How To Find Beauty In Self-Sacrifice | Jordan Peterson
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There's nothing better possible than what will happen to you if you tell the truth. It doesn't matter how it looks to you. And that's a terrifying thing, you know, because obviously you get in trouble for telling the truth. That's why everyone lies. And I believe that. And how could it be otherwise? What are you going to do? You're going to make the proposition that you bring about the order that is good in the world by lying.

Who the hell believes that? No one believes that. They might think they can get away with it, they might use it for manipulative purposes, but no one thinks that the path to paradise is paved with lies. If you believed that, it would destroy you if you truly believed it. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a world-renowned clinical psychologist, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, and online educator known for his influential lectures on religious belief, narrative mythology, and personality analysis.

In 2016, Jordan's public criticism of Canada's Bill C-16 catapulted him into the limelight. But his academic expertise and talent for storytelling have made Dr. Peterson one of the world's most popular sources of moral guidance and self-improvement. From his best-selling books like 12 Rules for Life to his online programs and live lectures, Dr. Peterson has helped millions of people reflect on their lives and develop a vision for their future.

Notwithstanding those tremendous accomplishments, Canadian courts are currently in pursuit of Dr. Peterson's medical license, mandating he undergo social media training to be able to continue to practice a truly Orwellian intervention and violation of free speech. Jordan's partnership with us here at The Daily Wire was a natural extension of his outspokenness on subjects like gender, personal responsibility, political correctness, and academic freedom. In his latest series, Foundations of the West,

Jordan travels to Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome to uncover the ancient roots of Western civilization. I was glad to join Jordan in the first part of the series where we traverse the hills of Jerusalem and discuss the sacred stories at the heart of the West's early flourishing. In today's episode, Jordan shares a few behind-the-scenes anecdotes from the series filming, his personal religious journey, and his observations on the biblical themes of risk and sacrifice.

It's always a pleasure and a privilege to talk with Jordan. I can't recommend enough his latest series, Foundations of the West, available right now at Daily Wire+. Stay tuned. Don't miss Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's latest insights on this episode of the Sunday Special.

Jordan, great to see you as always. Good to see you, Ben. Thanks for the invitation. Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about this series that we did one episode of together, maybe two episodes of together. But you did a bunch of episodes, Foundations of the West. So you and I were in Jerusalem together. And then you went to Athens with Spencer Clavin. You went to Rome with Bishop Barron. You went with Jonathan Paggio to pretty much all of these. It was an amazing series. What were kind of your biggest takeaways? What were the most interesting things for you in terms of the filming?

That's a hard thing to specify because so much of it was remarkable. I mean, how do you compare Athens, Rome and Jerusalem? Those are high points. I really enjoyed going through the archaeological expeditions with you. That was a good day. It was really exciting and interesting and somewhat terrifying to go up to the Al-Aqsa site.

on the Temple Mount, that was weird in 15 different dimensions, not least because we were under the watchful gaze of the religious hypocrites and totalitarians, which is always extraordinarily pleasant. And so that was fascinating. The dinners we had in those beautiful locations, those were, and we filmed them, of course, that's up on the Daily Wire now, the episode you and I did in Jerusalem,

going down into the archaeological digs to see the palace of King David, to walk the pathway from the Pool of Siloam upward towards Temple Mount, the same pathway Christ walked on. That was, you know, insanely interesting. Then with Paggio, we walked the stations of the cross and ended up in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was amazing.

Also crazily interesting and enlightening. And then I was in St. Peter's with Bishop Barron. And so that's a pretty good deal. And walked around the Acropolis with Spencer Clavin and

I think the editing team did a lovely job of putting things together. What did you think? I liked our dinner. I loved it too. I mean, it's just a beautiful series. And it is just a reminder that, you know, we in the West, we're sort of removed from history in the sense that all of the institutes of history, we've been shielded from those really since the end of World War II. And so our sense of place and our sense of time has been warped by the

by that. I mean, many people who are my age don't even remember the Cold War. And so the idea of serious hardship or the passage of people through time or standing on the shoulders of history. America is such a new country. I mean, it really is such an amazingly new country that when you're walking streets that are 3,000 years old, when you're uncovering sites that are going back, you know,

a thousand years before the birth of Christ, and then when you're walking through Athens or Rome and you're discovering the deep roots of your civilization, it is something I think that's going to be new for a lot of people who tend to think of the West as a new place, when in reality, the West is a very, very old place. And I think that the fact that so many people in the West don't even know about their own roots is really kind of shocking. And that only becomes clear to you when you actually walk the sites and you're standing next to stones that were piled atop those other stones several thousand years ago.

Yeah, well, I think also I'm hoping that we did a good job of juxtaposing the beauty of those sites and the spectacular depth that's uncovered, say, in the archaeological digs with some conversation about the significance of

the axis between Athens and Jerusalem and Rome and its determinant of effect on Western civilization. I'm kind of hoping that we got more deeply into that philosophically and intellectually than

would be the case with the typical documentary. We tried to do that because our conversations were unscripted. You know, it's been interesting doing these documentaries and the series with The Daily Wire because our documentaries really are unscripted. And so it's quite a testament to the skill of the editing team and also to all of the technicians who are recording audio and video that we can walk around like that

have those spontaneous conversations, have them recorded on audio and video, and then edited into something that, well, I think it looks very, it doesn't look very professional. It is very professional and impactful. So I was very pleased with it. And it was an incredibly interesting opportunity and a privilege to be able to undertake it. And I would also like to say that, you know, I've been very impressed with the Daily Wire's entrepreneurial daring

You know, I make these proposals like the Foundations of the West proposal or the Exodus seminar or the seminar that we recently did on the Gospels, which is coming out relatively soon too. And the answer from the Daily Wire people is always yes, which is really quite something because it's not inexpensive and it's very high risk, especially because it's not scripted. And so...

