A collection of transcript excerpts from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Series exploring the psychological significance of the biblical stories in the book of Genesis. You can now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/biblical-series-genesis">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/biblical-series-genesis">watch</a> the lecture series on DailyWire+.

_ Biblical Lectures_CoverArt

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Series exploring the psychological significance of the biblical stories in the book of Genesis. You can now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/biblical-series-genesis">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/biblical-series-genesis">watch</a> the lecture series on DailyWire+.
“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 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 him 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, Abraham: and he said, Here am I. And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.”
When I was answering the questions last night at this Q and A, a guy asked me this question. He said that he had parents who were desperate, antisocial, alcoholic, addicted, friendless, and they didn’t want him to leave their home. He was the only relationship they had, and he asked what he should do. I told him that he should leave. The reason for that is that you have a moral obligation as a parent to encourage your child to go out into the world and to be whoever they can be — to be the best they can possibly be. 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.
The great psychoanalyst — I think this is actually Freud’s dictum, but I’m not certain of that — 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. 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, obviously there’s sometimes 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. 
If you’re working with the elderly in an old age home, there’s a rule that’s something like, don’t do anything for any of the guests; they can do for themselves because you compromise their independence. 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, 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, 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 — as a light on a hill. That’s what you want if you have any sense. 
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. I’m not trying to damn everyone with a casual gesture, 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, and it’s brutal, but the world is a brutal place and much wisdom comes out of catastrophe. This is an indication of how much catastrophe our ancestors had to plow 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. 
Watch this lecture in its entirety <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/12-the-great-sacrifice-abraham-and-isaac">here</a>. 

Now, I think there’s more to it; I think 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 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 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. That’s laid out in these old stories as the optimal pathway of being. 
There’s a philosopher of science named Karl Popper, a very sensible and down-to-earth person, who was talking about thinking and its nature. He 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. 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 call the potential use in the future that will fail, and then you can embody the ones that will succeed. You do that while 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 the 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? Well, you’re trying to improve the future. We believe that the future can be improved. We believe that it can be improved as a consequence of our sacrificial work. So once again, what are the limitations? What are the limits to that? What are the necessary limits to that? I would say we don’t know. I would say as well, that that’s actually something that the entire corpus of Biblical stories is trying desperately to figure out and articulate. 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. What is it that you could contract for if you were willing to give up everything about you that’s weak and unworthy. 
There’s continual hints of that in the Old Testament because what happens with Noah is that he establishes the proper covenant with God, the proper contract with being, 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. None of that seems to me to be questionable. I also don’t think it’s anything that people don’t actually 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. This is one of those things that I think is exactly like that. It’s at the very core of our moral knowledge, which is our behavioral knowledge and our perceptual knowledge. 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. 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 it 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. 
<a href="https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/">Dr. Jordan B. Peterson</a> is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules For Life, and Beyond Order. You can now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/biblical-series-genesis">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/biblical-series-genesis">watch</a> his popular lectures on DailyWire+.
<a href="https://juliettefogra.me/">Juliette Fogra</a> is a fine art painter and graphic designer and was trained as a classical musician. She was the illustrator of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson’s Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

