Jordan B. Peterson

And I think we've lost that in our modern culture.

Like people say, well, I wish I was more courageous, or I wish I was more trusting, or they don't say this very often, but maybe they wish they were more humble, less prideful.

It's as if we think of that as something that's homogenous that could just descend on you en masse instead of something that you practice.

Like you practice trust with people.

If you're wise, you practice courageous trust and humility is a practice you have to

You have to get better and better at it if you can.

It's not like that's an easy thing to do, but you don't get better at it without practicing it in a ritualistic manner.

And that's what prayer is, is fundamentally asking what is highest to help you on that journey.

And it involves fundamentally the humility to station yourself in relation to that which you need and asking it for its help, day by day, his help, however you want to configure that.

Ours is a culture without prayer.

I remember as a student, a lecturer who was giving a lecture on the Stoics, and he said, the great difference between you and your ancestors, whether they were pagans or Christians, is they prayed.

And he meant these rituals of prayer, prayers at mealtimes, prayers punctuating life.

I mean, I think that is a very interesting observation about the modern world.

And why it might have lost transcendence.

It's funny, people still believe in a secular manner that still has an implicit transcendence, that there's something they can communicate with that will guide them, because people often in trouble will...

Well, let's say they'll hope they do the right thing.

But you think about what that means is that it means they know they're not doing the right thing at the moment and then they're opening themselves up to the possibility that there is a right thing and that there's a source of information that would reveal the right thing and then they generally

it's easy for them to attribute the discovery of the right thing then to themselves.

They thought it up.

But they act as if they're talking with something, speaking with something that's transcendent, that has the capacity to determine what constitutes what's right.