But anyways, what did you think of it? We had a great time in Jerusalem, you and I. Yeah, it's a wonderful journey. So again, the series, folks haven't seen it, is Foundations of the West. And we're bringing out a piece of new content with you literally every week for the rest of the year. I mean, that's how much content we've made with you and banked with you. And it really is all fascinating and spectacular stuff. Some of the backstory for people who may not have seen the episode or stuff that didn't necessarily make it to film. When you and I are sitting up

atop City of David, which is right over a very controversial area in East Jerusalem called Silwan, which is, you know, there are a lot of terror connections in Silwan. And there was a point during dinner where there was a person in a nearby house who's actually shining a laser pointer at us. I remember during that dinner and had figured out sort of what was going on. And there's a fair...

bit of tension during the filming of those episodes. And I think that it's a reminder that all of these streams of history that are crossed and that go back thousands of years, they have very significant real-world effects. And certainly in the episode that you and I filmed together in Jerusalem, you could feel that. I mean, you mentioned going up to the Temple Mount, and obviously your wife was wearing a cross, and she was told to put that away by the authorities on the Temple Mount because...

of all of the hatred and rage that emerges if people of one type pray there and that's not allowed and all of that sort of thing. That sort of stuff is very real for folks. And so I think it's a really fascinating,

combination of the ancient and the real world effects of that, which is I think when you and I spend a lot of time discussing politics, not just philosophy or psychology. And the thing about politics is that politics is really just the very surface level of that. I was discussing this actually recently, Spencer Clavin. And one of the things that we were talking about was at the Democratic National Convention, they opened the Democratic National Convention with a land acknowledgment.

And that just feels like kind of at this point in American life, you know, whatever. It's like a throwaway thing that you do because you went to university or whatever. It's not at all like that actually has deep philosophical roots. And to understand the deep philosophical roots of both the West and the people who oppose the West, you actually have to learn about it, investigate it, and in many cases go to these places.

Well, I'm really thrilled that we had the opportunity on, well, at a personal level to actually just do it. I mean, that was a crazy opportunity. And then also to bring it to this wide public audience. And so that's extremely exciting. And again, my kudos to the editing team you guys have at The Daily Wire, I guess us, we have extremely professional, high quality editors. And I really want to highlight the

difficulty of editing because we shot a lot more footage than we used and it takes real discrimination and judgment to

piece together a conversation to edit it down to something approximating 50 minutes to make that coherent, to keep the vitality alive during all of that, to give it a narrative arc, to select the proper images. And they did a bang up job. That's a lot of that was Jonathan. Hey, of course he's not the only one, but you know, kudos to them. That's for sure. Yeah. And I'm really looking forward to the rest of the episodes. You know, I haven't seen them, right. I saw the trailer and then I just watched our episode, uh,

two days ago, both the walk around that we did and our investigation underground into the archaeological digs, which are spectacular, but also the dinner we had, which I also thought worked out quite nicely. It was remarkably coherent, 45 minutes of film

given that it was a spontaneous conversation. And so, you know, a lot of the credit there is obviously due to you. So, cause you're such a remarkable conversationalist, but it was, it was very gratifying to see that this is working. And, you know, it's also interesting this technique of doing it without a script, because of course, one of the things that makes the kind of conversations we're having right now and

and also the conversations that say Rogan and people like that conduct on YouTube so compelling to people is that they're not subject to manipulative editing. What you see is what you get. And there's something, it's a lot harder to lie spontaneously. You know, you kind of have to think through your lies. And if you're engaged in an actual conversation, then you tend to say what you actually think. Well, you tend to discover what you actually think in the course of the conversation.

We'll get to more with Jordan in just a moment. First, here at Daily Wire, we've hired a lot of highly skilled people to be a part of this growing creative powerhouse. Editors, attorneys, engineers, you name it, like Jake.

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So, yeah, and you said we're putting out a different piece of content every week now. Yeah, pretty much every week all the way. That I've made with you guys. Yeah, and so there's the Foundations of Western Civilization, and there's about, what, six parts to that? Because, no, eight parts to that. I think there'd be at least eight. There'd be the four episodes that are geographically located. Each of them is associated, I believe, with a dinner event.

And then we have the gospel seminar, which is multi-part like the Exodus seminar was. And I tell you, Ben, that went spectacularly well. We missed you. It would have been nice to have you there. That obviously was extremely complicated. But I'm very curious to see what the editing team will have done with that because one of the things I encouraged them to do was to take it up a notch from what we did with Exodus and to

intersperse more interviews with the people who participated and also to use more images and you know to give it a bit more of a documentary feel so I'm very curious to see how that turned out. We did that in a week, eh? It was a crazy week man because we were recording four hours a day and that's a lot and I was trying to, was in the middle of my tour, I was trying to juggle

the conversations and to keep us on track through the gospel narrative and make sure that we were on time. And it was very demanding for everyone involved, but you know, we did, we got, we were on time with all the sessions and we got through the entire book and we didn't rush. And that's also a testament to Daily Wire because one of the things that you guys did that was really useful was allow the time for the conversation to unfold in

in its necessary way. You know, we doubled the length of the Exodus seminar and the Daily Wire went along with that immediately. It's very daring. And I guess the Exodus seminar was very successful. I heard from, yeah, yeah, that apart from the Matt Walsh's

What is a woman? It was what, maybe the second most popular thing that's been put out. So that's so cool. Really, really successful. And again, you exploring all of these topics with such fascinating minds, obviously a huge market for that. And, and obviously you're also extremely busy. I mean, you're traveling. I don't know how you have the energy to do it. You're traveling the world. You're giving lectures almost every night. And then you have your book that's coming out at the, at the end of the year in November, uh,