7 The Great Sacrifice_ Abraham and Isaac

PETERSON: The Great Sacrifice: Abraham And Isaac

Bible

Jordan Peterson

Readers Pass

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Series exploring the psychological significance of the biblical stories in the book of Genesis. You can now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/biblical-series-genesis">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/biblical-series-genesis">watch</a> the lecture series on DailyWire+.
“And the men rose up from thence, and looked toward Sodom: and Abraham went with them to bring them on the way. And the Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I’m about to do; Seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him?” I guess God is talking to himself here, or maybe he’s talking to the angels, but I think he’s trying to make a decision. “For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord, to do justice and judgment; that the Lord may bring upon Abraham that which he hath spoken of him. And the Lord said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous, I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which has come unto me; and if not, I will know.”
We don’t know what’s happened in Sodom and Gomorrah, but we know that God’s got wind of it, and that’s not good. We know that sin means to miss the mark, and so we know that whatever has happened in Sodom and Gomorrah means that something about the natural ethical order of things has been seriously violated. There’s a strong intimation in the Old Testament, which I think by the way, is completely correct, that if the proper order of being is violated — and that’s something like the balance between chaos and order — then all hell will break loose.
One of the things I can tell you from reading a very comprehensive set of myths from around the world is that, that’s a conclusion human beings have come to everywhere. Stay on the goddamned path and be careful because if you start to mess around and you deviate — especially if you know that you’re deviating — things are not going to go well for you. That idea is everywhere, and I think it’s right. I think the idea is right because there aren’t that many ways of doing things right, and there’s a lot of ways of doing things wrong. If you do things wrong, the consequences of doing them wrong can be truly catastrophic.
<h4>Watch this lecture in its entirety <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/11-sodom-and-gomorrah">here</a>.</h4>
One of the things I learned from reading Viktor Frankl first — but then Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who I think did a deeper job, and Václav Havel thought the same thing — was that these people were very much trying to understand what happened in places like Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” is a particularly good analysis of what happened in the Soviet Union, and his conclusion is a 2,100 page conclusion — and it’s hammered home with a hammer. It’s a book that everyone should read, assuming that you can read a 2,100 page scream because that’s basically what it is.
First of all, what he does is document just how terrible things were in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959. No matter how terrible you think they were, unless you know the stories, they were a lot more terrible than that. They were terrible personally because everyone lied. They were terrible in families because two out of five people were government informers. They were terrible among friends because no one could tell each other the truth. They were terrible socially because the whole system was corrupt; it ran on slave labor. They were terrible philosophically because the doctrine of man upon which the state was founded was hopeless and nihilistic, and they were murderous, destructive, and genocidal. 
They got it wrong at every single level of analysis simultaneously. And the question is, why? Solzhenitsyn’s answer, and to some degree, Viktor Frankl’s answer as well, and Vaclav Havel, and I would say also Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi, all ended up in the same conceptual sphere. The answer was because individual people lived crooked lives because individual people swallowed lies and spoke them and didn’t stand up for the truth. And the corruption that spread from each individual pulled the entire state mechanism into that corruption, and made everything into hell.
There are other theories — obedience. That’s kind of the Milgram idea that it’s easy to make human beings obedient to people in authority. I’ve explored that idea quite a bit with regards to what happened, for example, in the Nazi concentration camps. Yes, you can set circumstances up so that people are likely to be obedient to orders that are pathological. There’s no doubt about that. And yes, sometimes that’s indicative of the weakness of their character, but that’s not the issue. And the idea that what happened in Nazi Germany was because a population of good people listened to a tiny minority of bad people? That’s really not a good theory. The Nazi ethos was there at every single level of the social organization. Right from the personal, right from the familial, all the way up to the leadership. It was the same thing all the way up and all the way down — and the same thing in the Soviet Union.
So if you miss the mark, which is apparently what the people of Sodom and Gomorrah did, their sin was grievous. Then they risked destruction. I just cannot see how after the 20th century, anybody with any sense could possibly not see that as true. There’s a line in the Old Testament that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. One of the things that frightened me badly was the realization from reading Solzhenitsyn — and a variety of other things that I was reading at the same time, Dostoevsky as well because he makes the same point — a human being is not only responsible for everything they do, but for everything that everyone else does. Now, that’s crazy. 
He was an epileptic and a mystic, and that’s a crazy thing to say, but there’s something about it that’s true because if you were better, the people around you would be less worse than they are. And if you were good enough, you don’t know how much better the people around you would be. There’s this idea, too, that Christ took the sins of the world unto himself. That’s a complicated idea. I wrestled with that one for a very long time, but I think I figured out at least in part what it means. It’s something like the realization of complete humanity. To take the sins of the world unto yourself is to understand the Nazi concentration camp guard because that person is human — and so are you. If you can’t see you in that, then you don’t know who you are. And if you can see you in that, then you’ve started to take the sins of the world unto yourself because you’ve actually started to take responsibility for those terrible things.
I think it’s the motto of the Holocaust Museum in Washington: “We must never forget.” (That’s close.) You can’t remember what you don’t understand. You will forget what you don’t understand. And the question is, what are you supposed to remember about the Holocaust? It was a historical event? That 6 million people died? That’s not what’s to remember. What’s to remember is that’s what people can do, and you’re one of them. If you don’t understand that you could do that, then you don’t know who you are. 
So, God’s making a case here. He’s making a case that people of Sodom and Gomorrah have sinned, and it’s making a large racket that even God has heard about. That’s a very common mythological motif by the way: the sins and noise of humanity can reach such a clamor that even the gods hear and are forced to intervene. That comes all the way from the Mesopotamian creation story. It’s logical. They’re sinning. So what? Well, no, not, “So what?” It means that God’s offended, and that everything is at risk. That’s what it means. That’s something worth taking seriously. 
“And the men turned their faces from thence, and went towards Sodom: but Abraham stood yet before the Lord. And Abraham drew near and said, Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked?” This is a very interesting part of the story. A friend of mine took me to task the other day when I was writing about portraying the Old Testament God as pretty harsh and judgemental and the New Testament God as all loving, which he isn’t because there’s the whole Book of Revelation. I got that partly from reading Northrop Frye, but going through the Old Testament in more detail I realized that is too low resolution of an interpretation. God who’s dispensing a fair bit of harsh justice in the Old Testament is also someone who can be negotiated with — weirdly enough. That’s what happens here. 
Abraham has just been told that whatever is going on in Sodom and Gomorrah is seriously not good and that God’s going to do something about it. He takes it upon himself — this is an act of mercy — to ask God to be a bit more judicious. Okay, you’re going to wipe out the city. Well, bad things are happening there. But there’s probably a few people in the damned city that aren’t completely corrupted by what’s going on there. Of course, that’s an open question. It’s an open question, for example, how many people there were in Nazi Germany who weren’t completely corrupted by what was going on in Nazi Germany. And the same thing could be said about Mao’s China. And the same thing could be said about the Soviet Union. Perhaps there was a person somewhere who didn’t understand at some level what was happening, but the whole issue of willful blindness certainly springs to mind if nothing else. 
Abraham decides to intercede with God on behalf of these people who are going to be destroyed. He says, “Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Peradventure there be fifty righteous people within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein? That be far from thee to do after this manner” — he’s kind of reminding God that he’s a good guy, as far as I can tell — “to slay the righteous with the wicked: and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee: Shall not the judge of the earth do right?” He seems a bit taken aback here to me. 
“If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare the place for their sakes. And Abraham answered and said, Behold now I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, but am but dust and ashes. Peradventure there shall lack five of the fifty righteous: wilt thou destroy all the city for lack of five? And he said, If I find there forty and five, I will not destroy it. And he spake unto him yet again, and said” — he’s kind of sneaking up on God here — “Peradventure, there shall be forty found there. And he said, I will not do it for forty’s sake. And he said unto him, Oh, let the Lord not be angry, and I will speak. Peradventure there shall be thirty found there. And he said, I will not do it if I find thirty there.” And Abraham, who seems really to be pushing his luck by this point, says, “Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord: Peradventure there shall be twenty found there.” And God said, “I will not destroy it for twenty’s sake. And he said, Oh, let the Lord not be angry, and I will speak yet but this once: Peradventure ten shall be found there. And he said, I will not destroy it for ten’s sake. And the Lord went his way as soon as he had left communing with Abraham: and Abraham returned unto his place.”
There’s two ways — three, let’s say — you can read that part of the story. One is that, you can bargain with God, even if you’re annoying about it, so that’s kind of interesting. The second is that, even if there’s a minority of good in a place that isn’t good, it won’t be slated for destruction. That’s kind of a good thing. And the third is, a minority of good in a place can keep it from being destroyed. And that’s a really good thing, too. I believe that as well. I think that good is more powerful than evil. Naivety isn’t, but I think that good is. And I think that in a place that’s corrupt, a minority of people who stand forth against the corruption can prevail. 
<a href="https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/">Dr. Jordan B. Peterson</a> is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules For Life, and Beyond Order. You can now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/biblical-series-genesis">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/biblical-series-genesis">watch</a> his popular lectures on DailyWire+.
<a href="https://juliettefogra.me/">Juliette Fogra</a> is a fine art painter and graphic designer and was trained as a classical musician. She was the illustrator of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson’s Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

