Jordan Peterson Live on Tour: The Hidden Key to a Fulfilling Life

Speaker 1 Last year, Instagram launched Teen Accounts, which default all teens into automatic protections for who can contact them and the content they can see.

Speaker 1 And we'll continue adding new safeguards for teens to help give parents peace of mind.

Speaker 1 Explore Teen Accounts automatic protections and all of our ongoing work at Instagram.com/slash teen accounts.

Speaker 3 This is Marshawn Beast Mode Lynch. Prize Pick is making sports season even more fun.
On Prize Picks, whether you're a football fan, a basketball fan, it always feels good to be right.

Speaker 3 And right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use.
Pick two or more players, pick more or less on their stat projections.

Speaker 3 Anything from touchdown to threes. And if you're right, you can win big.
Mix and match players from any sport on PrizePicks, Prize

Speaker 3 America's number one daily fantasy sports app. PrizePicks is available in 40 plus states, including California, Texas, Florida, and Georgia.

Speaker 3 Most importantly, all the transactions on the app are fast, safe, and secure.

Speaker 4 Download the PrizePicks app today and use code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. That's code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup.

Speaker 4 PrizePicks, it's good to be right. Must be present in certain six.

Speaker 2 Visit PrizePicks.com for restrictions and details.

Speaker 5 This episode is brought to you by Progressive Commercial Insurance. Business owners meet Progressive Insurance.

Speaker 5 They make it easy to get discounts on commercial auto insurance and find coverages to grow with your business. Quote in as little as eight minutes at progressivecommercial.com.

Speaker 5 Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, coverage provided and serviced by affiliated and third-party insurers. Discounts and covered selections not available in all states or situations.

Speaker 2 Since 2018, I've been traveling with my wife around the world in what's essentially been a non-stop lecture tour. And it's quite a privilege.

Speaker 2 It's a remarkable thing to be able to extend what I was doing as a university professor to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people around the world and to have the privilege to lecture and think about whatever grips me at the moment.

Speaker 2 We've recorded a number of these lectures. We're going to release one that I delivered in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Speaker 2 I delved into the relationship between the concept of sacrifice and the idea of work.

Speaker 2 Work is the sacrifice of the present to the future. Work is the sacrifice of your own self-interest to that of your family and your community.
That's a good way to think about it.

Speaker 2 That self-sacrificial work is part of the proper foundation of the world. I elaborated on those thesis theses in my book, We Who Wrestle with God, and I'm writing about it now.

Speaker 2 I'm going to continue my lecture tour in Europe January through March of 2026. And so if you're in Europe and you're interested in

Speaker 2 hearing a live elaboration of such ideas, check out my website, jordanbpeterson.com. All the dates are listed there.
You have an opportunity to buy the tickets.

Speaker 2 In any case, here's the lecture from Reading, Pennsylvania.

Speaker 2 I hope, we hope, the whole team here, that you find it deep, meaningful, and useful.

Speaker 2 All right, so I'm going to tell you a series of stories tonight.

Speaker 2 And I'm going to make them center around the theme of sacrifice, which of course is everyone's favorite topic.

Speaker 2 But I'm going to start by telling you why

Speaker 2 I'm going to tell you stories.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 we are suffering from from the delusion in our culture that stories are mere entertainment.

Speaker 2 And that's a foolish theory. And part of the reason it's foolish is actually self-evident.

Speaker 2 Stories are entertaining. So that's why we listen to them.

Speaker 2 Well, why are they entertaining?

Speaker 2 They're entertaining to everyone.

Speaker 2 Your children will

Speaker 2 be pleased with you

Speaker 2 if before

Speaker 2 they go to bed, you tell them a story, you read them a story. They can learn things from stories.

Speaker 2 And you will do surprising things for stories. You'll watch them after work because it's a form of play.

Speaker 2 You'll line up

Speaker 2 and pay to go see a story, to go watch a movie, to watch a play.

Speaker 2 Most of the things that we

Speaker 2 do

Speaker 2 voluntarily

Speaker 2 have a story structure.

Speaker 2 And so if you're an intelligent scientist, let's say,

Speaker 2 let alone someone interested in literature, you need to understand,

Speaker 2 you need to ask yourself a very serious question. And the question is,

Speaker 2 well, why

Speaker 2 stories?

Speaker 2 So let's think of what you do when you go watch a movie. Okay.

Speaker 2 And this is also something that will help you understand how you understand other people, because these things are very tightly

Speaker 2 aligned.

Speaker 2 Obviously, you come to understand a character or a series of characters when you go see a movie, because otherwise the movie wouldn't make any sense.

Speaker 2 So how does the author and the actors, how do the author and the actors guide you through that process of understanding? And how do you manage that yourself?

Speaker 2 Well, what you see in a movie is a series of characterizations.

Speaker 2 It's akin to what you see when you meet someone multiple times. You know, you meet someone in different situations and you watch, what do you watch? You watch how they act.

Speaker 2 What do you specifically watch?

Speaker 2 You watch their eyes when you're talking to someone, when you're getting to know them.

Speaker 2 And the reason you do that where there's actually evolved adaptations that are biological that help you manage this

Speaker 2 your eyes are black pupils set as up set against a colored iris against a white background and the reason our eyes are like that is so that we can easily see

Speaker 2 that they're easily visible to other people and they need to be easily visible to other people because if you can watch someone eyes someone's eyes, you can see what they're pointing their eyes at.

Speaker 2 You can see what they're attending to.

Speaker 2 You can see what's important to them. That's what they're attending to.
And you can infer their aim.

Speaker 2 That's what you do when you watch someone's eyes. That's what you do when you

Speaker 2 point out things to children. You specify an aim.
Children learn to point around

Speaker 2 before two. It's quite a magical talent to point to something.

Speaker 2 Animals can't really understand pointing. Dogs can understand pointing better than wolves because they've adapted to human beings.
To point to something is to specify the target of aim. Okay, now,

Speaker 2 why do you want to specify someone's target of aim, what they're attending to, what they're interested in? Because then you know what they're up to, and more than that.

Speaker 2 And this is how you come to understand someone: you

Speaker 2 inferther

Speaker 2 aim from the manner in which they conduct themselves across multiple situations.

Speaker 2 Aim specifies perception.

Speaker 2 Now, this is a radical thing to understand, a truly radical thing to understand, because normally the way we think of the world is that we just look at the world and there it is

Speaker 2 in a self-evident way.

Speaker 2 objects of the world are just there simply and when we look they present themselves to us But that's not how it works, not actually, because

Speaker 2 there's an unlimited number of things you can look at. There's a number of unlimited number of things you can attend to.

Speaker 2 Even in the surface of any given object, there's variegated patterns in the carpets, in the walls, in the paint. There's shadows and lights.
There's changes in illumination.

Speaker 2 There's a trillion things going on. And how you simplify that to what you actually see is quite a mystery.
And the way that you do that, by the way, is with your aim, right?

Speaker 2 Your aim specifies the landscape of your perceptions. And what you really see in the world aren't so much objects as pathways forward,

Speaker 2 tools that you can use to move towards your aim, obstacles that will get in the way,

Speaker 2 friends,

Speaker 2 the human equivalent of

Speaker 2 what would you say, the age that move you along your way. Enemies, those are people who block your pathway.
And agents of transformation, those are magical things in a sense that transform your aim.

Speaker 2 You know, sometimes you're moving from point A to point B and you realize something fundamental or revolutionary. And now instead of moving towards point A, point B, you're moving towards point C.

Speaker 2 You're a new person. You're doing something new.

Speaker 2 You've changed. You have a new personality, right? The world is shaped differently for you.
The way that things make themselves manifest has shifted.

Speaker 2 Who your friends are and who your foes are is different.

Speaker 2 And your mode, your essential mode of being, your personality has transformed. This is what you're doing when you go watch a movie.
You see, you see someone,

Speaker 2 the protagonist, the hero, or the anti-hero, doesn't really matter. They're both exemplars.
They're both patterns that you can learn from. You see them in multiple situations.

Speaker 2 You see them acting in the world and you infer their aim. As soon as you infer their aim, you can inhabit the same world they inhabit.

Speaker 2 That's actually why movies are meaningful to you because as soon as you have the aim of the character, the world appears to you the same way it appears to the character.

Speaker 2 The objects of the world are the same and so are the emotions that you experience and the protagonist experiences. And you get to do that for free in a sense, right?

Speaker 2 You go see a James Bond movie and there's death everywhere and you can, death and adventure everywhere and you can participate in that without having to die

Speaker 2 and it's very useful to be able to explore very complicated ways of looking at the world without having to pay the ultimate price for it Greer and Catherine, their four-year-old son, was diagnosed with a degenerative illness.