We Who Struggle With God. We Who Wrestle With God. We Who Wrestle With God. We Who Wrestle With God. And that's going to be fascinating as well, especially because there's been so much speculation about your own religious worldview and your own religious journey and where you are in that. How much of you, in terms of your own kind of personal religious journey, is in that book? Well, in some ways, it's saturated with that because what I'm doing is revealing my developing understanding of these stories. I've been studying...

foundational narratives for a very long time. I got, how did I learn to do that? By reading Freud, by reading Jung, by reading Mircea Eliade, by reading Eric Neumann, the same thing applies to Mircea Eliade, the Romanian historian of religions. If the academy, if the Western institutions of higher education would have taken the Neumann-Eliade-Jung approach to literary interpretation, we wouldn't be in the culture war we're in now.

They were right, and they were right, they got it right. And I think we're actually going to reveal that with large language models eventually, because it's come to my attention that what the psychoanalysts were doing with their association work, free association in dream interpretation and narrative interpretation and amplification, is identical in the cognitive realm to what the large language models are doing with their mapping of the statistical regularity between concepts.

You know, and so the best way to think, Freud thought about a symbol, say a sexual symbol, as a substitute for a deeper truth that was a consequence of repression, right? So repressed content would come out in symbolic form. And that's almost true in the way that many of the things Freud said were almost true. And it was a useful error. But Jung took a completely different approach and

The best way to conceptualize that in modern terms is the way the large language models conceptualize it, is that any given concept is going to have a ring of associated concepts around it. So, for example, the concept which.

would be statistically associated with concepts like night and swamp and cats and brooms and potions. And that's part of the complex of ideas and the

Jungian-influenced psychoanalysts were very good at delineating the nature of these complexes, and partly what I'm doing in the book, this new book, is exactly that. I'm showing the patterns of ideas that are encapsulated inside the story. So I walked through about 10 stories.

the Old Testament biblical narratives the next book will be on the book of Job and the Passion and it's mostly written already but this one concentrates mostly on Old Testament stories and that was really exciting because it Especially with the lecture tour too because that enabled me to develop expertise in the analysis of a multitude of stories that I hadn't been that familiar with you know I knew

The Genesis stories pretty well. The creation story, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the story of the flood. I learned a lot more about the story of the Tower of Babel, which is actually a description of the construction of a totalitarian state as an alternative to

worship of the one true God, you might say. And so, and it's the engineers that build the Tower of Babel, by the way, in the biblical account, which is extremely interesting. And so, and then I learned, I really learned the story of Abraham, which I actually think compromises a rejoinder, an irrefutable rejoinder to Richard Dawkins' concept of the selfish gene. Because partly what the story of Abraham does is lay out the

the nature of the multi-generational non-selfish commitment that's integral to actual reproductive success. Like it's so cool, Ben, because what God promises Abraham when he decides to go out for the adventure of his life, one of the things he promises Abraham is that he'll become the father of nations. And so you can think of the story of Abraham

first of all as a delineated account of how you live if you're Abel or Seth, right? The proper sons of Adam and Eve. So Abraham is the first true individual. He's the archetypal individual, just like Moses is the archetypal leader. And the story of Abraham delineates a pattern of upward striving sacrifice

that establishes the pattern of paternity that best ensures reproductive success,

over the longest possible span of time. And that turns out not to be a selfish enterprise at all. Quite the contrary. It's a pattern of sacrifice that's exemplified by Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac. And it marks out the multi-generational commitment of human beings to their offspring. And so that was really fun to take apart. And I think it's unassailable because

The mistake Dawkins made in the selfish gene was assuming that reproduction and sex were the same thing. And that's not true. It's true for mosquitoes, and it's true for puffballs, but it's not true for human beings because we're high investment reproducers. And so, and I think this is irrefutable scientifically because part of the explanation the evolutionary biologists have for our lifespan is that grandparents, perhaps particularly grandmothers, but also grandparents,

grandfathers are necessary for the successful propagation of children. And so the mere fact that we live much longer than we're fertile, especially in the case of women,

is an indicator that there's a pattern of non-selfish sacrifice that's key to establishing reproduction that's successful across the generations. And so, anyways, that's just a fraction of what's in the book. I had a blast taking apart the story of Jonah, which is a story of the costs of remaining silent when your conscience tells you to speak. I really developed a much deeper understanding of

how the divine is characterized in the Old Testament. I think the best immediate characterization is that the divine is the dynamic between conscience and calling. And you could even think about that as the dynamic between positive and negative emotion, you know, because that locks it into the instinctual realm. So

The calling, what interests you, has its autonomy, right? Because you don't really pick what interests you, it picks you. And it calls to your positive emotion, it calls to what compels you forward, which is the definition of positive emotion from a neuroscience perspective. And so that's part of the manifestation of the autonomous divine. But the same is true of conscience, which is more like negative emotion, which warns you when you're wandering off the straight and narrow path. And

This also helped me put two and two together with regards to the pillar of light and the pillar of darkness that guides the Israelites across the darkness. The pillar of light is the light that shines in the darkness that compels you forward. And the pillar of darkness is the warning, even in the midst of plenty, that there's darkness to be contended with. And it's the dynamic between those two things that guides you when you escape from tyranny and you're lost.

And that's so cool, like it's completely understandable and I think it's profoundly true and it unites the divine and the instinctual which is like if truth is a unity, the biological and the theological are eventually going to unite. And I'm hoping that this book is a major step forward in exactly that endeavor and I actually think it is. So I'm really excited about its launch.