6 Sodom and Gomorrah

PETERSON: Sodom And Gomorrah

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Series exploring the psychological significance of the biblical stories in the book of Genesis. You can now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/biblical-series-genesis">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/biblical-series-genesis">watch</a> the lecture series on DailyWire+.
Let’s read the stories. The first one is about Abraham, Sarah, and Lot. “Now these are the generations of Terah. Terah begat Abram.” His name is Abram to begin with, and that actually turns out to be important. It’s not Abraham. “Nahor and Haran; and Haran begat Lot.” So Haran is Abram’s brother. “And Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees. And Abram and Nahor took them wives: the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai; and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah and the father of Iscah. But Sarai was barren; she had no child. And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son’s son, and Sarai her daughter in law, his son Abram’s wife; and they went forth with them from the Ur of Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan;” — that’s exile — “and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there. And the days of Terah were 205 years: and Terah died in Haran.”
There’s a reason that Sarai is introduced as barren, and it’s to set the stage. I think it was Anton Chekhov, who talked about the stage setting for a play, that if there was a rifle hanging on the wall, then it had better be used before, I believe, the second act or it shouldn’t be hanging there at all. So this is stage setting. Part of the reason that the Biblical writers are pointing out that Abram’s wife is barren is because it’s a real catastrophe for Abraham, and for Sarai as well, that she’s barren. It’s showing the trouble that Abram’s in at the beginning of the story. What happens as the story progresses is that Abraham and Sarah are eventually granted a son, but it’s way late in the story and they’re very, very old by the time it happens. Of course, you’re not going to be a father of nations without having a child, and so the writers are attempting to make the case that if you forthrightly pursue that which God directs you to pursue, let’s say, that all things are possible. That’s the idea and the narrative.
You might say that’s naive, and it’s not. You think it when you’re naive, and then you dispense with that idea. When you stop being the sort of person who dispenses with ideas, you come to another place, and that’s the place where you think you have no idea what might be possible for you if you got things together and pursued what you should pursue. You don’t know how much what’s impossible to you right now would become possible under those conditions. It’s an unknown phenomena. I’ve watched people who have put themselves together across time, incrementally and continually, and they become capable of things that are not only jaw-droppingly amazing, but also sometimes metaphysically impossible to understand. We don’t know the limits of human endeavor. We truly don’t. It’s premature to put a cap on what it is that we are, what it is that we’re capable of. You’re already something, and maybe you’re not so bad in your current configuration, but you might wonder if you did nothing for the next 30 years except put yourself together, just exactly what would you be able to do? You might think that’s worth finding out. But of course that’s the adoption of responsibility.
<h4>Watch the lecture in its entirety <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/9-the-call-to-abraham">here</a>.</h4>
I’ve been curious about this battle between meaning and nihilism. I could see for a long while the rationale in nihilism and the power of the nihilistic argument, but it occurred to me across time that the power of the nihilistic argument is more powerful than naive optimism. But it’s not more powerful than the optimism that is not naive because the optimism that is not naive says, it’s self-evident that the world is a place of suffering and that there are things to be done about that. And it’s self-evident that people are flawed and that there’s things to be done about that. Then the non-naive optimist says, the suffering could be reduced and the insufficiency could be overcome if people oriented themselves properly and did what they were capable of doing. I do not believe that’s deniable. I think that human potential is virtually limitless, and there’s nothing perhaps that’s beyond our grasp if we’re careful as individuals and as a society.
So I think that there’s no reason for nihilism, and there’s no reason for hopelessness, and there’s no reason to bow down before evil because we’re capable of so much more. You know that first because you’re not happy with who you are, and you’re ashamed and embarrassed about it — as you should be. You know it because if you look out there, you see people who are capable of doing great things. And you know that we’re not giving it our all. Still, we’re not doing so badly, and so you might wonder, if we devoted 90% of our effort to putting things right instead of 55% of our effort, or maybe even less than that, you might wonder just how well could things be put together. I think you can figure that out by starting with your room, by the way.
“And the Lord said unto Abram,” — and this is the opening of the story — “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee.” This is one of those phrases where every clause is significant. Go somewhere you don’t understand. That’s the first thing: “Get thee out of thy country.”
Back in the 1920s, there were a whole slew of American writers who ended up as expatriates in Paris — Hemingway among them, and Fitzgerald, then a variety of others. It was very inexpensive in Paris at the time. Part of their transformation into great literary figures was the fact that they were out of their country, and now they could see what their country was because you can’t see what your country is until you leave it. So you have to go into the unknown. That’s God’s first command. Go into the unknown. Because you already know what you know, and that’s not enough — unless you think you’re enough. If you’re not enough and you don’t think you’re enough, then you have to go where you haven’t been. That’s the first commandment to Abraham. That’s a good one. That makes perfect sense. Go to where you don’t know. Yes.
“And from thy kindred.” Well, what does that mean? It means grow up. That’s what it means. It means get away from your family enough so that you can establish your independence. That isn’t because there’s something wrong with your family, although perhaps there is, as there is perhaps wrong with you. But it means get away. 
I talk to people very frequently whose families have provided them with too much protection, and they know it themselves. That means they’re deprived of necessity. One of the things that you see in the United States, for example, is that the children of first generation immigrants often do better than their children. The reason for that is that the children of first generation immigrants have necessity driving them. You don’t know how much you need necessity to drive you because maybe you’re not very disciplined. And if a catastrophe doesn’t immediately befall you, if you don’t act forthrightly today, then maybe you’ll never act forthrightly because the gap between your foolishness and the punishment is lengthened by your unearned wealth so you never grow up and learn. You have to get yourself away from your dependency in order to allow necessity to drive you forward. And that’s to become independent and to become mature. 
I think part of what’s happening in our culture is that the force that’s attacking the forthright movement forward of young men in particular is afraid of the power of men because it’s confused about the distinction between power and authority and competence. A man who has authority and competence has power as a by-product — but authority and competence are everything. People who can’t understand that fail to make the distinction between power and authority of competence, and they’re afraid of power so they destroy authority and competence. That’s a terrible thing because we need authority and competence. What else is going to allow us to prevail in the long run? So you get away from your country and you get away from your kin and from your father’s house. You go out there and you establish yourself in the world. It’s a call to adventure. The first lines in the Abrahamic story are a call to adventure.
<a href="https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/">Dr. Jordan B. Peterson</a> is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules For Life, and Beyond Order. You can now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/biblical-series-genesis">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/biblical-series-genesis">watch</a> his popular lectures on DailyWire+.
<a href="https://juliettefogra.me/">Juliette Fogra</a> is a fine art painter and graphic designer and was trained as a classical musician. She was the illustrator of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson’s Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

