what happens is we end the story of Adam and Eve with the revelation that human beings are destined to work, to toil. And then Eve has the first two brothers. They're a pair of opposites. They're the eternal, warring, hostile brothers, right? They're Batman and Joker. That's a good way of thinking about it. Or Superman and Lex Luthor. They're Thor and Loki, right? They're Christ and Satan. There are two parallel patterns of being and sacrifice. And one works, another fails. And they're at war. And they're always at war. And they're at war in the world, and they're at war in your soul. And you understand that. Because if you didn't understand that, you couldn't go watch Batman and the Joker and understand it. You remember in the Dark Knight with Heath Ledger, remember the Joker, very, very interesting character, this evil clown, remember, he surrounds himself with people from the mafia, and they steal money from banks. And the mafia guys, they're kind of like you and me. They're pretty happy about the money, right? And so you can understand them, criminals though they are, they sort of abide by the same rules you do. They like money, you like money. You can understand each other. The Joker takes half the money that he steals and what does he do with it? He burns it. Right. And that's a very accurate observation about what would you say? The pattern of sacrifice that's almost. That's entirely antithetical to the proper pattern of sacrifice. It's the creation of misery for its own sake, the destruction of accrued wealth for the demonstration of its futility. It's the ultimate form of destructive nihilism. And we find characters like that compelling because that is a temptation that presents itself to all of us. Right? Because we suffer. And because we suffer unfairly and unjustly, it's very easy for us to turn against the covenant that unites the present with the future and to wish in our heart of hearts that everything burned and suffered. Adam and Eve. Eve gives rise to Cain and Abel, right? The first two human beings. So now they're paired off in an eternal struggle. And the struggle most accurately characterizes not only the world, but the struggle in people's soul, right? You could say that two spirits war within your breast. That's part of the eternal battle between good and evil. That's part of wrestling with God. Whenever you're making a judgment, you're making a moral judgment, right? And sometimes it's a judgment between two relative goods, but sometimes it's a judgment between what you would like to do, especially if you're bitter and resentful and hedonistic and what you know you should do, right? And every decision you make is a reflection of that fundamental decision at some micro level. You know, there are venal sins. There are small ways you can miss the mark, but they're generally embedded in a much larger pattern of missing the mark, right? That. That has as its archetypal foundation something like the battle between good and evil. The fact that we have to value even before we can see, right? Even before the world reveals itself as fact means that everything we do is conditioned by the desire to aim up or down. And vacillating between the two is the same as aiming down or perhaps worse. And Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bare Cain and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord. And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. So they picked two different occupational pathways. Now, both Cain and Abel make sacrifices. Now, this is a mysterious part of the biblical stories because modern people can't understand what archaic people were doing when they were offering sacrifices. But imagine this, imagine this is that in order to understand something, you have to act it out. Okay? So let's make that concrete. That's what children do when they play, right? It's like before a child can become a father or before a daughter can become a mother, she has to play at being a father. She has to play at being a mother, just like the son has to play at being a father. And to play is to embody, right? To play is to represent with your ritualized actions some pattern that you're striving to understand. That's what people do when they're in a play. That's what people do when they're in a movie. They're acting out a pattern. And they, like their audience, are trying to understand the nature of that pattern, maybe well enough to describe it explicitly by enacting the drama. You know, and as I said, maybe you go see 100 action adventure movies, romantic action adventure movies, so you can extract out the pattern of romantic adventure and embody it in your own life. And maybe you could do that merely as a consequence of imitation rather than explicit understanding. And the imitation would be acting it out. So what are archaic people doing when they sacrifice, when they make a sacrificial gesture, when they offer something on an altar? Well, they're acting out the principle of sacrifice. They're trying to. They're dramatizing the investigation into what it is that you have to let go of and offer so that the spirit of being itself will be pleased with you and maintain its contract. Now, it's archaic conceptualization. Why do you burn something on an altar? Well, that definitely. You're definitely offering it because it's destroyed. But you burn something in an offer and the smoke rises and God, hypothetically, is an aerial spirit. And you might say, well, why is that? It's like, well, it's for the same reason that you're struck by awe when you look into the night sky. I mean, archaic people, like modern people, were capable of being awed, let's say. And certainly the awe that characterized the heavens is a primordial form of awe. And it's reasonable to assume, and maybe it's literally reasonable to assume that there's some concordance between the infinite expanse of the heavens and the spirit of being and becoming itself. And to have that notion that God is akin to that which dwells in the heaven is not an unreasonable hypothesis. And given that God is an aerial being, while smoke is a reasonable way of communicating with him. And so God is the spirit that can evaluate the value of your sacrifices as a consequence of the rise of the smoke. Now, there's an element of primitivistic thinking in that. But these people weren't stupid. There's many of things we know today that they don't know, just as there are many things they knew that we don't know today. But that doesn't mean that what they were doing was without significance or meaning. And the notion that, first of all, the notion that you have to offer something of value to take your place properly in the world, that is a major realization. There's no difference between that and maturity. There's no difference between that and the rise to self consciousness of the human race. There's no difference between that and our ability to build culture, because our cultures are actually a storehouse of value to be drawn on in the future.
- [47:46]
B
Right?