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It's awesome. And the fact that, you know, you've spent so much time taking the biblical text seriously, I think for a lot of religious people is an amazing thing because for years, I mean, for generations, basically there's been this false dichotomy that's been drawn between quote unquote the reasonable and then the faith community. And it's been propagated through myths like the Galileo sort of rewriting of history, this idea that faith is dramatically opposed to reason, sort of a, you know,

bizarre enlightenment idea that is really not united with history. And religious people have taken it that way. And so they've dissociated from the scientific community in large ways. And the scientific community has taken it that way. And so they've dissociated from religion in large ways. And so the idea of just actually looking at the text, examining the text and seeing what there is to see is an amazing thing that you've done in reopening the book for people, for both religious to sort of a scientific neurocognitive

perspective and people who are scientific to, hey, maybe there's a reason that these pieces of data have lasted for thousands of years and been central to the development of the civilizations in which you live.

Well, one of the things I really tried to do in the book, and this was for me as well, is I tried to make sure that every point I made could be just as justified from the material and biological upward as from the divine downward. So as far as I'm concerned, and that's especially true because I believe that there is a unity of knowledge underlying everything.

that all the points I made had to be justifiable from both those perspectives. And I don't care personally whether the material world strives upward towards the divine or the divine world descends downward into the material. I think

You can look at it either way and probably you should look at it both ways simultaneously. And one of the things I'm trying to do in the book, which I actually think I do successfully, is to explain exactly what that means. It's interesting too, Ben, you know, I know a lot of evangelical Christians in Washington, a very admirable community of people that I know there, and they're much more biblically literalist than I'm inclined to be. And I asked a number of them the last time I was in Washington,

Because they come to my lectures, for example, and I've got to know this community quite well, how they're responding to the sorts of interpretations that I've been laying out. And the universal response was that it had done nothing but deepen their faith. And so that's also extremely exciting. And it's also given me a much more profound understanding of the

Organic relationship between Judaism and Christianity, you know, I mean there's plenty to work out on that front and that's for sure which was partly why it would have been nice to have you in the gospel seminar, but you know the one of the unfortunate elements of a certain kind of Christianity is the insistence that there's quite a delineation between the New Testament and the Old Testament and there's truth in that in some ways but in many ways

It's not the case that this stage is set in the Old Testament in a very profound way and also in a way that I think is inevitable. This is actually something I want to discuss with you in detail at some point, maybe after you read the book, because, you know, there is an idea, a religious idea, that the passion is implicit in the Old Testament. And I actually think that's true.

I think we might be able to demonstrate that statistically at some point actually, given the progress of these large language models, but I'd like to discuss with you, once you do take a look at the book, exactly what that signifies, what you make of it. Let me give you a quick example of that. So this is so cool, Ben. So the fundamental message of the Old Testament

Maybe there's two. One is that we live in relationship with something. Like, the human mode of being is relationship. Okay, so do we have a relationship with the transcendent? Well, we have a relationship of one sort or the other because we're finite and we face what's infinite. So, we have a relationship. It might be one of negation. It might be nihilistic. It doesn't matter. It's a relationship of some sort. And so...

Having established that, you might say, well, how is the relationship characterized in the biblical corpus? And it's characterized sacrificially. And I understood what that meant because there's an insistence in the biblical text that the community is predicated on sacrifice. And of course that's true. And here's why. Of course it's true. The reason for that is that, well, if you're in a community,

It's not all about you. If you're a solitary animal, it's all about you. If you're a two-year-old, although there are some social instincts that start to make themselves manifest, it's all about you. As you mature and you establish reciprocal relationships with other people, and you extend your viewpoint into the future, so you establish a relationship with your future self,

you sacrifice your short-term impulsive hedonistic whims. And you have to do that because otherwise you're not a communal being, you're a solitary being. Okay, so now you understand that the community is predicated on sacrifice. Well, the next question arises immediately, which is, okay, what's the most effective possible form of sacrifice?

And that's actually what the biblical stories investigate. That's why you have that strange spectacle of Abraham offering Isaac to God, which, you know, the atheist types point to the malevolence of a God who would demand that. But here's a rereading of that. It's like, well, first of all, Abraham doesn't have to sacrifice Isaac, right? When push comes to shove,

God intervenes so that the actual sacrifice isn't necessary. Okay, so how do you understand that? Well, here's the issue. Do you offer your children up to what is highest or not? And the answer to that is, well, if you're a good parent, you offer your children up to what's highest. You don't protect them.

You don't over shelter them. You put them out into the world. You have them confront the catastrophic chaos of reality and you orient them towards what's highest. You have to let your children go. You have to offer them to the world in order to raise them properly. Well, and what's the implication of the biblical story? If you do that properly, if you sacrifice your children properly, what's highest? You get them back.

Yeah, that's exactly right, man. It's clear part of that sacrificial process is the willingness of the parent to expose their children voluntarily to the cataclysmic adventure of existence. That's a sacrificial gesture. And so you see the stage is set. So one of the highest forms of sacrifice, obviously, if you're going to offer up something valuable, a child would be very high in that hierarchy.

You could offer yourself. You could offer your child. You know, and in the Christian passion, you see those two things come together. That's the theological insistence on the Christian side. But in the Old Testament corpus, Abraham sacrifices his son to God because the other thing that happens as Abraham develops, the quality of sacrifice that he's called upon to offer changes.

With every transformation of character, he has to offer something more fundamental in order to continue the process of personality transformation upward. And that's true, man. That's exactly how life works. The story of Abraham and Isaac, one of the most fascinating things about it, and there are tons of things about it that are really fascinating. There are a couple that come to mind immediately. One is that, obviously, the worst thing you can do in the ancient world, according to Judaism, is sacrifice your child. Right?