5 The Call to Abraham

PETERSON: The Call To Abraham

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Series exploring the psychological significance of the biblical stories in the book of Genesis. You can now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/biblical-series-genesis">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/biblical-series-genesis">watch</a> the lecture series on DailyWire+.
The chief causes lie at once in the sins of men and the decrepitude of the world, and the sins there are generally either acts of commission where people do things that they know to be wrong or they fail to do things that they know would be right. It doesn’t really matter. Sins of commission are usually judged more harshly within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but I think there might be a bit of an error in that because sins of omission can be a real catastrophe. 
Here’s a flood idea. There’s this idea that a judgemental being will flood you out if you continue on your wayward ways. It’s one of the examples of Jehovah being a little on the harsh side in the Old Testament, not something that modern people really approve of so much because we like our gods sort of domesticated — let’s put it that way. Unfortunately, that isn’t how it tends to work. But I’ve often thought about the reaction in North America to the hurricane in New Orleans because there’s two ways of reading that. One is mother nature has a little fit and sends a hurricane into New Orleans and wipes everyone out. Isn’t that a catastrophe? And isn’t that an example of our fragility in the face of natural power? But there’s another way of reading it and maybe this is unfair, but it will do for the purpose of illustration. 
The Dutch build dykes to keep the ocean back, and they’re actually pretty effective at that because their country is mostly underwater. It turns out that if you go to Holland, it’s actually not underwater — and so their dykes are working. The Dutch were very organized people, and they better be because their country is supposed to be underwater, so you better be organized if your country’s supposed to be underwater. They are very organized, and they have a rule for their dykes, which is to estimate the worst possible oceanic storm that will come in 10,000 years and make sure that the dykes will withstand that. 
From my reading, the Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans built the dykes for a storm every hundred years, and that’s not so good because we live about 80 years. That means the probability that one of those storms is going to come whipping by in a lifespan is pretty damn high. That perhaps wasn’t the wisest of planning, especially because some of New Orleans is actually supposed to be underwater. Worse, New Orleans is a city that’s quite well known for its corruption, so you might also say that a tremendous amount of the money and time and resources that could have and should have and was planned to go towards fixing the problem, didn’t. 
So the hurricane came along and the question is, what bloody well makes you so sure that it was a natural disaster? Because if the infrastructure would’ve been maintained and built to the specifications that were certainly technically possible — and would’ve actually been less expensive in the long run to build, and everyone knew it — and the hurricane came along and wiped out the city, why do you think that’s a natural disaster? To me, that’s a natural example (if you think about it from a metaphorical perspective) of a judgmental God deciding to use a flood to teach a moral lesson. You might say, that’s pretty harsh. What about all those flood survivors? Well, the whole flood thing was kind of harsh. Pointing out that there were steps that could have been taken — and also, that I doubt in the aftermath have been taken, even though everyone knows now exactly what happened — is a diagnosis. But it’s irrelevant because what I’m really trying to tell you is how the mythological stories would line up on this.
You can tell a story about mother nature manifesting her catastrophe and potential for tragedy, or you could tell another story of an absolute failure of the human social structure and the human individual level because of the corruption to address a problem that everyone knew was there. That’s a good example of how the flood comes when you’re not behaving properly.
Watch the lecture in its entirety <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/6-the-psychology-of-the-flood">here</a>.
One of the things that’s quite interesting about the Old Testament and the people who wrote it is that they always assumed that if the flood comes that meant you weren’t prepared — if that’s the rule. It’s like the apriori axiom. You got flooded out? You weren’t prepared enough. Well, how can you tell? You got flooded out. That’s the evidence. You might say, that’s not very fair. Fair isn’t the point. The point is, do you want to get flooded out again or not? Fair would be: you better figure out why you got flooded out and fix it so it doesn’t happen again. That’s the moral thing to do when you’re thinking about morality as walking the path that’s most appropriate to get to the destination that you think would be the best possible destination.
“By the mere fact that it exists, that is it lives and produces, the cosmos gradually deteriorates, and it ends by falling into decay. That is the reason why it has to be recreated. In other words, the flood realizes on the macro cosmic scale what is symbolically affected during the New Year festival: the end of the world, and the end of a sinful humanity in order to make a new creation possible.” There’s a lot of information packed into those few lines that Eliade wrote. In the Mesopotamian rituals, the Mesopotamians would act out the collapse of the kingdom into chaos, essentially at the New Year’s festival. It’s kind of what you do when you make resolutions; it’s a degenerate — what you’d say is our proclivity to make New Year’s resolutions sort of a degenerate ritual. And I don’t mean that it’s bad; I mean it’s the remnants of something much grander. 
The Mesopotamians would take their emperor outside the walled city once a year, and they would make him kneel, take off all his king clothes, whack him with a glove (if I remember correctly the priest would do that), and then they’d make him recount all the ways that he wasn’t being a good emperor that year. He wasn’t being a good Marduk because that was who he was supposed to be on earth. That’s the guy with eyes all the way around his head who speaks magic words and transforms chaos into order. That’s what the emperor’s supposed to do. So, you’re emperor. Have a little humility here because you’re not God incarnate. You probably made some mistakes. Can you think of any ways in the last year that you didn’t take advantage of every opportunity you possibly could have to take some spare chaos and transform it into habitable order. That’s a good thing to think about. That’s what you’re thinking about when you make a New Year’s resolution, even though you don’t know it. Could you be a better person in the upcoming year? 
You can imagine the flood, you can set yourself straight, and then you can prepare for it. And that means maybe you can stave it off, but it also means that maybe even if you don’t stave it off, you could ride it out. That’s actually the story of Noah. He can see that things are not good and that there’s a flood coming, and God is maybe letting him know. It says in the story that Noah walked with God. Remember, that’s what Adam did before he got self-conscious. He walked with God. But because Noah was straight, and he put himself together and his familial relationships were good — because it also says that — his antenna was working, and he could see a little farther into the future than someone whose vision was completely obscured by fog and chaos. He could tell that things were not going to go well, so he prepared for it. Because he prepared for it, things actually went pretty well for Noah, even though the flood came. That’s an interesting thing because that’s an indeterminate issue in human existence. 
How big a hurricane would it take to wipe out New Orleans if everyone was prepared? Well, you’re not going to wipe out the Dutch. That’s going to be a tough one. You’re going to have to conjure up a pretty damn big storm to take out their dykes. How thoroughly defended could New Orleans be if nobody in the municipal and state governments was corrupt? It would be the end of the hurricane problem because that’s something that we could clearly deal with. We know how to do it. 
