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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, everybody.
Chapter 2: What is the purpose of releasing archived lectures?
I'm pleased to let you know that we're going to release a lecture a week from my extensive tour archive beginning this Sunday and then repeating every Sunday after that. This allows me to do something interesting and useful while I'm otherwise incapacitated. My health is such at the moment that I can't really return to podcasting or public lecturing.
But we recorded these with the express intention of preparing them for release and we've all determined that this is a very good time to do that. So that's what's going to happen. I hope you find them useful and compelling. They'll be particularly attractive to those of you who liked my early YouTube work. that was very lecture focused. It's a return to my roots, I suppose, in some ways.
And I'm as happy as I can be under the current circumstances, given my ill health, to be participating in this process and to have these lectures prepared for release. Thank you very much for your continued interest and support. There's no adventure without trouble.
Chapter 3: How does Dr. Peterson view his current health situation?
And the greatest adventure has the most trouble. And if you took on the full trouble of your life, unstintingly, you'd have an adventure that would justify the misery. Why do you need a why? Have you tried making your way forward without meaning? What are you going to do? You're going to work with no purpose? You're going to sacrifice with no purpose? You're going to suffer with no purpose?
Present or absent, we wrestle with God. And that's human destiny. All aimed at answering the same question. On what principle is the world founded? And on what principle should the world be founded? If you gaze upon all the things that terrify you simultaneously, then you become who you could be. And that would be the spirit that could withstand death and hell and yet prevail.
Thank you.
So I was sitting backstage trying to figure out how I would open this 50 city tour, new tour. And a phrase came into my mind and that was, present or absent, we wrestle with God. And that reminded me of an interview I did a while back with a very urbane and sophisticated English actor, Stephen Fry. And I did a debate with Stephen. He was on my side at a forum called the Monk Center in Toronto.
I debated, we debated a New York Times journalist, and you can imagine what that was like, and a compatriot of hers. And Mr. Fry was a delight. He's educated the way that only educated Englishmen are educated with their with the accent that makes them sound intelligent, even if they're reading a telephone book. And he was witty and charming and brilliant and everything you'd hope a man might be.
And we got to know each other a bit, you know. And I interviewed him for my YouTube channel. And he's very interested in mythology. He's very interested in stories. He's an actor, so that makes sense. Stories compel him. And myths, myths are the deepest form of stories. That's a good way of thinking about it. We'll talk about that a lot, trying to get to the bottom of just what his story is.
And Stephen said some things that were quite surprising to me. He said a lot. I listened to him a lot. He needed to talk. People really need to talk. They really need to be listened to. And that's partly because we actually organize our brains at the highest level, our psyches, our souls at the highest level of abstraction and unity with language.
To allow us to think on our feet, our brains get terribly disorganized and our aim goes astray and we become chaotic and anxious and we wander off into the desert or off a cliff. It's not a good thing. And Stephen is a very intelligent man and he had a lot to say. And He said something that I found extremely interesting.
There's a scene in Dostoevsky's great book, The Brothers Karamazov, which is a classic scene. The book features the brothers, obviously, two of whom are Ivan and Alyosha. And Alyosha is a monastic novitiate, so he's a religious man. And his brother Ivan is a charming, materialistic atheist who can really wrap his brother up in verbal arguments with no problem.
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Chapter 4: What does it mean to wrestle with God?
And what he's trying to indicate there is that whatever constitutes the deepest form of ethic is not necessarily the same thing that makes you the most effective verbal adversary. And also to make the point that just winning the argument doesn't mean you're right. And that's something to really remember with people. It's really something to remember with your wife or your husband.
But I'm dead serious about that, you know. The fact that you might be able to defeat your wife in an argument or vice versa does not mean that you were right. And if you're wrong and you win, that's a really bad thing. Because then you're wrong and you think you're right. And if you were unbearable before, you're going to be a lot more unbearable after that.