Speaker 2 That initiated a discussion about resilience in children, resilience in general.

Speaker 1 It's a challenge for any parent to figure out when to nurture, when to push, when to comfort, how that works.

Speaker 2 It sounds like your son is social and he's verbal and he's smart and he's imaginative. Certainly.
Your task is going to be to help him find his way.

Speaker 2 He's going to have to be the person who figures out how much he's going to be willing to fall on his face. I want to be an oak tree, but also a source of light.

Speaker 2 My daughter was very ill for several decades.

Speaker 2 She was doomed with her illness and she figured it out and she's like iron on all cylinders. So who knows what you can manage if you maintain your upward orientation?

Speaker 2 You don't have to have all the answers, you just have to have answers to the questions he's asking.

Speaker 7 This next one's for all you CarMax shoppers who just want to buy a car your way.

Speaker 5 Want to check some cars out in person?

Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 Want to look some more from your house? Okay.

Speaker 7 Want to pretend you know about engines? Nah, I'll just chat with CarMax online instead.

Speaker 2 Wanna get pre-qualified from your couch. Woo! Wanna get that car.
ASAP! You wanna do it your own way.

Speaker 2 Wanna drive? CarMax.

Speaker 2 We're continually doing that with each other. We're continually telling each other our stories.

Speaker 2 We're exchanging our aims. We're exchanging the manner in which we look at the world with one another.
We're exchanging our emotional experience. It's really, that's what we have to offer each other.

Speaker 2 That's what we have to offer each other that's of value are alternative modes of being that might be more suitable.

Speaker 2 Aims that might be more suitable, pathways forward that might be more efficient, tools that might be more useful, obstacles, ways to climb over obstacles we hadn't imagined.

Speaker 2 This is what stories do for us.

Speaker 2 A story is a description of the structure through which you look at the world.

Speaker 2 This is a radical thing to understand.

Speaker 2 It's quite unlike the typical materialist, reductionist, scientific view of the world, which is that you follow the facts as they reveal themselves. That's not true.

Speaker 2 There's an infinite number of facts. If someone throws you in the middle of the desert and you're lost, the facts aren't going to guide you forward.
Right? You need a map. You need an aim.

Speaker 2 You need a mode of perception that structures the world so that you can navigate through it. That's what a story is.
That's what a story is. And this is a very fundamental discovery.

Speaker 2 This discovery was really only made starting in the 1960s. And a variety of different

Speaker 2 disciplines, humanistic and scientific, converged on this realization more or less simultaneously. The

Speaker 2 French literary critics, the postmodern types, for example, they got there quite early. The postmodernists realized that we saw the world through a story.

Speaker 2 Now, they fouled up soon afterwards with their presumption that the story through which we see the world is one of power. That tilted them towards a demented and pathological Marxism.

Speaker 2 But at the same time, robotics engineers and people who are studying AI and computation, and cognitive psychologists and people who are investigating perception and emotion, they all came to very similar conclusions.

Speaker 2 The structure through which we see the world is a story, right? We see the world through a story. Once you know that,

Speaker 2 well, why? Use the story to simplify the world and to specify it. So, for here, I'll give you a very simple example.

Speaker 2 So, if I'm standing on this side of the stage and I decide that I want to walk to that side of the stage, so now I've specified my aim. Well, obviously, I look towards my destination, right?

Speaker 2 Now, so what happens? Well, first of all, all you people instantly become irrelevant, right? Why? Well, you're still here. I could be attending to you, but why don't I?

Speaker 2 Well, you're not relevant to my goal, right? You're not in the pathway. You're neither a facilitator nor an impediment.
You're simply not relevant.

Speaker 2 And everything that's not relevant to your aim, that's going to disappear.

Speaker 2 Right. And so that's how you make a decision about how to simplify the world.

Speaker 2 You simplify and specify the world with your aim.

Speaker 2 Things that get in your way, they're negative. Things that move you forward, those are positive.

Speaker 2 Right. And so

Speaker 2 there's one, here's an early moral lesson from that realization.

Speaker 2 If the world is manifesting itself to you as nothing but thorns and impediments, with no positive impulse, let's say, or calling to move forward,

Speaker 2 there is something wrong with your aim.

Speaker 2 The word sin, by the way, it's an archery term, at least from the Greek, although three languages converged on the same derivation.

Speaker 2 The Greek word for sin is hamartia, and it's an archery term. It means to miss the target.
And so that's a good thing to know, right?

Speaker 2 I mean, if we're going to investigate the structure of the stories that guide us, it's useful to understand the most fundamental stories we have.

Speaker 2 It's clearly the case that the most fundamental stories we have, the stories out of which our culture emerged, are the stories of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Speaker 2 And those are encapsulated most fundamentally in the biblical stories. And one of the, there's an emphasis in the biblical stories on sin, let's say, as a negative mode of being.

Speaker 2 And sin is characterized as failure to hit the target.

Speaker 2 It's an archery term.

Speaker 2 How can you fail to hit the target? Well, there's lots of ways

Speaker 2 you can fail to specify the target. That's what happens when people have a fragmented story.
They don't have their act together. Things have fallen apart.
They've wandered off the pathway.

Speaker 2 They're no longer on the straight and narrow path. They've wandered into perdition.
They're in the outer darkness where there's gnashing of teeth. That's all.

Speaker 2 They're in the desert that the Israelites encounter after they leave the tyranny. They're in the wasteland.
They're consumed by chaos. The flood has come.

Speaker 2 That's all a consequence of failure of vision, failure of aim.

Speaker 2 A landscape that's bereft of structure, a place of anxiety and hopelessness, because that's actually what happens to you neurologically, neuropsychologically, when you're aimless.

Speaker 2 You are overwhelmed with anxiety because there's too bloody many choices and you have no hope because hope is experienced in relationship to a goal. So you need a goal.
You need to structure your aim.

Speaker 2 This is not optional. You know, John, when he introduced me, made reference to a study in the UK that said that 85% thereabouts of inhabitants of the UK felt their life was meaningless.

Speaker 2 It's well, what's the proper diagnosis of that? The people perish without a vision.

Speaker 2 Right? You need an aim. Okay, so now we know a couple of things.
You see the world through a story, and you're lost and hopeless without an aim.

Speaker 2 Okay, so another question immediately emerges once you know that, and that is, well, if you if you structure your perception of the world, your emotional experience of the world, your motivation, your understanding of others as a consequence of a story,

Speaker 2 what should the story be?

Speaker 2 Okay,

Speaker 2 that's the question that the biblical library, because it's a library, right?

Speaker 2 The Bible is a library of books, of separate books that were written by separate authors, separate human authors, and aggregated together.

Speaker 2 for reasons we don't fully understand into what actually constitutes a coherent narrative, which is really quite a remarkable thing. It's not obvious at all how that narrative came about.

Speaker 2 And it's a remarkable fact that it has a very deep coherence. You could attribute it to the collective workings of the human imagination.
That's sort of a psychoanalytic take.

Speaker 2 That would be akin to the interpretations that someone like the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung might have proposed, or say Joseph Campbell's study of a great investigator into the structure of mythology.

Speaker 2 Or you can take the religious tack and say that

Speaker 2 it's the what cumulative record of the revelations of the divine. Or you can take the cynical tack and say that it's nothing but stories told by fallible human beings.

Speaker 2 Well, there's no such thing as nothing but stories.

Speaker 2 Right? Not if stories are more than mere entertainment. Not if stories are actually a representation of the structure through which you see the world.

Speaker 2 There's nothing mere about stories, not in the least.

Speaker 2 You know, and if we need stories to organize our action and our perceptions in the world, if we need stories to organize our life, that means our life depends on stories.

Speaker 2 And you might ask yourself, well, isn't what your life depends on real? Like, what's your definition of real? How about pain?

Speaker 2 Is that real? A story that provides your life with meaning can be a medication against existential catastrophe. And people die without meaning, right?

Speaker 2 You can die of your, you can die of everyday suffering without meaning. What does that mean?

Speaker 2 Well, the story leaves you, or the story that you're living is false or hollow, or the story that you're living is fragmented and incoherent.

Speaker 2 The consequences of that can be fatal.

Speaker 7 Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide, supporting everyone from established brands to entrepreneurs just starting their journey.

Speaker 7 You can create your professional storefront effortlessly with Shopify's extensive library of customizable templates designed to reflect your brand's unique identity.

Speaker 7 Boost your productivity with Shopify's AI-powered tools that craft compelling products, descriptions, engaging headlines, and even enhance your product's photography, all with just a few clicks.

Speaker 7 Plus, you can market your business like a pro without hiring a team.

Speaker 7 Easily develop and launch targeted email campaigns and social media content that reaches customers wherever they spend their time online or offline.