The same applies in your own life: there are floods coming. You can bloody well be sure of that. That’s absolutely 100% certain. Some of them are going to be personal. Some of them are going to be familial. Some of them are going to be social and political and economic. Are they going to be catastrophes for you? Or are you going to ride them out? Are you going to prepare? The first issue might be, do you have your act together well enough to see them coming with enough advanced warning so that you can take proper measures? Maybe just to sidestep it. Maybe just don’t go where the flood is going to be. That’s a simple thing, but maybe you don’t have that luxury, so it is going to be a catastrophe. Maybe someone in your family is going to get really, really sick. And maybe there’s just a tiny pathway through that, that everything doesn’t fall apart. It doesn’t end in divorce. It doesn’t end in death. It doesn’t end in sorrow. It doesn’t end in catastrophe. But the margin of error is slim down to virtually zero, and every imperfection that you bring to that situation is going to increase the probability that that tragedy is going to turn into something indistinguishable from hell — and that’s coming. It’s coming your way — absolutely, certainly. Then you might think since it’s coming your way, maybe the best thing to do is to put yourself together so that when it comes, it can be the least amount of awful possible. 
I’ll close with this story. This was a very affecting story for me. My mother-in-law had frontotemporal dementia, and she developed it quite young. She was about 55. Her husband was a very extroverted man about town — I grew up in a small town — everybody knew him. He was charismatic, drank too much, a good businessman, quite a remarkable person, a real character, but not exactly a family man, even though he provided for his family very well. But when his wife got sick, he really took care of her. It was something to see because that’s no joke dealing with someone who has Alzheimer’s for all intents and purposes because they get taken away from you piece by piece. That is not pretty, and then it’s also hard. Not only is it catastrophic, but it’s hard. He just stepped into that perfectly. It was way less awful than it could have been — way less. It was just a tragedy. It wasn’t hell. 
I was there when she died, and my wife’s family is actually pretty good at dealing with death, as it turns out. My wife’s sister is a palliative care nurse, and you have to be a pretty tough cookie to be a palliative care nurse. You can do it, which is pretty interesting because that means that you can make relationships with people at the last stages of their life that are genuine relationships and people just die on you nonstop. She’s a competent, alive, alert, fun person. That’s someone you can rely on in a tragedy. Her other sister is a pharmacist, and my wife has volunteered in palliative care wards and is also very good at taking care of people who are genuinely not in good health. So, we were there when my mother-in-law died. Of course, you can imagine, here’s a deathbed situation for you: your mother-in-law is dying, and everyone’s at each other’s throats. You think that’s uncommon? Then your eyes aren’t open because it’s plenty bloody common. Then it’s not just a tragedy; it’s hell. Maybe you can stand the tragedy, but you can’t stand the hell. 
In this situation, that isn’t what happened; everybody pulled together and what happened was, well, she died. But what was so interesting was the family actually came together more tightly as a consequence. So although there was something taken away on the one hand, there was something gained on the other that wasn’t trivial. I’m not trying to be all optimistic and “isn’t the universe a wonderful place.” Someone died in an ugly way and it was harsh, but God, it was a hell of a lot better than it could have been. And maybe it was good enough. 
Something that I constantly wonder is, if people did what they could to speak the truth and pay attention, then maybe the tragedy that’s part of life wouldn’t have to deteriorate into the unbearable hell that doesn’t have to be part of life. Maybe we could actually tolerate the tragedy or maybe we could even rise above it or maybe we could even mitigate it because we can — we do that sort of thing all the time. It’s always an open question, and Eliade put it very well. Are the floods the consequence of the fact that things fall apart or are the floods a consequence of the fact that people make mistakes that they know they shouldn’t make and make anyway? They sin. That’s to miss the mark because that’s an archery term: to sin. That means, they don’t even specify the damn target, which, you’re not going to hit it unless you specify it. Or, having specified it, they just say, “Oh, to hell with it. It’s not that important.” You have to be careful when you say something like, “To hell with it. It’s not that important,” because one of the things that might happen to you if you say, “To hell with it. It’s not that important,” is that you might actually end up in hell for a pretty prolonged period of time or maybe for the remainder of your miserable existence because it’s certainly the case that people do exist there, and I’ve seen them exist there. And once you’re there, it’s no simple matter to get the hell out. 
So it might matter that the things that matter get addressed. It might matter that you do what you can to walk with God. It might be that that is how you build an ark and are protected from the flood even if the damn thing comes — and the thing is it will. This is a funny thing, too, that I’ve noticed about our education system and the way we teach students and their trigger warnings and all of that absolute rubbish. I think in most of my lectures, I’d have to have a trigger warning every 15 seconds. So as I tell my students, when they’re young: look, don’t fool yourself. You’re going to develop a serious illness — at least one, maybe two or three — and one of them is likely to be chronic. If it isn’t you, it’s going to be someone you love. It’s going to be your husband. It’s going to be your parent. It’s going to be your kids. That’s coming. And so is a lot of death and pain. Just exactly what sort of person are you going to be when that shows up? That’s the right question. It isn’t, how are you going to be happy in your life? Good luck with that. It’s a stupid ambition anyway as far as I’m concerned because it’s too shallow. Happiness, you’re lucky; that comes and goes like the sun coming out from behind the cloud. If you’re happy, more power to you. Enjoy it. It’s a gift from the cosmos to be happy. But a pursuit? No, no. The pursuit is, when the damn flood comes you want to be the person who built the ark. And that’s what the story of Noah is about. The flood is always coming. 
That’s another thing that’s worth commenting on with regards to this story is, there’s an apocalyptic element to the Judeo-Christian tradition. There’s an idea that the end of the world is always at hand and that you should prepare to be judged. The thing about that is, it’s true. And the reason it’s true is because the end of your world is at hand, and it will certainly come. When it comes, you will be judged because it will be up to you to figure out what to do with the fact that your world just collapsed. That’ll be a moral problem of ultimate severity because it’ll push you right to your limits, and you’ll find out exactly where your unaddressed weaknesses lie because that’s what happens in a crisis. 
The reason that’s an archetypal reality and it lurks underneath the entire Judeo-Christian structure — the impending apocalypse — is because we always live in apocalyptic times and your world is always, in small ways and large ways, coming to an end. So what do you do? You prepare for it. You prepare for your world to come to an end. And then maybe when the end comes, you get another world. That’d be a good deal.
<a href="https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/">Dr. Jordan B. Peterson</a> is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules For Life, and Beyond Order. You can now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/biblical-series-genesis">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/biblical-series-genesis">watch</a> his popular lectures on DailyWire+.
<a href="https://juliettefogra.me/">Juliette Fogra</a> is a fine art painter and graphic designer and was trained as a classical musician. She was the illustrator of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson’s Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

