Why Listening Beats Every Argument

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

In this lecture, Jordan Peterson explores the fundamental questions of identity, the nature of man and woman, and the relationship between hu

Key takeaways

• Peterson defines a 'quest' as an inquiry that leads to an unpredictable and transformative journey toward wisdom.
• He uses Leo Tolstoy's struggle with suicidal despair to demonstrate how a connection to something 'above' can stabilize a person over the abyss of meaninglessness.

Main topics

• Identity and politics
• The nature of the divine

Notable quotes

A question sets up a quest.

Conclusion

The lecture offers a profound framework for finding meaning through th

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) What if a few minutes with God could change the direction of your entire day? With Pray.com, you can begin each morning with powerful daily prayers, inspiring Bible stories, and messages created to strengthen your faith. Whether you need peace, encouragement, or a fresh start, Pray.com helps you make prayer part of your everyday life. Download the Pray.com app today. Speaker 1 (0:30) Last night, I figured something out that I'm going to expand upon a bit tonight. So, when I, in an event like this, I have a, what would you say, something I'm always trying to accomplish. Speaker 1 (0:54) And I've learned how to do it, and then I learned how to identify what I'm doing and to explain it. So, because often, you know, if you're living beyond your own understanding, if you're really living, you're living beyond your own understanding. You sort of catch up with yourself as you go, or not. So, I use the opportunity, this opportunity, and I did this when I was a university professor. I use the opportunity to speak, to think about something. So I'm not presenting my audience, let's say, with a preconceived notion and attempting to convince them that that's the case. You can do that, and you can do that better or worse, but the problem with doing that is that... Speaker 1 (1:48) It doesn't move you along in exactly the right direction. It doesn't move the audience along in the optimal direction. It moves, it cements you in your own presuppositions, and it moves the audience towards a predetermined end. Speaker 1 (2:09) There's something to be said for that, but it's more exciting to take yourself and the people you're talking to along for the ride. Towards what? Well, when I come out and start a lecture, I have a question in mind. I have three questions in mind tonight. So one of them is... Speaker 1 (2:35) What's the nature of man and woman? So that's a question about identity. How do you conceptualize identity? It's a very major preoccupation with our whole culture at the moment. It's identity politics. What's that? A dispute about the nature of identity. So we'll investigate that. We'll investigate the identity of the divine. Both of those investigations will be in some manner a matter of... definition, right? So, and then the third question, they're all interrelated, these questions, is what's the nature of the relationship between man and woman and the divine? Okay, so now those are the questions. Now, one thing that really struck me hard last night is that question and the word question and the word quest are the same word as The word inquiry and question and quest are the same word. And a quest is an adventure and a quest that you'd find fascinating. A movie quest, let's say, and most movies are quests, is it's a journey towards an unspecified destination that transforms in an unpredictable way. That's a quest. And if it's a... say a heroic quest, which is a true adventure story, then the destination is worth the effort and the quest is difficult, but meaningful. Speaker 1 (4:15) A question sets up a quest. And if you know that, then you can use the question to set up a quest, and that could be the talk. And that's the basis of a good conversation. Someone like Joe Rogan, for example, who's obviously spectacularly good at conversations, at least insofar as the opinion of people everywhere in the world is concerned. He's always on a quest, right? Because Joe asks questions because he wants the answers. He doesn't know where it's going to go. And he has his opinions, but those are expressed as questions, right? They're not so much impositions of his belief on the person he's talking to or the audience as... Speaker 1 (5:01) It has the foundation of the questions that he's using to interrogate his guest, let's say, and to move the conversation along. What, in the direction of what enhanced knowledge, something like that. So it's a pretty high order quest. And the goal would be to be wiser at the end of it, in a valid manner, and then also to be engaged along the way. And that would be good. Like, if you could live your life like that, that would be good, so that you... get wiser as you move along, and it's engaging along the way. That would be good. And so that's what a quest offers. And so a quest, a question is a quest, and that's good. A quest for meaning and wisdom. Okay, so now we have three questions in front of us, and they're complicated questions. What is a man and a woman? I mean, Matt Walsh, as many of you know, he... Speaker 1 (6:00) Right well, we're Right. What is the woman? It's very strange that we're asking that question But we are but we are that's worth noticing and I can you could parody that and he did and quite effectively but that shouldn't blind you the fact that that's actually become a question and there's a lot of foolishness in that but there's also a reason that question has come up and it's not trivial and If you're asking the question, what