- [47:47]
A
And so the fact that our ancestors were compelled to act out what constituted the appropriate sacrifice is a testament not to their foolishness, but to their genius. And so, well, what do they offer? Well, they offer the fruits of their work. Well, that's what you offer. That's what you offer. That's what you offer to your wife, that's what you offer to yourself. And insofar as you're a provider, that's what you offer your children. If you're a mother, you sacrifice your time to your children, right? You're offering something. Okay, so what should you offer? And then also in what spirit should you offer it? Well, if you're a child and your mother's affection is doled out begrudgingly, how's that going to work for you? Or if you're a husband in a relationship and your wife's affection is doled out begrudgingly or vice versa, right? That's not a gift that's going to give back. It's a gift that's going to engender a corresponding resentment in all likelihood. And so there's an idea lurking there. And you can evaluate this idea for yourself. Imagine that now you're, you're conversing with your conscience, it's at night, and you're taking yourself apart because you're guilty and you're trying to scour your imagination for some time when you acted in a manner that was sufficiently admirable so that you maybe have something to cling onto in the wreckage of your self conceptualization. And what do you remember if you're fortunate, what do you remember? You remember some time in your life where what you offered was the best you had, right? And if you're fortunate, not only did you offer what was best that you had, but it was received as the best and the consequences were positive. And then you can qualm your debate with your conscience, at least to some degree, by saying, well, at least there was something that I did. Right? Because you know, you know perfectly well in your heart of hearts that you're called upon to offer your best. Is why it says, for example, in the Gospels that you're not to hide your light under a bushel, but to shine like the city on the hill. And there's an idea there. It's a deep idea. An idea is if you did your best, you'd be accepted. And that's exactly what God tells Cain. So Cain and Abel make sacrifices. Abel, he brought the firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof. Okay, so what does that mean? This is a complicated thing. There's an idea in the biblical corpus that the firstborn should be consecrated to God. It's a very complicated idea. First impression, that's the most important impression. Why? Because it sets the frame for the interactions after that. If you read people a list of words and then you ask them to repeat them back, they're much more likely to repeat back the first and the last word. The first of something sets the frame. So what does it mean to offer the firstlings? It means when you embark upon something, you bloody well better make sure that what you're aiming at when you begin is correct. Right. First things first. Well, that's what Abel does, is that the sacrifices he makes are from the first moment of the highest quality and in the proper spirit. Right? So they're not narcissistic or psychopathic or Machiavellian or self serving or short term or hedonistic or power oriented. None of that. They're aimed up, right? They're aimed at establishing psychological stability and harmony and extending that out to the family and extending that out to the broader community. Right? And then he offers up the fat. Well, why the fat? The fat's the highest quality food and the fat of the lamb is the highest quality of the fat. And so what does all this mean if you strip it of its archaic terminology? Well, first of all, livestock was very valuable to archaic people because they weren't wealthy in the manner that we're wealthy. Their wealth, what they had, was literally embodied in their, in their flock. And to offer to God the choicest cuts of the flock was absolutely equivalent to offering your best in the world. It's a demonstration of sacrificial intent. Now, it turns out, and this is the optimistic part of this story, because fundamentally, it's a very optimistic story. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering. Okay, so let's think about this. You know, we have lots of reasons for assuming that the world isn't just. You know, I was re watching a debate I had with Stephen Fry, great Englishman, who's an actor and very interested in mythology. And he. Part of what we discussed was an interview he did where he mentioned how he would call God out if he ever had the misfortune to meet him. Now, Fry claims atheism, but he got quite heated when he was discussing the centrally evil nature of God. And he said, how is it that we're supposed to proceed in a world under the assumption that the created order is good when innocent children die horribly of bone cancer? And that's a perfectly reasonable question. You're going to ask yourself in your own life how it is that you can cope with the fact of being alive given the unjust suffering that you're being put through or that someone you love is being put through. Well, what's the counter position to that? Well, this statement. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering. So there's a proposition here. It's a proposition about the nature of man and God. The proposition is this. Regardless of the circumstances, if you offered your best, that offering would be gratefully, that offering would be incorporated into the covenant in a productive manner. And then you think, we can. We can think this through. Let's say you have a daughter and she's diagnosed with a terrible illness, and that's enough to make you shake your fist at God in the world. Well, how should you respond to that? In a manner that's going to be best for her? Are you going to become bitter and resentful and nihilistic and turn against the world? Is that going to be useful to her? Maybe. She's eight. She needs you. What are you supposed to do? Aim up, Offer your best. No excuses. And that idea is echoed continually through the biblical works. Job, for example. Job is literally the target of a bet between God and Satan. And Job is a good man. And Satan comes along to God and says, I don't think he's that good. You let me have Adam for a while and he'll turn against you. And God says, yeah, I don't think so. Do your worst. And so you'll feel like that at times in your life. And Job's answer is twofold. Answer number one is he's good enough so he doesn't have to take himself apart just because he's suffering. Because one of the questions you'll ask yourself if undue suffering visits you is, are you the sort of corrupt entity that deserves this right? It's just what you had coming to you now. That's what Job's friends tell him, by the way, while he's, you know, nursing his disfiguring illness in the ashes, his friends come along and say, well, this wouldn't have happened to you if you would have had your act together, you know? And they're kind of happy about being able to say that, which is a bit of misery, little excess misery for Job, just when he could use it the least. And he also refuses, point blank, to do what his wife says. Shake your fist at God and die. That's what you've got left. And Job's answer is, no matter what happens to me, I will maintain my faith no matter what. And then you think, well, there's an element of that that's unreasonable, obviously, because you can certainly imagine and no doubt experience being tortured to the point where your faith is sorely tested, and you feel entirely justified in cynicism and bitterness. In fact, you might even regard it as a form of justice. But then you can ask yourself a question in consequence, like, how's that working for you? And then you can see, too, when you encounter people who are suffering unduly and you see them bearing up under that nobly, and they're still aiming up and maintaining their faith and their integrity and their honesty and even their willingness to be of service to others, that's someone you admire, like, instantly. That's the sort of person you want to have around when the waves rise and the winds blow a little bit too roughly. And so there's a promise here. It's one of the first promises. It's the first promise, in some ways, that God makes to the men who are born rather than created. And the promise is, if you offer your best, it will be accepted. And this is something that requires immense soul searching, because you could well ask yourself always, always, if the world is not laying itself out for you in the manner that you deem acceptable, maybe your definition of what constitutes acceptable could use a little work. But maybe there's something that you still have been unwilling to part with, or maybe there's some manner in which you are still not offering your best because the best is. That's a lot to ask, especially under dire conditions. It's an all in full commitment, right? In every second. That's why Christ says in the Gospels that you're to be perfect like your Father in heaven is perfect. Right. That's why the doorway to paradise is barred by cherubim who wield swords that turn every which way and burn. And what does that mean? It means that everything that isn't worthy will be cut away. It means that nothing that is unworthy will be allowed to pass into paradise. Well, by definition, obviously, because it wouldn't be paradise if everything that was unworthy wasn't cut and burned away before entrance. And so you can ask yourself too, if you're suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, are there still things that need to be cut and burned away? And is that a sacrifice that you're willing to make and that's going to be dependent to some degree on your faith? Right? Are you willing to stake yourself on the presumption that if you let everything that was in you out, that the world would lay itself out properly at your feet? Or are you going to hold back? Are you going to keep something in reserve? Are you going to do what Cain does and offer what's second best? Well, what goes along with that? Well, first of all, he's fooling himself. Because every one of us knows perfectly well that life is far too difficult for you to be successful with a second rate effort. Like, you can just forget that getting through this properly is going to take not only everything that you have, but everything you could become if you gave everything you have. And everyone knows that. And so the notion that you can cut corners here and you can offer what's second rate there, it's like, do you believe that? And if you do, who the hell do you think you are? You think you can fool yourself with that presumption? You think you're going to fool other people. And more importantly, you think you're going to pull one over on the source of being itself. Do you? That's a Luciferian presumption, right? And that's exactly what God tells Cain, by the way. But unto Cain and his offering he had not respected, and Cain was very wroth and his countenance fell. Countenance, facial expression.