4 The Psychology of the Flood

PETERSON: The Psychology Of The Flood

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Series exploring the psychological significance of the biblical stories in the book of Genesis. You can now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/biblical-series-genesis">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/biblical-series-genesis">watch</a> the lecture series on DailyWire+.
Back to Genesis. We’re already up to Genesis 4. “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.” This is after Adam and Eve have been chased out of the Garden of Eden. What’s really cool about this — I really think that the Cain and Abel story is the most profound story I’ve ever read, especially given that you can tell it in 15 seconds. I won’t, because I tend not to tell stories in 15 seconds, as you may have noticed, but you can read the whole thing that quickly. It’s so densely packed that it’s actually unbelievable to me that it can be that densely packed.
The first thing is that Adam and Eve are not the first two human beings; Cain and Abel are the first two human beings. Adam and Eve were made by God, and they were born in paradise — what kind of human beings are those? You don’t know any human beings like that. Human beings aren’t born in paradise and made by God. Human beings are born of other human beings. That’s the first thing, and it’s post-Fall. We’re out in the world. We’re out in history now. We’re not in some archetypal beyond — although we are still to some degree, but not to the degree that was the case with the story of Adam and Eve. We’ve already been thrown out of the Garden. We’re already self-conscious. We’re already awake. We’re already covered. We’re already working. We’re full-fledged human beings. So, you have the first two human beings, Cain and Abel, prototypical human beings.
What’s cool is that humanity enters history at the end of the story of Adam and Eve, and then the archetypal patterns for human behavior are instantaneously presented. It’s absolutely mind-boggling, and it’s not a very nice story. They’re brothers; they’re hostile brothers. They’ve got their hands around each other’s throats, so to speak, or, at least that’s the case in one direction. So, it’s a story: the first two human beings engage in a fratricidal struggle that ends in the death of the best one of them. That’s the story of human beings in history, and if that doesn’t give you nightmares, you didn’t understand the damn story. 
In these hostile brother stories, which are very, very common, often the older brother, Cain — and this is very true in the Bible, but it’s true in all sorts of folk tales and all sorts of stories for that matter — has some advantages. He’s the older brother, and in an agricultural community, the older brother generally inherited the land — not the younger brothers. The reason for that was, well, let’s say you have eight sons and you have enough land to support a bit of a family and you divide it among your eight sons; then they have eight sons and they divide it among their eight sons. Soon everyone has a little postage stamp that they can stand on and starve to death on, and that just doesn’t work. So, you hand the land down in a piece to the eldest son, and that’s just how it is. It’s tough luck for the rest of them, but at least they know they’re going to have to make their own way. It’s not fair, but there’s no way of making it fair.
The oldest son has an additional stake in the stability of the current hierarchy. He has more of a stake in the status quo, so that makes him more of an emblematic representative of the status quo, and perhaps more likely to be blind in its favor. That motif creeps up very frequently in the hostile brothers’ archetypal struggle. Cain fits this — the story of Cain and Abel fits this pattern — because Cain is the one who won’t budge, who won’t move. He’s stubborn. The younger son, who’s Abel, is often the one who’s not so much of a revolutionary but perhaps more of a balance between the revolutionary and the traditionalist, whereas the older son tends to be more traditionalist, authoritarian — at least in these metaphorical representations. 
“And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.” There’s the first human being: Cain. The Mesopotamians thought that mankind was made out of the blood of the worst demon that the great goddess of chaos could imagine. Well, the first human being is a murderer, and not only a murderer, a murderer of his own brother. The Old Testament — that’s a hell of a harsh book. You might think, maybe that’s a little bit too much to bear. And then you might think, maybe it’s true, too. That’s something to think about. 
Human beings are amazing creatures, and to think about us as a plague on the planet is its own kind of bloody catastrophe — a malevolent, low, quasi-genocidal metaphor. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not without our problems, and the fact that this book that sits at the cornerstone of our culture would present the first man as a murderer of his brother is something that should really set you back on your heels.
<h4>Watch this lecture in its entirety <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/5-cain-and-abel-the-hostile-brothers">here</a>.</h4>
“And again, she bare his brother Abel, and Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.” There you see a very old representation. There’s Abel there, and he’s got his sheep up on the altar, and Cain is bringing a sheaf of wheat, and I don’t know exactly what’s happening here with the blood, but the overall impression of the image is that something transcendent is communicating with this sacrifice. And you think, oh, how primitive. How primitive, these people were sacrificing to their God. Those people weren’t stupid, and this is not primitive. Whatever it is, it’s not primitive. It’s sophisticated beyond belief because the idea is that you could sacrifice something of value and that would have transcendent utility. That is by no means an unsophisticated idea. 
In fact, it might be the greatest idea that human beings ever came up with. It’s an answer to the problem that’s put forward in the story of Adam and Eve because we became self-conscious, and then we discovered the future, and then we knew we were going to die, and then we knew we were vulnerable, and then we became ashamed, and then we developed the knowledge of good and evil, and then we got thrown out of paradise. That’s a big problem, so what the hell are you gonna do about it? Well, sacrifice. That’s the hypothesis. That’s a hell of a hypothesis. That’s what we’re doing. You’ve made plenty of sacrifices, even to sit in this theater. Many people made plenty of sacrifices to have a theater like this exist, and many people made sacrifices so that we could actually freely engage in the dialogue that we’re engaging in in a theater like this. All of this is built on sacrifice. Sacrifice bloody well better work because we do not have a better idea. Sacrifice. What’s the counter position? Murder and theft. So, let’s go with sacrifice, shall we? And perhaps we won’t consider it so damn primitive — because it’s not so primitive. 
“And again she bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain was a tiller of the ground.” Some people have read into this the eternal battle between herdsman and agriculturalists, which raged in the American West, for example, because the herdsmen liked to have their herds, sheep, cattle go wherever they were going to go. Of course the agriculturists, the farmers, liked to have things fenced off. The agriculturalists actually won in the final analysis. Abel is a keeper of sheep, and that’s interesting because that makes him a shepherd, and I think that’s part of the critical issue here. 
If you look at Michelangelo’s statue of David, which is another staggering work. David is no trivial figure. Of course, it’s David who slays Goliath, and Goliath is like the giant of the patriarchal enemy. Middle Eastern shepherds had to take care of sheep, and they’re edible. The lambs are very vulnerable, and there were lots of wild animals around. It wasn’t like England in the sixteenth century. There were lions, and you had a slingshot or a stick or some damn thing. Your job was to keep the sheep organized and not let them be eaten by the lions alone, so you had to have a clue and be tough and self-reliant. You had to be able to take care of a lot of vulnerable things. You had to be able to do it on your own. That’s all built into the shepherd metaphor, and it’s a tough thing. It’s not a great metaphor for modern people because we tend to think of the shepherd as someone like Little Lord Fauntleroy — certainly not a hyper-masculine, lion-killing monster. That’s not a shepherd. A shepherd sort of dances around; that’s not the metaphor here.
“So Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. And in the process of time it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord.” He’s participating in this sacrificial ritual. “And Abel, he brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering.” You don’t know why that is, and this is a built in ambiguity. I think there’s textual hints, but I’m not sure. “Abel brought the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof.” So what does that mean? He brought high quality sacrifice. You don’t know that Abel’s sacrifice is low quality because it doesn’t say Abel brought God some wilted lettuce and then burnt it. It doesn’t say that. But there isn’t a sentence there that talks about how high quality Cain’s sacrifice is. In any case, “the Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering.” There’s a hint that Abel’s putting a little bit more into the whole sacrificial thing than Cain, but there’s also a hint that maybe God is liking you a little better than he’s liking him. That’s, I think, useful from a literary perspective because there is that arbitrariness about life. 
With my own children, for example, one of them, I would say, things come easy to him. He’s lucky, fortunate — however you want to put it. He seems to be that sort of person. Whereas with my other child there’s one horrible Job-like catastrophe after another, and it’s so strange to see that because, as far as I can tell, the characterological differences are certainly not accounting for the difference in destiny. The one child who’s had so much trouble, as a child was just a wonderful child — amazingly happy and easy to get along with and fun. And they had a terrible time of it. So, who knows what God’s up to, but distributing fate equally certainly isn’t one of them.
“And the Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering: But unto Cain and his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth.” “Wroth” is a tough word. These are translated many times. It’s hard to get the full flavor of the words, but “wroth” — his countenance fell. Well, to have your countenance fall is to have it be heavy. Depressed, for sure. Angry, for sure. Resentful, probably. “Wroth” — that’s anger. Cain is not a happy clam; his hard work is being rejected by God. That’s worth thinking about because you think about how human that story is. We could say you might be a useless character, and you’re whining about how catastrophic your life is, and it’s pretty much obvious to everyone around you — and you — that it’s your fault. You just don’t try. You don’t wake up in the morning. You don’t get a job. You don’t engage in things. You’re cynical and you’re bitter and you’re angry. And you don’t try to help the people near you, and you don’t try to fix up your own life, and you don’t take care of yourself. And then things go wrong and, well, what do you expect? But that doesn’t mean someone in that situation will just say, “Well, that’s okay. I deserve it,” then they’ll be happy about it. They won’t. They’ll be absolutely bitter about it and angry. 
But put that aside for a moment. There are people who seem to struggle very forthrightly and still have one catastrophe after another happen to them. There’s no easy answer in this story. It’s like you can fall afoul of God because your sacrifices are second rate, or you can just fall afoul of God and you don’t know why. Well, tough luck for you. Then what happens in either case is exactly this, almost inevitably. Cain was wroth, and his countenance fell. People like this write to me all the time. I’ve seen many, many of them as clients. They say they’re 20 (not so often), 30 more commonly, sometimes 40. Their lives haven’t gone well. They’re in a pit of despair of one form or another, and not only are they in a pit of despair, but they’re also extraordinarily angry about it. And God only knows what they would do with that anger if they had the opportunity to give it full voice.
One of the things I’ve always thought about Hitler is that you have to admire Hitler. He was an organizational genius. People don’t refuse the ambition to become Hitler because they don’t have the genocidal motivation. They don’t follow that pathway because they don’t have the organizational genius. They’ve got the damn motivation. If you take a hundred people randomly and you talk to them — and you really talk to them — you’ll find that 5% of them would take their vengeful thoughts pretty damn far if they were just given the opportunity. In fact, they do because they make life miserable for themselves and often for their family and sometimes for anybody they can come near. Then maybe another 20% of people have that bubble up in them on a pretty damn regular basis. 
So, you can have some sympathy for Cain. Cain and Abel don’t just represent two archetypal types of being. It’s not like you’re Cain and you’re Abel and you’re Cain and you’re Abel. It’s like you’re half and half, and you’re half and half, and you’re half and half. This is two different potential patterns of destiny, and you don’t manifest one purely and the other zero. It’s the line between good and evil that runs down the human heart. It’s exactly the same idea. Maybe you’re more like Cain or maybe you’re more like Abel, but there’s still a little Cain in you no matter how Abel you are. And maybe more than a little. And probably more than a little. 
If you watch your fantasies, which I would very much recommend, you’ll find that they show you dark things about you that will shock you if you allow yourself to be conscious of what you’re thinking. It’s a good time when you’re having an argument with someone, especially someone you love, to just watch the pictures that flash in the back of your mind. That’s part of coming into contact with what Carl Jung called “the shadow,” and the shadow is the manifestation of Cain. That’s a perfect way of thinking about it. Jung was not someone you mess around with lightly. He said the human shadow has roots that reach all the way to hell, and Jung meant that. That’s no metaphor for him. Now he might not have meant it in the same way that a Fundamentalist Christian from the Southern US might mean it, but I would say that Jung meant it in a way that’s far more terrifying — and also far more true. 
<a href="https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/">Dr. Jordan B. Peterson</a> is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules For Life, and Beyond Order. You can now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/biblical-series-genesis">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/biblical-series-genesis">watch</a> his popular lectures on DailyWire+.
<a href="https://juliettefogra.me/">Juliette Fogra</a> is a fine art painter and graphic designer and was trained as a classical musician. She was the illustrator of Dr. Peterson’s Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

