Follow Whatever Glitters In The Corner

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Head to nyalloy.com and use code DailyWire to get 20% off your first order. This code is valid on products only. What's that, what's that, and a warm New York welcome. Thank you, thank you. It's so nice of you, it's so good of you to be here tonight. I know that of all the people in the world who are blessed with opportunities to spend their time anyway, they might choose you, people are at the top of the list, and I understand that you had many other options for tonight's entertainment night. Really, don't know what the hell you're doing here, but I definitely appreciate the fact that you're here. I'm going to tell you a story, it's one of the world's great stories, it's a masterpiece of compression and depth. I've returned to it dozens of times in my lectures, hundreds of times in my thinking. There's almost no limit to what can be discovered in it, even though it's only a few paragraphs long. It's hard to account for that precisely, although I'll try to account for that a little bit tonight, and to explain how such a thing can even be possible, that a story a few paragraphs long can be in some ways inexhaustible, it doesn't exactly seem possible. You know, everything's inexhaustible in some ways, right, because everything is connected to everything else, and if you love someone deeply a child or your wife or your husband, a parent, sibling, you can understand all of humanity, as a consequence of that relationship. If you investigate anything deeply enough, you start to understand how it's connected to everything, and so everything that attracts your interest and is worthy of pursuit is a portal to the infinite. That's actually what the story of the Burning Bush means, is a very good thing to know, and it's a good way of introducing the Canaan Abel story, which is the story I'm going to tell you tonight. The Canaan Abel story is a bottomless well of revelation, and it's a pointer towards the source of all revelatory wisdom. In the story of Exodus, when Moses encounters the Burning Bush, in some ways, he's just an ordinary man, now he has a strange parentage, he's the son of Hebrew slaves and the adopted son of Egyptian aristocrats, and so that marks him out in some ways is special, he's a combination of what's lowest and what's highest. But apart from that, when we encounter Moses in the story of Exodus at the time of the Burning Bush, he's just an ordinary man, he actually has a relatively low status occupation, he's a shepherd. Now he has two wives, and he's getting along with them fine, and he has a good relationship with his father-in-law, whose name is Jethro, who's a very good man, and he loves his wife and wives. And being a shepherd was a challenging occupation in ancient times, which is why the shepherd is an icon of heroism. A shepherd has to make his way with his wits out in the wilderness. The wilderness of that time was characterized by genuine danger, not the not least of which were wolves and lions, and so if you're going to be a shepherd, you had to be the sort of man who could live by his wits on the land and who could protect vulnerable, highly edible creatures from predation, and so Moses is no pushover, but he has an ordinary life, and then something extraordinary offers itself to him. Okay, so it's worthwhile understanding that to understand how something transcendent self to you, something magical. Something magical occurs in your life when after you encounter it, you play by a new set of rules. That's the magic. So if you encounter someone who lives in a world of conceptualization that's radically different than your current world, what they can do looks magical to you, because not knowing their rules, not having their skills, they're able to do things and perceive things in a way that's just not accessible to you. Now and then in your life you meet someone who transforms you profoundly that can happen in a relationship, often happens when you meet someone that you love, or that you deeply admire someone who serves as a mentor, for example, they're like a visitor from another kingdom and that new kingdom might be the kingdom that you would like to occupy if only you knew the rules. Imagine that as you move through your life, you transform sequentially. There's really no end to that, the amount that you can change, the amount that you can develop. Imagine that there's something in common among all the experiences that magically transform you from the smallest level of magical transformation to the cataclysmically transformative. There are times in your life where you have an experience and you're not the same afterwards and that can be brutal, although sometimes it can be very positive or often it's both. Moses is out conducting himself as a shepherd and he and something attracts his attention. Okay, so that's the first thing to understand. You can be going about your business and something can attract your attention. Now this is a mystery because we like to think that we're in control of our experience but that's truly wrong. There are some things that we're in control of but there's lots of things we're not in control of. For example, you can fall in love with someone in a catastrophic way and that can easily happen to you in some ways, despite yourself, you can find yourself foolishly entangled in an affair, let's say. And if you escape from that unscathed, which is highly improbable, you could easily look back and think, especially if you got tangled up with the wrong person, what the hell happened to me and what happened to you is that the things that back into you have an autonomy. This is a very strange thing so let me make a reference to something else. Back in the late 1800s, Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, announced that, announced the death of God and what he meant by that was that the unquestioned faith that was present in the West in relationship to what we held highest had become intellectually demolished intellectually. God died. This was not something Nietzsche was pleased about. He think thought that the consequence of that would be the rise of a murderous nihilism and the emergence of ideologies, of resentment, like communism that would kill tens of millions of people. When what's held highest disappears, new forces emerge to compete for that position of dominance. Nietzsche's Diagnosis of that and then offering of a cure was that because there was no longer anything of transcendent divinity, we would have to create our own values. We'd have to take on to ourselves the burden of generating meaning itself. All of existential philosophy in some ways came out of that idea that human beings had to take on the burden of creating the meaning in their life themselves. And if we stepped forward, we could do that in a manner that would enable us to thrive despite having severed our connection with heaven, let's say. It didn't take very long before the psychoanalysts generated the most profound critique of that proposition, Freud first and then Carl Jung, who was a real student of Nietzsche. With Freud and Jung noted that you can create your own values because you're not in control of yourself. You're not the sort of creature that can just tell yourself what to do. You know that. You're no more obedient to you than anyone else around you is obedient to you. You could have all the good intentions in the world, but that doesn't mean you're going to follow them. Sometimes people do that, but it's equally likely that you'll wander off in some direction that's not only not the direction you decided was appropriate, but really contrary to it. You're a place, you're a playhouse of demons. That's one way of thinking about it. You're a war of competing proclivities and motivations, and they have an autonomy. You can fall under their sway. This certainly happens when you fall in love. It's like, "Well, what's happening when you fall in love exactly when you find yourself attracted to someone?" Well, there's a sexual element, but it isn't exactly that that feels to you as something you've decided to do. What it feels like is you encounter someone who's unbearably attractive. It's the motive force of their attraction appears to you as something external. It's certainly not under your control. You can make an absolute bloody fool of yourself. In fact, it's highly likely that you will, despite your best efforts. So you can see that with love. You can see that with sexual attraction, but you can also see it in a more mundane way, arguably, with what you're interested in. You have to discover what you're interested in. And maybe that makes itself manifest in your life at a very early age. I've interviewed many people who'd be very successful in their life and asked them about how it was that they came to know what they were interested in. Jocle Willink is a good example of that. Jocle Willink is a Navy SEAL, very tough guy, it's about four feet thick. He looks like two Joe Rogan's compacted together. And he said, he knew he wanted to engage in mayhem from the time he was three. Like that was there for him. It called to him. And it's frequently the case that there are things in our lives that call to us. One of the definitions of God that permeates the biblical library is that God is the source of all the things that call to you. And here's a way of understanding that there's going to be times in your life where you're interested in one thing, and that'll lead you somewhere. And then when you get there, you'll be interested in something else. And so that interest changes, right? But the fact that something's interesting, the fact that something interesting is calling to you, is stable across your transformations. And what that implies is that there's a spirit of transformation operating behind all the particular things that interest you, that guide you forward. Carl Jung believed that that was the same thing as the instinct to develop. Here's a way of thinking about that. As your, imagine you as a child or imagine your own children. You know they get interested in something. They want to make a new friend. They want to go to school. They get interested in a new toy. And that interest motivates them to develop new skills and new ways of looking at the world. And as a consequence, they become more than they are. And so you can see that interest as the manifestation of the instinct that impels them towards development. And you want to encourage that. It's generally pretty happy if your child takes an intense interest in a sport, let's say, or hobby, or a friendship for that matter, because if they do that diligently, the consequence of that will be that they're highly motivated, which is a lovely thing to see in your children. But also that they'll become more than they are. And so you can think of the calling as the manifestation of the spirit that calls you to develop. That's what happens to Moses. So he's out there on the desert plane taking care of his sheep and something attracts his attention. And it's not a forest fire, something that you couldn't ignore at all. It's not something absolutely overwhelming. It's more like a gesture or an invitation. That's a good way of thinking about it, an invitation. It's something that glitters and gleams in the corner of your eye that pulls you towards something new, that compels you or invites you to step off the beaten track. And when you step off the beaten track, that's when you're new somewhere new. You go somewhere new. And that's when you develop. And so your interest is one of the things that pulls you off the beaten track towards the new land you couldn't