Speaker 7 If that's not enough, Shopify offers expert guidance on every aspect of commerce from inventory management to international shipping logistics to seamless return processing.

Speaker 7 If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period and start selling today at shopify.com slash JBP.
Go to shopify.com slash JBP.

Speaker 7 Again, that's shopify.com slash JBP.

Speaker 2 What's real? Well, the story's real. Well, what's the story? What's the proper story of

Speaker 2 mankind? What's the proper story that

Speaker 2 makes you a formidable, practical,

Speaker 2 generous,

Speaker 2 hospitable contributor to the social order? What's the story that makes you a good husband or wife? What's the story that makes you a good mother or father?

Speaker 2 What's the story that brings your family together? Maybe

Speaker 2 in harmony with your town and in and all of that in harmony with the state and all of that in harmony with the nation under some higher higher-order aim,

Speaker 2 right? That's an aim that unites. That's the monotheistic aim, that's the unity of story that underlies everything.
That's a way of thinking about it, right?

Speaker 2 That everything stacks together in this kind of harmonious manner, and that

Speaker 2 harmonious hierarchical arrangement, all the way from the individual to the highest level of social order,

Speaker 2 it has a nature.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 what stories might be typical of human beings? Well, the leftist types, the Marxists, the postmodernists for that matter, most of them, they believe that the fundamental human story is one of power.

Speaker 2 You know, and we're in a culture war about this. Make no mistake about it.
This is,

Speaker 2 you know, that. You wouldn't be here otherwise.
This is not a trivial matter. The insistence from the materialist types for the last hundred years,

Speaker 2 one of the profound insistences was that that the only true the only reality on the narrative side is one of power this is what people are taught in universities constantly how do you understand

Speaker 2 marriage well it's the story of the power of the patriarchy insofar as that regulates man and woman in in in the cultural sphere marriage is a patriarchal institution it's the fundamental subjugation of woman to man

Speaker 2 well how do you understand economic relationships? Oh, it's power. It's the exploitation of the worker to take a Marxist trope by

Speaker 2 the capitalist class, by the owner. It's a victim-victimizer story.
It's the same thing. It's power.

Speaker 2 There's a distribution of privilege. Those who are at the pinnacle of the

Speaker 2 who are at the successful end of the distribution, they're the oppressors. They use power to exploit those who are weak.
That explains all economic relationships.

Speaker 2 You can apply the same lens to history. History is nothing but the power struggle between different claims to power.

Speaker 2 That is absolutely what people are being taught in our institutes of higher education. And

Speaker 2 it's unlikely that there's a doctrine that's more corrosive in relationship to the actual spirit.

Speaker 2 upon which your country and the Free West in general was founded.

Speaker 2 Those are antithetical stories. Well,

Speaker 2 what's the alternative story? Well, let's lay some out. Here's another story.

Speaker 2 Do what you want will be the

Speaker 2 totality of the law.

Speaker 2 That's a somewhat mangled quotation from Eleister Crowley, who was a Satanist in the late part of the

Speaker 2 1800s. He was a...
He was like a disciple of the Marquis de Sade. He was one of these people who believed,

Speaker 2 as you can believe rationally, that why the hell shouldn't I do just exactly what I want, whenever I want, to whoever I want, regardless of, well, let's say the cost to them.

Speaker 2 What's the rational argument against that?

Speaker 2 What if I have power and I won't get caught, for example? If I just get away with what? My the untrammeled expression of my most primordial desires. Why not let that be the story?

Speaker 2 One whim after another. That's the hedonistic story.

Speaker 2 It's a cacophony, that story, because as you know from your own experience, if you give yourself over to your immediate wants, you're just one appetite after another, right?

Speaker 2 There's no real coherence there.

Speaker 2 You basically have the same psychological status as a very badly behaved two-year-old.

Speaker 2 Well, two-year-olds are like that.

Speaker 2 They don't have an integrated, their self their fundamental pattern of being and personality isn't integrated yet and so they're more or less at the mercy of their whims and a hedonist a hedonist is a worshiper of his own whims right and he's a pagan in that sense because it's just one damn desire after another and he might say to himself well those are my desires he might identify with those desires and that's really what would you say the cardinal form of identification in the modern world world.

Speaker 2 I identify with what my wants are, particularly sexual wants. That constitutes my identity.
And anyone who gets in the way can go directly to hell. And that's a very pathological mode of being.

Speaker 2 And there's a variety of reasons for it, not least that it's... exactly reflective of the same kind of immaturity that makes two-year-olds entirely self-centered and driven by instinct.

Speaker 2 Now, you might say, well, what's wrong with that? You know, and two-year-olds have their delightful element. You know, they're very enthusiastic.
They're very spontaneous.

Speaker 2 They're kind of alive in a fiery way, but they're completely

Speaker 2 incapable of taking care of themselves. Right? And this isn't a hypothesis.
You don't see roving bands of thriving two-year-olds running through the forest organizing themselves. Well, why not?

Speaker 2 Well, it's because that short-term, self-centered, whim-dominated possession doesn't allow you to exist in the world. You have to mature.

Speaker 2 And of course, that's what you're trying to do with your kids as a parent: you're trying to shepherd them through the process of maturation. Well, why?

Speaker 2 Well, so that, how about so they have some friends?

Speaker 2 Because if it's all about them,

Speaker 2 well, then they don't have any friends. And that goes for all of you, too.
If it's all about you,

Speaker 2 good luck with your marriage. If it's all about you, you don't have friends.
You might have,

Speaker 2 if you're a bully in particular, you might have, you know, toadies and thugs who benefit from your use of power, but you don't have friends.

Speaker 2 If you exploit your customers as a business person repeatedly

Speaker 2 to redound to your own immediate advantage, you're not going to have customers for very long.

Speaker 2 Your reputation is going to precede you. You're not going to do well in the world.
So, what do you do instead?

Speaker 2 Power is a bad story, it's a corrupt way of looking at the world. It leads to violence.
It's generally manifested in service to a narrow kind of hedonism.

Speaker 2 Because why have power unless it's to get exactly what the hell the worst of you wants from moment to moment?

Speaker 2 If you're not under the sway of some self-centered and relatively malevolent whim, you don't need to use power on other people because you could just ask them to go along for the for the journey.

Speaker 2 And maybe they would. That's what you do when you play instead of when you use force That's what you do when you invite instead of using force

Speaker 2 That's what you do when you establish a vision that other people share instead of being a tyrant

Speaker 2 Well, that's what you do if you're mature. That's even what two-year-olds understand by the time they're three when they start engaging in pretend play with

Speaker 2 With a would-be friend. Who's a friend to a two-year-old?

Speaker 2 Well, the first thing or three-year-old because three-year-olds start to become social Well, the first thing you want to do if you're a three-year-old is play a game with someone that's not the same as having your own game right if you play a game with someone else there are some intrinsic rules well what are the rules well how about they get a turn

Speaker 2 right and maybe a generous turn right because if you're going to have a friend and you want the friend to like you which is kind of like the definition of a friend and someone who likes you would like to see you again

Speaker 2 And that continuity of the desire to see you again and to play together, that's the definition of friendship. It's a sequence of games played with the same person.
The game has to be voluntary.

Speaker 2 It has to be invitational. It has to be reciprocal.
Right?

Speaker 2 And so what you're trying to do with your two-year-old is you're getting them to sacrifice the immediate gratification of their instincts to reciprocity. Right? Now, you do something.

Speaker 2 that's a bit more sophisticated than that too, because the other thing you do with children and yourself and with people you love, if you're the least bit sensible, is you let them know that they shouldn't conduct themselves in a manner in the immediate present that compromises their future.

Speaker 2 Right? That's what you mean when you tell your child, don't do stupid things. Well, what's a stupid thing, generally speaking? Something interesting and entertaining in the moment that you pay for.

Speaker 2 Right? And that's the same as an impulsive bad habit in adulthood. It's like the definition of a bad habit.

Speaker 2 A bad habit is something that works now and not so good tomorrow or next week or next month or next year or five years from now or 10 years from now. That implies as well that

Speaker 2 just as the child establishes a relationship of reciprocity with the friend, By starting to understand the future, they establish a reciprocal relationship with their future self.

Speaker 2 And that's the same thing. So what maturation is, we all know this, maturation is the ability, let's say, to share and to forego gratification, to delay gratification.

Speaker 2 What does it mean to delay gratification? It means you don't get what the hell you want right now all the time.

Speaker 2 You have to conduct yourself in a manner that assures communal stability, let's say, and reciprocity.

Speaker 2 And in the enjoyable sense, you want to be surrounded by friends and compatriots and people who move you forward and people who wish you well, because that's going to be a lot better for you than the alternative.