Right. Sacrifice to Molech is considered like literally the worst thing to do in the Bible. This is what distinguishes the Israelites from surrounding nations, for example. Also, we have a story of Abraham literally trying to argue God out of doing something that he thinks might be immoral when God decides to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. It's Abraham who says, you know, God, you might be killing too many innocents there. You might want to be careful there. And then they have a negotiation over exactly how many would be

the whole city versus innocence and all this. So one of the questions that gets asked by a lot of the biblical commentators is, so why doesn't Abraham have that conversation with God about Isaac? That'd be a perfectly obvious conversation to have. God says to him, I want you to take your son to a place that I'm going to show you, which by the way, similar language to, I'm going to take you to a land I will show you. I'm going to take your son three days distant to a place that I'm going to show you. And then

sacrifice him on that mountain, why does a neighbor have to have a conversation with God? Why does he say, well, hold up. I thought child sacrifice is bad. This is a thing we're not supposed to do. Why are you now telling me to do the reverse of all the things that you've educated me to do to this point? Instead, he immediately acts, right? It says with alacrity, he gets up, he saddles the donkeys, he puts together the team, and he starts to move. And the only way I think that you can explain the entire sentiment is that it is

It is just a reality. This is something I explained to, I remember I had this conversation with a person who I was in law school with. He's a secular Jew. And we were talking about whether he should raise his kids Jewish or not.

And he was saying, well, it would be stupid of me to raise my kids Jewish because it turns out that people really don't like Jews. A lot of people, as it turns out, who hate Jews and it's a much more dangerous world if your kid is raised Jewish. And if you're visibly Jewish, it's even more dangerous than that. And so it seems to me that if I really care about my kid and I want to keep my kid safe, then the best thing I can do is not raise my kid Jewish.

It'd be to have my kid, you know, be raised secular or some other form of religion. And by the way, this was not an uncommon thought for Jews for multiple centuries, was the best way out of the tribe was convert, get out, and that makes sure that your kids stay safe. And hide.

Right, exactly. And so what the Bible is saying is that there is an inevitable reality, and that reality is that you must be willing to subject your kids to additional levels of danger in pursuit of the highest goal. You have to do that. This is what defines you as a human being. And it's not... That's the same as exposure to the bronze serpent. Exactly. It's the same message. And it's not a matter of...

you know, you, it really is not a matter of speculation because the reality is in this particular story, God says to Abraham, okay, your kid is going to survive. There's a ram that's discovered. It's going to, the ram will be brought as a sacrifice instead. By the way, the Hebrew on, uh,

of sacrifice is korban. The root of that is karov, which means to become near. So, right, sacrifice is to become nearer to. Just like in love, if you make a sacrifice, you become nearer to the person. You sacrifice something, you make a korban, you become karov to it, and you become close to it, meaning you become closer to God through sacrifice. But the bottom line is that for Jews throughout the centuries,

And for Christians throughout the centuries, as it turns out, and for anybody who's a true religious believer, particularly in minority area, that is not a, that is not a, it's not necessary that the outcome is that your kid gets saved. The reality is that throughout the centuries, very often the kid does not get saved. That that is a very real risk. And to ignore that risk in favor of sort of the happy ending is to ignore the story. You feel like, well, why have the story at all? What's the point of the story? And the point is that it could have gone the other way.

And that would not have obviated the thing that Abraham did.

The thing that Abraham does is he says that the risk must be taken. You see an analogous image to that in St. Peter's in Rome. It's something that Bishop Barron and I discussed in the Foundations of the West. So there's a famous statue by Michelangelo, of course, in St. Peter's of Mary, who's the mother of God, right? So an archetype of the mother as such, right? The accepting mother who what?

who brings her child into the world willingly and gratefully, knowing full well that he'll be broken in every way. And that's the display of Mary, which is essentially, I think, equivalent to the female crucifix or crucifixion. And that's why it ended up in St. Peter's. And the thing is, is that the psychoanalysts figured this out in the first part of the 20th century because they said the good mother necessarily fails.

And what does that mean? Well, the maternal instinct is to protect and shelter, right? But the problem is, if you protect and shelter for too long, you weaken and destroy. That's the devouring mother. That's the terrible Oedipal mother that Freud's intuition pointed out to him so dreadfully accurately. And the good mother exposes her child fully to the catastrophe of the world

in an embracing spirit. And this is not a trivial thing. You know, the antinatalists, for example, and there's a huge antinatalist spirit in our culture,

make the case formally that existence itself is so brutal that the moral thing to do is to strive to take consciousness out of the picture, to cease reproducing because the pain of existence overwhelms the good and the utility of existence. That's part of the problem of construing existence

in terms of pain and pleasure, which is already a pathological thing to do. But Mary is the absolute antithesis of the antinatalist doctrine. But she's also the mother who accepts deep in her heart that she's bringing a child in the world to be betrayed and broken and die. And so, and that's

Well, that's part of the mystery of the sacrifice of the child upward towards what's highest and part of the mystery of existence. And that's a very consistent motif through the... One of the things that really struck me about going through the Old Testament stories was the stunning underlying consistency of the message.

It's so cool, you know, because you see all these multiple characterizations of divinity. And so in Genesis, the divine is the force that confronts chaotic potential and makes the order that's good with truth. God, that's a great definition of the divine. And then Genesis.