have, but if you became the new person you could become. Peterson Academy. Peterson Academy. Peterson Academy. It's called Peterson Academy. Peterson Academy. If you want an actual education, we can select professors from top universities around the world. Bringing the best professors together, making sure they're not censored in any way, giving them the audience and the remuneration and appreciation they deserve. And you are true to your work. You gave me absolute intellectual autonomy. I have had it through every course. He figured we can offer people a high quality university level education for under two thousand goals. Well, congratulations, Jordan. It's honestly brilliant. I can't wait to enroll myself. I'll be doing that straight off to this. Fungio. When God comes to Abraham, Abraham is about 70 when this happens. He's a rich. He's the son of rich parents. What that means is Abraham could just roll around the tent and has for seven decades, failure to launch. And there's no reason for him to leave because all his needs are gratified. And you might say, well, if all your needs are gratified, then why do anything? And that's a very good question for rich and privileged people. And answer that is something like, all your needs aren't gratified by having your needs gratified. The need for difficulty, for example, the need for challenge, the need for development, the need for play, the need for adventure. Those might arguably be the most profound needs, so to speak. God comes to Abraham as the calling to adventure. God comes to Abraham and says, look, hang around your tent there, buddy, for 70 years. He's getting kind of ugly. Leave your zone of comfort. Leave your father's tent, leave your family, leave your community. Leave everything you know and venture out into the world. In all its catastrophe, and Abraham commits to that, he agrees to that, and he also agrees to make the sacrifices along the way that enable his transformation as he pursues his adventure. That's really what the story of Abraham is about. And God makes him a deal, which is a very interesting deal. It's unbelievably worth knowing. It's like the secret to life in a way. God says, if you commit yourself wholeheartedly to the spirit of adventure, and you make the necessary sacrifices along the way, as you're called upon to transform, you'll turn into who you most deeply are. And the consequence of that will be that you're a blessing to yourself. So that's a good deal. That your reputation will expand. Your name will become known, but not in a narcissistic and shallow manner. You'll become known as. You'll become known for the same reason that people who are capable and competent and productive and generous and hospitable are known. So you'll earn your reputation. It's the opposite of narcissism, and the fact that your reputation will expand will increase your opportunities, obviously, but it will increase them and this is the next step. It will increase them in a manner that makes itself manifest in two ways. First is there's some reasonable probability that you'll establish something permanent. So Abraham has offered the opportunity to father nations. So the idea is that if he follows the calling to opportunity, that the consequence of that will be that his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, he'll establish the pattern that radically increases the probability that his descendants will be numerous and successful. Right, and that's in keeping with the impetus to adventure. And then this is the caper, God says, and if you do all that, you'll do it in a way that's a blessing to everyone else. And so there's a vision of like a multi-dimensional harmony, and it's a very optimistic idea. So imagine that you threw caution to the wind, let's say, although not wisdom and intelligence. And you said, well, I'm going to pursue adventure, the adventure that calls to me with no holds part, what will happen? The offer is, well, you'll be way better for yourself, more than you can even imagine. But that will happen in a way that will expand your reputation in a valid manner, that will increase the probability that you'll do something worthwhile and permanent, and you'll do it in a way that's very, very useful and good for everyone else. And so what the offering there is that that courage to allow yourself to unfold and develop, which is probably what you want more than anything else anyways because that's where all the adventurous joy in life is, that's identical if it's made manifest properly to the pattern that sets the world in order socially across the largest possible span of time. And then you might think, well, how could it be any other way? You know perfectly well with your children, you want to encourage your children to develop and to become competent, radically competent, so that they can live in the world without having to depend on you, so that they can go out and encounter all the catastrophes of the world head on and not only manage, but thrive. You assume that if they did that in the best possible manner, that would be good for them, and that they'd have friends and consequence of that and that they'd increase their probability of actual accomplishment and success, and that it would be good for everyone else. And the alternative hypothesis would be something like, well, if you followed the calling of adventure, you'd be a deceitful self-serving narcissist and that instinct would set you at cross purposes with everyone else. And that just seems unlikely, like how likely is it that the spirit that calls you to become all you are isn't the same spirit that aligns us communally and socially across the longest possible span of time. It's sort of like a definition of adaptation. If we weren't structured in that manner, the best of us would produce the worst possible social outcome. Well, no, obviously, okay, so Moses goes and investigates the burning bush. And why is it a burning bush? Well, everything alive is on fire. So it's life-hytoned. That's a good way of hallucigenically-hytoned. It's the spirit of life itself, not only being, but transforming, because fire is an agent of transformation. And something that's alive is burning, but staying the same at the same time. There's no difference between that metabolism. I mean, I would say in some ways you're most alive when you're most on fire, right? So that the process of weirdly enough, you're who you are most deeply when you're transforming as brutally as you can manage. And so that's what Moses encounters. He encounters the spirit of what calls you to attend that transforms you, and he investigates that. Okay, so how does that roll out in your life? Well, to the degree that you've pursued anything genuinely in your life, something called to you, and you followed it, you became fascinated by something, right? Which means it grabbed you and you locked onto it. You entered into a relationship with that thing that fascinated you, and that took you down a pathway, and the pathway deepened as you investigated, and you learned more and more as a consequence of your commitment to it, and the consequence of that was that you transformed. Now, Moses does that to the ultimate degree. Like Abraham, he's fully committed, and what happens to Moses is that the voice of God itself reveals itself to him. And this is a definition. So the idea is that if you attended without reservation in good faith and with courage, to those things that compelled you forward, and you committed to that investigation, that you would look into the structure of reality so deeply that the underlying spirit that animated everything would become known to you. And you might say, well, I don't believe that. It's like, it's not so obvious what we believe and what we don't believe. We know perfectly well that the best moments in our life occur as a consequence of taking something like a calling with all due seriousness. And we understand not only that that devoted, serious attention does broaden our capacity to understand, and deepen our souls and our understanding of the world, but also makes us more compelling to other people. One of the things, if you're talking to someone or interviewing them, and you want the conversation to light on fire to be a transforming conversation, you can ask people what their interest did. And if you listen, they'll start telling you, and when they start telling you, they light up, everyone knows what that means, and they get extremely interesting. And you know, if you can find out what someone loves, which is what you do for someone that you do love, is you find out what they're they love, and you encourage that, then the best of them comes out, and they become charismatic. So when Moses, when God reveals himself to Moses, God tells Moses that now he's to become a leader. And Moses says, "Well, I don't think so, I'm slow of tongue." Moses has, he's not a good communicator, maybe as a speech impediment, we don't really know, but communication isn't his forte. And God basically says to him two things. First, that's your problem. You're called upon to resist tyranny and to lead yourself and your fellow man away from slavery, no matter what your inadequacies. And then God also says, "People will listen to you because you will tell them that you're coming in my name." And you might say, "Well, what does that mean?" Well, imagine the circumstances in your life where people have listened to you. Now you can imagine that happening in two ways. You're manipulating them, you're selling them something, you're lying. I mean selling in the manipulative manner where you offer junk to idiots to take advantage of them. That isn't what I mean. I mean, imagine how effective you are as a model when what you're offering to people in your communication is a revelation of that which you find most deeply meaningful. People listen to you then because the best of you is revealing itself in a way that helps them reveal the best in them. You certainly do that as a parent if you have any sense. It is often in those familial relationships that the best of us can make itself manifest sometimes the worst too, but you get my point is that in so far as you're capable of making an account of what you've been, what you're committed to has transformed your life. And you do that honestly, people are going to listen to you. Now it's kind of strange that that's the case, but when you hear someone speak, you can tell the difference, usually, this can be game, but you can tell the difference between when they're genuine and interesting and those two things really are very closely aligned and when they're false and dull, false is almost always dull. And it's almost always compelling, even if it's in articulate. You meet people now and then who are of stellar moral character but can't really make much of an argument, but that doesn't, you still listen to them. There's still something about the way they conduct themselves that's compelling. That's basically what God offers to Moses. He said, "Well, if you tell people that you've come in my name, they'll listen." Well, people will listen to you if you tell the truth. So because their souls can discriminate between truth and falsehood. And so, and God tells Moses as a consequence of investigating this burning bush that But he's to go back to his wayward and enslaved people and free them from tyranny and lead them away from slavery and traverse the desert and head to the promised land. And that's what a leader does. A leader always stands up against tyranny. Sometimes it's the tyranny of his own soul. You can tyrannize yourself. He always stands up against slavery and the same thing applies there. You can