- [59:33]
B
Right.
- [59:34]
A
Cain becomes depressed and bitter and angry. Well, why do people become depressed and bitter and angry? Well, obviously because their sacrifices aren't rewarded, clearly. Like that's the embittering pathway. Cain's thinking, I break myself in half every day. You know, to please myself and other people in God. And all I get in response is a lack of respect. And underneath that is the presumption that Cain can offer his second rate sacrifices and that's okay. And that other people are at fault for not accepting them as if they're the real thing. And even more, that God himself is to be called out for the reality of creation because God won't allow himself to be fooled by second rate sacrifices. You can't possibly imagine anything more self centered, psychopathic and narcissistic than that proposition, right Job? One of the things God tells Job when Job is working through his suffering is that human beings have no right to judge the cosmic order. We don't have the wisdom, we don't have the perspicacity, we don't have the humility. If we set ourselves up as judges of the cosmic order, there's no difference between setting yourself up as a judge of the cosmic order and acting as an agent of the spirit who eternally conspires to overthrow God. That's the same story. That's Luciferian presumption. That's the Luciferian presumption of the intellect, more technically. And Cain is in alignment with that because it's the person who makes false sacrifices, who always thinks that he's smart enough to get away with it. He's smart enough to fool himself, he's smart enough to fool his partner. He can pull the wool over the eyes of his friends and the people in the community. And in the final analysis, if it was down to a showdown between him and God, he'd be on top and wants to be. And the Lord says unto Cain, why are you angry and upset and miserable and disappointed and bitter? And why is your face fallen? Why are you viewing the world in a sour manner and bitter and resentful and angry? Why is that. Sitting in the shadows, stewing in misery? Not least because of failure self induced, but because of the painful example of Cain, of Abel's counter example. Because you might ask yourself, well, if you are bitter and resentful because your second rate sacrifices have been rejected, does that instantly make you jealous of everyone who's done the right thing? And worse, does that make you hate them? And worse, does that make you murderous towards them? Even if they constitute your own ideal, even if in destroying them you would destroy what was best in you? Well, why do people become murderous? And people certainly do fratricidal. That's Cain's sin. He kills his brother. Not just his brother, the brother who's an Ideal, right. That's an echo of the eventual crucifixion, the death of the ideal. The resentful, jealous, bitter, nihilistic murder of the ideal. There's a movie I'd recommend. You could watch this if you want. It's a very deep analysis of this conundrum. It's a movie called Crumb. And these are the Crumb brothers. And as you can tell, their countenance has fallen. And the man on the right, Charles, he commits suicide six months after this documentary is filmed by drinking furniture polish. It's the sixth suicidal attempt he made. The person on the left, Max. He's a serial sex offender with an IQ of about 160 and a hyper creative person. And all three of these brothers, Robert Crumb is the middle, a famous underground cartoonist. Their exemplars in their countenance of the spirit of Cain. There's nothing heroic about that second rate sacrificial offering. It's not the noble Lucifer or Loki who rebels against God in the spirit of what noble revolutionary fervor. It's exactly this and that absolute miserable hating pathology that goes along with it. God says, if thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? Well, that's a tough one, right? Because like, do you believe and you have, you have to believe one way or another here. Do you believe that if you did your best you would be rewarded? And you might say, well, a fool would take that bet. But I would say, well, have you got a non foolish bet? You're going to lay your life's on the line anyway, so you're going to bet on something. You're going to bet that you can hedge your bets and thereby attain the final victory. How could you make a bet like that? How could you presume that any reward worth attaining wouldn't exist in proportion to the effort that you expended in attaining it? Even if you made half rate sacrifices, second rate sacrifices, and you accrued some reward, doesn't that merely imply that if you had done better that the reward would have been greater? And then like, what's the limit to that? You know perfectly well in your own life, when you've served the people around you and yourself in the most wholehearted manner that things turn out for you the best way they could turn out? And that might be even true in the midst of your suffering. And if thou doest not well, sin lies at your door. And unto thee shall be his desire and thou shalt rule over him. Well, this is one brutally miserable bit of correction from God. So Basically what's happened here is Cain's bitter and he's angry, and so he goes and has a chat with God and he says something like, what the hell's going on here? What kind of planet did you make? I'm like breaking myself in half here with my second rate sacrifices and it's just not working out. And that doesn't seem fair. And what about this able character, like everything he does turns to gold and you know, how dare you make a universe. This corruption. And there's a fair bit of presumption in that, you might say. And so. And what does God say? The last thing Cain wants to hear, the last thing anyone wants to hear when they make a proclamation like that. He says, sin lies at your door. And he wants you and you could rule over him, but you chose not to and you invited him in. You know, there's an idea in vampire movies that when they tap at your window, you have to let them in. Right? It's the same idea. Exactly the same idea. And this is exactly right. And I know this from my clinical practice. Let's say you want to get bitter enough to shoot up a school. Well, I'll tell you how to do that. It's like, first of all, accumulate all the evidence that the sacrifices that you're offering aren't paying off and allow yourself to become bitter enough so that you believe that the world is unfair and turned against you and that the only pathway to justice is your revenge. All right, now start fantasizing about what you could do. Okay, so what do you do when you fantasize? Well, you take that spirit of bitter resentment and you ask it, what do you want? What do you want exactly? Maybe you're angry at someone who turned you down at school. If you're a high school kid, someone you would respect and admire, that someone you would rather have on your side, Some girl you admire, some guy you'd like to have been your friend, and you get turned away. And so now you're bitter about that and you're angry and you think, what would I like to do to that person if I had them alone, right? If I had them alone for an hour, if no one ever knew. And then you have a little fantasy. And why? Because you invited it in. And