And so one of the reasons you really want to listen to your partner and maybe even help them make their point is, you know, just so you could investigate the off probability that someone as wonderful as you still has something to learn. And, you know, the thing is, if you're stupid and you learn why, even though it's painful, the advantage is that you don't have to be stupid again in the future.
And that's a big advantage, you know, and it's a really big advantage for your wife. So... And so Ivan trounces Eliosha regularly when they have discussions about, for example, whether or not God exists. And I started with this discussion with the proclamation that absent or present, we wrestle with God. Ivan does something famous in this book.
He mounts what's probably the most powerful argument ever offered in the literary domain for the atheist claim. And he does it essentially on moral grounds, interestingly enough. He tells this story that Dostoevsky actually took out of a Russian newspaper about this four-year-old girl who had tyrannical, terrible, brutal, psychopathic, tyrannical parents.
And one night to punish their daughter, they locked her in the outhouse. And this was Russia, and it was like 40 below. And
She froze to death during the night while she was screaming to be released, and that became a scandal in Russia, and it was a well-publicized event, well-publicized horrifying event, as the torturous death of a child is self-evidently, we hope, a moral crime, though we seem to be committing an awful lot of those recently.
And Dostoevsky uses that event as an argument that Ivan puts forth about the, I would say, about the iniquity of existence, essentially. And he asks, Ivan asks his brother, you know, if this God you believe, you believe to be a moral being, is willing to torture even one child to death, Regardless even if that holds up the whole world. Is that something you yourself would do?
That's what he asks his brother. And Eliosha has no idea what to say. Because what do you say to a question like that? And Ivan says to his brother, I know you wouldn't do that. But the God that you claim exists and that is good and that you worship apparently does. And so...
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Chapter 5: How do personal experiences shape our understanding of suffering?
perhaps inferior quality to other collections of ancient stories that we have accumulated. And that surprised me, because that's by no means evident to me. And I know a reasonable amount about mythology, and I've... found great wisdom in Taoism and in ancient Egyptian theology and in ancient Mesopotamian theology and many places that I've looked.
But it's certainly the case that I've found a wealth of wisdom, at least as rich in the biblical corpus, in the Judeo-Christian stories. And I would say deeper. And that's partly because a lot of those stories were written
They're the culture, part of the culture heritage of Judaism, and the Jews are smart, and preternaturally smart in some ways, and they were immensely remarkable storytellers, and the stories they told are unbelievably deep. They're insanely deep, and we'll wander through a couple tonight, and I'll show you some of that depth, and I'll... And then Fry did something interesting.
You know, he started talking about God, and I said, well, you know, what's your problem exactly with God as a concept? And I was expecting something akin to the materialist atheist notion that God is a superfluous hypothesis. And You know, that's a perspective, but not a very deep perspective in my estimation, and a very dangerous one, as we're finding out right now. But Fry actually got angry.
And what he got angry about, one of the things he pointed to, was the suffering of children, just like Ivan. He talked about watching children with bone cancer suffer, you know, and how dreadful that was and how preposterous it was to presume that in a world characterized by the suffering of innocents, that anything that could be regarded as a transcendent good might be held to exist.
Now, but, and fair enough, you know, you can understand that argument. But what I found so remarkable was he was actually angry about it. He was angry about it. He was morally outraged about it. He was shaking his fist at the sky. Well, that's what you do to someone that you're... angry about. You don't shake your fist at the rocks on the ground.
You shake your fist at the imaginary being in the sky, even if you're an atheist. And that's an interesting thing because what it indicates, at least to some degree, is that A, even if you're atheistic, you wrestle with God. And B, even if you're atheistic... you're at least unconsciously in a relationship, because why else bother with the anger? Why else?
