Why Short-Term Pleasure Is Ruining Your Life
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How does perception make every glance a moral act?
Hi everybody, welcome to this week's lecture. The first note, all the lectures that I'm releasing from my tour archives focus on psychological analysis of a set of key biblical stories. Each of them stands alone, but they work together as a group as well. Second note, last week in the intro I mentioned that I had written and released an article on climate change, but we decided to forestall that in favor of releasing another piece that I recently wrote. called They're Not Rape Gangs. Well, you can tell from the title that that's a very punchy and provocative essay. And we thought it should take primacy with regards to the first thing that I've written in a year. Not to say that the climate piece doesn't have plenty of power behind it.
Anyways, you can find it on my blog. You can find it on X. You can go to jordanbpeterson.com. On with today's show.
Well, I'm looking forward to this. That's typical. If I stopped looking forward to this, I would be morally obliged to stop doing it. It's a great privilege. So I'm going to talk to you for an hour, 15 minutes, something like that. Then we're going to do a Q&A. And so I'm going to talk to you tonight about... Well, something that I have talked about before and have written about before, but there was an idea that's been brewing in the back of my mind for a long, long time that I haven't ever made explicit. And I'm going to try to do that tonight. So that'll be entertaining. See if we can manage that. So... I have this new book, which is the name of this tour, We Who Wrestle With God, and it's a great joke on the New York Times that it hit number one on the bestseller list, which I'm quite grateful for, let's say.
And also regard as ridiculously comic that a book focusing on the stories of the Old Testament could hardly be anything more traditional, is the number one book, and your advice section. That's utterly preposterous and ridiculous, and a very good thing, because you might as well get advice from the best possible source. And so, and I don't mean me, I mean those stories. So, We who wrestle with God. Well, I picked that title because it turns out that that's what the word Israel means. And Israel, the people of Israel are the chosen people of God. That's the promise. And that's so interesting as far as I'm concerned because everybody wrestles with God. to a greater or lesser degree, and the reason for that is that we are fated to make moral decisions.
We have to chart our course forward into the unknown. There's no way around that, and that means that at every opportunity, with every glance, with every word, you're aiming up or down. Those are your options. And it's very much worthwhile thinking about what that means. So, I had a rule when I wrote this book. There was a couple of rules, but one of them was that I wasn't going to put forward any claim that I couldn't justify from the philosophical or theological perspective, insofar as I'm capable of doing that, and from the scientific perspective simultaneously. And part of that was based on my presumption that insofar as There is a unity at the base of all things that the scientific and the ethical must converge.
I don't see what the alternative is to that. There is no moral world. That's an utterly foolish claim that empirical facts have no basis in reality. That's a ridiculous claim. That those two modes of being are going to be necessarily set at odds with one another. That's the claim of those who insist that there's a conflict that's inalienable between the ethical and the scientific. I don't think any of that's true. I can't see how it can be true. So, I'm assuming for the time being that it isn't true. And that any apparent conflict is a consequence of our ignorance and not a consequence of some disjunction in the fundamental nature of reality or the illusory nature of the ethical. No, none of that makes sense to me.
So, let's investigate that a little bit. Where to start exactly? We could start with a riddle. Why did the chicken cross the road? Well, the answer to that is to get to the other side.
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