Speaker 2 And you want to do that in a manner that assures the future. The whole cortical, higher cortical

Speaker 2 apparati that

Speaker 2 human beings are blessed and cursed with is there to integrate the

Speaker 2 possessive, possessing spirits that might otherwise be

Speaker 2 impulsive and fractionating, to integrate them into a personality that can

Speaker 2 act reciprocally in relationship to others and guide itself as a consequence of apprehension of the future. It's a definition of maturity.

Speaker 2 Now, you kind of know this because as your children mature, as you've matured, the amount of time you can consider expands, right?

Speaker 2 For the 13-year-old,

Speaker 2 for a four-year-old sitting down to take piano lessons, half an hour is an eternity, right? For a 13-year-old,

Speaker 2 six months into the future is forever. By the time you're 50, a year is like a week, right?

Speaker 2 Well, and there's a loss in that to some degree, but there's a huge gain because as you develop, your capacity to apprehend the consequences of your actions across broader spans of time is much improved.

Speaker 2 And that reflects cortical maturation. And the same thing happens with regards to your ability to manage yourself socially.

Speaker 2 What does it mean to manage yourself socially? Well, it means, as I said, that it's not all about you. Your aim can't be the immediate gratification of the whims that possess you.
If you're married,

Speaker 2 if you're married, if you have a wife or a husband, is your wife or husband.

Speaker 2 How do they stand in relationship to their importance in relationship to you?

Speaker 2 Well, we could just think about it in a sort of clear-headed manner. Let's say you have a scrap with your wife.
You have a fight with your wife, a disagreement, and you win. You win.
She's wrong.

Speaker 2 She's punished for it, whatever way you can manage. What's the problem with that?

Speaker 2 You're right. She's wrong.
Well, let's say you do that 50 times.

Speaker 2 Well, now you're living with someone who

Speaker 2 you always defeat.

Speaker 2 And so now you're living with someone who's defeated. And what's the problem with that? Well, they're around.

Speaker 2 right and so maybe that's the problem with attaining a manipulated victory over your marital partner fine if it's a one-off but you know they're there when you wake up in the morning and so is the consequence of your what self-centered power-based maneuvering

Speaker 2 right and maybe you're a victorious tyrant and she's

Speaker 2 a

Speaker 2 defeated slave. Well, that's not much of a victory there, buddy.
Right? And I, and that same applies to any reciprocal social relationship.

Speaker 2 You know, if you have any sense, if you think it through, you want to build up the people that are around you.

Speaker 2 Well, why?

Speaker 2 Well, because they're around you.

Speaker 2 And so if you were a generous,

Speaker 2 if you made generous offerings to the social world, And you improved the nexus of relationships that you were involved in, why wouldn't that be good for you?

Speaker 2 Now, you might think, well, there's only so much to go around, and if everyone else wins, I lose. But that's another story, and it's the story of power.
And it's a very bad story, and it's not true.

Speaker 2 Because the truth of the matter is, is that there's more than enough for everyone to do, and your victory doesn't have to ever come at the cost of someone else's defeat. I shouldn't say ever.

Speaker 2 I mean, there are times when,

Speaker 2 you know, people are head-to-head, and the game that's being played isn't fair, fair and it's your victory or your defeat. But those are very

Speaker 2 pathological and unnecessary circumstances. And it would be better to do everything you can to ever avoid being in a situation like that.

Speaker 2 Situations like that arise when your relationships have deteriorated radically. And I would say as well, the same thing applies to the story of power.

Speaker 2 Power is the manner in which social relationships or even your relationship with yourself, it's the story that makes itself manifest when the proper story collapses. Right?

Speaker 2 It's the degeneration of a state that turns it into a tyranny. It's not the victory of a state.
And it's the same at every level of social relationship. If you're tyrannizing yourself,

Speaker 2 that's a failure. If you're tyrannizing your wife, that's a failure.
The same with your children, the same with your friends. It's not an optimized pattern of being.

Speaker 2 It's not about you.

Speaker 2 It's not about the whims that narrowly possess you. That's a more accurate formulation.

Speaker 2 So what does that imply?

Speaker 2 If it's not about you, it means you have to give up something

Speaker 2 to be social and to mature, right? What do you have to give up? You have to give up what the two-year-old gives up.

Speaker 2 You have to give up getting what the hell you want the second you want it, all the time, no matter what. So what are you giving up? You're giving up

Speaker 2 the momentary

Speaker 2 whims that possess you that you could identify with. You're giving up your wants.
Maybe you're giving up your needs. What does it mean to give them up?

Speaker 2 I said it means the other person gets a turn.

Speaker 2 It means that the future is taken into account.

Speaker 2 What does that imply?

Speaker 2 It implies that you made a sacrifice.

Speaker 2 Okay, so here's something to think about, and it'll guide us through the rest of the talk. The basis of maturity and community is sacrifice.
Okay, now it has to be that way. You understand?

Speaker 2 Like, this isn't an arbitrary proposition. We're communal beings, and we're future-oriented.
So, because we're future-oriented, we have to give up the present, right?

Speaker 2 Because we have to bring up the present. We cannot sacrifice the future to the present.
That's why you can't do impulsive, stupid, terribly interesting and entertaining things.

Speaker 2 People drink so that they can fool themselves into thinking that's okay. And it is.
It's a blast while it's happening. But

Speaker 2 the next day tends to be a rather dismal affair, especially if you've seriously gone overboard, let's say.

Speaker 2 And the reason for that is that it's too easy to sacrifice the future to the impulsive pleasures of the moment. And you know as a self-conscious being that

Speaker 2 You're going to have to bear the consequences of your actions as they propagate across time. And then it's the same with the others that you come into contact with.

Speaker 2 Because you're communal, because you're social, that's the human mode of being,

Speaker 2 you have to give up the fact that it's all about the local and narrow present-centered you. That's the sacrifice.
So what does that mean? Community is predicated on sacrifice.

Speaker 2 All right, so that implies that the central story of mankind is one of sacrifice.

Speaker 2 Okay, so now if you know that, you've got a fundamental key to understanding the fundamental stories of our culture, the biblical stories, because the biblical library is an examination of sacrifice.

Speaker 2 Okay, so now we're going to expand on that. I want to make it very clear so that it's perfectly understandable.
We'll start with the story of Adam and Eve.

Speaker 2 So Adam and Eve are the archetypal father and mother of us all.

Speaker 2 You could think about them as the pattern of masculinity and femininity as such. It's something like that, speaking metaphorically.

Speaker 2 So how is that to be understood? Okay, imagine a movie again.

Speaker 7 When my sleep is off, it felt like I couldn't show up as my best self. I spent night after night tossing and turning, waking up exhausted, and making it hard to keep up with the latest headlines.

Speaker 7 That's when I found Beam's Dream Powder. Beam is proudly founded in America and run by people who share our values, hard work, integrity, and delivering results.

Speaker 7 It's a healthy nighttime blend packed with science-backed ingredients shown to improve sleep so you can wake up refreshed and ready to take on the day.

Speaker 7 And unlike other sleep aids, there's no next-day grogginess, just great, restful sleep because Dream is made with a powerful blend of all natural ingredients, racey, magnesium, l-theanine, apigenin, and melatonin.

Speaker 7 I especially appreciate that Beam is an American company both built and operated here, so a purchase supports hardworking Americans committed to doing things the right way. Here's the deal.

Speaker 7 Beam is giving our listeners the ultimate Patriot discount of up to 40% off. Try their best-selling dream powder and get up to 40% off for a limited time.

Speaker 7 Head over to shopbeam.com/slash Peterson and use code Peterson at checkout. That's shop B-E-A-M.com/slash Peterson and use code Peterson for up to 40% off.

Speaker 7 Sleep better, wake up stronger, and show up ready for your family, your work, and your country. Because when you're well rested, you're unstoppable.
And this country needs more people like that.

Speaker 2 You know perfectly well that when you go see a movie, you don't just see a video camera following someone around

Speaker 2 for two hours of their life. Right? You don't see them wake up and you don't watch them blink and you don't watch them make their bed.

Speaker 2 You don't watch them go through the mundane things that make up day-to-day life. You're not interested in that.
You're interested in an abstraction of their

Speaker 1 the sounds of an Etsy holiday.

Speaker 1 Now that's special. Want Want to hear it again? Get original and affordable gifts from small shops on Etsy.
For gifts that say, I get you, shop Etsy. Tap the banner to shop now.

Speaker 2 Of their mode of being. You want the author, the writer,

Speaker 2 to present you with the drama of their life. You want

Speaker 2 the character that's being portrayed to be

Speaker 2 an abstraction of those elements of human aim and motivation that capture your interest.

