Lecture： Biblical Series XII： The Great Sacrifice： Abraham and Isaac (-yUP40gwht0)

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Pomp and Circumstance Thank you. Thank you. So I’ve been thinking about things that I’m happy about and what I’m most happy about so far is that I haven’t spilled my bubbly water into my computer so far while I’ve been doing these lectures. So that’s all. I’ll probably do it tonight now that I’m bragging about having avoided it. So thank you all for coming. This is the last lecture in this 12 part series. I did mention that I have made arrangements with the theatre at least to do this once a month for the next four months and we’ll play it by year past then. I want to continue and I’ll find another venue and perhaps to do it every two weeks but certainly once a month and maybe I can even get deeper into the material if it’s only once a month. So that would be… then we’ll really slow down to a snail’s crawl. So this is a tough one tonight. You know it’s something, a story that everyone with any sense should approach with a substantial degree of trepidation. I’ve been working on my book this week on chapter seven which is called Do What Is Meaningful Not What’s Expedient and it’s really, it’s been a very difficult chapter because I’m coming to, I’m trying to extend my understanding of sacrifice which is of course what we’re going to talk about tonight in great detail. And I’ve been wrestling with exactly how to do that and I’m going to read you some of that I think today. I don’t generally read when I do my lectures but this is so complicated that I’m not confident of my ability to just spin it off, you know, sort of what would you call it, spontaneously. That’s the word. And so, and it’ll also give me a chance to test out whether what I’ve written which I’ve been struggling with has the kind of poetic flow that I’d like to have. If you’re writing it’s really good to read things aloud, you know, because you can tell if you’ve got the rhythmic cadence right then. So anyways, thank you all for coming. Many of you have, I believe, attended all twelve lectures and that’s really remarkable. It’s amazing that, you know, this place has been full every single lecture. It’s completely unbelievable, that would be the case. And, you know, about more than two million views have, this has been watched more than two million views. It’s not two million people because it would be the same people I would suspect many times but that’s also crazy. But it’s a crazy world and it seems to be getting crazier. So hopefully this is some addition to stabilizing it and making it slightly more sane. That’s the hope anyways. So we’ve got a couple of stories to deal with tonight. Complex, complex stories. Not really easy to comprehend in any sense of the word. I mean, with the story of Isaac, God calls on his chosen individual, Abraham, the person he’s made this contract with to sacrifice his son. And it’s, how in the world are you supposed to make any sort of sensible sense out of that? It’s exactly that sort of story that makes modern people who are convinced that the faster we put the biblical stories behind us, the better. It’s grist for their mill, you know, because it seems like such an incomprehensible and even barbaric act on the part of God. And so, you know, I hesitate to even approach it because, well, because there’s so many ways that an interpretation of that sort can go wrong. But we’ll see how it goes. And so let’s walk through it and see what happens. So we’re going to start with the story of Sarah and Isaac. And the Lord visited Sarah as he had said. You remember when Abraham was in the midst of his appropriate sacrificial routines, which we’ve characterized as his return to the contract he made with the idea of the good, the contract with God. He was informed by God that he would get what he most wanted, which was an error, despite his advanced old age. And of course Sarah was very skeptical about that, as she had every reason to be. But this story opens with the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham. And the Lord visited Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did unto Sarah as he had spoken, for Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the set time of which God had spoken to him. And Abraham called the name of his son that was born unto him, whom Sarah bare to him, Isaac. And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac being eight days old, as God had commanded him. And Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born unto him. And Sarah said, God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me. And she said, Who would have said unto Abraham that Sarah should have given children suck, for I’ve borne him a son in his old age. And the child grew and was weaned, and Abraham made a great feast the same day that Isaac was weaned. I suppose one of the purposes, let’s say, perhaps the literary purposes of this story, is to exaggerate for dramatic purposes the importance of a child. You know, when people are young, and I think this is particularly true in the modern world, they seem to often regard the possibility of having a child as an impediment to their lifestyle. And of course, in some ways, I suppose that’s true. Although you have to have quite a lifestyle before a child actually constitutes an impediment, because having a child in your life is actually something that’s remarkable, almost beyond belief. You know, you can have a relationship with a child that is better than any relationship you’ve ever had with anyone in your life, if you’re careful and if you’re fortunate. Being fortunate helps. You know, I’ve seen many people delay having children, and for understandable reasons, it’s no simple decision to have a child. And of course, now we can make the decision to have a child, which of course people couldn’t in past ages, really. But sometimes you see people delay, and they delay too long, and then they don’t get to have a child, and then they’re desperate, and you know, they spend a decade doing fertility treatments or that sort of thing, and immersing themselves in one disappointment after another. It’s just at that point where you see exactly how catastrophic it is, it can be, how catastrophic it can be, for people not to have one of the, not to be able to undergo one of the great adventures of life, let’s say. And one of the things this story does, by delaying the arrival of Isaac, and delaying the arrival of Isaac continually, is to exaggerate the importance, significance of the child, because it isn’t until you’re deprived of something, it’s truly not until you’re deprived of something that you have any sense of what its value is. And Isaac was waiting, or Abraham was waiting a very long time, a hundred years, a very long time, and the same with Sarah. And so they’re unbelievably excited, and of course this also heightens the drama that’s inherent in the entire sacrificial story, because it’s not only that eventually that Abraham is called upon to sacrifice Isaac, which would be bad enough under any other, any circumstances whatsoever, self-evidently, but the fact that he’s been waiting a century for the arrival of this child, desperately, and made all the proper sacrifices, and lived in the appropriate manner to allow this to occur, dramatically heightens the literary tension. Now you remember Hagar, this is the next part of the story, Hagar was Sarah’s handmaid, and when Sarah was unable to bear Abraham a child, she sent him Hagar, and Hagar immediately got pregnant, and gave birth to Ishmael, and the story picks up from that point here. And this is quite interesting, I mentioned the other week when I was talking to you guys a couple of weeks in a row, just how interesting it has been to scour the internet for the paintings that are associated with these stories. There’s just an amazing wealth of great paintings that illustrate every single bit of every single biblical story, and it’s really been enlightening to me to find out just exactly how poorly educated I am. You know, like I’m a, what would you say, I’m a great admirer of artistic talent and of artistic endeavour, but there’s so much I don’t know about the history of art that it’s just absolutely beyond belief, and to see this treasure trove of images that I really had no idea that existed, of course they’re spread all over the world, and it’s only been in recent years that you could have access to them in this way, just, it’s just a, it’s a constant revelation of the depth to which these stories have absolutely permeated our culture, and the loss that it would be if we didn’t know them properly, and take them with the degree of seriousness that they deserve. So anyways, this is one of those great images, first of all Hagar had the first child, and that elevated her status, and she was Sarah’s maid, handmaid, and so that’s obviously going to be quite awkward, and then she lorded it over Sarah because of the fact that she got pregnant so easily, and now we see this situation where Ishmael is doing the same thing with regards to Isaac, and that causes a substantial amount of trouble. So, the family is a familial division occurring here. God said unto Abraham, Let it not be grievous in thy sight because of the lad and because of the bondwoman, in all that Sarah hath said unto thee, hearken unto her voice, for in Isaac shall thy seed be called. But also of the son of the bondwoman, will I make a nation because he is thy seed? That’s, so that’s an interesting outcome too, you know, we pointed out before, we discussed before the fact that because Abraham has made, has lived his life properly, and has kept the contract with God, there’s every evidence in this story that no matter what the vicissitudes of Abraham’s life, you know, how the great serpent that he sits on in some sense weaves back and forth, there’s always the promise that things will work out positively, and you know, you could read that as naive optimism, but I think it has a lot more to do with the actual power of keeping the contractual agreement, because I really do believe, and I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time thinking about this over the last couple of weeks in addition to the decades before that, and all that’s happened since I’ve been doing these biblical lectures is that my conviction in this has been strengthened, which is quite interesting, is that if you do what it is that you’re called upon to do, which is to lift your eyes up above the mundane, daily, selfish, impulsive issues that might beset you, an attempt to enter into a contractual relationship with that which you might hold in the highest regard, whatever that might be, to aim high and to make that important above all else in your life, that that fortifies you against the vicissitudes of existence like nothing else can, and I truly believe that that’s the most practical advice that you can possibly receive. You know, I received, I was answering questions last night, I did this Q&A, which I do about once a month for the people who are supporting me on Patreon, which I also release on YouTube, and somebody asked, you know, they were struggling with their religious faith, and they asked what they could do about that, and I’d also been thinking about the difference between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, which I’ll discuss in a minute, and I was trying to answer this question with regards to religious faith, because this person was shaky in his faith in life, let’s say, which is a better way of thinking about it, and it seems to me that the way that you fortify your faith in being and in life and in your own existence isn’t to try to convince yourself of the existence of a transcendent power that you could believe in the same way that you believe in a set of empirical facts. I don’t think that’s the right approach. I think it’s a weak approach, actually. I don’t think that the cognitive technology, I don’t think that’s the right cognitive technology for that set of problems, you know. That’s more a technology that you’d use if you were trying to solve a scientific problem. It’s more like, it’s more something that needs to be embedded in action rather than in stateable belief, and the way that you fortify your faith in life is to assume the best, something like that, and then to act courageously in relationship to that. And that’s tantamount to expressing your faith in the highest possible good. It’s tantamount to expressing your faith in God. And it’s not a matter of stating, well, I believe in the existence of a transcendent deity, because in some sense, who cares what you believe? I mean, you might in all that, but that’s not the issue. That’s not the issue. The issue, it seems to me, is how you act. And I was thinking about this intensely when I was thinking about Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, because of course you know that Nietzsche was the philosopher who announced the death of God, right, and who was a great, great critic of Christianity, a vicious critic of institutional Christianity, in the best sense, you know. And he announced the death of God, and he said that we’d never find enough water to wash away the blood. It wasn’t a triumphant proclamation, even though it’s often read that way. And Nietzsche’s conclusion from that, from the death of God, the fact that our ethical systems were going to collapse when the foundation was pulled out from underneath them, he believed that human beings would have to find their own values, to create their own values. And there’s a problem with that, because it doesn’t seem, and this is something Carl Jung was very thorough in investigating, it doesn’t really look like people are capable of creating their own values, because you’re not really capable of molding yourself just any old way you want to be. Like you have a nature that you have to contend with. And so it isn’t a matter of creating our own values, because we don’t have that capacity. It might be a matter of rediscovering those values, which is what Jung was attempting to do. Now, and so I think Nietzsche was actually profoundly wrong in that recommendation. I think he was psychologically wrong. Now, you know, Dostoevsky wrote, in many ways, in parallel to Nietzsche, and was a great influence on Nietzsche. Their lives parallel each other to a degree that’s somewhat miraculous, in some sense. It’s quite uncanny. Dostoevsky was obviously a literary figure, whereas Nietzsche was a philosopher, a literary philosopher, but still a philosopher. Dostoevsky wrestled with exactly the same problems that Nietzsche wrestled with. But he did it in a different way. He did it in a literary manner. He has this great book, The Brothers Karamazov, and in that book, there’s a… The hero of the book is really Elioche, who’s a monastic novitiate, a very good guy, kind of… not an intellect, not an intellect, but a person of great character. But he has a brother, Ivan, who’s his older brother, who’s a great intellect, and a very handsome soldier, and a brave man, and like Dostoevsky’s villains… Ivan isn’t exactly a villain, but that’s close enough. Ivan, or Dostoevsky, makes his villains extraordinarily powerful. So if Dostoevsky’s trying to work out an argument, he clothes the argument in the flesh of one of his characters. And if it’s an argument he doesn’t agree with, then he makes that character as strong as he possibly can, as strong and as attractive and intelligent as he possibly can. And then he lets him just have at her, and so Ivan is constantly attacking Elioche, and from every direction, trying to knock him off his perch of faith, let’s say. And Elioche can’t address a single one of Ivan’s criticisms, and he doesn’t have the intellect for it, and Ivan has a devastating intellect. It’s devastating to him, himself, as well. What happens in the Brothers Karamazov, essentially, is that Elioche continues to act out his commitment to the good, let’s say. And in that manner, he’s triumphant. It doesn’t matter that he loses the arguments, because the arguments aren’t exactly the point. The arguments, in some sense, are a side issue, because the issue is, and this is the existential issue, the issue is not what you believe as if it’s a set of facts, but how you conduct yourself in the world. So Dostoevsky, he grasped that, and it’s one of the things that makes him such an amazing, amazing literary figure, an amazing genius, because he was smart enough to formulate the arguments in a manner that no one else really could, with the possible exception of Nietzsche, and that’s quite an exception. And yet, he could still, using his dramatic embodiment, he could still lay out solutions