so then what do you do? You do that. 10,000 hours in your basement and you let that fantasy go wherever it will you. 10,000 hours of that and you'll be there with your automatic rifle shooting elementary school kids and thinking that you're doing a pretty fine job while you're doing it. And that's a consequence. It's a very deep line and it has many precursors in other mythological stories. The notion is that sin is something that's a collaboration between the spirit of evil itself. That would be the bitterness and resentment that makes it self manifest when your sacrifices have been rejected and the creative power of your own imagination. It's a collaboration. So what God actually says is sin lies at your door like a sexually aroused person, predatory animal, and you've invited it in to have its way with you, right? To brood, to sit on the fantasies and to nurse them. And as a consequence, they've taken you over. And that's exactly right. And God says worse. He says, not only that means not only are you at fault because you invited this thing in, but you're at fault because you could have resisted it. Even though you had your reasons to be upset, you could have resisted it and you voluntarily and consciously chose not to. And that's the last thing Cain wants to hear, right? He wants to hear God say, well, you know, I made a mistake when I was laying the foundation of the world and things didn't turn out in your favor despite your second rate sacrifices, because there's something not wrong with you, heaven forbid, but something wrong with the cosmic order itself. And God does exactly the opposite. He says, this is on you. You knew it all along. You played along, you dug the pit that you fell into. You know it, you're lying about it now, and you could change and you should change and go. And Cain, of course, does what tyrannical possessed spirits always do, like the pharaoh in the Egyptian story of the plague. Like you, when you're at your most stubborn and instead of letting go and sacrificing, say, the pathological attitude that brought about the catastrophe, he doubles down. And Cain talked with Abel, his brother. And it came to pass when they were in the field that Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and slew him. So what does this mean? Well, it means essentially that Cain invited Abel to go work with him in the field, right? Inviting him along like he's his brother. And then when he got out in the field, he decided that he had enough of his successful brother and kills him. And then you might say, well, why does he kill him? And one answer is, well, because his example is intolerable to him. That's a good reason, because it's a form of vengeance against Abel for the pretension of his success. But more, it's to get revenge against God because Abel is God's ideal right is God's chosen is the person who's walking the divine path. And the best way that Cain can determine to shake his fist at the Almighty who's torturing him by not accepting his second rate sacrifices is by destroying God's ideal itself. If you ever wonder, by the way, why high school shooters shoot everyone and then themselves, well now you have your answer. Because you know, they can save themselves a lot of trouble and everyone else just by committing the suicidal act first. But no, they can wreak the most havoc by distributing the most misery and then cap it off with a demonstration of their lack of worth even to themselves. It's a much more effective way to shake their fist at God and die. It's a dark story. And the Lord says unto Cable, where is Abel thy brother? And Cain says, well, how would I know? Am I my brother's keeper? Well, there's an implicit answer to that question which is supposed to be yes, right? And that's an echo right there of the notion that you are in fact your brother's keeper. And not because you should be nice to him, but because by acting in that manner you partake in the eternal proper cosmic order. You sacrifice your own pretentious desires, let's say, to the well being of the people around you. And that that is the most effective possible form of sacrifice practically and theologically. And God says, what of the. What are you done? What have you done? What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground. No crime goes unmarked, not least by the person who commits it. And now you're cursed from the earth which has opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the ground, it shall not hen forth yield unto thee her strength. And Cain said unto the Lord, my punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth. And from thy face shall I be hid. And I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth. And that it shall come to pass that everyone that finds me shall slay me. My punishment is greater than I can bear. What happens when you destroy your own ideal? What's left for you then? Right, you've destroyed the very concept of up itself. And that's what Cain comes to realize in the aftermath of the murder. It's like there's nothing for him now. And he thinks as well that everyone will kill him given what he's done. And God marks Him for a very particular reason. And the reason is to stop a cycle of vengeful counterslaying, right? To stop tit for tat revenge. And the Lord said, whoever slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon him, lest any finding him should kill him. And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden. The land of Nod. That's where you drift off when you're asleep, right off to the land of Nod. What does that mean? Cain goes and lives an unconscious life on the margins, right? Which is exactly what happens to people when they slay their ideal. And Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bare Enoch, and he builded a city and called the name of the city after the name of his son Enoch. The story branches out in complexity from here. Cain's sons are the first builders. They eventually build. It's Cain's descendants that build the tower of Babel. It's Cain descendants. It's Cain's descendants, the descendants of the bitter spirit of Cain who are the builders who attempt to supplant the divine with technology. Right? And they do that as a consequence of their. Their intellectual pride in their. In their. In their technological pretensions. And if you don't think we've been building towers of Babel recently of a gigantic size unparalleled in human history, you haven't been paying attention. And if you haven't noticed that it's the engineers who are doing it, you also haven't been paying attention. And Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bare Enoch, and he built a city and called the name of the city after the name of his son Enoch. There's nothing wrong with technology except when its pretensions are to supplant the divine order. How are we doing that now? Well, how about pornography? How about the fact that we've taken a single woman and transformed her into a million images of women that can invade every corner of every house in the world is supplant the divine order. How about we're trying to do the same thing with robots, Female robots, even sex robots, even. More children of Cain. His brother's name was Jubal. He was the father of all, such as handled the harp and the organ. The technological