Speaker 2 So a fictional account is a distillation,

Speaker 2 which means that fiction, modern people,

Speaker 2 because we think that stories are entertainment, we think that fiction is the opposite of fact. And that's a foolish thing to think.

Speaker 2 We know it's foolish because we know that works of great literature are true.

Speaker 2 We know that crime and punishment is true. We know that the brothers Karamazov or War and Peace is true.
Well, it's fictional. It never happened.
So, how can it be true?

Speaker 2 And the answer is: well, it's a distillation of what's true.

Speaker 2 A character like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, a character like the Joker in the Dark Knight, is a distillation of everything that's pathological, right, into one character. Now, is that real?

Speaker 2 Well, it's not real in that it is a videotaped representation of an actual sequence of events. It's real in that it's a profound abstraction.
And you might say, well, abstractions aren't real.

Speaker 2 It's like, really? Words are abstractions. Are they real? How about numbers?

Speaker 2 Numbers are abstractions.

Speaker 2 There's lots of mathematicians who think that numbers are the most real thing. Well, what does that mean? Well, if you're a master of numbers,

Speaker 2 You master the world.

Speaker 2 So how is that not real? How is an abstraction and a distillation not real?

Speaker 2 Fiction isn't the opposite of fact. Fiction is hyper-real.

Speaker 2 And the deeper the fiction, so to speak, the deeper the distillation, the more real it is.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 literature, great literature in particular, is very deep, but mythology, religious accounts, religious stories, are the deepest form of abstraction. So they're the most true.
Now,

Speaker 2 they're the most true. How does it mean that they help you specify your aim better than anything else? There's a definition of true, like an arrow flying true, right?

Speaker 2 Something that strikes right to the heart. You get your story straight, you see the world in a true manner, right?

Speaker 2 Adam and Eve are the distillation of what it means to be human. That's a good way of thinking about it.
Adam, for example, is charged by God with the task of naming and subduing the world.

Speaker 2 What is that a reference to? The masculine proclivity

Speaker 2 to set things in a determinate order. That's the what, would you say, impetus towards the patriarchal hierarchy, right?

Speaker 2 Even the feminists admit that the social order is a masculine construct. Well, that's Adam's task.
He's to, God charges him with that after his creation.

Speaker 2 To subdue, and name the world. What does it mean to subdue?

Speaker 2 It means to get every, give everything its proper due to put everything in its proper place in in the appropriate story that's the right way to think about it to give everything its name to specify the things of the world in a manner that allows in genesis 1 the garden to be shepherded and stewarded properly

Speaker 2 that's adam's job what's eve's job Well, it's an equal job. That's why she's taken from Adam's rib.
It's an equal job. The word Eve means, in Hebrew, is Ezer Kenegdo.
What does that mean?

Speaker 2 It means something like, I have to hit it from multiple perspectives to get it right. It means something like martial partner in challenging play.
Martial in the military sense.

Speaker 2 Ezer means military ally. That's one of its connotations, right? So it's a...
It's a relationship of strength. It's a relationship of challenge.
What's optimized challenge?

Speaker 2 How would you define optimized challenge? Think about it this way. Imagine you want to play one-on-one basketball and you want to win.

Speaker 2 Okay, so you're six foot five and you have a nephew and he's like six and he's, you know, four feet tall. And you think he'll be a good partner because why?

Speaker 2 Well, if I play one-on-one basketball with him,

Speaker 2 I'm going to win. And of course, you want to be a winner, so why not

Speaker 2 be six foot five and stomp the hell out of your nephew when you're playing one-on-one basketball? And you might say, well, that's not any fun.

Speaker 2 And then I might say, well, you're trying to win and it's pretty much assured. And you say, well, maybe I don't want an assured victory.
And that's why you get married.

Speaker 2 I'm dead serious about that. I'm dead serious about that.
You could imagine this.

Speaker 2 Imagine that's love. Imagine love as an instinct.
Okay, now you could imagine love as a divine,

Speaker 2 a divine gift of grace. It doesn't matter to me which of those two perspectives you adopt.
Imagine love as an instinct. Well, what's the instinct?

Speaker 2 It's the instinct to set yourself up with optimized challenge. Why?

Speaker 2 So you grow.

Speaker 2 So your eye falls on someone and love emerges, right?

Speaker 2 It's a calling to you. It's not something you create.
It's something that appears to you. What's the estimate that your instinct to love is attempting?

Speaker 2 I can spar with this person in a manner that will make both of us grow.

Speaker 2 That's what the love signifies, right? And it's, as I said, you can think about it as an instinct. You can think about it as a divine act of grace.
The two things converge.

Speaker 2 It makes no difference to me whether whether it's a bottom-up phenomena or a top-down phenomena.

Speaker 2 What does it mean to enjoy being with someone in the deepest sense?

Speaker 2 You want a partner in play who's matched with you, right?

Speaker 2 You don't want to be the six-foot-five bully who's winning every game because his opponent is not capable of pushing him or her to the limits of their ability.

Speaker 2 Well, why do you want to be pushed to the limit of your ability? So you improve.

Speaker 2 Well, why improve?

Speaker 2 Well, what's the alternative? A dull stasis? A dull, meaningless stasis? Or a degeneration?

Speaker 2 Insofar as pain and anxiety are real and hopelessness as well, those seem like unacceptable alternatives. It's certainly not what you want for your children or for anyone you love.

Speaker 2 What you'd hope for them is that they find

Speaker 2 an occupation, they find an educational pathway, they find a partner that puts them on the edge of their development so they can dance on the edge, so that they can continue to unfold, so that they can be better for themselves, so they can be better for the future, and so they can be better for everyone else.

Speaker 2 And maybe that

Speaker 2 optimized challenge that love

Speaker 2 indexes is the voice of the spirit that calls you to that continued pattern of adaptation. That's Eve partnered with Adam.
What's Eve's role?

Speaker 2 Well, we kind of know what the female role is. We could speak biologically again, the feminine role.
Women are more sensitive to negative emotion on average than men.

Speaker 2 That's cross-culturally validated finding. It's very well established.
It goes along with the female, increased female propensity for depression and anxiety. Men have their problems.

Speaker 2 problems, don't get me wrong. They're much more likely to be antisocial.
There's all sorts of sex-typed pathologies. I'm not trying to single women out, not in the least.

Speaker 2 There's no reason to assume that ability and proclivity for catastrophe are anything but equally distributed between the two sexes. Right? We, speaking biologically, we co-evolved.

Speaker 2 There's no reason to assume that the relationship isn't one of radical equality, for better or worse.

Speaker 2 Women are also more agreeable. What does that mean?

Speaker 2 They're more instinctively empathic. Well, why would women be more sensitive to negative emotion and more instinctively empathic? Well, let's start with negative emotion.

Speaker 2 Boys and girls don't differ much in their general patterns of negative emotion. The differences emerge at puberty.
Well, why would women become more sensitive to negative emotion at puberty?

Speaker 2 Well, see if you can figure it out.

Speaker 2 Well, here's a couple of reasons.

Speaker 2 Sexual dimorphism in strength emerges more profoundly at puberty. So men have much more upper body strength.
They're more physically, they're more capable of physical domination in dispute.

Speaker 2 Women are very...

Speaker 2 They're very good at long-distance endurance sports. They're very resilient.
But as as fighters

Speaker 2 they

Speaker 2 lose so what does that imply in terms of sensitivity to threat well

Speaker 2 the world's a more dangerous place for women why else well they're sexually vulnerable in a way that men aren't and that makes itself present obviously at puberty why are they more sexually vulnerable Here's the definition of a woman.

Speaker 2 I don't know if that's what you came here for tonight.

Speaker 2 You know the Matt Walsh movie, What is a Woman? Well, I'll tell you.

Speaker 2 We know the answer to that. It isn't chromosomal, even biologically.
Now, chromosome differentiation is a very powerful marker of sex, but it's not the fundamental distinction.

Speaker 2 The fundamental biological distinction between male and female is quite clear. Females are the sex that contribute more to reproduction.

Speaker 2 So, for example, the egg is 10 million times the volume of the sperm.

Speaker 2 And so, right at that level, the initial level of conception, the female is already doing,

Speaker 2 the female is already making the larger sacrifice. So, there's the definition of a woman.
A woman is the sex who makes the larger sacrifice for reproduction.

Speaker 2 Now, you have to be a fool to dispute that, obviously. Women carry babies.

Speaker 2 They're pregnant, and they take primary responsibility for infants when they're in their most dependent state. That puts them at a disadvantage

Speaker 2 socioeconomically. It's very much, it's difficult, differentially difficult for women to maneuver in the world when they're pregnant or when they have dependent infants.

Speaker 2 So what does that mean with regards to mate choice? It means that they look for men who are

Speaker 2 capable of keeping the predators who might prey on infants and them at bay, productive and generous. And so women look for for markers of social status to index attractiveness.
Why?