to the problems that he was describing that are extremely compelling, both crime and punishment, which is an amazing, thrilling, engrossing book. And the Brothers Karamazov, all of Dostoevsky’s great books, really circulate around those profound moral issues. So I’ve learned a tremendous amount from reading him. So, and God said unto Abraham, Let it not be grievous in thy sight, because of the lad, and because of thy bondwoman, and all that Sarah hath said unto thee, hearken unto her voice, for in Isaac’s cell shall thy seed be called. And also, of the son of the bondwoman will I make a nation, because he is thy seed. Alright, so I commented that Abraham is being blessed in multiple directions, even when things are going wrong, and this is pretty bad, because his family in some sense is breaking up. There’s this emphasis in the text that because he’s kept this contractual relationship with God, that he’s in an arc. We could say it that way, we could put it that way, and that he’ll triumph through the vicissitudes of life, which is the best you can hope for. And it’s quite interesting, again, one of the things that’s so powerful about the Abrahamic stories, is that it’s not like Abraham, even though he’s chosen by God, it’s not like he has an easy time of it, he has a rough life. I mean, it’s a successful life and all that, but it’s not without its troubles, that’s for sure. It’s got every sort of trouble you could possibly imagine, pretty much. And that’s one of the things that makes the story so realistic, as far as I’m concerned. And Abraham rose up early in the morning and took bread and a bottle of water, and gave it unto Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, and the child, and sent her away. And she departed and wandered in the wilderness of Yeshiva. I found the… it’s funny, I guess this had more of an emotional impact on me this week than it might have, because my daughter just had a baby a week ago, and so I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing, you know, and we’re so happy that that’s happened. And I was trying to put myself in the, what would you say, the conceptual space of the people about who these stories are about, and trying to, you know, notice the catastrophe that this sort of breakup would actually constitute. And the visual images really help with that, because they’re so carefully crafted, and they hit the story from so many different directions, that, you know, they add that additional layer of emotional meaning to it, which I found very, very significant. And the water was spent in the bottle, and she cast the child under one of the shrubs, and she’s sent to wander in the desert, you know, so it’s not just that she has to leave Abraham’s household, it’s that where she goes is not really amenable to life, and so it’s extraordinarily dramatic and terrible tale. And she went and sat her down over against him a good way off, as it were a bow shot, for she said, let me not see the death of the child. And she sat over against him and lift up her voice and wept. And God heard the voice of the lad, and the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven and said unto her, what aileth thee, Hagar? Fear not, for God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him in thine hand, for I will make him a great nation. And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water, and she went and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink. And God was with the lad, and he grew and dwelt in the wilderness, and became an archer. And that’s actually a relevant detail too, the fact that he became an archer, because I think I mentioned to you at one point that the word sin is derived from a Greek word, hamartia, even though it sounds nothing like that word. And hamartia is actually an archery term, and it means to miss the bullseye. And that’s a lovely metaphor for sin, I think, because it’s associated so tightly with the idea of goal direction and aim. Because there’s a metaphorical idea that’s embedded in that image, and that is that a human being is something that specifies a target, which we do all the time with our eyes, by the way. Our eyes are target specifying mechanisms. We have very precise, central focal vision, and we use our focal vision to target the aim of our behaviour. And so we are aiming creatures. It’s built right into our body, we’re built on a hunting platform, we’re aiming creatures, and we do that cognitively as well as behaviourally. And so as hunters, we take aim at things, and we take aim at moving targets, and we’re very good at bringing them down, and we’ve been doing that for who knows how long, millions of years, really. Even chimpanzees are carnivorous, by the way, and we split from them about six million years ago, so we’ve been hunting and aiming for a very, very long period of time. And we still have aims in our life, right, and that’s how we describe them. What are you aiming at, or what are your aims, what are your goals, what’s your target. It’s all based on that hunting metaphor, and the fact that Ishmael becomes an archer means that he’s someone who can take aim at the centre of the bullseye and hit it precisely. And so that’s an indication that he’s a good man, right? So, and I suppose also part of the, it carries part of the narrative weight of the story, because of course he’s Abraham’s son, and you’d expect Abraham’s son to be someone who’s very good at taking aim. And he dwelt in the wilderness of Peran, and he could live there and survive, which is no trivial thing, and his mother took him a wife out of the land of Egypt. Okay, so that’s the story of Hagar, and it’s a fairly straightforward story. It’s complex emotionally, but it doesn’t, and it brings up the terrible theme of familial catastrophe and the complications of romantic and familial relationships and all of that. But it really serves as a prodroma to the next story, which is the one that’s so complex and so difficult to understand. And it came to pass after these things that God did tempt Abraham, which is a funny thing for God to do, I suppose, and said unto him, Abraham. And he said, behold, here I am. And God said, take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, who thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. And Abraham rose up early in the morning and saddled his ass and took two of his young men with him and Isaac his son and claved the wood for the burnt offering and rose up and went unto the place of which God had told him. Then on the third day of journeying, Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place of far off. And Abraham said unto his young men, abide ye here with the ass, and I and the lad will go yonder and worship and come again to you. It’s really one of the first times that we’ve come across the word worship, if I remember correctly, and it’s a very difficult word to contend with, too. You know, because if you’re like me, or if you’re like me when I was a kid, because I haven’t thought about this for a long time, it was never really obvious to me why God would want to be worshipped. You know, if you go to church and you offer up your praise and thanks to God, and you think, well, really, does that make a lot of sense? It’s like, why in the world is that what he wants? It’s almost like you’re kneeling down in front of an ancient Middle Eastern tyrannical emperor and vowing your submission. And that never sat well with me, and I suppose it doesn’t sit well with many people, and I think that’s because it’s not the proper way of conceptualizing it. What happens when you see what Abraham does continually, and this seems to be implicit in the use of the word worship in this particular situation, is that, you know, as we discussed, he has an adventure in his life that comes to an end. So there’s an episode in his life that comes to an end, and then there’s a period of, you might consider it, where he reconstitutes himself to some degree. And that’s when he makes his sacrifices, and it seems to me that it’s that reconstitution that constitutes the worship. The worship is something like, you know, this is alluding back to my original proposition that it’s how you act that’s the issue. And the worship is the decision to enact the good in whatever form it is that you can conceptualize it, as well as trying to continually reconceptualize the good in a manner that makes the good that you’re conceptualizing even that much better, right? Because when you start aiming, the probability that you’re going to be aiming in the right direction is very low. But hypothetically, as you aim and as you practice and as you learn, the target is going to shift in front of your eyes, and you’re going to be able to follow it ever more clearly. And that seems to me, and especially given the context that this word is used in this particular story, is a much more appropriate interpretation of what constitutes proper worship. And I suppose it’s akin to the later Christian idea that it’s the imitation of Christ that’s the sacred duty of every Christian, of every Christian, and every human being, I suppose, insofar as that’s an archetypal idea. And the idea is something like, well, it’s the embodiment of the good that’s the issue. And it’s not your stated belief in the good. And, you know, when Nietzsche was criticizing Christianity, this is actually one of the things that he brought up as a major issue. He said that he believed Christianity had lost its way, because it had introduced a confusion between stated belief, which is, say, your belief in the divinity of Christ, whatever it means if you state that. It isn’t obvious what it means when you state that, because it isn’t obvious what it would mean that you believe it, or even what it is that you’re believing in. As far as Nietzsche was concerned, in some sense, not only was that beside the point, it was dangerously beside the point, because it actually allowed the Christian believer not to adopt the moral burden that was actually appropriate to the faith, which was to, and this is, I’m using a kind of a Jungian concept here, to manifest the archetype within the confines of your own life. And that’s to make the divine, your relationship with the divine, your relationship with the transcendent and infinite, into something that’s actually realizable in the context of your own life, which is to say, well, you know, you’re supposed to, again, to act out the highest good of which you’re capable. Now that’ll transform your life to some degree into an archetypal adventure. There’s no way around that, because as you attempt to climb a higher mountain, let’s say, or to aim at a higher target or something like that, then the things around you will become increasingly dramatic and of import. That happens by necessity, obviously, because if you’re aiming at something difficult and profound, and you’re really working at it, then your life is going to become perhaps increasingly difficult and profound. But that might be okay. That might be exactly what you need as an antidote to the implicit limitations that face you as a human being. And I and the lad will go yonder and worship and come again to you. Now, there’s an implication here, too, that it’s a foreshadowing that Abraham offering up his son is actually a form of worship and that it’s continuous with what he’s already done. And, well, now I’m going to read you some of the things that I’ve written and then I’ll return to this and we’ll see how that goes. So, life is suffering. That’s clear. There’s no more basic, irrefutable truth. It’s basically, as we’ve seen, what God tells Adam and Eve immediately before he kicks them out of paradise. Quote, unto the woman, he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam, he said, because you have hearkened unto the voice of thy wife and hast eaten of the tree which I commanded thee, saying, thou shalt not eat of it. Cursed is the ground for thy sake. In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you will return. Rough. You know, and we’ve associated that with Adam and Eve’s eyes opening and them becoming self-conscious and discovering the future and becoming fully aware and falling into history. And it seems to me to be a very realistic existential portrayal of the predicament of humankind. What in the world should be done about that? The simplest, most obvious, and most direct answer. Pursue pleasure. Follow your impulses. Live for the moment. Do what’s expedient. Lie, cheat, steal, deceive, manipulate, but don’t get caught in an ultimately meaningless universe. What possible difference could it make? And this is by no means a new idea. The fact of life’s tragedy and the suffering that is part of it has been used to justify the pursuit of immediate selfish gratification for a very long time. You know, even reading Jung, he often writes as if before the rise of the conflict between religion and science, which culminated, say, in Nietzsche’s pronouncement about the death of God, that people lived ensconced quite safely within a religious conceptualization that imbued their life with meaning. And that was just the state of reality, you know. There are ancient writings that makes it quite clear that the crisis of faith that characterized, say, modern people were certainly far from unknown in the past. And here’s one of those writings. This is from Wisdom II, the Revised Standard Version. Short and sorrowful is our life. And there is no remedy when a man comes to his end, and no one has been known to return from Hades. Because we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been, because the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason is just a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts. When it is extinguished, our body will turn to ashes, and our spirit will dissolve like empty air. Our name will be forgotten in time, and no one will remember our works. Our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud, and be scattered like mist that is chased by the rays of the sun, and overcome by its heat. For our allotted time is but the passing of a shadow, and there is no return from our death, because it is sealed up, and no one turns back. Come, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that exist, and make use of the creation to the full, as in youth. Let us take our fill of costly wines and perfumes, and let no flower of spring pass us by. Let us crown ourselves with rose buds before they wither. Let none of us fail to share in our revelry. Everywhere let us leave signs of enjoyment, because this is our portion, and this is our lot. Let us oppress the righteous poor man. Let us not spare the widow, nor regard the grey hair of the aged. But let our might be our right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless. It’s an amazing piece of writing. It starts with an announcement of the rationale for nihilism, and ends with a justification for fascist tyranny. And it’s thousands of years old. It’s a remarkable thing to see, and to be laid out so concisely. The pleasure of expediency may be fleeting, but it’s pleasure nonetheless. And that’s something to stack up against the terror and pain of existence. Every man for himself. And the devil take the hindmost, as the old proverb has it. Why not simply take everything you can get whenever the opportunity arises? Why not determine to live in that manner? What’s the alternative? And why should we bother with it? Our ancestors worked out very sophisticated answers to such questions, but we still don’t understand them very well. This is because they are, in large part, still implicit, manifest primarily in ritual and myth, and as of yet, incompletely articulated. We act them out and represent them in stories, but we’re not wise enough yet to formulate them explicitly. We’re still chimps in a troop, or wolves in a pack. We know how to behave. We know who’s who and why. We’ve learned that through experience. Our knowledge has been shaped by our interaction with others. We’ve established predictable routines and patterns of behaviour, but we don’t really understand them, or know where they originated. They’ve evolved over great expanses of time. No one was formulating them explicitly, at least not in the dimmest reaches of the past. Even though we’ve been telling each other how to act forever. One day, however not so long ago, we woke up. We were already doing, but we started noticing what we were doing. We started using our bodies as devices to represent their own actions. We started imitating and dramatizing. We invented ritual. We started acting out our own experiences. Then we started to tell stories. We coded our observations of our own drama in those stories. In