What else is the source of the moral outrage? And, you know, one of the things I've noticed is that, because I've read a lot of comments from atheists, like, I don't know, maybe more than anybody else in the world, you know, I'm dead serious about that, because I've done a lot of
analysis of biblical stories, let's say, online, and I read most of the comments that are put on my YouTube channel, and that's often like, you know, a thousand, five thousand comments a week, a lot of comments. And some of the arguments that the atheists mount against what I'm elucidating, let's say, are rationalistic, materialistic, atheist objections, but most of them are angry.
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Chapter 6: What insights does Dostoevsky provide on morality and ethics?
If you can't escape from a problem that besets you, what makes you think for a moment that it's you that's besetting you with the problem? And you know this perfectly well. You know this perfectly well because many times in your life, if you had the chance of just saying to yourself, you should let that problem go, you would. But you can't.
You can't, for example, when your conscience calls you out, or if you do, you damage yourself by lying that deeply. And it's the same if something calls to you, not so much besets you, but grips your interest, which is something that happens to scientists all the time. They're insanely... Called forward by some phenomena. And phenomena. Some set of phenomena. Phenomena means to shine forth.
They're called forward by what shines forth to them. And so you need that calling and conscience to specify your problem. And so you do that in relationship to what besets you and interests you. And there's an autonomy in that. You know this too. You can't decide what you're interested in. This is so weird. This is part of what got me interested in psychoanalytics.
Thought so many years ago, because Freud and Jung both said there are autonomous... There's an autonomy of spirit operating within you. They put it in the unconscious. You're motivated by things that aren't under your voluntary control. They have an autonomy. They call to you. They plague you. You can't control it. What the hell is that?
So you need to have a problem, and maybe it's a problem because you're fascinated by something, you're locked onto it by a force that's beyond your control, or you're plagued by it, your conscience screams that you have to do something about the cancer of children, for example. Because someone needs to, because the suffering is wrong. That's a moral claim, by the way, not a scientific claim.
From the purely scientific perspective, the cancer cell has just as much right to live as you do. You start your investigation with an a priori set of moral claims, all sorts of moral claims. The claim that The truth is at hand if you approach the problem properly. The claim that the truth is comprehensible, you have to believe that to be a scientist.
The claim that your pursuit of the comprehensible truth will make the world a better place, that's an axiom of faith. Are we so sure that our technology has made the world a better place? Well, maybe we are now, but if we wiped ourselves out with hydrogen bombs, we might rethink that hypothesis. So it's not self-evident. You have to have a problem.
You know, that's an interesting thing to know too, you know, because you're going to have a lot of problems in your life. And a problem approached comprehensively is an opportunity. And that's something very, very useful to know. And the deeper the problem is, the more it's going to hurt you.
But the more opportunity lurks in that problem, because the fact that it besets you means you could be the person to pursue the solution. And that's something very interesting to know. It's akin to the claim that the dragon hoards the gold. And implicit in that is the notion that the larger dragons have the more valuable gold. You know, and Tammy referred to that to some degree tonight.
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Chapter 7: How does the concept of privilege relate to moral responsibility?
And my objection would be, well, it doesn't really matter to me one way or another because you're so incompetent, you don't have the opportunity. And so that's not a moral claim. That was something Nietzsche pointed out in the late 1800s in his critique of morality as cowardice.
You know, if you're weak and useless, the best justification you have for it is that you don't do terrible things because you're good. It's like, no, you don't do terrible things just because you're useless. Now, that doesn't mean that's necessarily the only reason that people don't do terrible things. That is not what I'm saying.
I'm just saying that the accusation thrown by the postmodernists at the human race that our fundamental motivation is one of self-serving power, because power, properly defined, has to be self-serving. Otherwise, it's not power, it's cooperation. So I need to exercise power if I'm trying to compel you to do something you don't want to do. Maybe that's all we do. You're out for your power.
I'm out for my power. It's a bloody nightmare of power competition. And whatever stability we manage to attain is merely a consequence of the balance of our fundamentally competing interests. And that ethos is core to the unholy alliance between the postmodernists and the Marxists. There's no genuine reality. There's no genuine morality. There are a variety. There's no genuine reality.