Then the divine is the judge that bars the way to paradise so that nothing that is insufficient can make entry. It's like, well, yeah, obviously, nothing that isn't paradisal can make its way into heaven. That's the sword that turns every which way. And then in the story of Cain and Abel, God is the, the divine is the goal and aim of all proper sacrifices, all the sacrifices that set the world straight.

perfect and the judge of all those who don't bring the best to the table. And then in the story of Noah, God is the spirit that comes to the wise to tell them to prepare when chaos is about to descend. It's like, do you believe in that? And then in the story of the Tower of Babel, the divine is the force that brings the totalitarian Luciferian to his knees.

And then the biblical authors collate those and say all of those manifestations are of the same underlying unity. And then the unity is explored as the text progresses. It's so deep. It's so deep.

that it's, well, there's no end to the amount of exploration that can be done within the text. It was fascinating. One of the things that people always ask is sort of who's the central character of the Bible? I'll talk about the Old Testament because again, my knowledge of the New Testament is more limited, but it's true of the New Testament as well. The central character of the Bible is God. The central character of the Bible is not in fact Abraham. It is not Noah. It is not Moses. The central character is God. And God is, that's why

The idea of God being angry or God having pain, all these things are analogical in the sense that God doesn't have pain in the same way that you or I have pain, but it's kind of the nearest way that we can understand what exactly is happening with God because how else could we understand any of it? But the idea that what the Bible really is is a series of snapshots from various different angles.

of the living God. That's obviously true. And it's openly described in Exodus, right? When you and I went through Exodus and the Exodus series, what I think is the most moving segment of the entire Old Testament, which is where Moses, after he's been offered by God, God says, I want to get rid of the Jews. I want to get rid of the Israelites. Not interested in them anymore. They've sinned too many times. Done. And Moses says, no, if you are going to do that, you need to obliterate me also from your book. And

And God offers him, I'll make a new nation of you. And Moses is like, well, no, no, it's your nation. You know, I don't like them. I think they're jerks also. But you know what? This is your nation. And that's not the way this can work. And then God accepts that. And then he says, is there anything else you want? And Moses says, I want to see your face, which is just, again, I think it's the most romantic. It's the most romantic part of any literature ever written. When Moses says to God, I want to see your face.

And God says, no one can see my face and live. And so then God puts him in the cleft in the rock and it says he walks by him. And the basic idea is that Moses can see his back. That's such an unbelievable idea that you can only get a glimpse of God very often in retrospect and in the distance. The idea, like no one can see the full image

the fulsomeness of God and live. It's not possible. Human beings are not made to take all of that in. But what the Bible is attempting to do is show you a bunch of different angles on God so that you can better understand the universe in which you live that God built for you and built for you to live in. And that's why all these stories matter so much. Well, it does that. Well, the other case that I make, and this is also, like, I do believe that we're at the end of the Enlightenment, especially the French Revolution period.

rationalist/empirist enlightenment because they were wrong and the postmodernists, oddly enough, on this front were correct because the postmodernists, and they weren't the only discipline by the way that figured this out, the philosophers weren't the only people that figured this out because the cognitive neuroscientists have figured it out too, and so have the robotics engineers. The structure we perceive the world, first of all, we perceive the world through a structure. If you describe that structure, that's a story.

So the postmodernists were right that we inhabit a story. They were wrong in that we don't inhabit the Marxist story of power, right? And so they got the mystery right. We see the world through a story. And then they jumped immediately to a conclusion, which was, well, the story is obviously one of power. It's like, no, that's the Luciferian story, boys and girls. And you should be very careful before you presume that the fundamental motivating force in the world is power.

There is no more pathological claim. Theologically, that's a claim that Satan is the ruler of the cosmos.

Because he's the you super who uses nothing but power. And that's an unbelievably dangerous proposition. And so the question arises, if it's not power, then what is it? And Freud would say, well, it's sexuality. And to some degree, that's what Richard Dawkins does too. But they make the mistake of assuming that the reproductive instinct is identical with the sexual instinct. And that's just not true. It's way oversimplified. Or maybe there's no story and that leaves you

being a nihilist, or maybe the story is one of pure pleasure and that leads you to be a hedonist. And none of those stories work. And the story that's put forward in the biblical corpus is that sacrifice is the basis of not only community, but maturity and meaning. And I can't see any way that that's wrong. You know, like I took, I took, I do take what I do very seriously, you know, and

There isn't a sentence in this new book, and I think this is true of all the books I've written, that I didn't try to break apart with the biggest hammer I could find. I only left sentences that I could not dispute. You know, and I tried to attack the problem from a variety of different disciplines, you know, political disciplines and

scientific disciplines and from the theological perspective to the degree that I was capable of that. And that's dangerous because it requires a multidisciplinary perspective, but I only left standing what passed all those tests, those multiply derived tests. And I just, I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe nothing because God only knows what happens when you publish a book, Ben, but

I don't think the atheists are going to have a leg to stand on. I really believe that. I think that the argument can be made unassailably that community is based on sacrifice and that the human relationship to existence is a relationship.

Right. And I think that that, you know, that that point, it's it's really fascinating. I know that so many people have asked you before about your personal belief system. What is it you believe? Do you believe in God? Are you a Christian? And what is and the argument that I've always made when people ask why I believe in God is that that phraseology is just wrong in its in its essence.

I don't believe in God in the same way that I believe in a tautology like two plus two equals four or something. That's not the way that you interact with God. The way that you interact with the world is the way that you interact with God. You live, what I've said before is I don't believe in God. I live in God. And the truth is even most of the people who don't believe in God live in God, meaning they live a set of premises.

in their lives that are godly premises and cannot exist absent the premise of God, right? As opposed to the sort of Laplace argument that God is a hypothesis of which there's no necessity. It's precisely the opposite. It's the only hypothesis that's necessary because once you have a God, then the idea that there is a structure to the universe that is worth exploring, the idea that your choices matter, that there's a meaning in life, that there's something that's actually worth pursuing. Those are literal definitions of God as far as I'm concerned.