this manner, the information that was first only embedded in our behaviour became represented in our stories. But we didn’t, and we still don’t understand what it all meant. The biblical narrative of Paradise in the Fall is one such story fabricated by our collective imagination, working over the centuries. It provides a profound account of the nature of being, and points the way to a mode of conceptualization and action well matched to that nature. In the Garden of Eden, prior to the dawn of self-consciousness, so goes the story. Human beings were sinless. Our primordial parents, Adam and Eve, walked with God. Then, tempted by the snake, the first couple ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, discovered death and vulnerability, and turned away from God. Mankind was exiled from Paradise and began its effortful mortal existence. The idea of sacrifice enters soon afterwards, beginning with the account of Cain and Abel, and developing, as we’ve seen through the Abrahamic stories. After much contemplation, struggling humanity learns that God’s favour could be gained and his wrath averted through proper sacrifice. And also that bloody murder might be motivated among those unwilling or unable to succeed in this manner. When engaging in sacrifice, our forefathers began to act out what would be considered a proposition, if it were stated in words. That something better might be attained in the future by giving up something of value in the present. Recall, if you will, that the necessity for work is one of the curses placed by God upon Adam and his descendants in consequence of original sin. Adam’s waking to the fundamental constraints of his being, his vulnerability, his eventual death, that’s equivalent to the discovery of the future. That’s where you go to die. Hopefully not too soon. Your demise might be staved off through work, through the sacrifice of the now to benefit later. It is for this reason, among others, no doubt, that the concept of sacrifice is introduced in the biblical chapter immediately following the drama of the fall. There’s little difference between sacrifice and work. They’re also both uniquely human. Sometimes animals act as if they’re working, but they’re really only following the dictates of their natures. Beavers build dams. They do so because they’re beavers, and beavers build dams. They don’t think, yeah, but I’d rather be on a beach in Mexico with my girlfriend while they’re doing it. Prosaically, such sacrifice, work, is delay of gratification. But that’s a very mundane phrase to describe something of soul-shattering significance. The discovery that gratification could be delayed was simultaneously the discovery of time and with it, causality. Long ago, in the dim mists of time, we began to realize that the gratification of the soul is the result of the gratification of the soul. In the dim mists of time, we began to realize that reality was structured as if it could be bargained with. We learned that behaving properly now in the present, regulating our impulses, considering the plight of others, could bring rewards in the future in a time and place that did not yet exist. We began to inhibit, control, and organize our immediate impulses so that we could stop interfering with other people and our future selves. Doing so was indistinguishable from organizing society. The discovery of the causal relationship between our efforts today and the quality of tomorrow motivated the social contract, the organization that enables today’s work to be stored reliably, mostly in the form of promises from others. Understanding is something that’s often acted out before it can be articulated. Just as a child acts out what it means to be mother or father before being able to give a spoken account of what those roles mean, the idea, the act of making a ritual sacrifice to God was an early and sophisticated enactment of the idea of the usefulness of delay. There’s a long conceptual journey between merely feasting hungrily and learning to set aside some extra meat smoked by the fire for the end of the day or for someone who isn’t present. It takes a long time to learn to keep anything later for yourself or to share it with someone else. And those are very much the same thing as in the former case, you’re sharing with your future self. It’s much easier and far more likely to selfishly and immediately wolf down everything in sight. There are similar long journeys between every leap in sophistication with regards to delay and its conceptualization, short-term sharing, storing away for the future, representation of that storage in the form of records and later in the form of currency, and ultimately the saving of money in a bank or other institution. Some conceptualizations had to serve as intermediaries or the full range of our practices and ideas surrounding sacrifice and work and their representation could have never emerged. Our ancestors acted out a drama, a literary fiction. They personified the force that governs fate as a spirit that can be bargained with, traded with as if it were another human being. And the amazing thing is that it worked. This was in part because the future is largely composed of other human beings, often precisely those who have watched and evaluated and appraised the tiniest details of your past behavior. It’s not very far from that to God sitting above on high, tracking your every move and writing it down for further reference in a big book. Here’s a productive symbolic idea. The future is a judgmental father. That’s a good start. But two additional archetypal foundational questions arose because of the discovery of sacrifice of work. Both have to do with the ultimate extension of the logic of work, which is sacrifice now to gain later. First question. What must be sacrificed? Small sacrifices might be sufficient to small to solve small, singular problems. But it’s possible that larger, more comprehensive sacrifices might solve an array of large and complex problems all at the same time. That’s harder, but it might be better. Adapting to the necessary discipline of medical school, for example, will fatally interfere with the licentious lifestyle of a hardcore undergraduate party animal. Giving that up is a sacrifice. But a physician can, to quote George W., really put food on his family. That’s a lot of trouble dispensed with over a very long period of time. So sacrifices are necessary to improve the future. And larger sacrifices can be better. Second question, introduction. We’ve already established the basic principle. Sacrifice will improve the future. But what’s implied by that in the most extreme and final of cases? Where does that basic principle find its limits? We must ask, to begin with, what would be the largest, most effective, most pleasing of all possible sacrifices? And then how good might the best possible future be if the most effective possible sacrifice could be made? The biblical story of Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve’s sons, immediately follows the story of the expulsion from paradise, as mentioned previously. Cain and Abel are really the first humans. Since their parents were made directly by God and not born in the standard manner, Cain and Abel live in history, not in Eden. They must work. They must make sacrifices to please God. And they do so with altar and proper ritual. But things get complicated. Abel’s offerings please God, but Cain’s do not. Abel is rewarded many times over, but Cain is not. It’s not precisely clear why, although the text strongly hints that Cain’s heart is just not in it. Maybe the quality of what Cain put forward was low. Maybe his spirit was begrudging. Or maybe God was just feeling crabby. And all of this is realistic, including the text’s vagueness of explanation. Not all sacrifices are of equal quality. Furthermore, it often appears that sacrifices of apparently high quality are sometimes not rewarded with a better future. And it’s not clear why. Why isn’t God happy? What would have to change to make him so? These are difficult questions. And everyone asks them all the time, even if they don’t notice. Asking such questions is indistinguishable from thinking. The realization that pleasure could be usefully forestalled dawned with a difficulty that’s almost impossible to overstate. Such a realization runs absolutely contrary to our ancient fundamental animal instincts, which demand immediate satisfaction. Particularly under conditions of deprivation, which are both inevitable and commonplace. And to complicate the matter, such delay only becomes useful when civilization has stabilized itself enough to guarantee the existence of the delayed reward. If everything you save will be destroyed, or worse, stolen, there’s no point saving. It’s for this reason that a wolf will down 20 pounds of raw meat in a single meal. He isn’t thinking, man, I hate it when I binge. I should save some of this for next week. Here’s a developmental progression from animal to human. It’s wrong, no doubt, in the details. But it’s sufficiently correct for our purposes and theme. First, there’s excess food. Large carcasses, mammoths, or other massive herbivores might provide that. Weigh a lot of mammoths. Maybe all of them. With a large animal, there’s some left for later after a kill. That’s accidental at first. But eventually, the utility of for later starts to be appreciated. Some provisional notion of sacrifice develops at the same time. If I leave some now, even if I want it now, I won’t have to be hungry later. That provisional notion then develops to the next level. If I leave some for later, I won’t have to go hungry. And neither will those I care for. And then to the next level. I can’t possibly eat all this mammoth, but I can’t store the rest for too long either. Maybe I should feed some to other people. Maybe they’ll remember and feed me some of their mammoth when they have some and I have none. Then I’ll get some mammoth now and some mammoth later. That’s a good deal. And maybe those I’m sharing with will come to trust me more generally. Maybe then we could trade forever. In such a manner, mammoth becomes future mammoth. And future mammoth becomes personal reputation. That’s the emergence of the social contract. To share does not mean to give away something you value and get nothing back. That’s only instead what every child who refuses to share is afraid that it means. To share means properly to initiate the process of trade. A child who can’t share, who can’t trade, can’t have any friends. Because having friends is a form of trade. Benjamin Franklin once suggested that a newcomer to a neighborhood ask a new neighbor to do him or her a favor, citing an old maxim. He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged. In Franklin’s opinion, asking someone for something, not too extreme obviously, was the most useful and immediate invitation to social interaction. Such asking allowed the neighbor to show him or herself as a good person at first encounter. It also meant the neighbor could now ask the newcomer for a favor in return because of the debt incurred. In that manner, both parties could overcome their natural hesitancy and mutual fear of the stranger. It’s better to have something rather than nothing. It’s better yet to generously share the something you have. It’s even better than that, however, to become widely known for generous sharing. That’s something that lasts. That’s something that’s reliable. And at this point in abstraction, we can observe how the groundwork for the conceptions of reliable, honest, and generous have been laid. The basis for an articulated morality has been put in place. The productive, truthful sharer is the prototype for the good citizen and the good man. We can see in this manner how, from the simple notion that leftovers are a good idea, the highest moral principles might emerge. It’s as if something like this happened as humanity developed. First were the endless tens or hundreds of thousands of years prior to the emergence of written history and drama. During this time, the twin practices of delay and exchange began to emerge slowly and painfully. Then they became represented in metaphorical abstraction as rituals and tales of sacrifice told in a manner such as this. It’s as if there’s a powerful figure in the sky who sees all and is judging you. Giving up something you value seems to make him happy. And you want to make him happy because all hell breaks loose if you don’t. So practice sacrificing and sharing until you become expert at it and things will go well for you. No one said any of this, at least not so plainly and directly, but it was implicit in the practice and then in the stories. Action came first as it had to, as the animals we once were could act but could not think. Implicit unrecognized value came first as the actions that preceded thought embodied value but did not make that value explicit. People watched the successful succeed and the unsuccessful fail for thousands and thousands of years. We thought it over and we drew a conclusion. The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future. A great idea began to emerge, taking ever more clearly articulated form in ever more clearly articulated stories. What’s the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful? The successful sacrifice. Things get better as the successful practice their sacrifices. The questions become increasingly precise and simultaneously broader. What’s the greatest possible sacrifice for the greatest possible good? And the answers become increasingly deeper and profound. The God of Western tradition, like so many gods, requires sacrifice. We’ve already examined why, but sometimes he goes even further. He demands not only sacrifice, but the sacrifice of precisely what is loved best. This is most starkly portrayed and most confusingly evident in the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham, beloved of God, long wanted a son, and God promised him exactly that after many delays and under the imperably impossible conditions of old age and a long barren wife. But not so long afterward, when the miraculously born Isaac is still a child, God turns around and in apparently barbaric fashion demands that his faithful servant offer his son as a sacrifice. The story ends happily. God sends an angel to stay Abraham’s obedient hand and accepts a ram in Isaac’s stead. That’s a good thing. It doesn’t really address the issue at hand. Why was God’s going further necessary? Why does he, why does life, impose such demands? We’ll start our analysis with the truism. Stark, self-evident, and understated. Sometimes things do not go well. That seems to have much to do with the terrible nature of the world, with its plagues and its famines and its tyrannies and its betrayals. But here’s the rub. Sometimes when things are not going well, it’s not the world that it’s the cause. The cause is instead that which is most valued. Why? Because the world is revealed to an interminate degree through the template of your values. If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it’s time to examine your values. It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It’s time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best so that you can become who you might become instead of staying who you are. Something valuable given up ensures future prosperity. Something valuable sacrificed pleases the Lord. What is most valuable and best sacrificed? Or what is at least emblematic of that? A choice cut of meat. The best animal in a flock. A most valued possession. What’s above even that? Something intensely personal and painful to give up. That’s symbolized perhaps in God’s insistence on circumcision as part of Abraham’s sacrificial routine. What’s beyond that? What pertains more closely to the whole person rather than the part? What constitutes the ultimate sacrifice for the gain of the ultimate prize? It’s a close race between child and self. The sacrifice of the mother offering her child to the world is exemplified, for example, by Michelangelo’s great sculpture, the paeta. Michelangelo crafted Mary contemplating her son crucified and ruined. She’s sitting, most of you know this sculpture. She’s sitting, sitting on the throne of the Lord. She’s sitting and the body of her son is in her arms, her adult son, and it’s broken and he’s been destroyed. It’s a very beautiful but very tragic work of genius, work of genius level representation. Michelangelo crafted Mary contemplating her son crucified and ruined. It’s her fault. It was through her that he entered the world and its great drama of being. Is it right to bring a baby into this terrible world? Every woman asks herself