Speaker 2 Because they outsource the problem of who's the better man to the men, and they let them compete and they peel from the top. And it's a brilliant strategy.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 why do women reject men?

Speaker 2 Well, I just told you why.

Speaker 2 And so that might be very irritating.

Speaker 2 If you're rejected, it is very irritating. There's probably nothing worse in a sense, but like, how in the world could it be any different? Because the stakes are high.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 women are more sensitive to negative emotion and they're more empathic and agreeable.

Speaker 2 What does that mean? Why is that? Well, we talked about some of the reasons. Why else? Because they have to care for dependent infants.

Speaker 2 So here's the rule for caring for an infant up to about seven months old. Whatever the infant wants goes.

Speaker 2 Right? An infant in distress is never wrong. Now you can't say that about a creature of any other age.

Speaker 2 Once children are capable of moving, crawling even,

Speaker 2 they're not entirely dependent. And every single

Speaker 2 demand for gratification they make manifest is does not have to be met with immediate

Speaker 2 what would you say does not have to be addressed immediately at the cost of everything. It's not the case with infants six months and lower.

Speaker 2 Whatever they need and want now, that's what's to be provided, right? And so, women are tilted towards that kind of care.

Speaker 2 Okay,

Speaker 2 what does that mean in the biblical context?

Speaker 2 Adam's role is to name and subdue, to establish

Speaker 2 order. What's the problem problem with establishing order? You might leave something out.

Speaker 2 Women are the voice of that which has been left out.

Speaker 2 Well, what does that mean? Well, you know what it means.

Speaker 2 If you've had a family, if you're in a marriage,

Speaker 2 women bring the attention of men

Speaker 2 to the concerns of the vulnerable.

Speaker 2 And, you know, if you have a family and you have two kids and then you have a third baby,

Speaker 2 the family's already settled into a kind of stable order, let's say. But now you have this new infant and it's a completely new creature and it's got a new temperament.
God only knows what it's up to.

Speaker 2 It's an extremely complicated creature. And there has to be adjustments made to the structure of order so that that child can find its place.
And the women are in contact with that.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 their emotional makeup and perceptual structure, they're better at decoding nonverbal behavior, for example, than men are.

Speaker 2 That enables them to speak for the

Speaker 2 marginalized.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 That accounts in large part for the political divide between men and women that you can see growing.

Speaker 2 What's the sin of women?

Speaker 2 Amongst the marginalized are the serpentine.

Speaker 2 Right?

Speaker 2 Not everybody who cries victim is an infant.

Speaker 2 Some of the creatures that cry victim are monsters, and you shouldn't clutch them to your breast.

Speaker 2 That's what Eve does with the snake. She clutches the serpentine to her breast.
Why?

Speaker 2 To announce to herself the supreme power of her compassion.

Speaker 2 Right? That's the pattern. That's the eternal pattern of female sin

Speaker 2 as laid out in the second story in the biblical corpus. What's the sin of men? Adam? Because he falls immediately after Eve.

Speaker 2 Eve hearkens to the voice of the serpent, who is the immediate manifestation of the Luciferian spirit of the usurper

Speaker 2 and the deceiver. That's the mythological structure.
What does that mean?

Speaker 2 Psychopaths use victim status to gain what they want.

Speaker 2 Right?

Speaker 2 And prideful, compassionate fools fall for it. Why? To elevate their compassion to the highest place.

Speaker 2 Not a wise move. What's

Speaker 2 Adam's sin?

Speaker 2 What do men want?

Speaker 2 They want to impress women.

Speaker 2 I worked with lawyers for years, you know, high-end lawyers, people who ran law firms, who were partners of senior law firms, and they made a lot of money, $1,000 an hour, a lot of money.

Speaker 2 Why were they interested in the money? Well, there are materialistic reasons for being interested in money. We don't have to cover them.

Speaker 2 But most of them regarded the money, especially their bonuses, as, what did they say? That's how we keep score. What did that mean?

Speaker 2 Well, that was how the men rank ordered themselves in the status hierarchy within the firms. And that's very common among men.
They're rank-ordering status all the time. Why?

Speaker 2 Because women peel from the top. The biggest predictor of a woman's attractiveness to a man's attractiveness to a woman cross-culturally is his comparative status among other men.

Speaker 2 It's a walloping predictor. It's by far the biggest contributor.
And we've said why? Well, why? Well, because a woman doesn't need another infant,

Speaker 2 right? She needs someone who can help. And how does she find out? Well, she sees who wins the contest among men, and she assumes that the winner is the winner.
And so, why not have him?

Speaker 2 And it's a perfectly reasonable way of conducting an analysis. It can be gamed.

Speaker 2 But that's a different story.

Speaker 2 So, what's Adam's sin?

Speaker 2 He tries to impress Eve.

Speaker 2 So, when she comes to him, announcing

Speaker 2 her new relationship with the serpentine, he says, no problem, dear, whatever you want, and fails to

Speaker 2 establish the proper borders of order. What happens? That's the fall of mankind.
Okay, so what does that mean? It's a very complicated idea.

Speaker 2 There's a Christian idea, deep Christian idea, that suffering is the consequence of sin. And that the worst sin, let's say, is the sin of pride.

Speaker 2 Adam and Eve both fall prey to the sin of pride in the feminine way and the masculine way. Adam says, I got this, baby.
And Eve says, we can even clutch the serpent to our breasts. Right, right.

Speaker 2 That's their, that's their typical forms of pathology. What happens to people who bite off more than they can chew?

Speaker 2 What happens to people who attempt to incorporate and digest the inedible? They fall.

Speaker 2 That's what happens to Adam and Eve. Pride comes before a fall.
Okay, so what does that have to do with suffering? That's a complicated question, right?

Speaker 2 Because you might think, and rightly so, you know, that suffering itself seems to be built into the structure of the world, right? I mean, we're fragile. We can be hurt.
Our children are hurt.

Speaker 2 They stumble. They scrape their knees.
They break their arms and legs.

Speaker 2 They develop terrible diseases like we all do. There seems to be an element of suffering and vulnerability built into the world.
What else causes suffering? Biting off more than you can chew, right?

Speaker 2 So imagine how many times you're struggling forward in disenchanted misery

Speaker 2 because you've

Speaker 2 fallen away from what you should pursue,

Speaker 2 because you've falsely aggrandized yourself or taken on a task.

Speaker 2 claimed to be able to take on a task or to have a skill that you don't possess. Setting yourself up for a fall, what's the consequence of that?

Speaker 2 Misery.

Speaker 2 How much of the misery of the world is that? That's a real interesting question.

Speaker 2 We actually don't know, right?

Speaker 2 We've established, let's say in the course of this dialogue, that there's a certain amount of suffering that's a mere consequence of the structure of the world, the arbitrary nature of reality.

Speaker 2 The sort of random distribution of vulnerability and illness. But by the same token, man, you can do a lot of stupid things to make your life worse.

Speaker 2 And so you've got to ask yourself, if you stop doing those stupid things and you aimed in the proper direction, how much of the suffering that's attendant on life would vanish?

Speaker 2 And the answer is, well, quite a lot, because you know that when you...

Speaker 2 When you're doing your best, when you have your act together, when you're not pridefully overreaching, when you're not overextending yourself, when you're not acting falsely, when you're not trying to usurp and claim what's not yours, when you're not trying to be the pinnacle of the moral order, let's say,

Speaker 2 life's a lot better.

Speaker 2 And then it's an open question: well, how much better would it be if you were really good at that?

Speaker 2 And then there's another question, which would be, how much better would life be in total if everyone was doing that? Right?

Speaker 2 If everyone was walking with God in the garden instead of taking to themselves the right to define the moral order?

Speaker 2 How much suffering would vanish? All of it?

Speaker 2 It's hard for me to see how all suffering could vanish given our mortal constraints. But

Speaker 2 you can sure take a bad situation and make it worse with stupidity.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 the Christian insistence that suffering enters the world with sin, maybe it's

Speaker 2 more

Speaker 2 the suffering that makes the world unbearable enters the world with sin, right? Because there's nothing more

Speaker 2 effortful than the work you have to do to dig yourself out of the hole that you dug and fell in.

Speaker 2 And you see, this is sort of what happens to Adam and Eve in the immediate aftermath of the fall, because God tells Eve that she's going to suffer in life. She's going to suffer.

Speaker 2 in consequence of her children's dependence on her and her role as the primary contributor to reproduction. And she's going to suffer under the dominion of her husband.
Why?

Speaker 2 Well, they're both fallen creatures. Why would women suffer under the dominion of their husbands? This isn't something God says should happen.

