You Cannot Avoid Having a God. Here Is What That Actually Means.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

Jordan B. Peterson explores the idea that everyone inevitably worships something—what he calls 'God'—as the highest priority in their life. Using stories, philosophy, and psychology, he argues that meaning arises from aligning actions with a transcendent value, and warns against silence in the face of moral failure.

Key takeaways

• Your God is whatever you prioritize above all else.
• Anxiety signals a lack of clear direction or priority.
• Stories encode deep, timeless truths about human nature.

Transcript preview

Hi everybody. Welcome to the release of the second lecture from my extensive tour archives. We've been working late at night when my symptoms received enough so that I can finally concentrate to make this release a possibility. At the same time recently I've been able to write a little bit and I'm working on three essays which I hope to finish and release in the near future. One deals with the climate lies propagated by the socialists and the leftists and other deals with the issue of the alphabet mauphists and other deals with the issue of the alphabet and the associated pride movement and the final one deals with the so-called rape gangs in the UK asking whether the terminology rape gang which is definitely an improvement over grooming gang is sufficient to accurately describe the magnitude of the crimes that are being committed in any case I'm working on these now hoping to contribute something to the ongoing public debate about these crucially important issues I'm unhappy with my silence however necessitated it might be the conditions of my illness. I'd like to get back to my work, you know. Anyways, that's the update. Thanks for your time and attention and I hope you enjoy listening to this second lecture as much as I enjoyed delivering it. Bye-bye. Thank you very much. It's very good of you to come. I'm looking forward to tonight. What does it mean that we wrestle with God? Well, Tammy made some introductory comments. promoting, let's say, or discussing, is that what God is in some manner is a matter of definition. So here's a definition. Your God is whatever you put first. That's a definition. That's a definition. You might ask, well, why do you have to put something first? foot in front of the other when you go somewhere. And I really mean that specifically because in order to do anything you make that thing first. If you can't do that then you're confused and aimless and I suppose that's something too but it's not productive and it's anxiety provoking because anxiety actually signals that you're not aimed in a single direction. That's its technical definition. It's a good way of thinking about it. something first, you put something first with every glance that you take because there is a myriad of things that you could focus your attention on, but when you focus, you focus on one thing, and you focus on one thing for a reason. The highest reason that you could focus on one thing, and you focus on one thing, for a reason. The highest reason that you could focus on one thing would be God. That's a good way of thinking about it. And something, and something, is going to occupy that position of priority. Let me give you an example. We've actually been experimenting with this idea with large language models. So, you know, they're like the models that you see now coming out in computer platforms like Chat GPT or Elon Musk's Crock. I used to ask my students, for example, in my classes, why they... why they were handing in an essay, why they were writing a test. And people's answers differed in depth, depending on how wealth they had thought things through, which is in some ways equivalent to saying dependent on how conscious they were. Why are you here in this class? Well, I need to take the class to get a grade. Well, why do you need to get a grade? Well, I need to pass the course. Why do you need to pass the course? Well, I have to get my degree. Well, why do you want to get your degree? It says, well, people would start to stumble at that point, but why do you want to get your degree? Well, I want to get a job. I want to, I need to make some money. It's not a great answer because there's lots of ways of making money, right? So it's starting to get somewhat loose. But that's the next aim, let's say. Well, why. think you should get a job and make money, well, to live, but you can live on handouts, for example, you can live on social services. Why would you get a job? Well, I want to be a good citizen. Why do you care about that? Well, I want to be a good person. Well, how is it that you're a good person? You see, what you're doing in some ways is, is in a series of questions like that, you're leading people to either the apex of their value structure or downward to its foundation. You're, you can use either metaphor and you might say that the highest value or the most foundational value in that broadening hierarchy of values is also equivalent to God. One of the things I've learned by walking through the biblical corpus is that each of the stories that's associated with the characterization of God is a snapshot or a dramatization of God is a snapshot or a dramatization of of what should be put in the highest place. Once you understand that you have, that you inevitably put something in the highest place, no matter how fractionated that might be, no matter how confused you are, once you understand that you have to put something in the highest place, even to perceive, even to look, then the next question becomes, what if anything, can be properly put in that place. And I would say, that's being the eternal question that's faced the human race since we became conscious. What is it that should be put in the highest place? The story I'm going to tell you tonight, which is the story of Kane and Abel, is a brilliant exposition of that problem. It's a very short story. It's really about 12 to 15 lines long, depending on what you