There's nothing but a set of competing claims to power. And then there's the oppressed and the victimized and then there's the victimizer and that's a power dynamic and you can understand marriage that way and you can understand the family that way and you can understand history that way and it's nothing but power. And As I said, fair enough. You know, human beings are pretty damn brutal.
And you look at a regime like the National Socialist Regime or Maoist China or Stalinist Soviet Union, you think, or the degeneration of great institutions in the West, and you think, power's on the march, and maybe there's nothing else. There are a group of people who use nothing but strategies of power. Psychopaths. They're about 3% of the population, cross-culturally.
And that fact in itself is pretty damn interesting, because if there was nothing but power, why wouldn't the people who use nothing but power be the majority and be dominant? And they're not. Psychopathy turns out to be a very counterproductive strategy. Many psychopaths land up in prison. Psychopaths can't cooperate.
If I interact with you and I get what I want from you on our first interaction and then to hell with you, you're not going to interact with me again. So psychopaths are itinerant. Even psychopathic chimps don't do very well. The idea that the fundamental human motivation is one of power is about the most cynical and self-serving story that you could possibly tell. Now, it's a bit compelling, eh?
It's compelling because when a human social organization goes wrong, it degenerates in the direction of power. You know, if you and your wife are not getting along, you can't cooperate, you can't communicate, That's all off the table. You're left with the relationship of tyrant to slave.
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Chapter 8: What is the significance of storytelling in understanding human experience?
Why? How about because we're aware of the future? How would that be? Above all other animals. We understand that we stretch across time, that you have to save for your retirement, because the you now will be the you that's 65 and damn soon. And you have this perspective on the world that spans the ages, so to speak. And you have to make a bargain between what's...
and correct and enjoyable and fills you with enthusiasm at the moment and how you have to organize yourself into the future, to make a bargain with your future self, to strike the same bargain with everyone else and all their future selves and balance all that in the moment with work. What kind of work? That's the story of Cain and Abel. What sacrifice best pleases God?
Abel's sacrifices are accepted. His life goes well. Cain's sacrifices are rejected. He becomes resentful, arrogant, bitter, murderous, and then genocidal. Sound familiar? Those two things are laid out. Those two pathways of adaptation, those two pathways of narrative valuation are laid out at the outset of the biblical corpus in about 20 of the most tightly written sentences ever penned.
The story of Cain and Abel is inexhaustible. It sets the pattern of the battle between the hostile brothers, between Batman and the Joker. Between Superman and Lex Luthor. Between the Hobbit and Sauron. Between Harry Potter and Voldemort. It's the eternal battle of good against evil. And that's the most fundamental narrative trope.
And it's the meta-story that burns us, that's burned itself into our imagination and our memory. And why? Because that's your story. whether you know it or not. And no matter where you are in that story, you're in that story. And no matter which side you're on or what stance you take, you're in that story wrestling with God. And that's human destiny.
There's probably no one who thinks of God more than a committed atheist. Right, and that's not accidental. All right, so... I'm going to walk you through a bit of the first story in the biblical corpus, just to give you a flavor of exactly how this works. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. A few sentences. A relatively radical claim. So let me delve into this a little bit. Without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. It's a juxtaposition of a sequence of metaphors. The original Hebrew word was tohu v'bohu.
And tohu v'bohu means something like formless potential. The Spirit of God is that which wrestles with, which confronts and... battles and differentiates formless chaos into the manifest structures of the world. Okay. Now, and you're made in that image. What does that mean? Well, it's a claim about the fundamental structure of reality itself. And it's not a materialist claim, not in the least.
First of all, it claims the existence of something that in some sense is non-material. And I would say the closest straightforward word we have of understanding what that is, is consciousness. That's the brute fact of your awareness. But more than that, the brute fact of the fact that your awareness is integrally involved with the fact of being itself.
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