Speaker 2 Right? It's not a definition of the moral order. It's a definition of the fallen moral order.

Speaker 2 Women are attracted to high-status men. The degree to which a woman is attracted to a man is proportionate to his comparative status.
Women are attracted to men whose status exceeds their own.

Speaker 2 What's the implication of that? They're going to be under the dominion of their husband.

Speaker 2 If the husband is fallen, then they're going to be under the dominion of his tyranny. Right? So that's the definition of the fallen world for women.
What's the definition of the fallen world for men?

Speaker 2 Well, God says

Speaker 2 you're going to have to toil in the fields and it will bring forth thorns and thistles. You'll make your way forward effortfully and you'll return to the dust from which you emerged.

Speaker 2 When is work toilsome and effortful?

Speaker 2 It's particularly toilsome and effortful when you're digging yourself out of the hole that you dug and fell in.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 you can understand this. You know, there are times in your life where you're putting a lot of effort into something.
It's not exactly work, right? You're highly motivated to do it. Well, why?

Speaker 2 Well, because it called to you, because you're certain that you're engaging in a

Speaker 2 that you're aiming at something that is

Speaker 2 morally valid, let's say, that your conscience isn't going to upbraid you for, that's intrinsically interesting, right? If you're engaged in work that isn't

Speaker 2 the result of sin, so to speak, then is it toil or is it play?

Speaker 2 And you could ask yourself, you know, when your life is optimized and you're doing something that

Speaker 2 is in the nature of your true calling, when you're walking with God in the garden, when you've re-established that relationship, then

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 sacrifices that you have to make to move forward aren't painful.

Speaker 2 And You understand that because you can see that at the best moments of your life, you work, but in harmony with things in not in contradiction to them and that working in harmony there's a tremendous pleasure in that you know children's play is effortful if they're really playing hard they're on the edge of their developmental ability right they're stretching themselves but there's nothing about that that isn't joyful and so there's an insistence, an implicit insistence in the story of Adam and Eve that work aimed properly would be play and play in the eternal garden.

Speaker 2 And so one of the things you might want to ask yourself is that if your toil is not play,

Speaker 2 how wrong is your aim?

Speaker 2 And then the next question is, well, what should you aim for?

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 2 The biblical library does what it can to answer that question too.

Speaker 2 What should you aim for? God is characterized in the biblical stories as the source of the ultimate aim. That's a good way of thinking about it.

Speaker 2 So imagine that there are things in your life that interest you, compel you, and pull you forward.

Speaker 2 They call to you. Now, imagine that as you mature, what interests and calls to you and pulls you forward changes.
Right?

Speaker 2 But the fact that something interests you and calls to you and motivates your transformation, that doesn't change. God

Speaker 2 is defined in the Old Testament corpus as the spirit behind all transformational aims.

Speaker 2 Right?

Speaker 2 So you could imagine that the thing that beckons to you and calls you to develop and mature further varies in its specific manifestations depending on your time and your place and your temperament, but that there's something behind that that shines through all of those

Speaker 2 things that beckon and call and fill you with enthusiasm. And that's the deity at the pinnacle of Jacob's ladder, which is the never-ending spiral of upward aim.

Speaker 2 That's a definition, and that people are called upon to exist in relationship to that spirit-that's the covenant between man and God.

Speaker 2 What's how is that spirit characterized in Genesis?

Speaker 2 God,

Speaker 2 the source of ultimate aim or the target of ultimate aim is characterized as

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 spirit

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 broods upon the primeval water.

Speaker 2 That's the opening part of Genesis. Well, what does that mean? Well, there's no water yet in creation.
That comes later. What's the water?

Speaker 2 The Hebrew is tohu vabohu. And it doesn't exactly mean water.
It means something like

Speaker 2 potential or possibility or chaos.

Speaker 2 god is the spirit that extracts the habitable order that is good out of

Speaker 2 a pre-existent potential or chaos and human beings are made in that image what does that mean this is what you do in your life

Speaker 2 what do you perceive when you wake up in the morning Well, you think, well, I perceive my bed, I perceive my carpet, I perceive my curtains.

Speaker 2 That just shows how materialistic you are in your conceptualizations, because that's not what you perceive. What you perceive is the possibility that's making itself available to you

Speaker 2 for the day, right? Think about how you wake up. First of all, you're asleep, you're unconscious, there's nothing happening then.
Poof, daylight, you're awake. You're awake.

Speaker 2 And what are you contending with? Maybe you're terrified. Why?

Speaker 2 You're terrified by all the potential left over that you haven't realized because you've been offering inappropriate sacrifices at your job. That's what that means.

Speaker 2 Or maybe you wake up enthusiastic and optimistic and you can see that there's many things that

Speaker 2 exist in possibility for you that you could wrestle into

Speaker 2 the order that's good.

Speaker 2 Right? And so then you can leap out of bed enthusiastically and begin to, to what? Subdue and order the world right

Speaker 2 and that's that's the nature of consciousness itself like consciousness itself which is being as far as human beings are concerned because what is non-conscious being

Speaker 2 it's the spirit that grapples with the possibility of the world is the possibility real well

Speaker 2 can you do one thing or another Can you do one thing or five other things? Do you have choice?

Speaker 2 Well, you treat everybody like they have choice. You treat people like they have responsible choice.
You assume that on your own account.

Speaker 2 It appears to you that you have that ability to go this way or that way in what?

Speaker 2 In the realm of potential. Well,

Speaker 2 that's why human beings are made in the image of God. Well, that's why that's an accurate representation is we're doing the same thing at the local level.

Speaker 2 that the spirit that gives rise to everything is deemed to have done at the beginning of time and to be continually doing.

Speaker 2 Right, we have something to do. What?

Speaker 2 Transform possibility into actuality. In what manner? How about in the manner that aims up?

Speaker 2 We're transforming chaotic potential with our aim

Speaker 2 to what? To establish the kingdom of heaven. Or what? Its alternative? Hell.
We've done that plenty, especially in the 20th century, by aiming down, by lying, by being prideful,

Speaker 2 by being usurpers of the moral order? That's a communist ideologue in a nutshell. And what do they produce with their downward aiming, wrestling with potential? Hell.

Speaker 2 Is it real?

Speaker 2 Wait till you get there and you'll find out. And maybe you've had a few side trips already.
Right? It's as real as pain and suffering. It's as real as pointless pain and suffering.

Speaker 2 It's as real as self-inflicted pointless pain and suffering, or maybe it's as real as the pointless pain and suffering that you inflict with your carelessness and your deception and your pride, even on the people you love.

Speaker 2 That's a good definition of hell. Is that real?

Speaker 2 You can just ask yourself that question. Everybody knows the answer to that question.

Speaker 2 Is the alternative real, the upward aim?

Speaker 2 All of the great heroes of the Old Testament,

Speaker 2 they sacrifice themselves to the good. That's what they're doing when they're building altars.
So I want to tell you that story because this is very useful to know.

Speaker 2 I said the entire biblical library is an investigation into sacrifice. This really becomes clear in the story of Cain and Abel.
Now, Adam and Eve are fated to work.

Speaker 2 Okay, so let's make an equation here so that everybody understands what's going on. There's no difference

Speaker 2 between

Speaker 2 work and sacrifice. So So that's a key to understanding the biblical text.
Why? Well, what the hell do you think you're doing when you're working?

Speaker 2 You're sacrificing the present to the future, or you're sacrificing your immediate wants to the community. It's a sacrificial gesture, right? Work.
It's the definition of work.

Speaker 2 You're giving up something now.

Speaker 2 You're offering something now to what?

Speaker 2 To stabilize

Speaker 2 the community in the future, including your future self. It's a sacrificial gesture.
Work is sacrifice.

Speaker 2 Okay, so once you know that, you can understand, let's say, the story of Cain and Abel, which is the story that I'll close with.

Speaker 2 Cain and Abel are the first two

Speaker 2 human beings in the fallen world. So in the actual world, in the world of history, in the world we occupy.
They're born and not made by God. And they represent two patterns of sacrifice.

Speaker 2 The two patterns of sacrifice that characterize culture and psyche, individual and community.

Speaker 2 The fundamental patterns, just like Adam and Eve are the fundamental patterns of masculinity and femininity, Cain and Abel, the hostile brothers, are the twin patterns of sacrifice or work that characterize the human approach to reality.

Speaker 2 Abel, who's Abel? Abel aims up. He makes the sacrifices that are of the highest quality.
Abel is a...

Speaker 2 herder and he takes the best animals and he butchers them and he takes the best cut and he takes the best pieces of that and he immolates it on an altar because he wants to dramatize, because that's what he's doing, playing out the idea that the best is what will satisfy the spirit of the cosmic order.

Speaker 2 Do you believe that? Well, you either believe that or the opposite.