Right? And I think you're absolutely right. Like, we've made the huge mistake in the West. This is a massive mistake, and it's a consequence of a shallow and naive rationalism that belief is to be defined propositionally. It's like, no, the theological belief is what you stake not your life on. That's not enough.

What you believe theologically is what you stake your soul on. And you might say, well, you know, why soul and not life? Because isn't life enough? It's like, no, because there are things that you'll stake your soul on that you would die for. So when you'll die for your children, for example. And so, well, how can that be? How can anything be more important to you than your life? Well, what is it that's more important than your life? Well, how about the divine life?

is what's more important to you than your life. And that's a definition. And one of the things I do in the book insistently is to point out, we've been arguing about the wrong thing. And this goes for the new atheists, double even. You know, God is an old man with a beard in the sky. It's like, no, there's nothing that points to that in the biblical stories. That's a complete bloody fabrication. It's

The straw man argument of the worst kind. As you pointed out, for example, when push comes to shove in the biblical stories, the authors insist that God is fundamentally ineffable, right? Beyond definition. And that's why Moses, who's a great prophet, can only get a glimpse of him.

And then you could see, well, God is reflected in these multiple characterizations, but he's hardly reduced to that. And to think about that as some old man in the sky that grants your wishes, that is the hypothesis of an arrogant 13-year-old with no theory of mind. It's so pathetic.

Those texts are insanely deep. And the other thing that I've done in the book is I pointed out some of the connections between the stories in the book, like the story of the bronze serpent in the desert that Moses asks his people to gaze upon so that what's poisonous can't affect them.

I tied that into Christ's revelation of himself as the bronze serpent in the desert, which is an insane association, right? It makes no sense. It spans 3,000 years. It comes out of the blue and it's dead on point. It's dead on point. And I defy anyone to explain how that came about, to read the explanation of

The explanation is something like you need to confront what terrifies you in order to thrive. And one of the things that's characteristic of the Christian passion, the way the story lays itself out, is that there isn't anything more horrifying than that pattern of death.

Like it's the ultimate tragedy. And so Christ portrays himself as the bronze serpent in the desert because the details of his life involve everything that people are terrified of. And the insistence is, if you're willing to voluntarily confront that, God walks with you. And I think that's right. What's the alternative, Ben? You get stronger by turning away from things? That's a stupid theory. No one believes that.

And all the clinical evidence suggests the opposite. You get stronger by adopting maximal responsibility with open arms. Right? And that's a sacrificial process. And so, well, you know, I tested this book out on tour because I did like 60 lectures and I brought people along like Jonathan Paggio and Douglas Murray and...

and John Vervaeke and Constantine Kissin because I wanted to see how they would react to the ideas, you know, because some of them are more on the atheist end of the distribution. Well, that was extremely interesting too because I wanted to see if the ideas could be destroyed, cracked, you know, if there was some flaw in them that I hadn't discovered.

Well, I guess we'll see when I publish it because all my mistakes will be public, but I couldn't break it. And it's very exciting. It's been a ridiculously exciting endeavor. So after having spent all this time with the biblical text, who is the character who you find your heart with the most? Not God, everybody else. Like you've gone through a wide variety of these characters. Who do you see yourself in or who do you sympathize with the most? Or who do you, whose story do you find yourself drawn back to? Maybe Jonah. Yeah.

Maybe Jonah, you know, because Jonah gets swallowed by hell because he refuses the call of his conscience. And it's a great story because the story lays out the multiple motivations why someone might run from their conscience, but also points out that there isn't anything more dangerous that you can do than that. You know, even though if you speak the words of truth that you're called upon to speak, that may endanger you.

But remaining silent in the face of a divine command is even more dangerous. And there may be times in your life where you have to pick between competing dangers. You know, there's no safe pathway forward. Often, if you're compelled to speak, that's the situation. But the story of Jonah indicates very clearly that

Here's what it indicates, man, and this is an axiom of religious faith. There's nothing better possible than what will happen to you if you tell the truth. It doesn't matter how it looks to you. And that's a terrifying thing, you know, because obviously you get in trouble for telling the truth. That's why everyone lies.

But there's an insistence, especially in the story of Jonah, which is you don't see everything. You see the same thing in the story of Job. You don't see everything. Your purview of perception is not broad enough. If you understood, you would see that there is no order better than the order you call forth with the words of truth. And I believe that. And how could it be otherwise? What are you going to do? You're going to make the proposition that you bring about the order that is good in the world by lying.

Who the hell believes that? No one believes that. They might think they can get away with it. They might use it for manipulative purposes. But no one thinks that the path to paradise is paved with lies. Even the worst criminal knows that that's a fundamental fact.

misapprehension of the structure of existence itself. If you believe that, it would destroy you if you truly believed it. The story of Jonah is fascinating also because what Jonah is really seeking to avoid, I mean, just historically speaking, is the conclusion that God is saying to him, which is that the area in which you live will be conquered by your enemies.

Right. Nineveh, which is in Assyria, is an enemy to the Israelite kingdom at this time. Right. Right. And so and so what what Jonah is being told by God is you need to go and have these people repent, even though the likely outcome of their repentance is going to be their mastery of God.

the people you live with. I mean, it's going to be bad for you. It's going to be bad for your nation. You still have an obligation to go and repent. This is why Jews read Jonah on Yom Kippur, on the Day of Atonement, because the idea is that everyone is worthy of atonement, even people who are going to go on to do bad things. That atonement is a continual process and that atonement is, in fact,

such a high goal that we don't even look beyond what happens beyond the atonement. Like once the atonement is done, you've atoned, you're pure in that moment. What happens next? You know, that's up to you. And so he rejects the call because he doesn't want

He doesn't want the people to atone. It's not that he believes he's going to be killed by the people in this area. He believes they're actually going to do the thing. And the idea is the future is not in your hands. All that's in your hands is the thing that you have to do that's right in front of you that God instructs you to do. You can't control what's going to happen five years from now. You can't control the thing that is right in front of you today. Or you do control it insofar as you can by uttering the words that your conscience compels you to utter. That's the best you've got.