society has its dawn in the children of Cain. Tubal Cain, grandson of Cain, instructor of every artificer in brass and iron. He's the first person who makes weapons of war. And so what does that mean? It means the true cause of the terrible genocidal battles that plague humanity is their origin in the resentful spirit of Cain brought about by his refusal to make the proper sacrifices. Right? So there's a notion in this story that the consequence of that individual sin, and this is a terrible thing to think about in your own life. It's terrible. Multiplies as it extends itself across the generations and across the broader social community. That the sin of Cain is not isolated to the effects on his own soul. Right. That the descendants of that spirit are. Are the perpetrators of genocidal murder. Hitler was bitter. Stalin was bitter. Mao was bitter. And what was the consequence of that? What was the consequence of that bitterness spreading across the totalitarian landscape? The provision of opportunity for people who were sons of Cain to wreak havoc on the innocent people in the prison camps who were under their dominion. How about that for an ugly story? And what does that mean psychologically? Here's what it means. This is a horrifying thing. I think there's a direct link between your refusal to make the highest of sacrifices and the probability that society will deteriorate in a murderous and genocidal direction. It's that close together, way closer than you think, merely. If for no other reason than merely because your failure to make the light within you shine as brightly as it possibly can, disheartens you and others and turns them against the cosmic order. As you all know, the technological spirit. We'll close with this. Another one of Cain's descendants, Lamech. I have slain a man to my wounding and a young man to my hurt. Cain's descendants are literally murderous, but they're murderous in a manner that multiplies. So Lamech says, if you hurt me, seven people will suffer as a consequence. Cain says that, and Lamech says it'll be 70 and 7. Is that that that desire for revenge manifested in the social order multiplies exponentially. Right? And if you're ever asking yourself, because this is a good question, it's like, why do things go so dreadfully wrong? You can look at other people and you can say, well, what did they do that they shouldn't have done? Or what did they fail to do that they should have done? And you can point fingers and you can understand it. There are times where justice itself requires the identification of transgressors. But there's a more fundamental issue at stake here, which is what is it that you're bringing to bear on the situation or failing to bring to bear? And that's the fundamental question of conscience. Because you could say that if everything around you isn't proceeding in the optimal possible manner, then your shortcomings are linked to that failure in some way that you have yet to become conscious of. And that's a terrible thing. It's a terrible thing to contemplate. But it's an amazing thing to wonder, because it does mean that just as there's more resting on your shoulders on the side of sin than you think, there's way more available to you on the side of opportunity than you could possibly dream of. And that willingness to own the malformed aim, that's no different than learning to take advantage of the opportunity. And I would say, just as the abyss that lies underneath all of us is infinite in its depth, the opportunity that lies at our hands is infinite in its scope. And the proper sacrificial attitude brings you away from the abyss and moves you towards the realm of infinite opportunity. That's the kingdom of God that spread upon the earth that men do not see or will not see. Very stark division of choice. Right. It's a place where you have the landscape of heaven and hell laid out cleanly and clearly related to individual conduct. In the. Essentially the third story of the biblical corpus. It's absolutely. In 12 lines. It's absolutely inconceivable. And Adam knew his wife again, and she bear a son, and called his name Seth. For God said, she hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, who Cain slew. And to Seth, to him there was also born a son, and he called his name Enos. And then men began to call upon the name of the Lord. Well, Abel is dead to the terrible grief of Adam and Eve, but he represents a spirit that's not mortal. That's a good way of thinking about it. That can't be finally killed. And if it's killed in any of its incarnations, Abel, let's say, then it reappears in another guise, and that's what happens to Eve, is that the spirit of good cannot be overcome permanently by the spirit of evil. That's another optimistic element of the story. So that's the story of Cain and Abel. I don't think there's a more terror. I don't think there is a more terrifying story than that story. Actually. I don't think there's a more terrifying story in the biblical corpus. But properly understood, I don't think there's a more terrifying story, especially if you take it with some degree of seriousness, because it ties, like I said, it offers this terrible, stark representation of the Reality that's at hand for you. It's like when you make a moral error, when you fail to make the proper sacrifices, when you refuse to aim up, you are by definition aiming down. And hell is a bottomless pit for a reason. And what that means is that the degeneration of societies into totalitarian hell is a sin that can be placed on the shoulders of every person who's a denizen of that state. It's a process you participate in every time you're called by your conscience to stand up and say something you know you should say and you refuse. And by the same token, the words that you could bring to the world, that ring of truth and noble aim, they are literally the salvation of. They're literally salvation and redemption itself. And you want to know what the meaning of your life is? That's the meaning of your life. Dreadful as it is, promising as it is, stark as it is, adventurous as that is. It's not for nothing, you know that our society is predicated on the notion that human beings are to take up their crosses and bear them, right? More cataclysmic demand can not possibly be imagined. And yet the proposition that lies at the base of our culture is that you're the sort of person that can do that. That, that's your core. That's the core of your being. That capability to face the catastrophe of the world full frontal, eyes open, no reservation, and to transform it into the glorious resurrection. Thank you very much. Hey tim, How's it going? How does one keep focused on the day to day processes of goals instead of being overwhelmed by the big picture of achieving them? If the spectacle of you achieving your goals is too overwhelming, you're biting off more than you can chew, right? You're taking on to yourself more than you can bear. If, if your ambitions demoralize you, then they should be scaled back. They should be scaled back to the point where you feel challenged by them. But that. But that with some effort you could do them. And you look at that and you ask yourself if there's a sin of pride embedded in it. Presumptuousness, right? Adam and Eve get thrown out of