count. There's nothing to it in terms of length, and yet it's, it's inexhaustible and it's inexhaustible in its significance. and that's a very interesting fact as well you might ask yourself how stories like that can be so dense I would say well it's a consequence of a variety of factors a very old story and the story can enables a very old story at least multiple thousands of years old and likely older than that because the older a story is the higher the likelihood that it's even older than that is the farther back you go in time the less rapidly things change so something if a story is 10,000 years old it's probably 50,000 years old right I mean it vanishes into the sands of time so you can't be sure but but you can be reasonably sure people and they compress that into an account of the fundamental elements of the human drama. And then they tell that in a manner that if remembered has to be memorable, right? So it has to attract the attention of its listeners and then it has to be remembered and then it has to be remembered and then it has to be remembered and transmitted across the centuries, let's say. That's a very long period of time. So then you could imagine as well that, not only is a story that's abstracted and foundational and remembered, compelling and interesting, but it also modifies itself so that it's, it fits in the psyche. That's a good way of thinking about it. It adapts itself across time so that it can be remembered. And so it reflects the structure of memory itself itself. And you could imagine, even if you're biologically oriented, let's say, that our memory is adapted to remember what's it's important and so a story that fits in the structure of memory is going to be a story that only concentrates on what's important. Because everything else will get forgotten, no one will pay attention to it. It'll just drift away. Now, a highly abstract story like the story of Kane and Abel is memorable, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we understand it. Now, that's not necessarily a problem. You go to lots of movies that you don't necessarily understand. You do lots of things you don't understand. You don't understand. You do why you put up a Christmas tree, for example. Well, it's a very old ritual, right? And it predates Christianity, that ritual. And it isn't obviously linked in any way to Christianity, and yet it's something we do in celebration of Christmas. And I'm just telling you that not to pick on you because you don't know why you put up a Christmas tree. And everyone else is doing it isn't a good answer. But, but It's to celebrate rebirth, right? It's to celebrate the birth of the light, which is why you decorate the tree with light. The tree is the tree of life. The crucifix is a representation of the tree of life. Those things are all tangled together in that ritual. And we act that out even though we don't necessarily understand it. And it's meaningful to us, even though we don't necessarily know why. And so like our dreams can contain more information than we understand our stories, the stories that we tell. in the stories that we live by can contain wisdom that we don't fully realize. I mean if we fully realized all wisdom we would be omniscient. We certainly don't understand ourselves and we don't understand the drama that we're involved in even though we acted out and represented an image and in drama and in narrative in story. And then as we do that, as we acted out and we represent it, and we do come to develop more and more understanding. And I would say in the 20th century, there's actually been substantial progress in making the meaning of the deep myths upon which our cultures founded more conscious. Now, what I would say, Enlightenment minds tend to equate myth with falsehood and superstition. But that's a big mistake because it fails to grapple with the centrality of the story. I mean you can be cynical and you can say we we're compelled by stories because they're entertaining but that's a foolish observation because the mystery is why they're entertaining right because to say something like a story is entertaining entertaining. Entertaining enough so your children will torture you to tell them stories right. Entertaining enough so that you'll pay to go see them. right? Gripping enough so you'll even go to pay them, you'll even pay to go see them if they take the form of horror or if they're upsetting, right? They're, and compelling enough so that children can learn and be engaged in the learning process if what they're learning is encapsulated in a story. They don't have to struggle with that. It grips them and compels them. The story is a very important thing and a story is an abstraction. We tend to think of story as fiction and fiction is the opposite of fact, but that's not very wise. I mean, think about it this way, you know. You've read some shallow books in your life, no doubt, and seen some movies that were basically tripe, and sometimes there's a place for that because maybe you've worked hard all day or all week or for a year, and you know, you're at home and you're tired and you're tired and you just want to put on like Barbie and zone out for an hour and a half, right. You're not, right, right. You're not with God, let's say at that moment. But you know perfectly well that what you're watching is shallow, and you don't do it necessarily with any pride. It's just, it's a form of effortless relaxation. But then you also know that now and then you read something, a work of fiction, or you watch a movie, another work of fiction, and it strikes you very deeply, which is an interesting metaphor. You know, that you're moved and you're moved deeply and you're moved deeply. something stirs within you, there's something to the story that's compelling and transformative. It might make you tear up, it might even change the way you look at the world. If the story is deep enough and we do presume that great literature has that capability and it does have that capability. I mean I was, I've been struck