that question. Some say no. They have their reasons. Mary answers yes voluntarily, knowing full well what’s to come, as do all mothers if they allow themselves to see. It’s an act of supreme courage when it’s undertaken voluntarily. In turn, Mary’s son, Christ, offers himself to God and the world to betrayal, torture, and death, to the very point of despair on the cross where he cries out those terrible words, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? That is the archetypal story of the man who gives his all for the sake of the better, who offers up his life for the advancement of being, who allows God’s will to become manifest fully within the confines of a single mortal life. That is the model for the honorable man. In Christ’s case, however, as he sacrifices himself, God, his father, is simultaneously sacrificing his son. It’s for this reason that the Christian sacrificial drama of son and self is archetypal. It’s a story at the limit where nothing more extreme, nothing greater, can be imagined. That’s the very definition of archetypal. That’s the core of what constitutes religious. Pain and suffering define the world. Of that, there can be no doubt. Sacrifice can hold pain and suffering in abeyance to a greater or lesser degree. And greater sacrifices can do that more effectively than lesser. Of that, too, there can be no doubt. Everyone holds this knowledge in their soul. Thus, the person who wishes to alleviate suffering, who wishes to rectify the flaws in being, who wishes to bring about the best of all possible futures, who wants to create heaven on earth, will make the greatest of sacrifices of self and child, of everything that is loved, to live a life aimed at the good. He will forego expediency. He will pursue the path of ultimate meaning. And he will, in that manner, bring salvation to the ever desperate world. On the third day, Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place far off. It’s not an accident, also, that it’s in a mountain, right? Because the mountain is so far away, that it’s not a place where you can see the mountain. It’s a place where you can see the mountain. And it’s not a place where you can see the mountain. It’s not an accident, also, that it’s in a mountain, right? Because a mountain is something you have to climb, and you have to climb to the pinnacle of a mountain. And the mountain is up, right? And the mountain stretches up to heaven. And it’s a long journey to specify the right place on the highest pinnacle. And that’s symbolic, because of course it’s a pinnacle that you’re always trying to reach, just like you’re always trying to aim. You’re always trying to climb upward. At least that’s the theory. It depends to some degree, of course, on your definition of upward. And Abraham said to his young men, Abide he here with the ass, and the lad will go yonder in worship and come to you again. And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son. And he took the fire in his hand, and a knife. And they went both of them together. And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father. And he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire in the wood! But where is the lamb for a burnt offering? And Abraham said, My son God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering. So they went both of them together. And they came to the place which God had told them of, and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. And the angel of the Lord called unto him, out of heaven, and said, Abraham! And he said, Here am I. And the angel said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto him. For now I know that thou fearst God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me. When I was answering the questions last night at this Q&A, this guy asked me this question. He said that he had parents who were desperate, antisocial, alcoholic, addicted, friendless, and that they didn’t want him to leave their home. He was the only relationship they had that was of… He was the only relationship they had, and he asked what he should do. And I told him that he should leave. And the reason for that is that you have a moral obligation as a parent to encourage your child to go out into the world, right? And to be whoever they can be, to be the best they can possibly be. And in doing that, you’re encouraging them to pursue the good. You’re sacrificing them to the good. You’re not keeping them for yourself selfishly. You’re telling them that they can go out and live their life and live it properly. And that’s the parallel to the idea of the sacrifice of Isaac, as far as I can tell. You don’t want for your son what it is that you want for him. You want for your son what would be best for him and for the world. And you let go in precise proportion to your desire to have that happen. You know, the psychoanalyst, the great psychoanalyst, I think this is actually Freud’s dictum, but I’m not certain of that. He said the good man is the good man. I’m not certain of that. He said the good mother fails, which is a brilliant observation, because when you have an infant, you do everything for the infant, because the infant can do nothing for him or herself. But as the infant matures and is increasingly capable of doing things for him or herself, then you pull back, right? You pull back, and every time the child develops the ability to do something, you allow them or encourage them to do it. And you don’t interfere. So if your child is struggling getting dressed, well, obviously there’s some times that you help them, but mostly you let them learn so that they can know how to do it in the future. That’s better for you, and it’s certainly better for them. There’s a rule if you’re working with the elderly in an old age home, and the rule is something like don’t do anything for any of the guests, let’s say, that they can do for themselves, because you compromise their independence. And so as a mother, you pull back, and you pull back, and you let your child hit him or herself against the world, and you fail to protect them. But by failing to protect them, you encourage and ennoble them to the point where you’re no longer necessary. Now, they may still want to see you, and it would be wonderful if that was the case, but the point is that you’re supposed to remove yourself from the equation by encouraging your child to be the best possible person that person can be. And you sacrifice your desires, all of your desires to that, your personal desires, even your desires for your child in relationship to you, because you want them to move forward into the world as a light, right, as a light on a hill. That’s what you want if you have any sense. And so you don’t get to keep your children at home because you need them. Now, I’m talking generally, obviously, and there are circumstances under which families make their own idiosyncratic decisions, and I’m not trying to damn everyone with a casual gesture, you know, but the point is still strong that the good father is precisely someone who is willing to sacrifice his child to the ultimate good. That’s dramatized in this story, you know, and it’s brutal, but the world is a brutal place and much wisdom comes out of catastrophe, and this is an indication of how much catastrophe our ancestors had to plow through, had to work through in order to generate the substructure for the conceptions of freedom even that we have today for freedom and the good, and that’s how the story appears to me. Now, I think there’s more to it. I think if there has to be more to it, it lays the groundwork, at least in the Christian context, for the eventual emergence of Christ, as I alluded to in my reading. That story obviously has to be unpacked and unpacked and unpacked, just like it has been for the last 2,000 years. It’s also an indication here of, well, I would say the transmutation of sacrifice into an increasingly psychological form, which is a development that we’ve tracked all the way through the Old Testament up to this particular point. First acted out, then represented in ritual, those would be the rituals of sacrifice, then laid out in story, then turned into a psychological phenomena, so that now we’re capable of making sacrifices in abstraction, right? To conceptualize a future that we want, to let go of the things that are stopping us from moving forward, and to free ourselves from the chains of our original preconceptions. And that’s laid out in these old stories as the optimal pathway of being. And there’s a philosopher of science named Karl Popper, very sensible and down-to-earth person, who was talking about thinking and its nature, and he was thought about thinking in a Darwinian fashion. He said, the purpose of thinking is to let your thoughts die instead of you. It’s a brilliant notion, and so the idea is something like, you can conjure up a representation of yourself, you can conjure up a variety of potential representations of yourself in the future, you can lay out how those future representations of yourself are likely to prevail or fail, you can cull the potential yous in the future that will fail, and then you can embody the ones that will succeed. You do that well simultaneously, conjuring up a representation of your current state, and determining for yourself, because of your undue suffering, which elements of your pathetic being need to be given up so that you can move forward into that future. And the goal, what is it that you’re aiming at with that work and that sacrifice? That’s the ultimate question. It’s the question I was trying to address in that writing. What is it that you’re trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? We conjured up this remarkable idea. The future exists. We can see it even though it’s only potential. We can adjust our behavior in the present in order to maximize our probability of success in the future. How best to do that? Well, the idea is something like, don’t hesitate to offer the ultimate sacrifice. If you want the future to turn out ultimately well. Now, obviously, that idea is clothed in metaphysical speculation and religious imagery. But it still remains an intensely practical issue, right? What is it that you could contract for, let’s say, if you were willing to give up everything about you that’s weak and unworthy? There’s a continual hints of that in the Old Testament, right? Because what happens with Noah, of course, is that he establishes the proper covenant with God, the proper contract with being, let’s say, and thrives as a consequence. And then Abraham does the same thing. There’s a strong intimation that that’s how the world is set right. That idea develops and magnifies as the stories progress into something like the concept of heaven on earth. The notion being that the proper sacrificial attitude produces a psychological state and then a social state that’s a manifestation of that attitude that decreases the probability that the world will careen into hell and increases the probability that people will live high quality, meaningful, private lives in a society that’s balanced and capable of supporting that. And none of that seems to me to be questionable, really. I also don’t think it’s anything that people don’t actually know. You know, people have told me many times that when they listen to me talk, they’re hearing things that they already knew but didn’t know how to say. It’s something like that. And this is one of those things that I think is exactly like that. I mean, I think it’s at the very core of our moral knowledge, which is our behavioral knowledge and our perceptual knowledge. I mean, let’s get this straight. Moral knowledge is no trivial matter. It’s knowledge about how it is that you orient yourself in the world. There’s no more profoundly necessary form of knowledge. Well, it’s predicated on something that’s exactly like this. We know that we have to make sacrifices. We know that we have to aim at what’s good. So then why isn’t that we don’t aim at what’s best and make the sacrifices that are necessary in order to bring that into play? I think it seems to me that in some sense that’s self-evident. The question is why we don’t do it. But there’s answers to that too already in the material that we’ve covered. Life is hard and it hurts people, it’s rife with limitation, and some of it’s arbitrary, and it’s no wonder, and some of it’s unjust, and some of it’s worse, some of it’s malevolent, which is even worse, and something I haven’t talked about at all in this lecture. It’s not surprising that that combination of vicissitude can turn people against being. But I think even when that happens, and even when people have the kind of history that if they revealed to you, you would say, well it’s no wonder you turned out that way. The people who turn out that way still know that it’s wrong. They still know that however deep their own suffering, however arbitrary their own suffering, however much that’s caused by the malevolence of others, as well as the tragedy of existence, that that does not in any way justify their turning away from the good. And I believe everyone knows that. I believe that they know it implicitly, even if they don’t allow themselves to know it explicitly. And I believe that if they violate that idea, then they violate themselves, and that they end up in Cain’s position, which is the position of the man who’s been given a punishment that is too great to bear. And Angel said, God, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto him, for now I know that thou fearst God. Seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him, a ram caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering, in the stead of his son. And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah-Jirah, as it is said to this day, in the mount of the Lord it shall be seen. And the angel of the Lord called unto Abraham out of heaven the second time, and said, By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, that in blessing I will bless thee. And in multiplying, I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore. And thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies. And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed. Because thou hast obeyed my voice. So Abraham returned unto his young men, and they rose up and went together to Beersheba. And Abraham dwelt at Beersheba. And it came to pass after these things, that it was told Abraham, saying, Behold, Milka, she hath also borne children unto thy son. She hath also borne children unto thy brother Nahor. And Sarah was a hundred and seven and twenty years old. Those were the years of the life of Sarah. And Sarah died in Kershatharba, the same as Hebron in the land of Canaan. And Abraham came to mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her. Well, I don’t exactly know what to do now. Because that… I’ll review what we’ve covered. And then I’ll bring this to a close. We can have some more questions than would be usual tonight. So, what have we established by this point? The stories that have been revealed so far are something like… They contain the idea that there’s something divine that’s analogous to the human capacity for communication and attention. That’s at the… That operates at the genesis of being itself. That’s the initial account in the Old Testament. It’s an account that places the role of spirit centrally in the nature of being. I’m not exactly sure what to make of that. Because in some ways I’m as materialistically oriented as modern people typically are. But the stories make sense to me in many ways. The idea that there’s something world creating about human consciousness. And that that’s akin in some sense to the divine force that called order out of chaos at the beginning of time. Seems to me to be a very powerful metaphysical idea. And it also seems to me to be an idea that is immovably at the foundation of Western culture. Because our entire legal system, our society, our mutual expectations, all of that are conditioned to the final degree by our presupposition that each of us has an intrinsic value that transcends the local conditions of our being. And it’s with that presupposition that we’ve been able to establish the society that functions. A society that functions and functions well. And it has its current characterization. And that’s a non… it’s an unlikely occurrence and it’s a non-trivial reality. And I don’t see any way out of that. Way out of that conclusion. I don’t see anything that that can easily be replaced with. And so God calls order into being out of chaos at the beginning of time. And attributes to human beings the same essential capacity. And we turn to Adam and Eve in the garden. And they’re unconscious