be a slave to your own convictions. You can be a slave to your idiot ideology. You can be a slave in your marriage. You can be a slave to your children. You can be a slave in a totalitarian state. You're going to have that dynamism of tyrant slave in your life in all times, not the mere archaic biblical. It's the same thing always. And a leader is always the person who calls the slaves to adopt responsibility, the responsibility that's in nobling and who stands up against the tyrant. And the injunction in the Exodus story is that if you attend to that which compels you forward, you'll become the leader that is capable of doing exactly that. And you know that, too, because those times in your life where you've pursued what you've been interested in without reservation and developed in consequence offers to you a kingdom within which you're sovereign and a space in which you can speak about what you know in a manner that compels and invites others. So that's the burning bush. The burning bush is what calls you to adventure. It's not all that calls you to adventure, but it's one major element of what calls you to adventure. In the biblical stories, God is defined as the spirit of adventure. This is very much worth knowing because modern people don't know where to find God, so to speak. God comes to you with the offering of meaning, not a good way of thinking about it, and the place that meaning reveals itself can transform, but the ultimate source of the meaning is constant. When you approach something that's meaningful, you might change enough so that that pursuit, you've exhausted that pursuit so it's no longer meaningful, and something new offers itself as your next destination, but it's the same thing again. And it's different for every person because what you're interested in isn't going to be what you're interested in. There might be some overlap, but it's very particularized, but it doesn't matter because it's all pointing. This is the monotheistic hypothesis. It's all pointing to the same thing. And so, okay, so what's a burning bush in relationship to what I'm going to talk to you about tonight? The story of Cane and Abel is a burning bush. A story that's been sufficiently interesting so that people have remembered it and told it for thousands and thousands of years. We have no idea for how long. It's a very, very old story, and it's very old in its written form, but the older a story is in the written form, the more likely it is that it's way older than that in an oral form. So like a story that's, say, 4,000 years old is probably a story that's 50,000 years old. So partly because the farther you go back in time, the slower things change. So if something exists at any point in the past, it's very, very likely that it's existed for an immense amount of time. Okay, so let's unpack the story of Cane and Abel, this burning bush, and let's see where it takes us. So Cane and Abel are the first two human beings. That's a good way of thinking about it. Now you might think, well, no, it's Adam and Eve. It's like, no, not really, because they're made by God. And so they don't really count, they're sort of, they're unique. They're not born. Cane and Abel are the first two people born after the fall when history starts. Adam and Eve are made by God and they live in the garden of paradise, and that's not true for any of you. And it's not true for Cane and Abel. So in a way, Adam and Eve are your ancestors in so far as they're the primordial mother and father of all, but in history, in the fallen world, Cane and Abel are the first two human beings. Okay, now they're brothers as well. Now they establish a pattern. Now, when Eve gives birth to Cane and Abel, she says, I've gotten a man from God. And the reason she says that is it's a precursor. It's of the same pattern as Mary's proclamation in the Gospels that her son Christ is a consequence of her impregnation by God. And so what does that mean at minimum, psychologically? Well, it means the father, biological father, contributes to reproduction, obviously, but in some ways very little, it's not a lot of work, right? And in a way, you don't have much to do with it, like you didn't create your body. You didn't generate any of the biological processes that give rise to the baby. The thing you actually contribute is 10 million times smaller than the egg, so that's a lot. Actually the definition of female is that sex, which contributes most to reproduction. That's a deeper definition than even the chromosomal definition. And so the male contributes something necessary, but most of the work is God in the woman, right? So the man can make up for that as time goes by because he can stick around. That's what Joseph does, right? That's what Joseph does in good faith, and that's when his contribution is elevated beyond the merely whimsical, let's say, or beyond the realm of immediate gratification. It's all prefigured in that very condensed statement that Eve makes about her gratitude for having been given her sons. Her sons are at war. Okay, why? Well, Cain and Abel represent two diametrically opposed patterns of adaptation to the fallen world. So what do we know about the fallen world? We know that it's a world that requires sacrifice. Okay. So when Adam and Eve are chased out of paradise, actually when they fall out of paradise as a consequence of their pride, God tells them that they're going to have to work. That the woman's work in large part is going to be centered around. The sacrifice is attendant upon establishing a relationship with a man, which is by necessity in some manner dependent in contrast to him because she has to make herself vulnerable in consequence of being a mother. That's her fate, and that's basically what God tells Eve. It's like, well, you muck things up because of your pride, you're now in the fallen world. Now you're stuck with this man and you're going to be beholden to him. He's not saying that's how it should be. He's saying that's how it's going to be. And then he tells Adam, well, you're in trouble, too, because as a consequence of your idiocy and your pride, not least in agreeing without resistance to everything Eve offered you, and then blaming her for the corruption that emerged as a consequence, your life is going to, your work is going to become painful and difficult, and the world won't easily bring forth its abundance to you. So what does all that mean? Well, one of the things it means is the more prideful and arrogant you are, the harder your work is going to be, right? So and you can imagine this, too, you know, even if you have a rough job, if you were wise enough to have some gratitude for that, and you entered into it in the full spirit of sacrifice and you did your difficult job without victimizing yourself and with full commitment. First of all, you might be able to take some joy in that job and a joy that might be commensurate with the transformation of your attitude, but it might also be the case that to the degree that you could accept your starting point without bitterness and resentment, and you could commit wholeheartedly to the task at hand that you would start to transform in a way that would take you out of that lowly position very rapidly. I would say in most societies that are reasonably functional and the United States is probably first and foremost in the world in this regard is that you can start in a pretty miserable place and if you are careful and you make the proper sacrifices, things can get better for you very, very rapidly. Now, to the degree that your society is just and productive and generous and stable, that's increasingly likely. But likely your country has done that better than any country's ever done it, and it's certainly in the situation now where you're still doing that better than it's done anywhere else. So, okay, so out of, or can enable, they're born into a world where sacrifice is a necessity. Okay, so now we need to understand what that means because if you want to understand the Western, the story of the West, and you want to understand the stories upon which the West itself is predicated, you have to understand what sacrifice means because the entire biblical corpus, which is the foundational text of the West, is a meta story about sacrifice. And it's very hard for modern people to wrap their heads around this 'cause they don't know what the hell sacrifice means. So, when I used to teach at the University of Toronto, I had a lot of immigrant kids in my class, most of them Asians, children of first generation immigrants, and I would ask them when I was trying to lose it at this, I'd ask them, "What did your parents sacrifice to get you here?" And believe me, at least among the Asian kids, there wasn't much doubt about that because their parents had told them like 8,000 times what they had sacrificed to get them to that damn university and part of that informing was, screw up and you'll pay for it 'cause we put everything on the line for you and that was dead serious. And so those kids were often firmly committed in a manner that was likely to make them more successful. But they knew what the sacrifice meant. Okay, but what, so, what does it mean that you sacrifice or even more than that? What does it mean that that's the pattern of human adaptation? Or even more than that, what does it mean that you sacrifice in relationship to God? Well, those are complicated questions. Well, let's start with sacrifice itself. There's no difference between sacrifice and maturity. Okay, so you can even think about this physiologically. What happens to you when you mature is that you replace your subjugation to your short term self-centered biological whims with the ability to delay gratification, plan for the future and engage in reciprocal play, in reciprocal offering. So if you and I are gonna play a game, one of the sacrifices I make to play that game is, you get to have a turn, and even more profoundly, now and then you get to pick the game. And so you see among children who are radically unpopular, that the reason they're unpopular is 'cause, they don't ever let anybody else have a turn. And no one else ever gets to pick the game. It's like my game or no game, which is one of the claims that's at the heart of the current culture war, by the way. I am whoever I say I am. And you better not get my way. It's like, well, that's all well and good for you, except, nobody's gonna wanna play with you, 'cause why would they? It's like, you know, I've run your marriage that way. It's like, you're just whoever you are in whatever way you wanna be at every given second and your partner doesn't get a say in the matter. Well, first of all, you do that for a few years and you're like, you're so far away from the straight, narrow path that you're gonna be in your own particular form of hell, because if you're ruled by nothing else then you're immediate whim. You're gonna end up in a place that's brutally miserable and isolated. Your identity is negotiated all the time. If you're in communal relationship, do you have a wife or a husband? If you have children, do you have parents? Do you have friends? You're taking turns and making sacrifices at every second. And the better you are at that, the better those relationships are gonna be. You know, I mean, it's not a useful thing to turn yourself into a martyr in relationship to your wife, but it's a very good thing to offer to your children and your wife and your friends and your community, the best that you have to offer. It's a very good thing to forstall your demand for immediate, hedonic self gratification for the sake of a higher unity. When you're disciplining two-year-olds, you're not punishing