paradise because they bite off more than they can chew, right? That's the eternal fall of man. Really. That's really the moral of the story. Pride goes before a fall. That's the same moral. If your ambitions are so daunting that they paralyze you, you've picked a dragon bigger than you can fight and you should pare back. Now you might say, well, why should I pare back? I, I hope to be ambitious and I would say, well, everything in its proper place. You have to, to use a terrible cliche, you have to walk before you can run. You know, if you're, if you want to do one on one pickup basketball, you probably don't want to play Michael Jordan, right? Because you're just going to get crushed. And you don't want to play your 3 year old nephew either because you're just going to stomp him. You want an opponent that's matched to you and it's the same with your ambition. Now I would say what's positive in that regard is that if you choose an ambition that's well suited to your abilities as they actually are, then as you pursue that, your scope of vision will broaden. And so you don't have to sacrifice your high ambitions if you replace them with a more proximal ambition that's more properly matched to your time and place. And that's really what humility is. I would say humility is the proper matching of challenge to ability, right? And you can tell that by the way. And this is something very important to know. You can tell that because if your challenges match to your ability optimally, you'll proceed in a spirit of play, right? Because play is the marker of optimized challenge. You know, if you're playing a good game, you want to play against someone who could beat you, right? Not someone who will certainly beat you, but someone who especially could beat you if you don't do your best. And your challenge, your ambition, should be a partner of that sort, something you wrestle with. That's an angel of God. That's a good way of thinking about it, right? You want to pick the right size avatar of the highest to wrestle with and you'll improve in the wrestling. So it doesn't mean you'll forego your ambition. So scale back. This is another thing that's really useful to know too. If you find that you're, you have an ambition and you continually fail to implement it, one of the things you could ask yourself is, well, possibly you're demanding too much of yourself at the moment. What if you, what if you scaled back by half? And if that doesn't work half again, here's a hint, scale back till you do it. Really like that's what you do as a behavior therapist. If you're, if you're setting someone off, for example, I'll give you it. I'll give you an example. So I had this client who, he got Some girl pregnant, and she decided to keep the baby. And he was going to be a father. And he was completely immature. He's about 30, and he lived at home in his high school bedroom, which he hadn't cleaned up since he was, like, born. And, and he came to see me because he, he knew he was immature and he felt he should get his act together so he didn't doom his new son, which was, you know, a noble ambition. And we decided we were going to start by cleaning up his room. And so what do you do is a, what you do as a behavior therapist is you. You pick a fairly concrete task that's aligned with some reasonable goal. You know, like if you're going to get your act together, you live at home in your high school bedroom under the care of your parents, and you're so useless, you don't even keep the room clean. Well, cleaning it up isn't exactly a heroic struggle, although it's more heroic than you might think, because there's many things that stop a room like that from being cleaned up. There's many devils guarding the mess, you could say, but you have to scale back until you find a starting place. And we decided he was going to vacuum his rug. Probably need like, a dumpster and a, and a front end loader to do that. But so what he did, he went and got the vacuum cleaner. It was this upright vacuum cleaner. And he got it all the way to the door of his bedroom. And then he left it in the door, propped at 45 degrees for a whole week, and walked over it. And then he came to me, and he was embarrassed about this, as he should have been. And, and what it was, it was an indication of the fact that he knew that he was risking all hell breaking loose by cleaning up that room. God only knows what sort of revenge his parents would have taken on him for having the unmitigated gall to move towards maturity at the age of 30. So he left the damn vacuum cleaner, you know, on the, on the threshold. So we recon, we reconsidered the task, you know, I said, what sort of shape are the drawers in your cabinet, you know, where you keep your clothes? Said, well, you can imagine. I thought, yeah, I've seen drawers that haven't been. That are stuffed with the chaos of a wasted life, that's for sure. You think you could clean up half of one drawer, and that's pretty humiliating, right? That's the thing you have to do on your knees if that's where you got to start. That's a dismal realization, you know. But he came back the next week and he'd done that, you know, and, well, then it was a whole drawer, and then it was the bureau, and it wasn't that long before it was the room. But he had to start where he could start. And that meant he had to face who he was. And he was a man who, at 30, was too terrified to vacuum his rug. And that's a lot more common than you might think. And it is a humbling experience to take yourself as you are. But, man, there's another rule. To those who have everything, more will be given. From those who have nothing, everything will be taken. That's an economic law, by the way. The economists call that the Matthew principle, even though it's derived from. It's derived from a gospel saying. What it means is that if you start moving forward, you start moving forward more rapidly, right? The mirror, the first step you take increases the probability of the second step, and the first two increase the probability ability of the next two. And so you don't improve like this. You improve like this. And because of that, it doesn't really matter where you start. And that's something extremely useful to know, because no matter what skill it is that you're lacking, if you're willing to face that lack squarely and start where you are and. And begin to practice and to make the appropriate sacrifices, you can learn far faster than you might imagine. And because it's an exponential increase, it doesn't really. In some ways, it doesn't matter where you start. It matters that you start. So if you're biting off more than you can chew and the resultant dragon terrifies you into paralysis, you know, swallow your pride, man, and then start where you are. And that's why Jung said. Carl Jung said the fool is the precursor to the savior, right? The fool is the person who's willing to be wrong, honestly wrong. Because the person who's willing to be honestly wrong and to reveal that that's a fool, that person can learn, right? It's always the fool who learns. So the honest fool, a good man is an honest fool. That's a good way of thinking about it. Do you have any regrets with regard to parenting or one piece of advice you'd offer to parents of older teens slash young adults?