by all appearances. Allied tightly with God, but unconscious. They don’t seem aware of the future. They don’t seem aware of themselves. They don’t seem aware of their own vulnerability. They make the fatal error of having their eyes open. They discover their own vulnerability. They also discover their capacity for evil. We reviewed that to some degree. What’s the association, because it’s the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the fruit of which they eat? What’s the association between the discovery of vulnerability and the emergence of moral knowledge? It’s something like, as far as I can tell, that you actually don’t know how to be evil or to be good. Until you’re actually aware consciously of your own vulnerability. Because the essence of evil is the exploitation of vulnerability. Perhaps for the sake of that exploitation. And I can’t understand how to hurt someone until I know exactly how I can be hurt myself. And I can’t understand how I can be hurt myself until I become cognizant of my mortal limitations. Until I understand what brings me pain. Until I understand the suffering that goes along with my mortal limitations. My inevitable death and the suffering that goes along with that. And with the accrual of the knowledge of mortality and good and evil, Adam and Eve are cast out of paradise and history begins. And that seems right to me. Because I don’t think that history did begin before human beings became self-conscious. So there’s something about that that’s right. Because history doesn’t really begin until people become aware of the future. History doesn’t really begin until people work and start to build. We would still be ensconced in essentially an animal existence. Until we’re aware of the future and start to buttress ourselves against it. Start to wear clothing, start to build buildings, start to make cities. All in consequence of having become aware of the fact that we’re fragile and that the future is a dangerous place. So that seems to me to be existentially correct. And then we have the story of Cain and Abel. Brilliantly placed immediately afterwards. And so those are the first two people in history, essentially. And they make sacrifices. So that goes along with the idea of the discovery of work, the necessity of work and the discovery of the future. And then exactly what you’d expect would happen. One segment of mankind, let’s say, makes the sacrifices properly and prevails. And the other segment makes the sacrifices improperly and fails. And that’s perfectly reasonable given what you see around you because that’s what seems to happen all the time. And then more interestingly, I would say that the sacrificial failure produces embitterment, right? And that embitterment produces a hatred for being and a desire for revenge. That seems perfectly appropriate. When I look at people who are bitter and who want revenge, it’s generally because their sacrificial efforts have failed. Now I’m loathe to say that that’s a matter of their own doing, although sometimes it clearly is. The embittered and vengeful complain to God and blame him for the structure of existence. You know, I read about the Columbine Massacre and the kids who undertook it. That’ll make your hair stand on end if you want to read something that will really disturb you. Reading Eric Harris’s writings will really disturb you. No matter how much you know about human beings, reading Eric Harris’s writings will disturb you. And Harris is a cane, you know. He says it straightforwardly. He hates human beings. He hates being itself. He would destroy everything if it was within his power to do that. And of course, him and his colleague were motivated to produce far more carnage than they managed that day. What was successful was only a fraction of what they had planned. And Harris said very straightforwardly that he had set himself up as the judge of being and that it lacked all utility in his eyes. Human beings certainly should all be removed from the face of existence because of their pathology and the fundamental horrors of being itself. So there’s nothing in the Cain and Abel story that isn’t real. It’s real and Cain complains to God, as people will when their dreams are dashed. And that goes for people who don’t believe in God, too. It doesn’t really matter, you know. It’s harder, I suppose, if you’re atheistic, to figure out who to blame. But that doesn’t mean that the sentiment… Well, it doesn’t mean that the sentiment is any different. Right? The same drama is being enacted. You shake your fist at the structure of being rather than at God himself. But it doesn’t make any difference, except in the details. So God responds to Cain and tells him that he’s got no right to judge being before he gets his sacrificial house in order. And even worse, he says that Cain is the architect of his own downfall and the invited catastrophe into his own house willingly and entered into a creative union with it and therefore brought about his own demise. And it’s that additional self-knowledge you can imagine, too. Imagine that you’re facing your life, you’re facing the failures of your life, and let’s say that you’ve had a failed life, and you’re bitter about that, and then you meditate upon it and you think, well, why has this come about? And then you think, well, perhaps I did something wrong. You know, when Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote the Gulag Archipelago, which is the book that detailed the catastrophes of the Soviet Union and helped bring it down, there’s one part of that book that just struck me so viciously when I read it. He was in the Gulag and he was there for a very long time, and he said that he observed a variety of people in the camps who he really admired. They were rare. They were usually religious believers in his experience who were not participating in the pathology of the camps at all, period, no matter what. He said he learned a lot from watching those people. He had a hard time believing that they even existed, that they could even exist. But he said that one of the things that he was brought to, as a consequence of watching those people live their contract with goodness out, even under the most horrifying of conditions, was that it was possible that he himself was responsible for his position in the camp. Now, it’s a very dangerous line of argumentation, you know, because who wants to be the one who blames the victim for the catastrophe? You know, you have to be very careful when you walk down that road. But Solzhenitsyn was speaking about himself. And he said, well, he was a communist, you know, and he arrogantly and forthrightly moved the movement out into the world and had not fully gone over his life with a fine-tooth comb to find out what mistakes he had made that brought him so low. But his contention eventually was that part of the reason that he ended up where he ended up was because he and many others had completely forfeited their relationship with the truth and allowed their society to degenerate into deceit and tyrannical catastrophe without mounting sufficient opposition. And so he decided when he was in the camps to straighten himself out bit by bit. And that culminated in the production of the Gulag Archipelago. And that book really demolished once and for all any moral credibility that the communist totalitarian systems had left. And so one man in the depths of catastrophe who determined through good example, at least in part, to stop lying, produced a book eventually that demolished the foundation of the very system that had imprisoned him. And that is really worth thinking about. That’s one example of the absolute grandeur of the human soul and the capacity for transformation that it has when let loose properly on the world. So let’s say you’re conceptualizing your own failure, you know. And you meditated on it and you come to the conclusion that God forced Cain to. Hey, not only have things not been going very well for you, but it’s actually your fault. And not only that, you brought it on yourself. And not only that, you knew it all the time. Well, then you might think you’ll wake up and fly right, right? You’ll get your wings in order and fly right. But there’s no reason to assume that at all. And that’s not what happens to Cain. That just makes him more bitter, right? And you can understand that if you think about it just for a second. It’s like bad enough when something horrible happens to you. But then to have to swallow the additional pill, right? To have to take in the information that you could have done something different. It was avoidable. And you knew it at the time. And you decided to do it anyways. And I think people are in that situation a lot more often than anyone is willing to admit. You know, you have that little voice in the back of your head that says, Don’t do it. And you override it. And you know it’s arrogance that makes you override it. It’s always arrogance, you know. It always warns you. It’s always arrogance. Yeah, I can get away with it. It’s like, no, you can’t. I don’t think you ever get away with anything. So and maybe your experience has taught you different. But my suspicions are it hasn’t. And if you think it has, well, the other shoe hasn’t yet dropped. So Cain doesn’t take the opportunity to let God’s wisdom reorient his character. And that could have been the outcome. He could have got down on his knees, so to speak, and said, Oh my God, I’ve been wrong all along. I’ve been living improperly. I’ve been making the wrong sacrifices. Abel deserves everything he has. I got exactly what was coming to me. You know, could I possibly now straighten myself out and live in repentance and improve my position? But that’s not what he did at all. He said, all right, fair enough. I get it. It’s like, I’m going to go after the thing I most admire. And I’m going to destroy it. And I’m going to do that despite its cost to me. And I’m going to do that just to spite the creator of being. That’s exactly what Harris did at Columbine. It’s exactly what he says, in fact, in his uncanny writings. It’s why the mass murders always shoot themselves afterwards, not before. Because you might wonder if you’re so upset with the structure of being, why you don’t just commit suicide in your basement? Why do you have to go out and mass murder before you top it off with a gun to your forehead? Well, you don’t make the point, is effectively, if you just commit suicide in your basement, it’s like, well, my life means nothing to me. But neither does anyone else’s. And neither does the structure of being itself. And I’ll take all my revenge as much as I possibly can. And then just to show you how little I care, I’ll cap myself off at the end. And I would say also, people say all the time, I don’t understand how that could happen. It’s like, I don’t believe that. I think an hour of thought, of real thought, real thought about your darkest feelings about existence itself, illuminates the pathway to that sort of behaviour quite clearly. And I think if you, I mean, I might be wrong. I might be a darker person than most. And it’s certain. Okay, okay. Well, at least I think there are plenty of people out there who are sufficiently dark to know exactly what I mean when I’m saying these things. And I would also say that if it doesn’t leap to your understanding how that pathway might be illuminated, then you need to know a lot more about yourself than you actually know now. Because whatever you might say about someone like Eric Harris, he was a human being too. There’s this thing called the dark side of life. There’s this idea in the New Testament that Christ was he who took the sins of the world onto himself. It’s a very complicated idea, but part of it, part of it, part of it is associated with the idea that he met the devil in the desert as well. To take the sins of mankind onto yourself is to understand that within you dwells exactly the same spirit that that’s part and parcel of your makeup and then to take responsibility for it. And I think that in the aftermath of the terrible 20th century, that’s what we’re left with. We’re left with the necessity to take responsibility for the most terrible aspects of ourselves. And that way, perhaps we can stop those terrible things from happening again. And I think that’s the way that we’re going to be able to do that. And I think that’s the way that we’re going to be able to do that. And that way, perhaps we can stop those terrible things from happening again. That’s all. And that also means, you know, that you don’t look for the, you don’t look for the, what would you call it? The purveyor of malevolence outside yourself. Right? It isn’t someone else, even though sometimes it’s someone else. You know what I mean? It’s like there are identifiable perpetrators. But that’s not precisely the point. The point is something more like that the proper place for the encapsulation of that malevolence, at least the proper place to start, is within the confines of your own existence. And then perhaps within the confines of your family. And that way, you’re not a danger to those that you misapprehend as malevolent and evil. Because you won’t get your aim right to begin with. You’ll identify them improperly. And you’ll take your revenge in a manner that allows you to omit your own responsibility, to act out your unconscious desire for revenge, and to move the world just that much closer to hell. Well, so Cain kills Abel. And then Cain gives rise to his descendants, one of whom is the person who’s the first artificer in weapons of war. And then comes the flood, right? Which seems perfectly miraculously reasonable to me, because what those stories do, it’s so amazing that the story of Cain and Abel segues into the story of the flood. Because it is the case that the catastrophes that beset society can best be conceptualized as the spread of individual pathology into the social world. And the, what would you call, the magnification of that pathology to the point where everything comes apart. And I truly believe that if you familiarize yourself with the last hundred years of history, that that’s the conclusion that you would derive. And the people who are most wise that I’ve read, who commented on that, say the same thing over and over, which is the key to the prevention of the horrors of Auschwitz and the Gulag in the future is the reconstruction of the individual soul at the level of each individual. And that’s a terrible message because it puts the burden on you. But it’s an amazing message because it also means that you could be the source of the process that stops that catastrophe and malevolence from ever emerging again. And you know, it’s hard for me to imagine that you have anything that could possibly be better to do with the time that you have left. Well, then we see Noah, who walks with God and whose generations are in order, right? Which means that he’s entered this contract with the good, let’s say, that has the protective function of the ark. He’s put his family together and he can ride out the worst catastrophe. And he’s actually our ancestor, right? So interesting, it’s that these people who get their act together properly and make a contract with the good are constantly presented as the genuine ancestors of mankind. And that’s a really positive element of the story as well. And it’s one I believe because, well, it hasn’t been easy for us to get here, you know? We are the descendants of the great heroes of the past. And if you took all those heroes and you told their stories and you distilled their stories into a single story, maybe you’d have a story like the story of Noah or the story of Abraham. No, the story of the successful, the story of our forefathers, you know, and not the cancer on the planet that certain people tend to think that we are. And so the goal is to be one of the people like that. And there isn’t anything better that can possibly be done. And the alternative is something like hell. And so Noah rides out the storm. And that’s what everyone wants because you want to ride out the storm. You don’t want to be happy because that’ll just happen if it does or if it doesn’t. But you definitely want to constitute yourself so that you can ride out the storm because the storm is always coming. And so then you’re fortified against the worst. And that’s what you want because, well, the best you can handle, the worst you have to prepare yourself for. And then we see the same thing repeated in the story of Abraham, essentially, right? Abraham makes this contract with the good and constantly renews it. That’s his sacrifice and his worship. He constantly renews it. And he has the adventures that are sufficiently typical of