to the core by, well, by many things I've read, but I would say there's a cardinal dozen books that I've read that really changed the way that I looked at everything. for me dostievsky the Russian novelist sort of top of that list his books the brothers karamazov and crime and punishment and notes from underground the devils are unbelievably compelling works of fiction and they're deep now they're not fact so does that mean they're not true and they aren't true in a way because the events that dostievsky details for example in crime and punishment never happened or or wait or did Or is that accurate? It's not that easy to tell what's happening. It's not that easy to tell what's happening. You know this. You know this if you're married or in a long-term relationship. You know perfectly well that you can exchange a few casual words with your wife or husband and feel things moving underneath the surface, right? And you can exchange the wrong words casually about nothing and not be able to look each other in the eye. a week, right? Because something in that exchange moved something that was way under the surface, and maybe it's something under the surface you bloody well both know is there, and the last thing you want to do is admit it or talk about it. Right? And so, and then you might say to your wife, well, what's wrong? And she says, well, nothing. And you both know that that's a lie. And you know that the exchange pointed to something. deep. You know that it's part of a much a story that has not yet been told and that maybe needs to be told. And so maybe you delve into that and you try to get to the bottom of it and it's it's pretty awful you know to sort out exactly what was said and what wasn't said in a situation like that. If you want an actual education, with hand-selected 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 were true to your word. You gave me absolute intellectual autonomy. I have had it through every course. We figure we can offer people a high quality university level education for under $2,000. Well, congratulations Jordan. It's honestly brilliant. Can't wait to enroll myself. I'll be doing that straight after this. Joe. If you're a great storyteller, what you do is you watch a lot of different people act in a lot of different people act in a lot of different situations and you start to extract out regularities of action and So if you go see an action adventure movie like a James Bond movie let's say What you get is a distillation of romantic adventure Right everything that isn't romantic or adventurous is edited out And you might say well that's unrealistic it's like well not exactly It's not exactly unrealistic it's more like hyper realistic It's like the writer and the filmmaker decided to watch a thousand people and pull out the most exciting elements of their life the most exciting and romantic elements of their life, you might say, and then amalgamate all those into something that's super romantic and super exciting to get to the core of what constitutes romantic adventure itself. And then you're pretty interested in that. You'll go watch that movie, partly to be entertained, but also partly maybe to live the life you haven't lived, that's a good way of thinking about it. But also maybe to get to the core of what constitutes a romantic adventure, to learn. And so it's a distillation. Here's a question for you. Is an abstraction more or less real than the thing that it's abstracted from? Right? Because if you make this fact fiction separation, you say fiction is falsehood, it's not true, it never happened, you're left with a problem that you could make the same criticism of abstraction per se. Like we abstract out numbers, for example, from a multitude of different different... amalgamations to fruit, to cars, to people. What's common across them is two. And you might say, well, that's less real, two, as a number is less real than the things it represents. But I would say, well, why are you so sure about that? Because if you can manipulate the abstractions, you're more powerful than you are if you manipulate the actual things. The abstractions in some ways, you could make a case that the abstractions are more real. You could make a case that the that they're hyper real. Words are abstractions and yet they have motive force in the world. What's the reason, what's the possible rationale for presuming that an abstraction isn't real? Well a great story is an abstraction. A story about a great man is an abstraction about what it is about men that make them great. And a story about the greatest of all possible men would be the ultimate abstraction of greatness itself. And why, how is that not real? say well it's not about anybody in particular well it might depend on how great the man was right how well that man played out that pattern it could be about someone in particular could be about a genuinely great man who acts out or embodies or incarnates the pattern of greatness as such say it's about you too insofar as there have been now there have been times in your life where you made that pattern manifest we understand these things because we understand for example if we're men that we can be fathers and being a father is to participate in a pattern and we know perfectly well that we can be better or worse fathers and we generally even know if we are being better or worse fathers and so we understand that the abstraction represents a mode of being and it's something that we can participate and should participate in and don't participate in well to our great loss and also the loss of our children. We can abstract out stories and great storytellers abstract out great stories and the greatest stories we abstract out are myths. and they're hyper true like ordinary truth is true they're they're true in the way in a way that reveals to you what truth itself is. That's a strange way of thinking about things. Well here here's a here's a hypothesis. I think it's true. I think the scientific data suggests this by the way