Follow Whatever Glitters In The Corner

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

Jordan Peterson delivers a lecture dissecting the biblical story of Cain and Abel as a profound exploration of sacrifice, resentment, and moral responsibility. He contrasts Abel's pattern of

Key takeaways

• Cain represents a pattern of second-rate sacrifice that inevitably breeds bitterness, entitlement, and destructive resentment toward those who succeed.
• Abel's offering of the best cuts symbolizes optimal sacrificial adaptation, aligning personal development with communal stability and long-term reward.

Main topics

• Cain and Abel narrative analysis
• Sacrifice and psychological maturity

Notable quotes

There's no difference between sacrifice and maturity.

Conclusion

The episode offers a rigorous psychological and philosophical framework

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:03) But what's that? What's that and a warm New York welcome? Speaker 2 (0:14) 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 any way 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. And I 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. Speaker 2 (0:53) dozens of times in my lectures, hundreds of times in my thinking. Speaker 2 (0:59) There's almost no limit to what can be discovered in it, even though it's only a few paragraphs long. Speaker 2 (1:06) 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. Speaker 2 (1:29) You know, Speaker 2 (1:31) Everything's inexhaustible in some ways, right? Because... Everything is connected to everything else. If you love someone deeply, a child or your wife or your husband, a parent, sibling, Speaker 2 (1:46) You can you can understand all of humanity as a con all of humanity as a consequence of that relationship Speaker 2 (1:54) If you investigate anything deeply enough, you start to understand how it's connected to everything. And so everything... Speaker 2 (2:02) 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 Cain and Abel story, which is the story I'm going to tell you tonight. The Cain and Abel story is a bottomless well of revelation. Speaker 2 (2:29) And... Speaker 2 (2:34) It's a pointer towards... Speaker 2 (2:38) The source of all revelatory wisdom. Speaker 2 (2:44) In the story of Exodus, Speaker 2 (2:48) 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 as 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. Speaker 2 (3:41) Being a shepherd was a challenging occupation in ancient times. Speaker 2 (3:46) Which is why the shepherd is an icon of heroism. A shepherd has to... Speaker 2 (3:55) make His way with His wits. Out in the wilderness. The wilderness of that time was characterized by... genuine danger. Speaker 2 (4:07) 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. Speaker 2 (4:34) And then something extraordinary. Offers itself to him. Okay, so it's worthwhile understanding that. To understand how something... Speaker 2 (4:48) transcendent. Speaker 2 (4:51) offers itself to you, something magical. What's 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... Speaker 2 (5:20) 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. It 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. Speaker 2 (5:57) 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. Speaker 2 (6:08) 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 Speaker 2 (6:32) Moses is out. conducting himself as a shepherd. Speaker 2 (6:38) And something attracts his attention. Okay, so that's the first thing to understand. You can be going about your business. Speaker 2 (6:49) And something can attract your attention. Now this is a mystery. Speaker 2 (6:55) 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 a... In an affair, let's say. Speaker 2 (7:25) 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... Speaker 2 (7:42) The things that beckon to you have an autonomy. Speaker 2 (7:46) This is a very strange thing, so let me... Speaker 2 (7:51) 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 Speaker 2 (8:17) was demolished intellectually. Speaker 2 (8:22) God died. This was not something Nietzsche was pleased about. He 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. Speaker 2 (8:53) Nietzsche's... Speaker 2 (8:57) Diagnosed diagnosis of that and then offering of a cure was that because there was no longer anything of transcendent Speaker 2 (9:05) Divinity. Speaker 2 (9:07) We would have to create our own values. We'd have to take on to ourselves the burden of generating... Speaker 2 (9:19) Meaning itself. Speaker 2 (9:26) 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. Speaker 2 (9:35) And that if we step 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... Speaker 2 (9:52) generated the most profound critique of that proposition. Speaker 2 (9:58) Freud first and then Carl Jung who was a real student of Nietzsche both Freud and and Jung noted that You can't create your own values because you're not in control of yourself. Speaker 2 (10:11) 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 gonna follow them people make Speaker 2 (10:29) resolutions to improve themselves constantly and 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, right? 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... Speaker 2 (11:37) 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 Like 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 Jocko Willink's a good example of that Jocko Willink is a Navy SEAL very tough guy. It's about four feet thick He looks like two Joe Rogan's compacted together Speaker 2 (12:22) 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. Speaker 2 (12:49) 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 you're 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 Speaker 2 (13:43) 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. You're generally pretty happy if your child takes an intense interest in a sport, let's say, or a 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 plain 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 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... Speaker 2 (15:23) Towards the new land you could inhabit if you became the new person you could become. Speaker 1 (15:28) It's called Peterson Academy. Peterson Academy. Peterson Academy. It's Speaker 2 (15:33) called Peterson Academy. Peterson Academy. If you want an actual education. With hand Speaker 1 (15:38) -selected Speaker 2 (15:38) professors from top universities around the world. Speaker 1 (15:42) 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 Speaker 2 (15:48) 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, Speaker 1 (15:59) congratulations, Jordan. It's honestly brilliant. Can't wait to enroll myself. I'll be doing that straight after this. Speaker 2 (16:05) Fungio. Speaker 2 (16:11) When God comes to Abraham, Abraham is about 70 when this happens. He's a rich, he's the son of rich parents. And what that means is Abraham could just lull 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? That's a very good question for rich and privileged people. And the answer to 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. Speaker 2 (17:01) 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, you've been hanging around your tent there, buddy, for 70 years. It's getting kind of ugly. Speaker 2 (17:21) 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... Speaker 2 (18:38) You become known for the same reason that people who are capable and competent and productive and generous and hospitable are known. Speaker 2 (18:46) 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'll increase them, and this is the next step. It'll 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 is offered the opportunity to father nations. So the idea is that if he follows the Speaker 2 (19:18) Calling. to opportunity. that the consequence of that will be that his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, he'll establish the pattern that... Speaker 2 (19:35) 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 capper 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 It's a very optimistic idea. So imagine that you threw caution to the wind let's say although not wisdom and and Intelligence and you said well, I'm going to pursue Adventure, the adventure that calls to me with no holds barred. 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 what the the 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 that would be good for them, and that they'd have friends in 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... It 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... Speaker 2 (22:33) Why is it a burning bush? Well, everything alive is on fire. Speaker 2 (22:39) So it's it's life Heightened that's a good way of hallucinogen ically heightened. 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, and I would say in some ways you're most alive when you're most on fire right so that the 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? Speaker 2 (23:32) 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, didn't it? And you learned more and more as a consequence of your commitment to it, and then... 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... Speaker 2 (25:20) If you're talking to someone or interviewing them, and you want the conversation to light on fire, to be a transforming conversation. Speaker 2 (25:31) You can ask people what they're interested in. 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 love, and you encourage that, then the best of them comes out, and they... And they become charismatic. Speaker 2 (26:02) 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 he has 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. Like, 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, you know, 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 will 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's 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... Speaker 2 (27:45) Insofar as you're capable of making an account of how 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, you know, 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. And false is almost always dull. Genuine is almost always compelling, even if it's inarticulate. You know, 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. Speaker 2 (28:40) So, because their souls can discriminate between truth and falsehood. And so... Speaker 2 (28:48) And God tells Moses, as a consequence of investigating this burning bush, that... 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