is a woman? You're asking the question. What is a man because you can't ask one of those questions without asking other So there were that's where we're at in the culture is there? we're We're questioning our most fun Truly our most fundamental assumption. I don't think there's a more fundamental assumption even speaking biologically then Then what constitutes male and female that's it's more fundamental than down and up or black and white or night and day Speaker 1 (7:04) Creatures differentiated sexually before there were nervous systems. Like I said, an old distinction. So that means things without brains can tell the difference between male and female. Right. But it's become a question. Okay, so I'm going to start this. Remember the questions. What is a man? What is a woman? What's the nature of the divine and what is the relationship between man and woman and the divine those are the three questions now I'm going to hit that those questions from a variety of different perspectives and Hopefully that'll culminate in something like the goal of the quest let's say So I'm going to start by telling you a story. This is from Tolstoy's Leo Tolstoy. It was a great Russian author. He wrote war and peace and Anna Karenina Speaker 1 (8:03) Many people believe that War and Peace is the greatest novel ever written. I don't think so, because I'm more of an admirer of Dostoevsky, but Tolstoy is more of a sociologist, and Dostoevsky is more of a psychologist, and I'm more psychologically minded, so I like Dostoevsky, but Tolstoy is a great author, and War and Peace is a masterpiece by any definition, and so whether it's number one or number five in terms of great books, it's still, you know. doing well. And Tolstoy was an extremely successful man by any standard of success. So he had immense estates. He had a huge family. He was extremely wealthy because of the success of his literary works, which is a pretty hard thing to pull off. And he was a renowned author, so it wasn't just that he was famous and rich because of his writing. He was also extraordinarily admired. And so, and at the height of his fame, literally at the height of his success, he was deeply suicidal, deeply suicidal. He was constantly afraid on his estate when he was there walking that he'd hang himself in the barn or shoot himself. He... Speaker 1 (9:31) He had this very strange combination of Success at the highest conceivable level and absolute despair and I think it was also the disjunction between those two things that Drove them to despair because you know it's one thing to be miserable when you're actually miserable right and that's kind of understandable Everything's not going your way but then to have everything that you could think that anyone would want and to have even earned it and deserved it and then to still be in a state where you're desperate beyond belief that's there's a kind of a perverse hell about that that's You know, you could argue it's better to be rich and miserable than poor and miserable. And, you know, fair enough. But you don't have to use your imagination to any great degree to understand that that's a very perverse and paradoxical form of suffering. And that that might have... Because what would he think? It's like, I've got everything that I could have. And I can't see any way to be grounded in my life. I'm drowning in misery. And yet there's nowhere to go. So there's a kind of... Particular desperation in that now Tolstoy wrote a book called confessions or confession I don't remember if it's singular or plural and It's relatively short book. It's very much worth reading It's a pretty straightforward read all things considered though. It's a deep book and it's a meditation on success and suffering and it ends in a very interesting manner because He didn't commit suicide. He reconciled himself to life, and he turned his attention increasingly to religious matters as he became an older man. And he wrote some very great books that were religiously oriented, specifically one had a fairly major impact on me called The Kingdom of God is Within Us. It's a great book. And he had a dream or a vision while he was starting to recover from his intense suffering. Speaker 1 (11:33) The dream was that he was suspended in mid-air at extreme elevation so that the earth was spread out below him, but thousands of feet below. And he... He had that feeling of vertigo that you'd get appropriately if you found yourself suspended thousands of feet in the air. He's looking down, and it was extraordinarily painful, physically and psychologically, to contemplate the depth of the abyss that was beneath him. And it doesn't take Freud... It doesn't take the genius of Freud to understand how that vision related to his predicament, because Tolstoy was suffering from gazing into the abyss, right? The abyss of meaninglessness, the abyss of chaos, and the dream was representing that. But then, and he could see that he was, there was a rope descending from him that reached all the way to the ground. And that was somehow stabilizing him. That was establishing the relationship between him and the ground. In looking down, he was overwhelmed. And he realized that he could look up. And what he saw when he looked up was the same rope, golden rope, except it was extending so far above him that he couldn't see its culmination point. And that that was suspending him over the abyss. It was what was stopping him from plunging to his death. Speaker 1 (13:16) And he saw the rope and he gazed upward, and that's when he woke up. And that was the beginning of his recovery. Now, what Tolstoy realized, it's very complicated, that image. What he realized, and I'm going to unpack