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Thank you.
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I have things I wish would have been otherwise. I have things I wish I would have had the luxury of having otherwise. I would say one of the things that Tammy and I determined to do when our kids were teenagers was to take a trip with each of them separately once every year or two. And you might say that's not very often, but it's way more often than it usually happens. And you're bloody fortunate if. If you get to manage it. I took one trip with Julian, only, my son. And then my daughter. Our daughter got very, very ill, and that was the end of that. And so you took a trip with her to New York. I took a tree. I did. I took. I. I took a trip with Michaela. Yes, definitely. But we didn't get to take those trips with the frequency we would have wanted. Now, you know, generally, if you lose something, if you're fortunate, you can gain it back. Not necessarily in exactly the same manner, but in a. In a. In a manner that. That. That fills the gap, you know, And I have done many things with my children, later with my daughter when she became healthy again. And. And I would say, too, the fact that I did learn that that time with my son was so precious and so fragile, we don't take that for granted, I can tell you that. So if I am with him, I'm very happy about it, and I do everything I can to make the most of it. I don't take it for granted. Here's something you can do. This is a good thing to do. Some of you, most of you are adults, most of you be 30 or over, most of you have parents who are living. Count how many times you're likely to see your parents for the rest of your life. So my dad's 85. I'll probably see him five more times. You know, when my dad was about 65, I figured, I'll see him 20 more times. 20 times, right? If you're aware of these things, you don't take them for granted, you know, and people don't like to think that way because it's morbid. It's like. It's not as morbid as a lost opportunity, I'll tell you. And, you know, if your dad's 65 and you see him once or twice a year, you know, maybe you live around the corner, but even then, people often don't see their parents that often. 20 is a pretty finite number, but you're lucky if you're going to get it. So maybe you don't want to muck it up, since time is fleeting, as they say, you know? And I think if you had the proper attitude, virtually every moment you spent would be spent in that state of apprehension. Right? I mean, people insist to themselves that their faith would be Buttressed if they were only privileged to apprehend a miracle. If God suspended the rules that govern the cosmic order for their convenience, they would be transformed in a moment. And I would say there's miracles unfolding in front of you every second. And if you can't see them, it's not because they're not there, it's because you're blind. And so don't waste time. Tick tock, right? And you'll be judged, not least by yourself, for every moment you waste. John Deere is headquarters here and its executive team has become laser focused on DEI and wokeness. How do the employees fight back? Well, I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell you a little story first about what will happen to you if you don't fight back because you need to be afraid of the right thing. You know, people have complimented me fairly frequently on my bravery and that doesn't sit well with me because I'm not brave. I'm afraid of different things than most people. I would say, you know, you need to know what to be afraid of. If you know what to be afraid of, you'll be, you'll be courageous. If you know what to be properly afraid of, you'll be courageous. So Jonah, the story of Jonah. Jonah is this, I don't know, he's just some middle aged guy wandering around a few thousand years ago. We don't know anything about him until God shows up one day and says, I, I got something for you to do. You got to go. There's a city north of here and you don't like the people that live there. They're actually your hereditary enemies. But doesn't matter. I'm kind of annoyed at them. I'm thinking about wiping them out. And so I'd like you to go there and just remind them that they've wandered off the beaten path. And, you know, maybe then they'll straighten out and I won't have to like go all Sodom and Gomorrah on them. And this is a city of about a hundred thousand people. It's Nineveh. And Jonah thinks, yeah, I don't think so. I don't like these people. They deserve what's coming to them. There's a hundred thousand of them, there's one of me. I don't like those odds. Why would they listen to me anyways? Because I'm part of a tribe they regard as an enemy. And like, up yours. And so, and so he thinks I'm out of here. And so Jonah decides to Ignore God, to ignore the voice of his own conscience. Because it's well established in the biblical corpus by this time that one manifestation of God is the still small voice, conscience. So it's Jonah's conscience that comes calling and says, you got something to say there, buddy? And Jonah thinks, not me. And so off he goes, and he takes a boat, and he's going to get as far away from Nineveh as he can possibly manage, right? He's going to go hide. And the waves rise and the wind blows, and the ship is threatened, and the sailors are all shorting out, and they think someone on this boat is not right with one of their gods. And so they go around to everyone on the ship, and they find Jonah, and he's asleep because people who are doing this are asleep. And they wake him up and they say, we're trying to find out who has not been attending to the dictates of their God, because this storm ain't good and, you know, we'd like to do something about it. And Jonah says, yeah, that's probably me. And they say, well, what God do you worship? And Jonah says, well, you know, he's the God. He's not some, like, God of the kitchen table or God of the local bar. He's like the God that created everything. And the sailors go, you just. You disobeyed a direct order from your God, and your God is the God who created everything. Said, that's not a good idea, and that's not a good idea. And. And they feel they have to throw them overboard, but they're good guys, and so they try to get to shore so they can just get rid of them. They try not to throw them overboard, but God doesn't have. He's not having none of that. And the waves get higher and, like, the ship's gonna founder. And Jonah finally says, like, it's me. Like, just throw me over. You know, we're all going to die anyway. Throw me over. So they throw him over, and you think that's pretty bad. So what's the moral of the story? Disobey a direct order from God and drown. Die. But that's nothing. That's nothing. Because there are lots of things worse than death and disobeying a direct order from God. Death is just where the fun starts. So what happens to Jonah? A creature comes up from the abyss itself, right? A whale. And takes them in his jaws and pulls them all the way down to the bottom of things, right? Three days in hell. That's worse than death. If you don't know there are worse things than death. You're a very fortunate or a very blind person. And so Jonah. Jonah is now in the grip of hell itself because he failed to say what he was called upon to say. And after three days, he repents. And the whale spits him out and he goes to Nineveh and he tells the people that they're sinning, and he tells them why. And they listen and they repent. And God