them for being selfish. That's not what you're doing, not if you're doing it right. What you're doing is freeing them from the subjugation of their immediate whim, so that could be their boisterousness, it could be their sorrow, it could be their rage, it could be their exhaustion and replacing that with the ability to regulate their emotions in a manner that allows them to become the sort of person who's eminently desirable as a friend and partner. That's the purpose of discipline, and there's no difference between that and cortical maturation. Those are the same things. You're born into the world, a war, a warring battleground of short-term motivation and emotion. That's what a two-year-old is. There's something fascinating about that. It's fun to be around two-year-olds, 'cause they're so alive, right? When they're angry, it's like they're 100% angry. It's kind of a miracle. They can lay on the ground and kick and hold their breath until they turn blue. That's, if you ever saw an adult do that, it would take you like five years to recover. So, and there are forms of adult pathology where the person afflicted is so immature that they're capable of having that kind of fit of rage. It's a terrifying thing to observe. You certainly don't want to see that ever let alone every day. People who are very afflicted by a pathologically prolonged immaturity will use the threat of that to obtain what they want. Don't upset your mother, whatever you do. Don't upset your mother, could be your father too. But you know what I mean is that behind that threat is the notion of explosive emotionality wielded as a weapon. When you help your child mature, you help them substitute the kind of integration that enables them to regulate all the emotions and their motivations with an eye to the long run so that they don't do things in the short term that hurt them in the medium to long run. But also in a manner that makes them eminently desirable socially so they can have friends. That's all sacrifice. So, human beings, when we became aware that we were naked and mortal, when we became aware that we were subject to pain and death, when we started to understand that, when we knew we had a boundary in time, we started to sacrifice. And what did we do? We started to work. There's no difference between sacrifice and maturity, but there's also no difference between sacrifice and work. They're the same concept. Why? Well, work is sacrificial. Well, why? Because when you work, you sacrifice the present for the future. It's like the definition of work. It's like you're not doing exactly what you want to do right now at this moment because that would be play. What you're doing instead is for going the need for immediate self-gratification so that things will be better for you in the medium to long-term, in a way that's also better for your wife and your kids and your community. And that's sacrificial. And there's a certain pain that's associated with it. People are relieved when it's Friday. So they can let their hair down a little bit. So they're not in harness, even though it's necessary to be in harness. We know that our life is sacrificial. So part of the mystery of our life is, well, how do we conduct ourselves sacrificial in the highest manner, which is what sacrifices are optimally pleasing to God? It's the same question. And what does that pattern of optimal sacrifice-- how does it appear? Well, this is exactly the mystery that's presented in the story of Cain and Abel. So Cain is an agriculturalist. And Abel is a keeper of-- he's a shepherd. We talked about shepherds already. He's a shepherd. And Cain and Abel make offerings to God. That's the-- so they both have their jobs. And they both make offerings. Well, your job is an offering. Your job is not only an offering. It's a covenantal offering. It's a contractual offering. Here's why. You assume if you work that you're banking the consequences of your work in the future. You're making a contract with the future. The contract is, if I give up my hedonic self-gratification in the present, and I invest, let's say, that that will pay off. OK, so pay off in what way? Well, if your society is well-organized, it'll pay off because the deal is that no one will steal what you've worked for. That's a really hard thing to establish. Because the default is, well, you have something I don't. took it from me and it's okay to kill you to get it back. Like that's the fate of mankind almost everywhere, almost always. You have to have one sophisticated society before it's default okay that people bank up their wealth, but if that isn't okay then you don't have any wealth. Because if the rule is you have some wealth as a consequence of sacrifice and then you die, no one is going to work obviously. And so you can imagine that that sacrificial covenant is a contractual arrangement with the future and with the community that if you make the proper offering you'll be rewarded in proportion. That's your faith in your community. That's your faith in the future. Look we know that as someone's life becomes more radically unpredictable and unstable because their community is degenerating they'll turn to short-term gratification as a strategy. And it's because if you can't rely on your community you can't store anything of value up. Why in the world would you make any sacrifices? You're just a full vend. You sacrifice in the present so you have no short-term gratification but there's no payoff. Well no one's going to do that. You want to set up your society so that your sacrificial offerings are banked and stored. The best way to do that by the way is not in money but in reputation. The best storehouse of wealth for sacrifice is in your reputation for generosity, hospitality and productive self-sacrifice. Is it people think highly of you genuinely? Then you're protected against every storm in a way that nothing else can protect you. And that's how what's moral and highest lines up perfectly with the spirit of the highest possible sacrifice. Okay so can enable sacrifice. Now we don't hear much about Cain's sacrifices. We only know that he offers up the fruits of the soil. The story doesn't say much else about that. It does say a fair bit about able sacrifice. It says that what able does is he takes the best of the best and he offers that to God. So he has unblemished perfect animals and he takes the cuts of meat from those animals that are of the highest quality and then he cuts off the parts of those that are of the highest quality, the fattiest cuts and he offers them to God. Okay and so how does he do that? Well he does that on an altar. He burns them. Okay so first of all the burning. Remember people are acting this out. They're trying to grapple with something they don't understand which is the spirit of sacrifice. People are learning that they can sacrifice the present for the future that they can store value. They're trying to figure out what that means. They do it the way children do it in some ways. They dramatize it. They play it out and it's all an attempt to come to understand it more and more explicitly. It's the dream. It's the dream of the representation of sacrifice. They offer it to God. They offer Cain Abel offers his best to God. Okay what does that mean? It means that if you offer your best you're most likely to be accepted. That's the deal. Now you might be cynical about that. Say well I am best punished for my virtues. I've tried very very hard and I haven't been accepted but let's take that apart a little bit. Look if you have a son and you love him you don't say to him ever. Yeah really even if you're a criminal although there's some you know deviation from this among criminal subcultures. You don't say to him look kid here's how you should conduct yourself. You should lie and cheat and steal whenever you get a chance. Deceit is your best move forward. You should always stab a friend in the back if it's gonna be useful to you. If you're on a sports team hog the glory and distribute the blame and manipulate and short change at every opportunity. Okay first of all you'd never say that to anyone you love. Even if you're pretty damn bent and people who are criminal even at the extremes are genuine generally not so delusional that they'll teach those lessons directly to their own children. Now I understand that as I said that there you can be so lost that you'll actually want to corrupt even your own son but you get my point. No one with the vague bit of soul left thinks that the proper lesson for your children is the lesson in the least possibly desirable sacrifice. What do you tell them instead? You say well look kid maybe they're off to play baseball for the first time. You say look what do you say? Do your best right and that's what you want to go watch your child playing a sport and you want to see him do his best and so what does that mean okay what does it mean for him to do his best. Well it could mean to be highly skilled right because it beats fun if you have a child who's very skilled athletically and is the star on the field but he even if he is the star there would have been a period of time where he had to develop that. What you want to see is that your kids out there pushing himself so that with each practice he gets better so he's in this zone of proximal development right he's beyond his zone of comfort and he's unfolding himself in relationship to skill but that's not all you want to see in fact it's not even the most important thing you want to see me you could imagine going to a sports event with your son and he's clearly the star and he never he's playing soccer he never passes the ball even when one of his teammates is open he's always trying to hog the glory for himself if he does score a goal maybe scores three of them and is genuinely the hero of the game he comes off the field and bitches and complains about all the losers on his team and he wants all the attention and if you have any sense as a parent you're pretty appalled by that even if he is the star and you think you know kid it doesn't matter whether you win or lose it matters how you play the game and that's a sacrificial piece of advice because what you're basically saying is you're not trying to win this game kid you're trying to win the game in a manner that makes you most desirable as a play partner and so what would that mean well what would you want to see for your son you'd want to see well when he has the opportunity he tosses the ball over to someone else to give them a chance and I don't mean in the kind of condescending manner I mean in a manner that would help the team be better across time and you want to see him encouraging people when they push themselves and you want to see him inviting the people who are less well integrated in the team into the community and you want to see him emerging as team captain so he's a leader and then maybe if he's highly skilled and a leader it's like you've got yourself a good deal right and so and then you'd say well you did his best he offered his best and can't able offers his best so the moral injunction in the story of can enable is that the proper pattern of sacrifices to offer your best cane doesn't do that okay so what does it mean not to offer your best well it's lazy obviously and what does lazy mean it means it means you're doing less than you could well how's that gonna work if you have any sense you know that your life isn't impossibly difficult and to to offer what's less than what's your best is to make the assumption that you are so remarkable that you're going to be able to establish yourself properly in life with the second rate effort well you know good luck to that