3 Cain and Abel_ The Hostile Brothers

PETERSON: Cain And Abel: The Hostile Brothers

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Series exploring the psychological significance of the biblical stories in the book of Genesis. You can now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/biblical-series-genesis">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/biblical-series-genesis">watch</a> the lecture series on DailyWire+.
For whatever reason, there is a lot packed into these stories, so let’s investigate a couple more of them. We’ll start with the story of Adam and Eve.
You may remember that the Bible is a series of books — Bible actually means something akin to library — and these books were written by all sorts of different people and groups of people and groups of editors who edited over and over across very, very large periods of time. So, they’re authored by no one and many at the same time. There was a tradition for a long time that the earliest books were written by Moses, but that’s probably not technically correct, even though it might be dramatically correct in the way that a fairytale is correct. (And I’m not trying to put down fairy tales by saying that.) But there’s a number of authors, and the way the authors have been identified — tentatively — is by certain stylistic commonalities across the different stories: different uses of words (like the words for God), different poetic styles, different topics, and so forth. People have been working for probably 200 years (roughly that) to try to sort out who wrote what and how that was all cobbled together. But it doesn’t really matter for our purposes. What matters is that it’s an aggregation of collected narrative traditions, and maybe you could say it’s an aggregation of collected narrative wisdom. We don’t have to go that far, but we can at least say it’s aggregated narrative traditions. 
There was some reason that those traditions — and not others — were kept, and there were some reasons, complex though they may have been, why they [narrative traditions] were sequenced in the order that they were sequenced. One of the things that’s really remarkable about the Bible as a document is that it actually has a plot, and that’s really something. It’s sprawling, and it goes many places. But the fact that something’s been cobbled together over several thousand years — maybe 4,000 years, maybe longer than that if you include the oral traditions that preceded it, and God only knows how old those are — that’s part of the human collective imagination has cobbled together a library with a plot.
I see the Bible as an attempt, a collective attempt by humanity to solve the deepest problems that we have. I think those problems are, primarily, the problem of self-consciousness. The fact that not only are we mortal and that we die but that we know it. That’s the unique predicament of human beings, and it makes all the difference. I think that’s laid out in the story of Adam and Eve. I think the reason that makes us unique is laid out in that story. Interestingly — I really realized this only after I was doing the last three lectures — the Bible presents a cataclysm at the beginning of time, which is the emergence of self-consciousness in human beings, which puts a rift into the structure of being. That’s the right way to think about it, and that’s really giving cosmic significance. Now, you can dispense with that and say, “Well, nothing that happens to human beings is of cosmic significance because we’re these short lived, mold-like entities that are like cancers on this tiny little planet that’s rotating out in the middle of nowhere on the edge of some unknown galaxy in the middle of infinite space and nothing that happens to us matters.” It’s fine. You can walk down that road if you want. I wouldn’t recommend it. That’s part of the reason I think that, for all intents and purposes, it’s untrue. It isn’t a road you can walk down and live well. In fact, I think if you really walk down that road and you really take it seriously, you end up not living at all. It’s certainly very reminiscent. I’ve talked to lots of people who were suicidal — and seriously suicidal. The kind of conclusions that they draw about the utility of life, prior to wishing for its cessation, are very much like the kind of conclusions you draw if you walk down that particular line of reasoning long enough. 
If you’re interested in that you could read Tolstoy’s “A Confession.” It’s a very short book. It’s a killer; it’s a powerful book — very, very short. Tolstoy describes his obsession with suicide when he was at the height of his fame: most well-known author in the world, huge family, international fame, wealth beyond anyone’s imagining at that time, influential, admired. He had everything you could possibly imagine that anyone could have, and for years, he was afraid to go into his barn with a rope or a gun because he thought he’d either hang himself or shoot himself. He did get out of that, and he describes why that happened and where he went when that happened. If you’re interested in that, that’s a very good book.
<h4>Watch this lecture in its entirety <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/4-adam-and-eve-self-consciousness-evil-and-death">here.</a></h4>
The Biblical stories, starting with Adam and Eve, present a different story. They present the emergence of self-consciousness in human beings as a cosmically cataclysmic event. You could say, “Well, what do we have to do with the cosmos?” The answer to that is, “It depends on what you think consciousness has to do with the cosmos, and perhaps that’s nothing or perhaps it’s everything.” I’m going to go with everything because that’s how it looks to me. Of course, anyone who wishes to is welcome to disagree. But if you believe that consciousness is a force of cosmic significance — which being itself is dependent on in any real sense, at least in any experiential sense — then it’s not unreasonable to assume that radical restructurings of consciousness can worthily be granted some kind of cosmic or metaphysical significance. Even if it’s not true from outside the human perspective, whatever that might be, it’s bloody well true from within the human perspective, that’s for sure. 
That’s the initial event, in some sense, after the creation, is the cataclysmic Fall. Then the entire rest of the Bible is an attempt to figure out what the hell to do about that. Everything in it is. For example, in the Old Testament stories, the state of Israel is founded, and it rises and falls and rises and falls. There’s this experimentation for centuries, millennia even, with the idea that the way that you protect yourself against the tragic consequences of self-consciousness is by organizing yourself into a state. But then what happens is the state itself begins to reveal its pathologies, and as those pathologies mount, the state becomes unstable and collapses, and then it rises back up and becomes unstable and collapses, and then it rises back up. After it does this a number of times — this is primarily from Northrop Frye’s interpretations — people start wondering if there’s not something wrong with the idea that the state itself is the place of redemption. There’s something wrong with that idea. On the heels of that comes the Christian revolution with its hypothesis that it’s not the state that’s the place of salvation; it’s the individual psyche. There’s an ethic that goes along with that, too, which is quite interesting. 
The ethic of redemption, after that state experiment fails, is that it’s within the individual that redemption can be manifested — even insofar as the state is concerned because the state’s proper functioning is dependent on the proper functioning of the individual, rather than the reverse, most fundamentally. And the proper mode of an individual being that’s redemptive is truth, and truth is the antidote to the suffering that emerges with the Fall of man in the story of Adam and Eve. 