the adventures of a human being who’s alive and engaging in the world, right? He bumps himself up against all the horrors of existence. And yet the story is told in such a manner that reveals that his primary ethical commitment to the overarching good is sufficient to protect him against the vicissitudes of existence. Well, that’s an optimistic story. And as a pessimistic person, I appreciate an optimistic story that’s believable. And there’s great demands placed on Abraham. It’s not as if this just comes to him as a gift. He has to be willing to sacrifice whatever is necessary in order to maintain that contract. And so that seems to me to be realistic. There’s no reason to assume that life isn’t so difficult that it actually demands the best from you, that it’s actually structured in that manner. And that if you are willing to reveal the best in you in response to the vicissitudes of life, that you might actually prevail. And you might actually set things straight around you. And well, what if that was true? That would be a remarkable thing. And I can’t see how it cannot be true. And I can’t see that it’s not stamped on the soul of everyone who’s conscious. I think we all know this perfectly well. Although the stories remind us, you know, Plato, Socrates believed that all knowledge was remembering. You know, he believed that the soul before birth had all knowledge and lost it at birth. And then experience reminded the soul of what it already knew. And there’s something about that that’s really true. Because you’re not just a creature that emerged 30 years ago or 40 years ago. You’re the inheritor of three and a half billion years worth of biological engineering, right? You have your nature stamped deeply inside of you, far more deeply than any of us realize. And when you come across these great stories, these reminders, they’re a reminder of how to be properly. And they echo in your soul because the structure is already there. The external stories are manifestations of the inner, are manifestations of the internal reality. And then there are called to that internal reality to reveal itself. Well, then we come to the end of the Abrahamic stories, at least this section of them, with Sarah’s death. And Abraham is called upon to make the supreme sacrifice. And interestingly enough, because he’s willing to make the supreme sacrifice, he actually doesn’t have to. And that’s an interesting thing as well, because I believe that it’s reasonable from a psychological perspective to point out that the more willing you are, for example, to face death, perhaps, the less likely it is that you’re going to have to face it, at least in an ignoble manner. And so with that, then we’ll bring this 12-part series to a close. You know, I think that applause is for everyone. And I hate to say that because it sounds so new agey. But you know, it really does seem to me that this is a participatory exercise. And that it would not be possible for me to go through these stories without having you here to listen. And I always think when talking to a crowd that it’s a dialogue. It’s a dialogue. You sit and you listen, and you’ve all listened, and thank God for that. And that gives me a chance to think, and it gives me a chance to watch, and it gives me a chance to interact. Because you’re emblematic of humanity at large, I suppose. That’s one way of thinking about it. And for me to be able to craft what I’m saying so that it has an impact on all of you here also means that I can simultaneously craft it so that it has an impact that in principle can reach far beyond this place. And so, you know, I’m hoping that, I’m really hoping that one of the things that can start to happen with this, at least, is that we can put our culture back on its firm foundation. Because it’s something that’s desperately needed. And in order to do that, we have to understand both the evil and the good. We have to understand both the evil and the nobility of the human soul. And that’s a fundamental truth, you know. And I don’t think you can get to the nobility without a sojourn through the evil. I really don’t believe that at all. It’s no place for the naive to go, that’s for sure. But anyways, I would like to thank you, as you thank me, for your close and careful attention and your support during all of this. It’s been really a remarkable experience. It’s certainly sort of developed beyond my dreams. So, thank you. Applause On to the questions. Hi, Dr. Peterson. It appears to me from this series and from the biblical stories themselves that the emphasis of the stories is the utmost importance of the fool for the maintenance and adaptation of being or society. The figure who will lunge head first into uncharted territory, explicitly aware of the danger and risk of loss in confronting what cannot be understood, but unafraid and with zeal. And that the dangers of ideological possession are just as much of a concern as that individuals are unwilling and perhaps unable to form an opinion and take a stance one way or another when confronted with a fork in the road or a decision that must be made. You’ve seen this apathy throughout the universities, as I have too in the public schooling system. My question is, how can one model being the fool to plunge into the unknown and publicly fall on your face in pursuit of learning in a way that clearly demonstrates the urgency and utility of the fool? Well, there isn’t any difference between the fool and someone who’s courageous, right, from an archetypal perspective. And I mean, Abraham is a fool, obviously, when he starts his adventures. I mean, the story lays it out in that manner. He’s far too old to be leaving home, for example. He’s a late bloomer. You know, and then he has a lot of catastrophic adventures along the way. And certainly you could imagine that had you encountered him when he first encountered the famine in the land of strangers when he first went out, that the idea that he had followed his misguided intuitions would have been self-evident. But in the Abrahamic stories, there is this call to get out and do. And that’s it. The thing is that, you know, one of the things I’ve learned to make it concretely is that I’ve done a lot of different things in my life, and every time I did a new thing, I was a fool. I did it badly. I was an imposter, right? And because when you first start to do something, you don’t know what you’re doing. But that’s okay. That’s an acceptance of your vulnerability, right, and your ignorance. That’s humility in some sense, the willingness to be a fool in the land of strangers. That’s it. The willingness to be a fool in the land of strangers. And that’s an act of courage. Because you also reveal your vulnerability to the world by stumbling around. But as long as you’re stumbling forward, then you’re going to move forward. Now, how do you do that more concretely? You aim at an ideal, right? And you aim at an ideal that’s beyond you. Now, maybe you don’t aim to begin with an ideal that’s so beyond you that you’re crushed by its magnificence, you know? Maybe that’s too demotivating to move you. But you could at least conceptualize yourself as the you that you are with fewer of the faults that you know of. And that’s a good start. And I also think that’s associated with the idea of humility. Take stock. Figure out how it is that you’re not who you could be. And then move in that direction. And accept the consequences, you know? You’re going to get slapped a lot. But maybe with each slap, you’ll straighten up a little bit. Especially if you listen, even to the people who are slapping you. Because sometimes they’re the ones who can reveal for you very quickly where it is that you’re weak and insufficient, so that you won’t have to be that way in the future. So, yeah. Thank you. Hello. Hello. Dr. Peterson, I have no questions for you. All I ever wanted to do is just stand in front of you and be able to thank you for everything you’ve done for me. Thank you. My pleasure. Uh-oh. Good morning, citizen Peterson. You got a short one? Yeah, I do. I mean a question. Saved the best question for last. Trust me, this one’s good. But first, I’ll break the ice. Many people have said, no icebreaker? You want me to get right into the real question? I want you to get right into the question. All right. So this question is about hypercritical thinking? Yep. Now everyone knows that critical thinking is a great thing to develop. You have to be able to, I guess, think about your ideas. If information is presented to you, you have to decide if it’s legitimate or if there’s some sort of deceit behind it. But when it’s taken to its extreme, no matter how great or noble somebody is, you can always find a crack in the armor and try to figure out how they’re covering up something that’s not great about them, you know? And you might then discredit everything they do as just a facade. Okay, so let me stop you there for a sec, because I want to address two of the issues that you already brought up. So there’s the issue of hypercritical thinking, partly in relationship to yourself and partly in relationship to others. So I’d like to address the issue with regards to yourself to begin with. So there’s this idea that Carl Jung developed. He extracted it, I don’t know from where, from some ancient writings that he was familiar with. I believe they were Jewish writings. He said that, classically speaking, traditionally speaking, God was viewed to rule being with two hands, the right hand and the left hand, and the right hand was justice, and that was you’re going to get what’s coming to you. But the left hand was mercy. And the idea essentially was that the cosmos could not exist without the proper combination of justice and mercy. You should get what’s coming to you. But people are fallible and they make mistakes. So it’s reasonable to apply that to yourself. You know, there’s an idea that’s been developed by psychologists over the last few decades that people are basically narcissistic and that they generally feel that they’re better at most things than other people. I don’t buy that. I don’t think the experimental evidence for that is very strong, and I certainly haven’t seen that, for example, in my clinical practice, where I’ve seen that people are generally far harder on themselves than they are on other people. One example of that, I’ve written about this in my new book too, is that if you have a pet that’s sick and you take it to the vet and you get medication, you’re very likely to give the pet the entire course of medication, to go to the pharmacy to get the prescription filled, to give the pet the medication to follow it through. But if you are the person who has the problem, yeah, you all laugh because you know the story. It’s like, at 30 you won’t even go fill the prescription, and of the remaining two thirds of you, half won’t take it to completion. And you think, well, why are people like that? And I think it’s because they know themselves, they have contempt for themselves because of their flaws, and then they come to despise themselves. And I think that’s a big mistake. That’s too much justice and not enough mercy. You know, Jung wrote about the biblical injunction that you should treat your neighbour as if he were yourself, essentially. But he talked about that as an equation, which was quite interesting, because it’s often read as something like, you should be nice to people, which is not what it means at all, because first, nice is a very low-end virtue, but it isn’t what it means. What it means is that you should treat your neighbour as if he or she is someone that you wish to encourage and develop, but that you should also have exactly the same attitude towards yourself, which is sort of in some sense, regardless of what your opinion is of yourself, critical, let’s say, hypercritical even, which is often the case with people who are anxious, or perhaps who are hyper-conscientious. You have to put forward to yourself the same sympathy, we could say, that you would extend to someone else that you cared for. That’s the thing, is that you have to come to treat yourself as if you’re someone that you care for. And I mean that technically. You know, you detach yourself from yourself, and you think, well, if I was going to construct a mode of being that was optimal for this person that I happen to be, what would that look like? And that’s sort of independent of whether or not you think you deserve it. It’s like, maybe you deserve it, maybe you don’t. Innocent until proven guilty, that’s a pretty good policy. But you should come to lay out a mode of being for yourself that gives you some credit. You know, and that will also help you in your dealings with other people, but it’s often very difficult for people to do that to themselves. Okay, so that’s the first part of that. Perfect. So it starts out with this hyper-critical thinking, and you talk a lot about Nietzsche’s assertion about the death of God, but I see it sort of more like a willful destruction of the heroic ideal. And I guess several months ago I had occasion to look up a definition or explanation for the zeitgeist of modern victimhood outrage culture, and I sought in this particular case, and I found. And this paragraph, okay, this has what you call the rhythmic cadence that just made my hair stand up on its ends. And if you could look at it and read this, this is better than the last one. Ha ha ha! The image of man that dominates in modern literature in visual arts, cinema, and theater is primarily a gloomy image. The great and the noble are suspect from the outset. They must be torn from their pedestal so that one can see through them. Morality counts as hypocrisy, and joy as self-deception. Anyone who simply puts trust in the beautiful and the good is either inexcusably ingenuous or acting with evil intent. The truly moral attitude is suspicion, and its greatest success is in exposing. Criticism of society is obligatory. It is impossible to find words lurid and brutal enough to describe the dangers that threaten us. This delight in the negative is not, however, unlimited. There exists at the same time an obligation to be optimistic, and the failure to observe this obligation does not go unpunished. For example, anyone who expresses the view that not everything in the intellectual development of the modern period has been correct, that it is necessary in some essential areas to reflect on the shared wisdom of the great cultures, has chosen to make the wrong kind of criticism. He finds himself suddenly confronted with a resolute apologia for the fundamental decisions of the modern age. No matter how much delight one may take in negation, he is not permitted to call into question the view that the fundamental trajectory of historical development is progress, and that the good lies in the future and nowhere else. You know, I thought a lot about nihilism, let’s say, and its justification. And I think that a very powerful justification for nihilism can be found in the mere observation that life is rife with tragedy and malevolence, of which there is no doubt. But then I got suspicious of that rationale for nihilism over the years, because a counter position to it emerged, and this is something Nietzsche, of course, concentrated on as well, that had more to do with resentment. It’s like, you can imagine negation of the heroic ideal from despair, from the despair, say, produced by tragedy and by exposure to malevolence. But it’s also, it’s completely and delightfully irresponsible to negate the heroic ideal, because it means that you don’t have any responsibility. And it seems to me that if you’re nihilistic and prone to criticize the heroic foundation of, let’s say, Western culture, that one of the first questions that you could ask yourself is, what makes you so sure that you’re appropriately cynical, suspicious, and critical, and not just running away as fast as you possibly can from every bit of responsibility that you could possibly adopt? And I think that that’s a perfectly reasonable perspective, and I think that that is reflected to some degree in what the person who wrote this paragraph was attempting to. Can you guess who it was who wrote that paragraph? No, I can’t. Really? No. I left you a hint at the… Who was it? Cardinal Ratzinger. Come on. Ah. There it is. All right. I’m going to take another question. Well done. Hello. Hello. How are you doing? Doing good, Dr. Peterson. It’s been a pleasure. 