because life is impossible and you'll barely get through it unscathed and won't actually even if you do offer your best and if you're playing a second rate game you haven't got a chance and then if you play a second rate game there's a lot of things that go along with that you have to assume that other people are too stupid to see through that and so then you get arrogant and you also have to assume that and you have to lie to yourself so that you don't have to face the unpleasant truth that you're offering less than your best and so that makes you delusional and then you have to propose and act out the proposition that you're so much the center of things that you can offer less than your best and that will even fool God because you're gonna get away with it and so well so that's what Cain does and then it doesn't work his sacrifice is rejected by God because it's not of the highest quality and so then what happens well it's exactly what happens in life so what happens if people fail as a consequence of their second-rate sacrifices, well they get unhappy and miserable and bitter. And so that's what happens to Cain. It says in the story that his countenance falls, so he's depressed and embittered and and possessed by rage and vengeful. And that's just where things get going. And then he shakes his fist at God and challenges him. In the story of Job, Job is visited by all the catastrophes of life. And very unfairly, even by the admission of God, his business is collapsed, his family is destroyed, it gets a terrible disfiguring illness, he's sitting in the ashes, bereft of hope, and then his friends come along and tell him that well he deserved what happened to him, because nothing happens without a reason. And they're kind of happy about it, you know, in that horrible way that makes bitter people thrilled when something may respect is destroyed so that they don't have to bear the burden of that ideal. And Job is so bereft that his wife says to him, "There's nothing left for you except to shake your fist at God, curse God and die." And why? Well, curse God because the world is revealed itself, the created order has revealed itself as entirely antithetical to anything you might desire. And there's going to be times in your life where you feel exactly that, you know, where you're apparently put in the effort and things have still gone sideways for you. And it can get to the point where it's so demoralizing that you are unhappy and demoralized and also angry, and Job takes that on and says, "I don't care what happens to me, I'm not going to lose faith in the essential goodness of my being, and I'm not going to lose faith in the spirit that gave rise to the created order." No matter what, that's the key issue in the story of Job. No matter what, there's a moral lesson there which is you are required to maintain your faith in yourself and in the essential goodness of the spirit that creates order, regardless of the circumstances of your life. Not least because if you don't do that, it'll be worse because you could imagine this, you know, imagine everything falls apart around you. You won't have to imagine that because there'll be times when that happens. But imagine that everything falls apart around you and unfairly. And then imagine that you let that make you bitter. You say the facts themselves speak to the necessity for my bitterness. You let that make you bitter. It destroys your faith in yourself and it makes you angry about the fact of reality itself. Well, then along with your suffering, you have the collapse of everything that could conceivably move you forward. And so you're no better off. You still have all the suffering. Plus, you've lost faith. And so the hell you were in is way deeper now. The story of Job is the proclamation that you maintain faith no matter what. That's a hell of a thing to think through no matter what. Part because that's your best bet. It's that's not the only reason. But it's partly because that is genuinely your best bet. Now, you know that you admire people who can do this. You see people who've been dealt a miserable blow by fate and they maintain themselves ethically. They continue to strive upward under their unbearable load. And you think there's really something to behold there. And if you have any sense, you pray that in similar circumstances, you'd have the nobility to manage the same. Cain does the opposite. He goes to God, he says, "Look, buddy, I'm not very happy about your world. I'm breaking myself in half here, shoulder in my load, and nothing's working out for me." And that able of yours, who you seem to favor, he doesn't have to do anything really. And the sun shines on him all the time. His life is easy. That's the statement of bitterness. All success is due to unfair ease. Well, that's what Cain tells God. You accept able sacrifices. You don't accept mine. That has nothing to do with me. Quite the contrary, there's something wrong with you. And you know, that's a problem because he's talking to God. And in some ways, it doesn't even matter if he's right. He's not, but it doesn't matter. It's like, you don't get the question the moral order. That's what Eve does. That's what Adam does. That's their sin. That's what knocks them out of paradise. They take, they incorporate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. They take it on to themselves to define the moral order. You don't get to do that. That's not within your purview, so to speak, as a created entity. You're to discover the moral order and abide by it. But that's not Cain's suggestion. Cain's suggestion is, "Things aren't working out for me because you, God, made a mistake when you established the foundations of the earth." Now, that's a hell of a thing to say, right? It's Luciferian in presumption, because Cain is saying, think about that. He's saying that his failures are an indication of a flaw in the structure of reality itself. There isn't anything more prideful that you could possibly say than that. Now, you can understand why he might want to say it because it'd be pretty damn convenient, pretty convenient if everything, every time everything went wrong for you, was actually God's fault, and that you were actually perfect in every possible way, and all of your failures were a direct reflection of the inadequacy of God and being itself. You've got to ask yourself, like, who the hell do you think you are? Well, that's exactly the situation that Cain finds himself in. So he goes to God with all these complaints, and God says, "If you did well, you'd be accepted." Okay, now, you know, you could debate that because it isn't immediately obvious that we reap a reward every time we do something right. But here's something that I decided to experiment with many years ago. Here's a proposition, you can tell me what you think about this. You can think about this. If you tell the truth, whatever happens to you in consequence is the best thing that could happen, even if you can't see it at the time. So that's a statement of faith. It's a hypothesis about the way reality is structured. So, you know, people lie because they don't want to face the consequences of telling the truth. Obviously, when a child lies, it's because he wants to get away with something that he shouldn't get away with, or he wants to have the world deliver him something he doesn't deserve. Entirely understandable why people lie. Well, then why not lie? Well, one answer is, even though you're not wise enough to see it, there is no better pathway forward than the truth. And so, God's statement to Cain, strangely enough, is something like, you don't have a better deal than doing your best. There's no alternative to that, or or all alternatives to that lead to hell. When Job is tortured, he gets everything back because he maintains faith. It takes a while and it isn't obvious that the fact that he gets everything back justifies the torture, right? It's not an ends justify the mean sort of thing. It's more reflection of the fact that, regardless of the circumstances of your life, you're called upon to offer your best, even when things are most dire, maybe particularly when they're most dire. So that's what God tells Cain. It's like, if you did well, you'd be accepted. And then he says something, this is all very subtle in the text. He says, sin crouches at your door like a sexually aroused predatory animal, and you invited it in to have its way with you. You know, and you could say that Cain could excuse his behavior. He could say, look, God, I know I'm bitter and resentful and miserable and dangerous, but I've been tortured a lot, and there's a causal connection between the degree of my misery, even though it might be someone warranted, there's a causal connection between how miserable I've been and how unhappy and bitter and resentful I've become. I couldn't help it. Anybody in my situation would have done the same thing. Okay, so I've met people, I interviewed a friend of mine, Charles Joseph on my YouTube channel, who was brutalized in a residential school in Canada in a manner that brings to mind nothing more than Auschwitz. It was absolutely nothing less than Auschwitz. It was absolutely brutal. You can't listen to what happened to him without it like just taking you out. And it really hurt him unsurprisingly, and he was on the streets for a long time and was an angry guy and no wonder. But you know, he decided He became an artist. You know, that was his-- burning bush. He became a great artist. He quit drinking. He got himself off the street. He's managed to have a family. He's good to his kids. He's a good person. He had every reason to be every goddamn nightmare you could possibly imagine. And with full justification. But the thing is, there is no justification for that. No matter what happens to you, there's no justification. That's what God tells Cain. He says, "Look, you would like to think that the reason that you're unhappy and miserable and bitter and resentful and fratricidal and murderous is because your life has been so difficult that anyone would have been transformed into a monster merely as a consequence of suffering what you suffered." But that's not how it worked at all, buddy. You had an option. Here was the option. The temptation to become that way made itself manifest on just outside the door of your house. And it made you an offer which was possession by the spirit of murderous resentment. And you didn't have to open the door. But you did. And you didn't just open the door. You hopped into bed with that beast and you let it have its way with you. And so now I've studied people who've done terrible things and I've had more than a few of them as clients. And I can tell you, if you want to get to a place where you're going to do something truly terrible, like shoot up a high school or an elementary school, you're going to spend like 2,000 hours fantasizing about it, right? You're going to take your bitterness and your resentment because of your rejection, let's say, because of your suffering. And we could even say, "That's warranted. You were rejected and you were suffering." That's not the point is that along with that rejection and suffering came a temptation and the temptation was to open the door to the spirit that would enable you to capitalize on that. And then you invite that in and you enter into a creative union with it and you start to dwell and brood on it and you start to fantasize about your revenge and you start to presume that you're in a position to judge man, man kind and God and you put yourself in a position where your murderous and then suicidal outburst is the culmination of the darkest fantasies produced by your miserable