it for you. This is the way you would unpack a complex dream, which is a very difficult thing to do. A dream is a place where ideas are born. And so in a dream, a new idea can emerge, but not in full-fledged form. It emerges as a vision or an image, and it may take... It may be beyond you to transform it into words. If you look at a profound painting, profound religious renaissance painting, for example, dealing with like a deep religious matter, you could write about it forever. Like, images can be of infinite depth, which is often why cathedrals, for example, are decorated with complex images, because they're inexhaustible in their meaning. And dreams are like that. And they mean a lot, but... Speaker 1 (14:21) You might say even that they mean so much that they can't be easily comprehended or put into practice. Ideas have to be born somewhere. Speaker 1 (14:33) An idea won't just... A truly creative and original idea will not just emerge in the theater of your imagination fully fledged. It has a developmental history like anything complex. And the birthplace of the explicit idea is the image, the dream. A dream is a moving image, like a movie. Speaker 1 (14:56) And so Tolstoy is trying to work out this problem he has, which is how to cope with the abyss of life, even when the material abundance that life can bring is insufficient to provide orientation. That's a complicated problem, and the dream is a step towards solving that. And what Tolstoy saw in the dream was the fact that... Speaker 1 (15:26) As deep as the abyss is below us, the expanse above us is infinitely, as infinitely high. And that there was some relation, just as there was a relationship between Tolstoy and the abyss beneath him, there was a relationship between Tolstoy and the infinite expanse above him. And it was that relationship with what was above that was sustaining him, even though he didn't know it, over the abyss. Okay, now the question, of course, then is, well, what is the infinite expanse upward? Tolstoy knew what the infinite abyss downward was. That was suffering and misery and nihilistic catastrophe and hopelessness and pain. But he only got a glimpse of what it was that was... Speaker 1 (16:20) extended equally above them. Okay, so now, if you're critically minded, you might think, well, why assume that there's anything above? And that would be a nihilistic stance, let's say, or an atheistic stance. Possibly a hopeless stance, if your experience of gazing downward was hopelessness. There's nothing that sustains us over the abyss. Well, that's a hard... Claim to make because people do live in the spite in spite of their suffering and their misery so we obviously can prevail and it's clearly the case that We're not suicidally miserable all the time so despite the fact that we confront our own limitations and death Speaker 1 (17:11) There are things that sustain us. Speaker 1 (17:27) Bringing the best professors together, making sure they're not censored in any way, giving them the audience and the Speaker 2 (17:32) remuneration and appreciation they deserve. And you Speaker 1 (17:34) 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 2 (17:44) congratulations, Jordan. It's honestly brilliant. Can't wait to enroll myself. I'll be doing that straight after this. Speaker 1 (17:50) Fungio. Now Tolstoy, I would say, spent the rest of his life... Speaker 1 (18:01) Trying to puzzle out what that might be that relate upward relationship and he turned to traditional Christianity to flesh out his vision which is a wise thing to do because It's a very difficult the problem of defining The infinite upward expanse is a very complicated problem and other people have tried to To what to specify that? Speaker 1 (18:30) expanse and our relationship with it and there's no reason not to draw on that if you have any sense. Just like with any endeavor, you would want to gather as much knowledge as you can about the territory before wandering off on your own. And so... Okay, so now that's one story. So keep that story in mind. Now I'm going to tell you another story. It's the same story. And so there's a parallel between them. And the point we're aiming at is illustrated by the parallel. I'm going to tell you a bunch of stories that are parallel. And it'll be in that, the exposure to those parallels that the understanding will emerge. That's part of the investigation. Okay, so now there's a story in the Old Testament about a man named Jacob. And Jacob, Jacob is a man whose identity transforms as he has his adventure. Okay, that happens to all of us, is that we know that, is that you're not the same as you were when you were a child. You might not even be the same as you were last week. People can get stuck so they're in a rut and they can remain static for decades or they can transform so completely that it's as if they become a completely new person. There's a lot of range in the mutability of our identity. Speaker 1 (19:52) Jacob is a man who starts as a very bad man and ends as a very good man. And so that's a radical transformation. And he does that in part because he decides that he's going to do that. So that's an interesting beginning. So Jacob becomes Israel. And the word Israel means the chosen people first, but it also means those who wrestle with God. And I learned that. Seven years ago something like that and it struck me because I thought I understood what it meant and it means something like Who are the chosen people of God? Those who wrestle with God or what does it mean to wrestle with God? What means to wrestle with? it means to wrestle with your destiny it means to Wrestle with the difficult moral decisions that constitute your navigation