decides to spare the city. That's your job. That's everyone's job. That's the job of a sovereign citizen. Every single one of you. You know, your entire culture is predicated on the idea that you have intrinsic value and intrinsic responsibility, that your integrity is the foundation of the state. And that's no joke. That's not some casual statement. It means something very literal. Abdicate your civic responsibility and watch your society decay. And when you ask why, just remember you were called upon to say something and you remain silent. Right? It's on you. Okay, so. So now you know what to be afraid of. It's like you could be afraid of losing your job. You could be afraid of being called out by the woke mob. Or you could be afraid that the ship will sink and that you'll end up in hell, just like the Soviets did, just like the Maoists did, just like the Nazis did when they held their tongue, when they should have said something. And if you don't think that could come your way, well, then why are you worried about the DEI people at John Deere? Okay? Now, having said that, and so harshly, I would say something else. You can't do this foolishly, right? When you. When you're called upon to speak, you have to speak wisely. And you might not be in a position. There's no sense burning up your bridges with a. What would you say with a casual outburst at work because you've been pushed too far. If you've decided that you're going to do something about this, if you've decided that it's something that needs your attention, then you have to give it your attention. You have to start to prepare for the battle or for the war, even. And I don't mean the war that will be fought with guns, because we bloody well hope it won't come to that, although it often does. I mean the war that you'll have to undertake in order to set. To set the society around you, right? And I don't know what that'll mean for each of you individually. Ask yourself. Ask yourself. It's like, I mean this literally, you know, they say you knock and the door will open. If you ask, you'll receive, and if you seek, you'll find. It's like, okay, you've got a problem. You know, something's rotten. What should you do about it? Sit on your bed? Sit on the edge of your bed and ask yourself, you know, get your aim straight. I would like to do something about this. I would like to do it wisely and carefully and judiciously. I'd like to do it in a manner that doesn't expose myself and my family to undo careless risk. I'd like to find the right pathway forward. Is there anything that I could do that I would do? You know, maybe it'll take you a month for the revelation to make itself manifest. Maybe I've talked to your wife, maybe I've talked to your friends. You got to be wise as serpents, right? That's the injunction. This is no casual thing. But if it's bothering you, people say, how do I find the meaning in my life? What bothers you? That's your problem. That's God offering you an opportunity. That's so strange, you know, because maybe it will be that you'll be like Moses. Moses was thick of tongue. He couldn't speak well. And maybe you're in the same situation. You think, I don't have a political bone in my body? It's like, well, grow one. You know, I'm dead serious. Like, this problem that you're seeing could be the greatest opportunity of your life. Because in confronting it, you could turn yourself into what you are. Not yet, but that happens to people all the time. They find the adventure in their life in confronting the problems that beset them. Because you could ask yourself, here's a question for you. Why does it bother you anyways? Why can't you just ignore it? And if you can't ignore it, it's like, well, what is it that you can't ignore? Is that you? Or is that something reminding you of who you are? You know, And I mean, this is as practically as possible. If it was just you, well, then why can't you control it? We don't control our conscience. We can listen to it or not, but we certainly don't. Control speaks to us. And I would say a wise man listens. Or else. And like. And I mean or else. I spent a lot of time studying the development of totalitarianism. Totalitarian. Totalitarianism starts with lies. It starts with some lies, and then it's many lies. And Then once it's total, everyone lies about absolutely everything, everything they do, everything they imagine, everything they say all the time to themselves and everyone they love. And the grip of the lie, that's the totalitarian state. You think it's the dictator. It's like, no, everyone in a totalitarian state is their own dictator. So if you don't want that, don't do it. And that doesn't mean to act unwisely, right? There's no sense cutting off your arm so you can bleed on your opponent. Right? And I mean this like, I. I help lots of people in my clinical practice stand up to bullies at work. Like, that's. You have to get your act together to do that. It's. It's. You gotta make the decision. You gotta talk to your wife, you gotta talk to your kids, you gotta talk to your family and your friends. You gotta think, are we gonna do something about this? Like, or can we, you know, can we nurture our little family and continue in the shadows, you know, without taking on this additional responsibility? Or has push come to shove? And if you decide that you're in, it's like, okay, wake the hell up. Get your words in order, get your forces around you, muster up your friends, Figure out what you have to say, and do it wisely and maturely and with forethought, right? What you'll find is that those who insist that you swallow the lie are weak. How can they not be? They're living in. They're living on a lie. That's the definition of weak. Now, couldn't they make things hot for you for a time? Not as hot as they'll be made if you hold your tongue. And that's for sure. So that's why you have to be afraid of the right thing. You know, there's nothing you should be more afraid of than losing control of your tongue. No, that's the divine word that produces the cosmos. That's good. And you're made in that image. You lose that, you're done. So nothing that earthly authorities can do to you has that cataclysmic consequence. Maybe you have to prepare to find another job. Who knows what that would mean? Maybe you have to get your resume in order. Maybe it's time for you to make a move anyways. Who knows, right? Fortify your walls and gird your loins and don't let people. Don't swallow the lie, folks. That's a very bad idea. That's every time you lie, by omission or commission, you move the world closer to hell, and we could produce quite the hell now with the tools we have. So if that's what you want for your kids, then remain silent when you're called upon to speak. That's it. All right, everyone, Thank you very much for coming. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability. Veris 18
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this episode is brought to you by Google Health. Stop chasing someone else's definition of health. What matters is what's healthy for you. Google Health offers a new kind of coach built with Gemini for effortless tracking, sleep insights and holistic coaching tailored to you. Visit googlestore.com to learn more and start a new relationship with your health. Requires Google Account, Google Health App Internet and Google Health Premium Subscription. Features subject to change availability and results vary. Not intended for medical purposes. Works independently of Gemiini apps. Check responses for accuracy.