sacrifices and unaccepted sufferings and you're consorting with the devil that you've invited into your soul. And that is how these things work and so that's what God tells Cane. And Cane is not very happy about that because it's the last thing he wants to hear. What he wants to hear is, "Sorry, Cane. This is God speaking. I obviously made a mistake when I established the foundations of the world and you've borne the brunt about with the misery of your life and I'll do everything I can to make it up to you and none of this is your fault." And that isn't what God tells Cane at all. He says, "Hey, buddy, this is on you and you know it and you invited it in and you didn't have to and you decided you decided to enter into a creative union with the heart of darkness itself and that's why you're miserable." And Cane, he leaves that conversation. He wasn't very happy to begin with. He's seriously not happy after that conversation. And so then he goes to Abel and he says, "Hey, bro, let's go out in the field and do some work." You know, we'll engage in a productive enterprise together using his position as his brother to facilitate that interaction and he kills Abel. And so what does that mean? It means that bitterness and resentment kills the ideal. Now Cane and Abel are the two patterns of software-croficial adaptation that characterize humanity. There's in their extreme. There's the all-in spirit which is, "I will do whatever necessary to aim up. I'll offer whatever's necessary to put things right. I'll do my best in every gesture and every work. I'll do that in good faith with an eye to the future in a communal spirit with no holds part." And the other pattern is, "I'll cheat and lie and pervericate and manipulate and offer what second rate and deceitful and I'll trumpet my bitterness and resentment as a moral virtue and all develop the spirit that becomes the enemy of God and the enemy of what's good." It's Christ and Satan in their nascent forms and that pattern is established as the fundamental pattern of mankind at the beginning of the biblical narrative. Two attitudes towards work, two attitudes towards sacrifice, one which leads to the pathway that Abel walks on which is walking with God in the garden and proceeding up hill in the proper sacrificial attitude and the other is, the other is the pathway that leads to you, not only killing your brother, killing your productive, successful, generous and productive brother, because he's productive and successful in generous, to spite him and God even if it involves your own destruction or maybe even because it does. Look, you watch these people shoot up high schools and then kill themselves and you think, why didn't you just do the world to favor and reverse the order? And the answer is, well, that's not the proper dramatic statement because the proper dramatic statement is something like, well, I care nothing for my own life. I've already given that up. But I'm making the dramatic point about my resentment and moral superiority a lot more effectively if I take out the people you love and then shoot myself as well to show just how little I care. And me, you know, maybe you can't understand that. You should understand it because you need to because you need to be afraid of that so you don't do it. It's understandable why you wouldn't want to see that and would never want to think that you could approach that kind of conceptualization, but in your most embittered moments, the spirit that motivates that kind of action is their offering itself, offering an invitation to you. And that's true of everyone. That's why these two spirits can enable their you, right, in the deepest possible sense. So, Cain kills Abel and then God calls him on it. And Cain says, am I my brother's keeper? And the proper answer to that is yes. But Cain sloughs off his responsibility. But he also says to God at the same time, my punishment is greater than I can bear. Well, why? Well, if you destroy your own ideal, what Cain's better because he wants to be able in the most fundamental, at the most fundamental level, Cain admires worships everything Abel represents. And then he goes and destroys that. Well, if a society turns on those who are properly sacrificial and successful, the society disintegrates into utter chaos. If you define success itself as exploitative or pathological or indicative of the fundamental unjust injustice of the world itself, then your society is doomed. If you murder the spirit that represents the best in you, what's left for you? There's nothing left for you. Well, that's what happens to Cain. God says, you will now visit the land of Nod. You'll now be an inhabitant of the land of Nod. Nod is the land of the wandering. Okay, so when do you become an inhabitant of the land of the wandering? Well, that's what a psychopathic itinerant does, the drifter who moves from place to place. Well, why? Well, you know, I can screw you over once. But the second time is harder and the third time might be impossible. And so if I'm going to allow the spirit of malevolence and bitterness to take root in me, the only way I can survive is to wander. That's why the strange loner who moves from place to place is a literary trope. If your sacrifices are second rate and your fundamental orientation is embittered and selfish, you're consigned to wandering. Okay, and it's obvious, too, because if you're if the pattern of proper sacrifices maturity and it's the maturity upon which the stability of the future and the community depends, if engaging in that process of sacrifices, what makes you welcome in the community, rejecting it entirely, is going to make it impossible for you to have a community, for you to have a wife, for you to have a family, for you to have any friends, for you to be welcome anywhere. 'Cause you've rejected exactly that. You've rejected the sacrifice that would enable you to become desirable to others. And so, of course, you're gonna wander. And that is exactly the fate of the criminal psychopath, let's say, the bitter criminal psychopath, who thinks he's smarter than everyone else, who's always unhappy and miserable, who's shaking his fist constantly in a cynical manner about the validity of the created order. Well, that isn't where the story ends. Cain's descendants are worse than him. So imagine now that Cain is the pattern that punishes the successful and rebels against God. The descendants of Cain would be the consequences of that decision. Lamec is one of the descendants of Cain. If you kill, if you bother Cain, he kills you. If you bother Lamec, he kills seven of you. Okay, so what does that mean? It means that once that pattern of murderous resentment gets established, it spreads. You wonder how a society deteriorates. That's how it deteriorates. You get that pattern establishing itself, then it has children. And the children are worse, and the grandchildren are worse yet. You get a situation like Rwanda, where the entire country is overwhelmed with murderous brutality in a three-week period, and a million people are brutally decimated. Societies deteriorate like that all the time. What's the biblical message in the story of Cain and Abel? Make second-rate sacrifices. End up bitter and resentful. Shake your fist at God. Invite in the spirit that motivates your desire to destroy everything successful and good. Give rise to the children that are genocidal and let everything vanish. What's the next story? The flood. Well, so that's the story of Cain and Abel. Two patterns of sacrifice, right? One that leads upward. One that is in keeping with the proper covenantal relationship with self, mankind and God. The other, that's prideful, bitter, deceitful, vengeful, murderous, fratricidal, and then genocidal. And that's the battle between good and evil that characterizes the narrative landscape that is the best possible representation of the world that we actually inhabit. Because the patterns that are portrayed in that narrative representation are the fundamental patterns of sacrificial adaptation. And that's the pattern of human being and becoming. And that's the prescription for a life properly lived. Offer your best to God or face the consequences. And so that's the end of that story. Thank you very much, everyone. (audience applauds) All right, so Constantine is gonna come out. I brought Constantine along in part to push me on these ideas. I'm running this tour in part to reintroduce an appreciation for sacred stories among the people who are at least listening to this lecture series who will read my book. It's a very contentious enterprise. Why the story, why these stories? What does it mean that we should or do or must believe in them? Why should we accept that? Well, Constantine's a good critic and it's useful to be pushed. And so he's going to come out and harass me. And then he's gonna go through the questions that you all so kindly offered and we're gonna discuss them. And that'll bring the evening to a close. So that's the plan. Come on out, sir. - Well, everybody, thank you. Give it up for Jordan one more time, everybody. (audience applauds) All right. So harass you, say, Jordan, you'd like me to harass you. All right, well, I agree with everything you said. By the way, Jordan invited me along to disagree with him. We've had one show together. I haven't landed a glove on him yet, but we'll try. I agree with everything you said. It was a great lecture about how to live your life. What I don't understand is why you called your tour, we who wrestled with God. Everything you said, you know, engage with the challenge that seeks you out. Do so with passion. We can go down the stories. Everything you said, sacrifice in the way that the parents of the Asian kids did. All of the things you talked about, it's great advice, but what does that, you didn't explain in any way why God is necessary for any of that. It's great, it's great advice. As a clinical psychologist, you could be sitting here. Why is it God up there? I would say most profoundly, when we finally heal the wound that's divided the West, say, between the enlightenment and the religious enterprise, people will look back and wonder why it ever existed because they'll draw the same conclusion you did, which is, well, obviously that's true. In the biblical corpus, what God is is continually defined. So in the final analysis, the God that's presented both in the Old and the New Testament is ineffable, right? His fundamental nature is unknowable. It's conceptualized as something that you have a relationship with. So it's relational, but apart from that, all you ever see is God's back, like Moses does. You never get a glimpse of the totality. You get hints of the manifestation of the spirit of the cosmic order in different partial manifestations. And what the biblical library does is walk you through those manifestations. And so the story of Canaan Abel isn't an argument for the existence of God exactly. It's a definition of what constitutes God. Okay, so God in that story is the spirit that rewards proper sacrifices. God is the spirit that punishes deceitful presumption. And God is the target of all proper sacrifice. Those are definitions. They're definitions. Hold on a second. Well, why is it necessary? Because the stories, and let's say that they're just good metaphors. They're good metaphors for teaching our children have to behave in the world. Life is a marshmallow to sacrifice now so that you will benefit later and the people around you. Do act in a way that enhances your proper reputation with other people. These are all good lessons. Why does this have anything to do with God? Why are they good lessons? Because they're practically