forward And it means if you're striving to do that wrestling, which is the striving, then you're one of the chosen people of the divine. And so... That's an interesting thing to know. To know the next time that you're trapped in a difficult ethical decision and that you're trying to find your way forward. That the fact that you're plagued by ethical consideration puts you in the game. Now, Jacob famously transforms his identity in the final sense one night when he's off. to reconcile himself with his brother after being absent from his family 14 years. After 14 years previously, after being really quite a terrible person who was dependent on his mother in a way that wasn't good, who betrayed his father in a very deep manner repeatedly, and who... Speaker 1 (21:54) deceived and manipulated his brother in as profound a way as possible, in a manner so egregious that his brother became homicidally enraged, and Jacob had to leave the family. And Jacob's brother had every reason to be as angry as he was, because what Jacob did was not... Speaker 1 (22:21) forgivable in some ways. There was a law in place at the time that if you were the oldest son, you inherited the lion's share of the estate. And there's a reason for that. Modern people might not think that's fair, but there was a reason for that, particularly in agrarian societies, because if you kept splitting the land or the ownings, the agricultural ownings, over successive generations, everybody would end up with just enough land to starve to death on. And so it made for a more sustainable society to keep the agricultural holdings intact, to give them to the firstborn, because there had to be some arbitrary decision, and that's an arbitrary decision in some ways, and to tell the other children that they more or less had to fend for themselves. And you might say, that's not fair. It's like, that's not a very thoughtful analysis. It's a complicated problem that these people were facing. For better or worse, that was their solution. And so Esau had the rights of the firstborn, and Jacob conspired to take those rights to himself. And he did that very treacherously. So he wasn't a good guy. And yet he became one of the greatest heroes, let's say, of the biblical stories, and the founder of Israel, the founder of the people of God. Speaker 1 (23:52) So that's quite something, given that he was not such a good guy to begin with. And it's one of the things that might give you hope from a narrative perspective, right? Because you're probably not as good as you could be. And, like, maybe your past was, you know, pretty shady. And you might think, well, there's no hope for you. And, you know, the more sin you've accumulated as you've moved forward, the harder it is going to be for you to aim up. But... Speaker 1 (24:20) So the story goes, that doesn't mean it's hopeless. And so Jacob's story actually lays out the pattern of upward transformation. So when Jacob leaves his mother, who he connives with, when he runs away after his crimes, he leaves his mother, he leaves his father, he leaves his brother, he goes to visit his uncle, and on the way he decides that he's going to be a new guy. Speaker 1 (24:49) And so he builds an altar, and he makes sacrifice, and then he has a dream. Okay, so what does it mean that he builds an altar? So all these story elements, they meld together. They're all pointing in the same direction. They're coherent. Speaker 1 (25:07) He builds an altar to signify his willingness to sacrifice towards what's highest. Okay, so there's no difference between doing that and deciding that you're going to sort yourself out. It's just the concretization of that, you see, because if you decide you're going to sort yourself out, then you're establishing a relationship with what's up instead of down. By definition, you wouldn't think that you had to sort yourself out unless you were willing to draw a distinction between the terrible things you'd already done and some other way of being that was better, right? So you're establishing a gradient between good and evil, and then you're deciding that you're going to serve good, even though what the hell do you know? Because, you know, you're just... You're not a good person, and so you're going to do it pretty badly, but at least you've decided that that's going to be your intent. That's going to be your aim. And then you might say, well, why the sacrifice? The answer is, well, you're going to have to give up some things to do this, like who you are. Right? Because the more corrupt you are, the more you're going to sacrifice to aim up. And you see this as the story unfolds. You see this in the story of Abraham too because these people, they transform so completely it's as if they're new people. That's why they end up with a new name. Jacob becomes Israel, which is a name bestowed upon him by God. The same thing happens to Abraham. Abraham starts as Abram, A-B-R-A-M, and ends as Abraham. And the meaning of the story is that aiming up can take you on a journey that can transform your character so completely that it's as if you're a new person, as if you've been reborn. That's a way of thinking about it. In fact, baptism itself is a symbolic portrayal of that radical capacity to transform. It's a way of dramatizing it. So you... In a baptismal ceremony, you're plunged into chaos. That's the water, the baptismal water. That's a dissolution into the water that existed at the beginning of time. That's a good way of thinking about it. The waters that the Spirit of God rested upon at the beginning of time. You're plunged into that. Your old self is dissolved and your new self emerges. It's like the rise of the phoenix. That's another image