I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture that in order to even perceive you have to prioritize, right? To prioritize means to value. So if you're out on first date with a woman that and you want the date to go well and you're in a busy restaurant, there's 50 conversations going around you and you could attend to any of them. But you don't. You eliminate from consciousness all the conversations you could be attending to, even the one that you could be having with yourself in your own mind. you ignore that and you prioritize what it is that she's saying and how she's acting and you elevate that above everything else right and you do that because you're as for well God only knows what your reason is but you know it could be you're gonna have a reason right and it could be the reason you're all thinking of or it could be or it could be a higher order reason because maybe you're a serious person and you're looking for a long-term relationship and the way that you're going to structure your attention while you are listening is going to reflect that aim and she's going to be watching you like a hawk also depending on what it is she's aiming at to see just exactly how it is that you're directing your attention moment to moment in that interaction right and if you both are out for nothing but a night of fun well the conversation is going to go one way and if you're actually looking for someone to share the rest of your life with and you think the possibility is there in that moment then you're going to interact and attention and prioritize in a completely different way. And all of that is going to be dependent on what it is that you're aiming for and that aim is actually going to structure the way that that person makes themselves manifest to you. And that's something to know too, because one of the things you could hypothesize. This is a terrifying notion is that people make themselves real to you in direct relationship to your aim. And I think it's worse than that. I think that the world does that. Now we kind of know this even as scientists of perception because your senses are actually navigation equipment, right? The reason you have senses is so that you could move from one place to another successfully and so when you and when you're moving from one place to another you have an aim, the aim is to get to the next place, right? To get to the promised land, architipally, to get to the best place possible in the short variations of that or over the long run. And when you make that aim, then the world lays itself out for you. This is how your perceptual systems work as a pathway to that end, accompanied by obstacles that make you, that produce negative emotion and facilitators or tools affordances that produce positive emotion. So the facts of the world make themselves manifest to you in relationship to your aim, and the emotional valence of things is determined by the relationship of things is determined by the relationship between those facts and where it is that you're headed. And so that's an amazing thing to know because one of the things that suggests is that if the world keeps kicking you in the face, it's possible that your aim is wrong. And so one of the, well, it's either that or God made an arbitrary world that's designed to torture you. Right, and that is the story of Cain and Abel, because that's Cain's conclusion, right? And so we'll delve into that. And so, that's that's that's possibility and then another hypothesis that you might derive from that set of notions is that the aim that would reveal the beauty of the world the beauty and the significance of the world to you in the highest degree that aim there's no difference between that aim and aiming at God that's a definition so you can imagine that you could organize your perception so that the best of all possible worlds could make itself manifest to you, right? Hypothetically, imagine that was hypothetically the case. And that a surname would have to go along with that. Well, I can give you an example about, so one of the insistences in the gospel text is that you should treat other people as you would like to be treated. It's actually quite a complex moral directive because it doesn't mean be nice to other people. Because you know perfectly well sometimes nice isn't what you need. You need a slap on the head. You need to run into the obstacle you deserve to run into. You know perfectly well if you have children and you love them that just doing what makes them happy right now is not the right thing to do. You want to take your son or your daughter and you want to think, I want this person to thrive in the world and their behavior at the moment is not in accordance with that aim and they need a certain degree of correction. And if I was that child and someone who loved me was interacting with me, they would stop me if I was So treating people as you would like to be treated doesn't imply that you should go out of your way never to make them uncomfortable emotionally. It means you should put yourself in their position. You should assume that what you're trying to do is to help them live in the world in a manner that reveals the beauty and the significance of the world to them. And then you should decide how it is that you would interact with them so that that was possible. So that became increasingly. possible. And then you might say, well, imagine you did that to everyone you came in contact with. There's immense emphasis, for example, in the Old Testament on hospitality. It's a sacred duty, hospitality. Well, you invite people to your house and you're productive, so your house is well apportioned and you're generous and you're generous and you're which is the same thing. It's an earlier version of treating other people like you would want to be treated. Imagine you do that with everyone you meet all the time, with every word and gesture. Well, then you might say, well, what's going to be the consequence to you? Well, you know, now and then someone's going to take advantage of you, but I would say