Speaker 2 Those are your options. There's a no non-belief option here.
You believe one thing or another.

Speaker 2 If you offer your best, will you be accepted? Because that's God's pronouncement to Cain. Cain takes the opposite stance.
He offers what's second best

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 doesn't work.

Speaker 2 Well, is that true? Well, how often have you offered anything but your best and had it work? And then you might think, well, why would you even think it could work? Because life is very difficult.

Speaker 2 It's very difficult. And if you're going to make a success out of it or something that isn't an absolute hell, it's fairly probable that you're going to have to bring your best to the table.

Speaker 2 Because like, you think, who do you think you are?

Speaker 2 You think you're the sort of person who can defy the structure of reality itself, that you can fool yourself and other people and the natural order and God by offering what's second rate and succeeding.

Speaker 2 That's your theory. That's not a wise theory.
Not in the face of the difficulties of life. That's Cain's theory.
That's what he tries to do. And what happens to him?

Speaker 2 It says in the text, his countenance falls. What does that mean? He's bitter, resentful, miserable, unhappy, and vengeful.
Well, why? Well, because he's being rejected. Well, why is he being rejected?

Speaker 2 Because he's not bringing his best to the table. And so what does Cain do? Well, he doesn't do what Abel does.
Abel always aims up.

Speaker 2 Right? He makes the sacrifices that are acceptable to God. That's his story, because he brings what's of the highest quality to the table.
Cain doesn't. Cain

Speaker 2 fails, is bitter, miserable, and resentful. And

Speaker 2 what does he do? Well, he doesn't admit it because he's not able.

Speaker 2 He calls out God.

Speaker 2 And so he has a little chat with God, just like we all do when we're bitter and failing. How did you make this world

Speaker 2 where I'm breaking myself in half? And all that's happening is I'm failing. And my brother, Abel, the sun shines on him.
Everything he does touches to gold.

Speaker 2 What the hell's wrong with the moral order? What's wrong with the spirit who created existence itself? That's Cain's challenge to God.

Speaker 2 It's a hell of a thing to think about failure as a consequence of second-rate effort. It's like, well, I'm failing because God made the world wrong.

Speaker 2 There isn't a more prideful presumption than that. And it doesn't really work on God.
And God says to Cain,

Speaker 2 if you did well, you'd be accepted. And what does that mean?

Speaker 2 It means if you brought absolutely everything you had to bear on the circumstances at hand and you left nothing behind, if you were willing to sacrifice everything necessary,

Speaker 2 you could have what you needed and wanted. But nothing short of that will suffice, right? That's why it's nest.

Speaker 2 This is why Christ in the Gospels calls upon his followers to abandon even their brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers if they're going to walk uphill.

Speaker 2 This is why Abraham is called upon to sacrifice Isaac to God. It's like everything is to be sacrificed to the upward aim.
And that's what God insists upon.

Speaker 2 And he's characterized as the spirit that makes that insistence. And we're characterized in relationship to that spirit.

Speaker 6 At blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments. It's about you, your style, your space, your way.

Speaker 6 Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right.

Speaker 6 From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. Because at blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you.

Speaker 6 Black Friday deals are going on all month long. Save up to 45% off site-wide, plus an additional 10% off every order right now at blinds.com.

Speaker 2 Rules and restrictions apply.

Speaker 2 And God says something else, which doesn't make Cain the least bit happy.

Speaker 2 Cain believes that the reason he's bitter and resentful, miserable, and vengeful, and cursing God and shaking his fist at the sky in this prideful manner is because he's failing.

Speaker 2 And God says, that's not why you're miserable, buddy. There's an intervening variable you're not, he doesn't say that because God's not a scientist.

Speaker 2 There's an intervening variable you're not taking into account. What does he say to Cain? He said,

Speaker 2 sin crouches at your door like a sexually aroused predatory animal, and you invited it in to have its way with you. And so what does that mean? It's brilliant.
It's so condensed. It's so brilliant.

Speaker 2 It's the most accurate bit of psychology of resentment I've ever seen. What does it mean?

Speaker 2 You fail. Okay.

Speaker 2 The causal consequence. You're bitter.

Speaker 2 Well, no, one of the causal consequences could be you could wake the hell up and start doing better and repent and confess and get your act together and atone and move on right and learn that's causal too you can't blame your resentment misery on your suffering there's an intervening spirit what's that the spirit of sin that crouches at your door a predator a sexually aroused predator why that well because it wants to

Speaker 2 you

Speaker 2 I'm dead serious about that. It's a very ancient metaphor, that metaphor of,

Speaker 2 what would you say, the seminal quality of evil. What's evil? It's something you invite in, right? It's something that you creatively

Speaker 2 engage with. That's the sexual metaphor.
It's something you brood on. It's something you allow to inhabit you.
It's something that possesses you.

Speaker 2 The terrible people who do terrible things, the people who shoot up high schools, It's like 2,000 hours of fantasizing before they pull the trigger. And

Speaker 2 what's that a result of? Bitterness and resentment, but that's not all. It's the invitation of something in to take possession of them.
And so that's what God accuses Cain of.

Speaker 2 And that makes him extremely unhappy, as you might imagine.

Speaker 2 You're miserable because you're not making the right sacrifices. You're resentful because you invited in the spirit of sin itself.
It's all to be laid at your feet. The last thing Cain wants to hear,

Speaker 2 the most corrective possible piece of advice, which he instantly rejects, what does he do? He kills Abel.

Speaker 2 What does it mean? If you're resentful enough and you're vengeful enough, you'll destroy your own ideal, right? You'll destroy everything. Why?

Speaker 2 To obtain revenge on

Speaker 2 the source of your suffering, right? To foment bloody rebellion against God. That's what Cain does.
That's what the spirit of bitterness forever does. Cain makes the wrong sacrifices.

Speaker 2 He sacrifices the ideal itself to his own pride. And then he tells God, my sin is greater than I can bear.
Well, why? Destroy your ideal as a consequence of bitterness?

Speaker 2 You've got nowhere to go. Cain is destined to wander the land of Nod.
Where's that? That's where children go when they're asleep.

Speaker 2 Sin badly enough, you'll take escape in unconsciousness.

Speaker 2 Why does Cain wander? Because he's a bitter psychopath and no one wants to be near him.

Speaker 2 And so he takes the pathway of the itinerant vagrant who's so pathological in his orientation that anyone decent will step away from him.

Speaker 2 What's the consequence of Cain's failure to sacrifice?

Speaker 2 His descendants are worse.

Speaker 2 His descendants are the first

Speaker 2 worshipers of technology.

Speaker 2 They're the first

Speaker 2 vengeful, tit-for-tat genocidal agents.

Speaker 2 Lamech,

Speaker 2 one of Cain's descendants,

Speaker 2 says, you kill Cain and you offend Cain and you die. You offend me, seven or seventy die.
What does it mean? The pattern of resentful bitterness that Cain, that characterizes Cain,

Speaker 2 can make itself manifest in the broader community and turn everything into a genocidal nightmare. Right.
What follows?

Speaker 2 The flood.

Speaker 2 Right. The flood that washes away

Speaker 2 Cain's descendants. Right.

Speaker 2 Sacrifice. That's the essence of adaptation.
That's the essence of maturation. It's the fundament upon which the communion is predicated.
I'll end with this.

Speaker 2 For 2,000 years,

Speaker 2 we've put a symbol at the center of our culture, right? Insofar as our cultures are Christian. And by the center, I mean literally the center.

Speaker 2 The cathedral at the center of the town or city, the altar at the center of the cathedral, the crucifix at the center of the altar. Why?

Speaker 2 Because it's a symbol of the ultimate sacrifice. Right? The full sacrifice of self

Speaker 2 in service of future, others,

Speaker 2 community, and God.

Speaker 2 Is that the principle upon which the community is founded? The principle upon which the community is founded is sacrifice. What's the ultimate sacrifice?

Speaker 2 Well, it's the sacrifice of everything to what's good.

Speaker 2 Right?

Speaker 2 That's the fundamental story of

Speaker 2 Judeo-Christian culture.

Speaker 2 Is it true?

Speaker 2 Try making your life.

Speaker 2 Try

Speaker 2 walking through your life successfully without making the proper sacrifices upward and find out whether or not it's true.

Speaker 2 All right, everyone. Thank you very much.

Speaker 8 With Vimmo Stash, a tag on one hand, and ordering a ride in the other, it means you're stacking cash back. With Vimmo Stash, get up to 5% cash back when you pick a bundle of your favorite brands.

Speaker 8 Earn more cash when you do more with Stash. Venmo Stash Terms include supply.
Max $100 cash back per month. See terms at Vimmo.me slash stash terms.