useful. Why are they practically useful? We empirically observe that they are. Because they reflect the fundamental moral order. Well, that's the practical answer is that, see, this is something that Jonathan Pazzo has helped me more deeply understand. It's that at some point, the fact of the practicality of the metaphor is a pointer to something that's more than metaphorical. So, and it's a weird, it's a strange thing because it's partly definitional. It's partly metaphorical. But it's not, it doesn't exhaust itself in the metaphor. These are practical lessons because they most deeply reflect the fundamental nature reality. You could also think about that as definitional. You could think of the fundamental reality as being something like a meaningless material substrate with a moral order on top of it. That's one way of looking at it. The Judeo-Christian biblical corpus inverts that says, no, the moral order is fundamental. If you conceptualized reality properly, you would see a hierarchy of moral order with something united at its pinnacle that you should embody that in every gesture and every word and that will put you in alignment with not only the created order that's good, but the spirit that gives rise to the created order that's good. It's a definition. It's a proposition about what's most real. You see, the question you ask comes from the position you've already made an axiomatic decision of faith. Your axiomatic decision is, the meaningless material order is most real. There's a moral order on top of that. Well, that's one way of looking at things, but the problem with looking, one of the problems with looking at it, that way is that, well, why does it work? It wouldn't work if it wasn't. This is a definition of true. If it really works, it's true. If it's really true, it points to that, which is deepest. Now, I don't exactly understand that, because to some degree, I'm in the same conundrum as most materialist atheists, you know, I don't know how to understand the relationship between the 14 billion years that the cosmos has made itself manifest, and the fact that consciousness has only existed, well, at least at maximum, since life itself emerged. I have no idea how to conceptualize what was there before there was anything conscious. I don't even know at all what role consciousness itself plays in the cosmic order per se. But by the same token, if you have the best possible map, if the map you have is the ultimate treasure map. And if you follow the direction that that treasure map specifies, and it leads you to the treasure, then not only is it the best possible map, it's the map that best represents the underlying territory. Sure. Right. So the underlying territory would have the moral order built into it, rather than something that's epiphenomenal. And if it's an emergent property, it'd be a reflection of something even deeper. Now, I wouldn't say that I understand that completely, but I would say that your instinct for meaning, for example, is a pointer in that direction. Like it is the case that your attention is captured by markers that move you to the ultimate treasure. That's how you're set up physiologically. Or even if you're a materialist, for example, you have to contend with the fact that the evolutionary process itself has shaped you into something that fundamentally perceives the world as a story. So Pazzo, Jonathan Pazzo's objection would be, well, how is the world not a story if perceiving it as a story is the most functional possible mode of perception? These are brains of quite primitive in relation to the reality that we're attempting to process. Why is, okay, the fact that I need to tell myself a story about this infinite selection of stimuli, and I need to pick out the ones that I need to tell the story that helps me in the current moment, does not mean that the world is a story. That means my primates of brain is only capable of experiencing it as a story. Then your presumption is that your pathway forward to maximal adaptation is necessarily predicated on something that's false. So then the metaphysical presumption underneath that is that in order for you to thrive in the world, you are obligated to adopt a falsehood. What is the falsehood? While you said that the presumption that there's an implicit moral order is merely a consequence of, let's say, our primitiveness, there's lots of psychological schools that have taken that tack. The paramanagement theorists believe that, for example, is that life is fundamentally pointless in the final analysis, that everything we do comes to naught, that the existential reality of that is so cataclysmic that we have to delude ourselves practically and philosophically into abiding, into inhabiting necessary delusional fictions in order to reconcile ourselves to the fundamental horror of existence. And you know, I can understand why people, I don't think it's true. My sense is that. No do I. Okay. Okay. Let me try this a different way and maybe bring it back into the real world. So one of the things, obviously you and I have both talked about a lot is the malaise that seems to be affecting the West. Yeah. That's a good example. And your argument is that Christianity or Judeo Christianity, let's say, is the water in which we swim and having removed the water, the fish on our floundering. Is that fair? It's a massive obvious simplification. Sure. That'll do. Right? What if as our good friend Louise Perry is written in her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, this is simply a product of the fact that in the 60s we invent and roll out the pill. The pill has massive repercussions on women, the way their brain works, the way they choose mates. And that has a downstream consequence on the family unit, the breakdown of the family. And really, what we're facing is a crisis of meaning because people, the thing that gay people meaning, which is the reproduction of their genes, someone like Dawkins might argue. Right? And as a new father, I certainly agree with that. There's the most meaningful thing I've ever done. What we're facing is a society in which I use the word, advisedly, the sacred bond between men and women has been ruptured. What's the moral precondition for the invention and distribution of the pill? And does that become allowable more? When does it become desirable? Under what circumstances does that become desirable? Because birth control itself was illegal, many places for a very long time. So before you get the pill, you get a revolution in ethics that makes the pill possible and then desirable and then necessary. What is that revolution in your opinion? That's what I'm asking you. What do you think? I don't know. How about pleasure without consequence? How about pleasure without responsibility? How about the deepest possible pleasure with the least amount possible, with the least amount of responsibility possible? How about that as an ethical transformation that makes it even okay to investigate the pill? Now look, I agree with you, by the way, that the pill itself has had incalculable and incalculable effect on our society. We know, for example, that women who are on the pill like men who aren't the men they would like if they weren't on the pill. Yeah, this is not a trivial problem. We know that women on the pill like less masculine men, facially, let's say, and temperamentally. So here's a question for you, is the antipathy, how much of the antipathy of feminists towards masculine men is a consequence of the birth control pill? The answer is, don't know, we have no idea. I mean, messing with hormones is like that's a fundamental, that's a fundamental revolution. We have no idea how fundamental. We have no idea, for example, if it's the sort of revolution that destroys the world. Like, it could easily be because it's equivalent to the fact that women now have control over the reproductive function is equivalent to a revolutionary genetic mutation. Okay, but that's not exactly the issue. The issue is, what moral transformations have to take place before the offering of such a solution becomes morally desirable? And I would say, we know what happened. Everyone knows what happened. What happened when the pill emerged? Okay. The family fell apart, and that started in the socio-economically marginalized and moved up the socio-economic hierarchy, and now the only people not affected are basically the wealthy who are married to the same degree that they were in 1960, but all the other classes aren't. Okay. So then what happened? Well, we have the sexual revolution. Well, what was the sexual revolution? The sexual revolution was, you can pursue pleasure of the short term kind, with whoever the hell you want to, under any conditions whatsoever, at any time and place, and that's normally allowable, but desirable. Okay. So here's a technical problem with that. This is very much worth knowing. So in the biological community at large, the community of living things that sexually reproduce, there's a distribution of reproductions of strategies. On the one end are puff balls and mosquitoes, and that's the make lots of offspring and invest nothing in them strategy. So a mosquito will have millions of offspring, and all of them die, but like one. So we have a kind of constant supply of mosquitoes, but The ratio of life to death among Juvenile mosquitoes is very, very low, they all die. Puff balls, same thing. No investment in offspring, massive production of numbers. On the other end, literally on the other end are human beings. We produce very few offspring at a very high price and we invest in them multi-generatially. So where high investment, our reproductive strategy is a high investment, sacrificial strategy. Okay, now, so we'll establish that just biologically. So in order for human beings to propagate themselves, we've adopted a long-term monogamous child-centered, sacrificial, multi-generational strategy for the rearing of children. Now if that falls apart, children don't do well. A clinical literature on that, or it's crystal clear, like fatherlessness, for example. It's a catastrophe, and any clinician who proclaims otherwise is either deluded or deceitful. Because there's almost nothing documented better in the developmental literature than that. Okay, why? Well, children are difficult. It's hard. It takes like 18 years before they can more or less make their way, or 40 years. And it's too much for one person, especially in their early years, because if you're the mother, which you will be, if you gave birth to the child, then you're going to be economically compromised in a deadly serious way for five months during the pregnancy, and then for at least four years after that, and way more than that if you have multiple children. And so you need someone long to help with that, and maybe the minimum person you need is the father. You probably need some, like friends and grandparents and so forth. Okay, so we have this multi-generational sacrificial strategy. Okay, so now just imagine you take just human beings, and you divide them into two mating strategies, short-term zero investment, and long-term sacrificial. Okay, short-term zero investment, that's the one-night stand crowd. Most of them are men, because women pay a much higher price, obviously, for sexual promiscuity. Now, hypothetically, the pill eradicates that, and in some ways it does. That's why we have a sexual revolution, but in many ways it doesn't. Okay, that's fine, so let's say it doesn't matter, because once you have the pill, it's okay to engage in short-term mating strategies, the pursuit of pleasure without responsibility. Because the pill eliminates the consequences, so