That relates back to the chapters that we’ve already talked about because there’s this insistence in Genesis one that it’s the Word in the form of truth that generates order out of chaos, but even more importantly — and like I said, I most clearly realized just doing these lectures for the last three weeks is — God continues to say, as He speaks order into being with truth, that the being He speaks into being is good. There’s this insistence that the being that spoke into being through truth is good. There’s a hint there. It’s so interesting. There’s a hint there, right at the beginning of the story, that the state of being Adam and Eve inhabited before they fell, before they became self-conscious — insofar as they were made in the image of God and acting out the truth — that being itself was properly balanced. It takes the entire Bible to rediscover that, which is a journey back to the beginning. That’s a classic mythological theme: the wise person is the person who finds what they lost in childhood and regains it. I think that’s a Jewish idea that Zadok (if I remember correctly), who’s a Messiah figure, is the person who finds what he lost in childhood and regains it. The idea of this return to the beginning, except that the return is, you don’t fall backwards into childhood and unconsciousness; you return voluntarily to the state of childhood well awake and then determined to participate through truth in the manifestation of proper being. 
I’m a psychologist, and I’ve taught personality theory for a very long time. I know profound personality theories pretty well, and I’m reasonably well versed in philosophy, although, not as well versed as I should be, but I can tell you, in all the things I’ve ever read or encountered or thought about, I have never once found an idea that matches that in terms of profundity — but not only profundity also in believability. Because the other thing I see as a clinician, and I think this is very characteristic of clinical experience and also very much described explicitly by the great clinicians, is that what cures in therapy is truth. That’s the curative. Now, there’s exposure to the things you’re afraid of and avoiding as well, but I would say that’s a form of enacted truth because if you know there’s something you should do by your own set of rules and you’re avoiding it then you’re enacting a lie. You’re not telling one, but you’re acting one out. It’s the same damn thing. So, if I can get you to face what it is that you’re confronting that you know you shouldn’t be avoiding then what’s happening is that we’re both partaking in the process of attempting you to act out your deepest truth. What happens is that that improves people’s lives, and it improves them radically. The clinical evidence for that is overwhelming. We know that if you expose people to the things they’re afraid of, but that they’re avoiding, they get better. You have to do it carefully and cautiously and with their own participation, but of all the things that clinicians have established that are credible, that’s number one. And that’s nested inside this deeper realization that the clinical experience is redemptive because it’s designed to address suffering, insofar as the people who are engaged in the process are both telling each other the truth. 
If you have some problems and you come to talk to me about them . . . well, first of all, just by coming to talk to me about them, you’ve admitted that they exist. That’s a pretty good start. And second, if you tell me about them, then we know what they are. If we know what they are, we can maybe start to lay out some solutions, and then you can go act out the solutions and see if they work. But if you don’t admit they’re there and you won’t tell me what they are, and I’m posturing and acting egotistically and taking the upper hand in our discussions, how the hell is that going to work? It might be comfortable moment-to-moment while we stay encapsulated in our delusion, but it’s not going to work. If you think it through, it seems pretty self-evident. 
Freud thought that repression was at the heart of much mental suffering. The difference between repression and deception is a matter of degree, and that’s all — it’s a technical differentiation. And Alfred Adler, who was one of Freud’s greatest associates and much underappreciated, he thought people got into problems because they started to act out a life lie. That’s what he called it: a life lie. That’s worth looking up because Adler, although not as charismatic as Freud, was very practical and really foreshadowed a lot of later developments in cybernetic theory. And, of course, Jung believed that you could bypass psychotherapy entirely by merely making a proper moral effort in your own life, and Carl Rogers believed that it was honest communication mediated through dialogue that had redemptive consequences. And the behaviorists believe that you do a careful microanalysis of the problems that are laid before you and help introduce people to what they’re avoiding. All of those things to me are just secular variations of the notion that truth will set you free, essentially.
It’s a pretty powerful story and (a) it’s not that easy to dispense with, and (b) you dispense with it at your peril. The people that I’ve seen who’ve been really hurt have been hurt mostly by deceit. And that’s also worth thinking about. You get walloped by life; there’s no doubt about that. There’s absolutely no doubt about that. But I’ve thought for a long time that maybe people can handle earthquakes and cancer and even death, but they can’t handle betrayal and they can’t handle deception. They can’t handle having the rug pulled out from underneath them by people that they love and trust. That just does them in. It makes them ill, but it hurts them. Psycho-physiologically, it damages them. But more than that, it makes them cynical and bitter and vicious and resentful. And then they also start to act all that out in the world and that makes it worse. 
God uses the spoken truth to create being that is good, then the cataclysm occurs, and then human beings spend untold millennia trying to sort out exactly what to do about the fact that they’ve become self-conscious. By the way, we are, in fact, self-conscious. No other animal has that distinction. Now you’ll read, for example, if you put lipstick on a chimpanzee — it’s kind of a strange thing to do — the chimpanzee will wipe off the lipstick if you show it a mirror. Dolphins seem to be able to recognize themselves in mirrors. So there are the glimmerings of self-conscious recognition in other animals, but to put that in the same conceptual category as human self-consciousness is, to my way of thinking, uninformed to say the least, but I also think it’s motivated by a kind of anti-humanistic underlying motivation. Our self-consciousness is so incredibly developed compared to that, that they’re hardly in the same conceptual universe. It’s like comparing the alarm cries of vervet monkeys when they see a predator to the language of human beings. There are some similarities, there are utterances, and there are utterances with meaning, but they’re not language. The self-consciousness of animals is proto self-consciousness, and it’s only there in a very small number of animals. It’s nothing like ours. They’re not aware of the future like we are. They’re not aware of their boundaries in space and time, and that’s the critical thing — and most particularly, time. Human beings discovered time. When we discovered time, we discovered the end of each of our being. And that made all the difference. 
And that’s what the story of Adam and Eve is about. 
<a href="https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/">Dr. Jordan B. Peterson</a> is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules For Life, and Beyond Order. You can now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/biblical-series-genesis">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/biblical-series-genesis">watch</a> his popular lectures on DailyWire+.
<a href="https://juliettefogra.me/">Juliette Fogra</a> is a fine art painter and graphic designer and was trained as a classical musician. She was the illustrator of Dr. Peterson’s Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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Biblical Series: Genesis

PETERSON: The Great Sacrifice: Abraham And Isaac

PETERSON: Sodom And Gomorrah

PETERSON: The Call To Abraham

PETERSON: The Psychology Of The Flood

PETERSON: Cain And Abel: The Hostile Brothers

PETERSON: Adam And Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, And Death

PETERSON: Introduction To The Idea Of God