12 weeks, 12 moments, let’s say. Okay. So two weeks ago, we talked about your mischievous suggestion, I might say, to cut the university’s funding by 25% and how that might have influenced that sort of language in Andrew Scheer’s platform, right? Yeah. And then you discussed how you’re not exactly sure what your role is in all of this, and that you don’t want to be in a war, and you don’t want to be using war-like language. And I think what you want to be doing is you’re trying to restore order but not have conflict. And so after the lecture two weeks ago, I asked you, like, maybe I should do some sales work for your postmodern Lexicon website. But I think I’ve found a better niche for someone of my temperament to help this cause. So I go to Dalhousie University, and because so many students are dropping out, especially men and especially ethnic minorities, they’ve created this team called the Student Success Team or something, Student Success Advisors. And you’ve been incredibly successful crowdfunding for your research and on your Patreon. And I think, like, how much does it cost for a single person to do the self-authoring program? Well, it’s two for one, so it’s both $15. Okay, so nothing then, basically. But I was thinking that somehow we could incorporate the self-authoring program into this new advisor committee at Dalhousie that students can figure… Knock yourself out, man. Do it. That’s… Like, the data for the future authoring program is quite clear. If students even do it for an hour before they go to university, they have about a 30% less chance of dropping out in the first semester. So, you know, and it would really be nice to see some student organizations that were seriously devoted to facilitating student success. You might think that’s what student organizations should do, in fact. Well, it seems rather self-evident when you think about it. But, you know, so I would say, like, if you’re oriented in that direction, get at her. So it’s a fine plan, and I like the emphasis of it because you’re directing yourself towards the facilitation of individual accomplishment. And you’re at least going to do very little harm that way. And that’s a really good start, man, you know. That’s that… Because that’s what you should think about when you’re setting out to make things better. The first thing you should think is, I’m not so sure I know what I’m doing. So why don’t I first attempt to do the least amount of harm possible? And by concentrating on helping someone develop their own plan and implement that into the future, and encouraging them with regards to whatever success they would like defined their way, there’s a pretty low probability that you’re going to act the tyrant and play a detrimental role. So good luck. Maybe we can communicate about it in the future. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, I’m going to send you an email. Thank you very much. Hi, Dr. Peterson. This is the first of these lectures that I’ve been here to listen to, but I’ve listened to all of them on YouTube so far. I’m going to get you to move a bit. Oh, sorry. Am I not close enough? Not quite. That’s good. Okay. Yeah. And I’ve been trying to think up this question since basically the first lecture, because I’m a seminary student at an evangelical seminary. And a lot of what you’ve been saying has really been resonating, and it’s really been fascinating to listen to. And, you know, there’s been many people who’ve been asking you questions, like, what do you believe about the resurrection? Do you believe in God? Are you a Christian? And all these sorts of things. And, you know, I’ve been listening very closely to all your answers and have groups of friends on Facebook who are following very closely, saying, oh, you hear what Peterson said this time. Maybe he’s one of us finally, or something like that. But at the same time, other ways that you explain some of the stories sound very close to what we call theological liberalism. You know, in the 19th century, the idea that using historical critical methods of reading and interpreting the Bible and understanding Jesus more as a moral figure than as a literal historical figure whose atonement provides satisfaction for man. So I tried to figure out what the question was because I could interpret what some of your answers were. So I’m going to put it in more of a general way. Okay. Where exactly do you see yourself differing from traditional orthodox evangelical Christianity? And why would you differ there given how much you seem to understand the importance of the biblical stories in the Western history? Okay. Okay. Well, that’s a good question. Well, obviously, I have to answer in a general way. I mean, I think that one of the things that makes me different is that I take the idea that things are 14 billion years old seriously. You know, and the idea of evolution seriously, I mean, as does the Catholic Church, by the way. And so, but I don’t see that as an impediment to the pursuit that I’m undertaking. Now, I don’t know how to bridge that gap precisely, but I’m not that worried about it. I mean, you can’t bridge every gap. It’s just not possible. It would require infinite knowledge. Okay. And how so? That’s one major because I’m coming at this from a scientific. I really am coming at this from a scientific perspective. You know, like I try to make sure that everything that I talk about is commensurate with current scientific knowledge. Now, current scientific knowledge, no doubt, is airing in all sorts of ways. Like, I think our notion about exactly how evolution progresses is flawed in many, many ways. And the recent discoveries in the field of epigenetics, which show that you can actually transmit acquired characteristics, you know, has really put a whole real serious stick in the spokes of the evolutionary bicycle, let’s say. But then I also think the question is mis-asked in some sense, because I gave this lecture series a specific title for a specific reason. And the lecture series is The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories. Now, I’m not claiming that my psychological analysis exhausts the significance of the biblical stories. You know, they have multitudes, let’s say, layers of meaning. And some of those layers are metaphysical, and some of them are more specifically religious. And I’m trying the best I can not to wander into those domains, like I do, because it’s impossible to keep yourself bounded, you know, when you’re a discursive speaker, let’s say. But I’m trying to, what I’m trying to do is the sort of thing that Jung did, essentially, is to take a look at these old stories and say, Okay, well, let’s look at this from the perspective of the human psyche, and let’s see what the significance can be. And not to say that’s all the significance there is. Who knows what significance there is? One thing I have learned about the biblical stories is that no matter how deep you go into them, you are not at the bottom. And so that’s been very, very interesting to me. And God only knows about the metaphysical substructure of reality, because human beings certainly don’t. So I don’t want to claim that what I’m doing is a religious interpretation, although, you know, it drifts into that direction. I want to stay within the purview of my expertise, such as it is, and to say, well, if you look at this psychologically, here’s what you can extract as pragmatically, existentially, and clinically meaningful. And the rest of it, well, the rest of it has to be left in abeyance, because I don’t have the capacity to investigate claims that go beyond that. That does not mean that I’m saying that what I’m doing is reducing these stories to their psychological significance, even though the psyche is a grand thing. I’m not trying to do that. It’s not reductionistic. It’s a take on it. So people can make up their own minds metaphysically, and they also have to make up their own minds about how they’re going to act, which is really the crucial issue as far as I’m concerned. So you bet. Hi. Hi. I had a question with respect to data that you presented, I believe, two weeks ago. Sorry, a question with respect to? To data that you presented, I believe, two lectures ago regarding the use of psilocybin in treatment of mental illness. Yes. Yes. So subsequently, I looked up some of the recently published literature, and one of the studies I found extremely striking was one that was published less than a year ago in The Lancet, which is a very high-impact, well-respected journal. And what they looked at was efficacy in patients with severe treatment-resistant depression. And what they found is that in 11 out of 12 of the patients, they showed significant remittance following just a single dose of the substance, up to three months following the single dose without additional dosing. So this not only substantiates, I suppose, my own experiences, but when you read some of the commentary or review articles surrounding these types of topics, not with respects to depression, but things like post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, they’ll unequivocally state that these types of results are completely unprecedented in the realm of psychiatric medicine. Yes. So I was wondering if you could comment as to whether or not that type of rhetoric is overblown, and if not, do you see these being more mainstream in your future, or suspect that they’ll fall victim to something on the lines of regulatory capture? No, I don’t. Well, I don’t think they’re overstatements, and I know some of the people who are engaged in this research, and they’re actually very conservative people. Like, they’re brave people, but I mean conservative in the best sense, you know. They’re not Timothy Leary, and I’m not trying to put down Timothy Leary. I’m really not. But, you know, some caution would have been a good thing. Although, you know, when something like, when the psychedelics burst onto the scene, no one had any idea what to do with them, right? And we still really don’t. But the new research is being conducted very, very carefully. But it is really remarkable that those epithets are used, or those terms are used to describe the results, because those are, the Lancet, for example, is one of the top-end medical journals. You don’t see grand claims in the Lancet, right? Scientists don’t write that way. They’re trained from the very beginning to downplay their results. But they’re quite struck by the fact that these effects occur with single doses. Now, I think that what we don’t know about psychedelics could fill many, many, many thick volumes. And they’re absolutely mysterious in their function, purpose, effect, consequence, all of that. And I’ve always thought that it was really appalling that we stopped investigating them back in the 1960s. Although it’s not been that long, you know, 20 years, historically speaking. It’s really nothing. But, and no, I don’t think that there’ll be, that the research will be stopped by regulatory capture, because the people who are doing it now, I think, learned their lesson from what happened in the 60s, and are doing it pretty damn carefully. So we can hope that more results like this are produced, and that they’re replicable, and that perhaps they’ll prove helpful with any luck. Yep. Hi, Dr. Peterson. I found this lecture series really, really enthralling. And it, it- Why? No, it’s such a strange thing to say. If I try to explain that, I want time for the question. Yeah, well, that’s okay. I’ll get, let you get to the question. But I’m curious, like, why, why do you think that is? Because it’s a strange thing to have happen. Like, it’s a lecture on the Bible, for God’s sake, you know. It’s like, it’s not something you’d go to a venture capitalist with a business plan for. So, like, what, what is it about it, do you think, that’s been, that’s had that effect on you? Ha, I asked you a question instead. Look, I don’t want to, I don’t want to put you on the spot. If you want to just move to your question, that’s fine. But if you have an answer to that, I would be very interested in knowing what it is. Well, I, hmm. It’s, it’s a thrill to encounter a kind of means to a metaphysical system that’s so persuasive and potent. And I hadn’t really experienced that a whole lot in my life. That’s what universities are supposed to do for people, eh? That’s what universities are supposed to do for people. They’re not supposed to take people who are barely hanging together and break them and make them weak. They’re supposed to equate them with the heroic, the heroic substructure of the human psyche. So that they can move out into the world and thrive. And it’s an absolute crime that that isn’t what’s happening. So, hooray for that, man. It occurred to me that the kind of tradition and genre that you are working in here is that of the sermon. Now, are you comfortable with that categorization and why? So far. We’ll see where you go with it. Well, that’s the essence of my question. Are these sermons and might one then call you a preacher? I don’t know. Sorry, what was the last part? Might one call you a preacher? Well, you could certainly call me one. I think that there’s a certain overlap. But this has been characteristic of my approach to education right from the beginning. Because I have some rules about what I lecture. What about the topics that I lecture about and the way that I deal with it. So, the first rule is I don’t want to tell you anything that isn’t useful. I’m a pragmatist. Like I’m an American pragmatist. That’s part of my philosophical grounding. And I believe that knowledge is tool-like. And that the proper thing to do is to equip people with the tools to move effectively in the world. And so, I want to make sure that if I offer a story or a fact for that matter, I also say, Well, here’s why you need to know this fact. It will actually improve your life. Or it will stop you from wandering into a pit, which is approximately the same thing. And then, knowing this will also make you a more effective actor in the social world. And that will improve the social world, right? And hopefully that will improve the environmental world, etc., etc. And so, I would say to the degree that those who produce sermons are concerned with producing alterations in behavior, which are moral alterations, say, then I share the same territory with them. But I wouldn’t say that that’s something that should be only relegated to the domain of the sermon, because I believe that it is the job of the universities, for example, especially in the damned humanities, to ennoble people and to enable them to adopt the mantle of proper citizenship. And that we’ve forgotten that. We’ve forgotten that. Or we’re avoiding it. Or we’re refusing it. Or something like that. You know, and I think we’re using the death of God as an excuse. So, I think that to the degree that I’m a preacher, I’m making an error. And also to the degree that I’m politicized, I’m making an error. I’m wandering out of my proper territory when that’s the domain that I’m in. But when I’m attempting to assemble multiple layers of facts towards a practical end, which is what I’m trying to do, and the end is the ennoblement of the individual, right? That’s my goal. Then I’m in my proper domain. I’m going to make mistakes. I’m going to wander out of my territory. I try not to do that, but it’s part of being a fool. You’re going to make mistakes. So, yeah. Thanks very much. No problem. Hi, Doc. Thanks for continuing to do all the cool stuff that makes everyone love you. It’s great. Not everyone. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a generalization. There’s lots of people that seem not to love me. Yeah. And I can’t blame them, really. Anyway, yeah, I’m going to lead into a question here. So in your book Maps of Meaning, you got that quote from Dostoevsky about how humankind, mankind, if you give them all the cakes in the world, oh my god. Yeah, oh my god is right, man. That’s one killer quote. That’s from notes from the underground, eh? Everyone should read that because everyone’s underground. And it’s a great little journey through that. Yeah, so it’s basically, yeah, if you have the perfect utopia, I often use it. Basically, if you have the most perfect utopia, humans will find a way to screw it up. Purposefully. Yeah, because we like chaos and the unknown. We’ve talked about this. Yeah, well, that’s the thing is that we’re heroic adventurers, right? We’re not Sybarites laying on a beach, although when you get the opportunity to do that, like, make sure you take it. But that’s not the proper calling of the human soul, right? We’re out there to conquer chaos and the unknown. And it’s in that we find meaning, and that’s better than the utopia. That’s what Dostoevsky, you know, God bless his soul. Dostoevsky had that, he was such a genius. He had everything that was wrong with communism figured out even before it started. Amazing. Really, like, if you read The Possessed or The Devils, which I would highly recommend, although it’s a hard book to get into. It takes about 100 pages to really get moving. But Dostoevsky talks, his main character in that novel is a person who’s, again, a very powerful person, who’s completely possessed by what’s essentially the communist ideology, and he’s very effective at moving it forward. And Dostoevsky lays out brilliantly exactly the catastrophic consequences of that, both personally and socially. And he did this, like, 30 years before the Russian Revolution. It’s just, it’s uncanny. I don’t know where the hell that guy was from. Must have been his epilepsy, you know? So, yeah. I’m glad I got you all excited. I’m just gonna keep going here. Basically, I used to use that, you know, to kind of flate, a lot of it comes from the left wing, this utopia we’re going towards with the universal income, and there’s gonna be AI, and suddenly the whole population’s gonna become insanely creative and with no incentive. But it’s not, the utopia is not there. It’s not like this thing that hasn’t happened yet. We’re in it! We’re in it! This is the best thing ever in, like, all of humanity, the Western civilization, like, oh my god, in a material sense. I mean, ugh! It just, toilet paper, toilet paper just happened. Anyway, so what I’m trying to say is, seriously! So we have this beautiful thing, and people are trying to take it down at all costs, and now we go into the dark phase of my, into my question here, which is, and it actually goes into, Charlotte’s bill had, you know, with the initial purpose of protecting the statue was a good thing. I don’t know about Confederacy, except for the big thing, but honestly it’s a slippery, slippery slope, and the confused souls who, and the bad, just darkened souls, for sure, not good. They screwed it up big time because the purpose behind it is so important, because it’s going to be founding fathers next, anyone who ever contributed anything to Western civilization as we know it, it’s already being done. James Madison High School in the States is getting renamed because some girl, one student felt unsafe, and so yeah, this is a serious issue, and I want to, like, I feel like really up against the wall now, because now they found their Nazis, man, the Nazis are flooding the streets now, so how do we possibly, you know, kind of save our cakes? You had to bring it up, didn’t you? Well, having the right degenerate into identity politics does not seem to be a positive solution, so one of the things I would say is that, like, I understand why the identity politics that has been practiced so assiduously and so devastatingly by the left has been co-opted by the right. I understand that. But then here’s what I would say to the people on the right who are playing that game. If you play the game of your enemies and you win, you win their game. You don’t win. That’s not victory. You just become the most successful exponent of their pathology. How is that a good thing? It’s a bad thing. So what does that leave people as an alternative? Well, I don’t think that the Caucasians, let’s say, should revert to being white. I think that’s a bad idea. It’s a dangerous idea, and it’s coming fast, and I don’t like to see that. I think the whole group identity thing is seriously pathological. I think we’ve made big mistakes in Canada. I understand why, at least to some degree in that respect, and that large mistakes are being made all over the Western world, where we’re making your group identity the most important thing about you. I think that’s reprehensible. I think it’s devastating. I think it’s genocidal in its ultimate expression. I think it will bring down our civilization if we pursue it. We shouldn’t be playing that game. So what’s the alternative? You know, I’ve thought for a long time about a political career, really, forever, since I was like 12, really, for a long time. And I’ve always decided against it because it seemed to me that the proper level of analysis with regards to the solution of the problem that we’re facing isn’t political. And that’s why I think it’s a mistake when what I’m doing gets politicized either by me or others. I think that the way that you deal with this is to put yourself together. I really believe that is that because I think that individual people are far more powerful. They’re certainly far more evil than they’re willing to consider. But that’s also a sign of their unbelievable power. So I think that what you do is you aim high and put yourself together and stay the hell away from the ideologues because they’re hiding. They’re hiding behind a wall. They’re not able to come out and fight on their own behalf. And so the way forward through the ideological mess, and that’s the lesson of Western culture, is to place the individual at the place of paramount importance and to make the group identity emerge only when necessary and secondarily, if ever. And so you can do that. You can do that now. You can do that tomorrow. Like you can put your life together. And again, as I mentioned to the other young man who asked the question is you won’t hurt anyone doing that. Right. Pick up your goddamn responsibility. Sort yourself out. Fix up your family. Right. And then you can be a force for good in the culture. And if enough people do that, the ideological mess will just evaporate. It’ll just disappear. I think that’s the way you show people the right path forward, too, is that you say, well, look, we would like we would like it so much if you could thrive as an individual. Drop your cult-like affiliation. Right. Step out of the shadows, the demonic shadows, your ideological possession and step forward as a fully developed person into the light. Do it by example. That’s your that’s your best bet, man. So that’s what it looks like to me. I’m going to take one more question and then I’m going to there is a young man from Kentucky here, Brian. It’s Brian here. OK, so I’m going to answer one more question and then I’m going to let you take Mike. OK. All right. Good evening, Dr. Peterson. Good evening, everybody. I also want to thank you first for your lectures that I’ve been following on YouTube mainly. And to say that they have been well, life changing wouldn’t be an overstatement. Great. And I’m one of the crazy people increasing your views on YouTube because I flew in from Belgium last night to be here. And it’s like three a.m. for me right now. And English is not my first language. So bear with me. I would have many burning questions to ask you, but I thought it was fair and necessary to pick one. And it would be this one. There are concepts that recur in your lectures. But this one you only mentioned once in your early videos on Bill C-16 about self-esteem. You said you don’t believe in the existence of self-esteem. When you teach children, they’re all special. You think you boost their confidence. But the only result is that some get narcissistic. The reason why I’m interested in that is about standing up for yourself. And it is when I try to, you know, do it. I see that rational arguments, faith in rationality doesn’t get the best results in negotiations. That’s why you learn how to be socialized by playing rough and tumble. It’s not an intellectual conversation that gets you socialized. So I’m also reading that book suggested by Stephen Hicks, explaining postmodernism, because I wasn’t really familiar and I’ve been listening to a lot from you. I’m going to talk to him later this week, so that might be fun. And I’m trying to read with fresh eyes because I’ve been indoctrinated by you, of course, so I’m very critical. And there’s one more point that I have to agree with the postmodernists. And that is the world seems to me, as I observe it, a place where powers are at play. It’s not rationality that leads that. So when I’m in a weak position and I want to fight back, not to get resentful, I find that it’s not a rational argument that will get me there. There’s something else that I don’t do and that I should be doing and I don’t know what it is. So you see the relationship with self-esteem seems to me that people who think of themselves start in a better position in this game. OK, so OK, OK, great. All right. So there’s a lot in that question. So the first thing is, is there’s a problem with the measurement of self-esteem. And that actually matters because self-esteem is a psychological concept, a scientific concept, if you like, and you have to get the measurement right. And you can predict self-esteem almost perfectly by measuring someone’s extroversion and subtracting from that their negative emotionality or neuroticism. So it’s actually just a combination of big five traits. And so people who are extroverted, who feel a lot of positive emotion and who are and who don’t feel a lot of negative emotion score high on scales of self-esteem. OK, so conceptually, it’s a non-starter because you’re not going to move people’s levels of neuroticism, let’s say, by trying to get them to feel good about themselves. OK, now, having said that, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t encourage people right now. There’s this psychologist named Jerome Kagan, who’s quite a great psychologist, developmental psychologist. I think he’s an emeritus at Harvard at the at the at the moment. He studied temperamentally inhibited children. You can. So they’re basically kids who are high in neuroticism, probably low in extroversion. And he found that if those children you can identify them as early as six months, right, very, very inculcated in their temperament. He found that if you encourage them in the world, you could shift them into a more stable personality configuration. And what you basically did was when they were manifesting signs of distress, instead of encouraging them to withdraw and retreat, which is what they might be attempting to do, you encourage them to go out and explore. So, for example, if you have a temperamentally inhibited child and you go to a playground and there’s kids out there like you have an extroverted emotionally stable kid. Three years old. As you put them on the ground, their feet are already moving right like a puppy over water and you let them go and they just run to the to the kids and they’re there. And then you have to drag them away. But if you have a temperamentally inhibited child, the child will sort of stand around your legs and sort of peek out, you know. And then what you do is wait it out. Let them watch. Encourage them to move a little bit forward. Encourage them to take their steps out into the unknown and the strange land. And don’t let them withdraw. Like you can do it, they’re slower to warm up. They’ll warm up. They’ll habituate. And if you continually expose your inhibited child to the things that make them anxious in measured doses, then you can transform their psychophysiological temperament. Now you’re probably not going to shift them way the hell out onto the extroverted emotionally stable land, but you can make a big difference. That’s very different than making them feel good about themselves. Which is such a… You need to curse. You need to curse when you discuss that concept. Right? So it isn’t to improve their self-esteem. It isn’t how you feel about yourself, right? It’s how you act effectively in the world and how you’re trained to do that. So, okay, now, then you were talking about negotiation, right? And you said something like, don’t people who feel good about themselves, aren’t they able to negotiate better? And I know that’s a poor paraphrase, excuse me, but negotiation is actually a practical issue to some degree. Like, the first thing is that you have to figure out what you want. Because you were saying, well, it’s not merely rational. It’s like, yeah, yeah, that’s for sure. You have to bargain from a position of authority, let’s say, not power. Authority is a better word. But you don’t have authority unless you know what you’re talking about and unless you can bring some… Unless you can bring some, let’s say, force. That’s not the right word. You can’t negotiate with anyone unless you can say no. And you can’t say no unless you’ve set yourself up with alternatives. So when you go to your boss and you negotiate for a raise, you need to have this sort of CV that enables you to go find another job. And you have to have your CV prepared. And you have to have looked for another job. And you have to be able to get one. Because then you can go in there and say, I’m not as productive as I could be at my current level of remuneration. It’s not reflective of what I’m able to do. And I want this. And this is what will happen. If you give me this, this will be the good things that will happen. And what do you think of that? And the person is going to know, even by the way that you hold yourself while you’re having the discussion, whether or not you’re someone with options. And you can’t fake that. Well, you can. But it’s not helpful. Like, it just doesn’t work for very many iterations. You have to. It’s not rational. You’re preparing yourself for battle. That’s what you’re doing. And you can’t be weak when you prepare yourself for battle. Because if the person says no, I’m not giving you a raise, which is exactly what they should say, because what are they going to do? Just like sprinkle the money around? You need to be able to say, OK, then there will be consequences that you don’t like. And that’s what it means to say no to someone. No means if you continue to push this, things will happen that you don’t like. Now, in that case, it’ll be all depart and take my talents with me. And if they don’t care, well, then you’re in the wrong business or you don’t have any talents to begin with. So in order to negotiate properly, and this is more difficult for people who are agreeable, for example, because they tend to be more conflict diverse, you have to put yourself in a position where you can push back as hard as you’re going to be pushed on. And that means you have to open up your space of available options. Because otherwise the person says no and that’s it. You’re done. Well, you lose them. It’s as straightforward as that. Now, with regards to the self-esteem part is practice on small things because you build the skills. Forget about the self-esteem. It isn’t about being confident or feeling confident or any of that. It’s about knowing bloody well how to negotiate. Start with small things, you know, so you’ll notice that there are things in your relationships in particular that aren’t the way you want them to be and that you could see how could be improved. It’s like figuring out how they can be improved. Negotiate with your partner. Make the incremental improvement. Keep doing that. You’ll get better and better at it. And then you’ll be able to go out and have a harder negotiation in the world. So it’s a set of skills. There’s an attitude behind it, you know, and it’s easier for some people than others. But fundamentally, it’s a set of skills. No problem. All right, so now we have something interesting and unexpected to close this off with. The floor is yours. Dr. Peterson, I’d like to say thank you for making your videos available online. They’ve had a great effect on me over the last year. I actually found them a few years ago, but sometime around July or August of last year, I got hooked. I would wake up at like 5 a.m. in the morning to watch your Maps of Meaning releases, the new ones, the old ones, et cetera. I found myself inspired by both the academic and technical material as well as what I might term the more fatherly directives or wisdom. I shared this with my family and my friends as well as my girlfriend. She’s here tonight as well. She’s been following the biblical series. But what I’d like to say is thank you for inspiring me to stand up and face something that I’ve been afraid of all my adult life. And thank you for granting me the permission to ask this question here. It’s actually for my girlfriend. Will you please stand up? So some might say, given that we are a couple of primates full of snakes, it’s pretty miraculous that we haven’t killed each other. But I think you’re pretty great. And we’ve been talking about commitment. And I think I’m ready. I know I’m ready to commit to a life with you of sorting ourselves out. I’d like to clean some rooms with you. And even as scary as the shackles of marriage have been made to seem to us, I’m thinking about forever. And simply in my words, I love you dearly. You feel like home. I never want to lose that. Will you marry me? And if you want to come here. So you’re saying you’re going to shackle yourself to me and never run away? Then I shall suffer the rest of my life with you. Thank you.