then who cares? Then let's party. Well, that was like the 1960s. Well, you know, we had an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, oops, and that was AIDS in its most severe manifestation, and that could have wiped us all out. It didn't, but that's more good fortune than anything else. So, you know, nature had its revenge in that regard, let's say, because the problem with sex is it's a great factor for the transmission of diseases, and that's a major problem. But the whole '60s sex party kind of came to a targary end by the mid-70s, and everyone, and that went along with the increased proliferation of pornography and so forth. Okay, so what's wrong with that? I mean, if we can get away with it, why not do it? So how have psychologists addressed this? They've looked at the personality characteristics of short-term maters. So imagine you are temperamentally inclined, or you teach yourself to adopt a hedonistic orientation towards sex. Okay, so what does that look like? Well, we know what it looks like. It looks like the dark tetrap. So what's the dark tetrap? It's a constellation of personality traits that have to do with the exploitation of self and other in pursuit of short-term gratification. Well, you might say who cares about that, like if you can obtain pleasure in the short-term, and there's no consequences because of the pill, then have adder. Okay, fair enough, who are these people? They're narcissistic, which means they want reputational status without doing any of the work necessary to obtain it genuinely. They're Machiavellian, which means that they use their words for no other reasons than to manipulate for short-term gain. They're psychopathic. So that's fun. That means they're parasitic predators. They'll steal what you have and they'll live off you with no work. And that was the dark triad. That was how that was identified first, and then the research is delved even more deeply into it because they hadn't got to the bottom of hell yet. And it turned out that an additional constellation of personality traits had to be added to that, sadistic. A sadistic person takes positive delight in the suffering of others. Dark tetrap types preferentially pursue short-term mating strategies. But the reverse is true, too. If you preferentially pursue short-term mating strategies, that's who you turn yourself into. All right, so it could easily be that the pill has produced a breakdown of familial structure, an irresponsible breakdown of familial structure, a proliferation of pornography, and all sorts of associated social cataclysms. But I would say that in itself is reflective of something even more fundamental, which is a breakdown of the social order that's predicated on the primacy, the necessary primacy of the optimal long-term sacrificial pattern. Well, I don't understand how you've made that leap, but I want to get some audience questions. And by the way, when you were describing that type of person, every woman in the audience is going, yeah, I've had an ex-boyfriend like that. Oh, well, the other thing I could tell you in that regard is that, so these, the men who adopt this pattern, the narcissistic types, they're like Gaston and Beauty and the Beast. So they, I mean that, that's a representation of this sort of man. Those men mimic sacrificial competence. So they're confident, right? Now, women look at men to see if they're confident, because they use confidence as a marker for competence. But a deceitful, narcissistic psychopath has confidence without the competence. And naive women can't tell the difference. And so we know that narcissistic psychopath, dark tetra, short-term maters are much more successful with naive young women than with women who've had some maturity and experience. Because with maturity and experience, the women learn to tell the difference between the tamerable beasts and the, and the narcissists, Jordan very quickly, because I do want to get a couple of audience questions. And but just explain to me so that I understand if nothing else, why is it that the technology of the pill, the sexual revolution, the dropping testosterone levels and men, which we see from generation to generation? Why is that not enough to explain everything that's happening? Why do you say the, the shift in cultural attitude had to come first? Because you wouldn't have even had the pill as a phenomenon, and if we hadn't already decided at a, decided at a cultural level that we could prioritize short-term sexual gratification over everything else. But that probably wouldn't have been how it was perceived at the time. It was like, here's this new technology that gives women a time. Yeah, I know, yes and no. Look, there was some notion and perhaps some warranted notion that wouldn't it be a wonderful thing if people could plan their families intelligently? Right. And I think we're still sorting that out, you know, because I could understand my wife used birth control. We used birth control. I can understand why that's desirable. So there was that. There was, well, wouldn't it be good if we could, if we could plan our lives out more particularly? And you can understand why people think that's a good idea. Whether or not it's a good idea is a different question because another idea is, if you could choose to have children, would you? And the answer appears to be no, because we're way below replacement in terms of production of children in the West. And some of that, part of that's partly because, well, when's a good time to have children? And the answer is, well, never is a good time, obviously. And also, you know, should you bring a child into a world such as this? And at least that's sufficiently disputable to forestall the decision. So perhaps it was a good idea for that choice to open up, but it's not self-evident that it was a good idea. But at the same time, there were also sorts of social currents making themselves manifest in the early 60s that were tilting us hard in the direction of a much more hedonistic society. And it wasn't many decades before that birth control per se was illegal. And part of that was, and I'm not saying it should have been, that's not my point, you had to have a conjunction of the notion that the pursuit of sexual pleasure without responsibility per se was at least allowable and perhaps even desirable before even research on the pill could have taken place. There had to be a transformation more of you before the technology could possibly make itself manifest. To be continued. enjoy that. Great. Christina says, what is your favorite verse in the Bible and why? Make this one quick, because I want to get a couple more in. Probably the truth will set you free. That's a good one. Yeah. Can I explain why briefly? It's your show, man. You can do whatever the hell you want. Well, if you imagine that if, if what's true most accurately represents, if, if true words most accurately map the territory, well, how could you possibly be more free than that? I mean, you're going to run into the fewest possible obstacles. Now, that could easily not be none, right? Because getting through life without running into obstacles, you can just give that up. But in terms of optimized strategy, it could easily be that just the truth is the best. And I think that's true. One of the things you see in the story of Abraham too is that there's an insistence. This kind of builds in the biblical corpus overall. There's an insistence that the call to adventure and the truth are the same thing. That's part of the monotheistic hypothesis. Hypothesis, the logos that gives rise to the created order at the beginning of time is, is the spirit of truth. And it's the spirit of truth is deemed identical to the spirit of adventure. Right? So this, the, the accumulation of the stories builds up a portrait of the unified, of the unified character that sits at the pinnacle of the moral hierarchy. Truth most accurately maps the territory and provides the most adventurous journey forward. Well, that is free. That's the right kind of freedom. See, the thing about telling the truth, this is a wonderful thing to understand is you don't know what's going to happen. Like, you're not calculating. And you might think, well, what if I don't get what I want? It's like, what the hell do you know? Like, how many times have you got what you wanted? And that didn't work out for you. Because your aim was off. To walk, to have the spirit of truth guide your words is to follow the spirit where it listeth. It's to go where truth takes you. And there's kind of no burden in that because you can just say what you think. And then you can see what happens and god only knows what will happen. But at minimum, it's going to be a surprise. And sometimes it'll be troublesome. But it that usually turns out to be troublesome in an extremely useful way. So it's a very good deal. If you know that truth and adventure are the same thing, that's a really useful thing. If you just take that away from this lecture, then that's well worth the ticket price, let's say. Here's one I wish more people were asking Jordan. I think you probably do as well. How do you know when you're ready to get married? That's easy. Your girlfriend thinks it's time. So the answer is the time to get married is right now. You look, you know, yeah, right? Well, you never, you never know. Like how in the world are you going to know that? You don't know your your girlfriend. And even if you do, you don't know what she's going to be like when she's your wife. Like that's a whole different universe. And so, you know, you're, you're, you're, your commitment to be married is a, it's a flinging yourself off the cliff in faith. I mean, I'm dead serious about that. It's like you, you, you, you take this person that's foolish enough to pick you. And you link yourself together and you leap off the edge and you say something like, maybe we can play intelligently together on the way down. And do you know what's going to happen? Well, do you know what's going to happen when you hit the bottom? Do you know what's going to happen? Well, no, you don't ever know what's going to happen in any of the major decisions you take in your life. This is partly why there's such an emphasis, for example, in the biblical stories on faith is like you take every decision that's cataclysmic in your life in good faith. It's the same when you have kids. It's the best and worst decision you'll ever make and marriage is certainly like that. And then you might say, well, maybe there are some things you could have faith in that would increase the probability that your faithful journey forward would be desirable and productive. And I would say, well, yes, you know, you should have faith in the truth, for example, you know, if you ground your marriage in truth, then you'll set up the dynamism between you that enables you to radically adapt to the transforming circumstances that are unpredictable that will constitute your life. Right. And you can't compute that beforehand, because life really is unpredictable. A future genuinely is unpredictable. It's not reducible to a set of, there's no set of rules that you can use to compute the future. You have to dance with it. And if you're going to dance with your wife on the edge of the abyss in truth, then the utility of the truth is she brings her best to the conversation and you bring your best and the exchange of information that that commitment enables makes you both wiser and more resilient than either of you would be alone. And that's your best bet. And it's better to just get on with it. Well, young man, you've got your marching orders. 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