There's no up above that. There's no rationalistic manipulations that are strategic on your part that's going to pave a pathway forward better than just the stark truth. And so, like, yes, that's...

The stories were fun. It's so fun to take apart the story of Jonah. It's such a complex story. It's very, very comical too. And it's very realistic. I mean, the biblical stories are hyper-realistic. It's very interesting to go through them. So yeah, that's very exciting, Ben. And what we're producing with The Daily Wire, that's very exciting. And the Gospel Seminar, that's a ridiculous opportunity. And

We launched this online university two weeks ago, Peterson Academy, and we've got 25,000 students already. And so that's like, and people are happy with it by all appearances. And so all the courses come out real soon. And now we have enough capital to, all right, we're going to find the best professors in the world on an ongoing basis. And we're going to

film them at the highest possible quality, and we're going to distribute that at the lowest cost and educate everyone who wants to be educated. So that's fun. That's ridiculously entertaining. I mean, 15 years ago, is this what you imagined that you would be doing? I mean, it is kind of amazing, the trajectory from teaching psychology in Canada to doing what you're doing today. Well, Ben, I knew, like,

students reacted to the material I was teaching in a way that was very unlike their reaction to most courses. And I was always kind of shocked that I got away with it, both at Harvard and at the University of Toronto, because I thought, boy, if anybody ever figures out what I'm teaching, there's going to be hell to pay. And of course, that eventually happened. But I knew, I knew that

what I was describing had a revelatory quality. Now, I'm not attributing that to me. I read an essay by Carl Jung a long while back called The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious, and it's a very interesting essay. It's very hard to understand unless you know what he's talking about. And what he's talking about specifically in that essay is the danger of attributing the power of archetypal narrative to yourself.

Right? And so he warns against that very explicitly, that that's the pathway to like a manic inflation or a pathological populism, a self-aggrandizement that's Luciferian. And it's a very strict warning. And so I was always very careful to understand that there's a very big difference between the messenger, let's say, and the message. And the fact that I was unveiling the deeper meanings of these archetypal stories is

That wasn't the power in that wasn't me. And so but I did understand a very long time ago, probably when I first cracked some of these codes, so to speak, that there would be a stunning consequence of that, because you can't delve into those stories without understanding.

encountering the burning bush. You can't. And there's nothing that reveals itself with more might than, as Solzhenitsyn said, than a single word of the truth. And so I could see that, you know, the typical student comment in my courses was, this course changed everything I thought, right? And that's a hell of a, and then it wasn't the course, it was the walking through the archetypal narratives. And that's what they're supposed to do.

Now we've forgotten them because we misapprehend them in the way that you described. We think that they're propositional hypotheses. They're not. They're descriptions of the structure through which we see the world. And so, and now I think we can consciously understand that in a way that wasn't possible before. And that's a ridiculously exciting thing to participate in.

So, Jordan, I would be remiss if I didn't get the update on the Canadian attempt to come after you using the mechanisms of DEI law. I know, I know. So what is the latest update on the... Well, my lawyers are in touch with the college. The college told us to get in touch with whoever's going to re-educate me, but they redacted the person's name in the documents. So I don't know who the hell to contact. And so I've got my lawyer's

Straightening that out so that I can reach out to the social media expert, whatever the hell that is, so that I can be reeducated. And so, you know, I don't exactly know how that's going to proceed, but I'm going to go along with the show.

at least in part out of morbid curiosity. You know, and my attitude towards it has changed slightly because I'm increasingly embarrassed to be identified as a professional psychologist because my colleagues have manifested such a shortage of spine

in the face of the onslaught, let's say by the gender-affirming care liars and butchers, that it's an embarrassment to have the profession that I have now, which I think increasingly does more harm than good. But by the same token, I'm not going to let a bunch of half-wit, DEI, radical leftist, utopian, lying pricks take my license away without a war.

And so, so far my hand has been stayed, at least to some degree, by the necessity of behaving properly while the legal battle unfolded. But now it's sort of, well, all the gloves are off, boys and girls, and we're bloody well going to see how that turns out.

So it's very annoying. And there's a part of me, maybe this is why I identify with Jonah, let's say, is I just as soon flee to Scottsdale, Arizona, where I have a house and say, to hell with you pikers. I don't need that trouble and harassment and all the expense and idiocy that goes along with it. But I think I have a moral obligation to see the show out to its end, whatever that might be.

I can tell you the end isn't going to be what the people who are driving this strategic machination think it's going to be. That's for sure. So we'll see, Ben. Maybe I'll get Matt Walsh to re-educate me. He's a DEI certified whatever the hell you are when you're a DEI certified. And so...

It's true. It's true. He has the qualifications. He does. He has all the qualifications. Yeah. And so if he continues along this path, we will have to exile him to Canada. But Jordan, it's always great to see you. I can't wait to read the new book. Obviously, folks, go check out Foundations of the West along with all the other Jordan content, the new piece of Jordan content dropping every single week from now till the end of the year. Amazing stuff. Jordan, great to see you. Yeah, good to see you, Ben. Maybe I'll send you a copy of the book if you don't mind. It sounds great. Look forward to it.

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