
October 5, 2020
Biblical Series: Introduction to the Idea of God | Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Check out the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast Episode Page & Show Notes
Key Takeaways
- Human beings want to know where they are going and why, which is different from what actually is! (behavioral truth vs. objective truth)
- “Dreams are the birthplace of thought.” – Carl Jung
- Our neuropsychological systems are so deeply rooted, they are the same now as they were when our ancient ancestors were scanning the Sahara for predators
- If there are things that threaten you (chaos itself), open your eyes and use your words precisely to encounter and contend with the world
- Facing your challenges and proper speech (leadership) are the predicate for creating an effective society
- What people believe to be true, they will act out
- Development of the prefrontal cortex came from the ability to create an abstraction of a behavior, think on the abstraction, then act on it if it is safe
- The distance in time between the Bible and the internet is shorter than the time from a chimpanzee to a modern human
Intro
- Jordan B. Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) is a Canadian clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto
Purpose of The Biblical Lecture Series
- Jordan’s goal is to extract stories and information from literary/art forms (example here is the Bible) into practical and applicable tools to put into life from a psychological perspective
- It is very interesting to Jordan how these stories have been replicated/retold for thousands of years and have such widespread impacts on psychology and society
- Evaluate the psychological significance of the biblical stories
- Not an easy feat in any capacity, Jordan himself says he is learning and working out his ideas as he is lecturing
Nietzsche
- Jordan is fascinated by the works and thoughts of Fredrich Nietzsche, despite the fact that Nietzsche was vehemently against dogmatic religion, Christianity in particular
- Extreme ideologies – Nietzsche correctly predicted in the 1800’s that hundreds of millions of people would be killed due to deeply incorrect representations of the world in the 20th century
- Jordan calls ideologies “crippled religions”
- Warped and twisted from the original framework
- Nietzsche’s view: Human beings are going to have to create our own values (not God creating them)
- This concept was manipulated by the Nazi party and the concept of the “overman” or “superman”
Stories & Myths
- Stories or abstractions from Fiction are not necessarily “untrue”
- Ex: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Numbers
- Are mathematical numbers more real than reality?
- Hamlet is an abstraction of the human experience
- Carl Jung (one of Jordan’s favorite minds in the field of Psychology) stated: “Everyone acts out their own myth, but they don’t know what it is”
- “Dream is the birthplace of thought.” – Carl Jung
- An admirer of Nietzsche, student of Freud
- It aims you somewhere… to where? Self-realization?
- “Everyone acts out a story, but not everyone knows what it is… for many, it might be a tragedy.” – Carl Jung
- Form of competence, tremendous knowledge from action
- Question should not be “what is the world” but rather “how do you live in the world”
- Stories and dreams model this for us
- Some (dreams, stories, and myths) are translated into articulated thought
- Some rituals have been replicated for tens of thousands of years
- When Moses comes up with The Law
- He goes up the mountain and sees God, brings down The Law
- Trying to keep the peace (like a judge)
- How do you mediate please? What are the principles? He had a revelation of finding the peace through the Ten Commandments
- The body of law demonstrates the principles of behavior to live by
- How do you mediate please? What are the principles? He had a revelation of finding the peace through the Ten Commandments
- Trying to keep the peace (like a judge)
- Extract out the core of the guiding principle – in this case, through the Bible
- He goes up the mountain and sees God, brings down The Law
Psychotherapy & Psychoanalytic Thought
- Jordan has spent a long time studying the role that belief systems have in psychological and social health (at least since the 1980s)
- We perceive our enemies as literal demons
- In psychotherapy, critical to break things down into incremental small components and challenge them
- Modern humans developed around 150,000 years ago
- Thinking in evolutionary context is a grander, more encompassing way of thought
- Psychoanalytic thought
- People are made up of sub-personalities that Jordan believes to be alive:
- Low-level resolution of self (anger only wants anger, etc.)
- Very, very ancient neurological system
- Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom
- Greek culture believed that all life was determined by the gods
- Recognition that there is more than we perceive, and potentially out of our control
- Development of the prefrontal cortex came from ability to create an abstraction of a behavior, think on it, then act on it if it is safe
- Allow the abstraction to die rather than you!
- Same neurological system as ancient humans seeing snakes
- Paralyzed when threatened, “Turned to stone”; snake in the garden, etc.
Mesopotamian Gods (dating back 15,000 –10,000 years ago)
- Different tribes coming together had different gods, how do we come together to believe the same thing and not?
- Marduk – elected by all other gods to be the top god, has eyes all the way around his head and speaks magic words
- Marduk has to confront chaos itself (Tiamat) – described as a watery sea dragon:
- Tiamat – word comes from “theom” – the same word that God uses in Genesis to create the world out of chaos
- Also correlates to the story of St. George and the dragon.
- Tiamat – word comes from “theom” – the same word that God uses in Genesis to create the world out of chaos
- Marduk cuts Tiamat into pieces; makes the world
- World created from breaking up chaos through the use of proper words
- Language is essential for effective leadership
- This is an allegory of the same chaos God encountered at the beginning of time
- World created from breaking up chaos through the use of proper words
- If there are things that threaten you (chaos itself), open your eyes and use your words to encounter and content with the world
- Facing your challenges and proper speech are the predicate for creating an effective society
Existentialism & Existential Thought
- Jordan believes that what people believe to be true they act out, not what they say
- Behavioral truth is different from objective truth
- Overlay objective truth with behavioral truth or existential structure.
- Finding your aim!
- Human beings want to know where they are going and why, that is different from what actually is! (behavioral truth vs. objective truth)
Logos – The Word
- Being – it cannot exist without consciousness
- The Logos manifests itself as reality
- The ability to conceptualize reality and transform it – Jordan says this is a very complex topic
- Jordan relates that The Logos relates to human beings being made in the image of God
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment shows the main character, Raskolnikov, decide that life is only his intentions and motivates matter, nobody else’s intrinsic thoughts matter
- He ends up committing murder and changes as a person
- He finds out that pre-murder and post-murder Raskolnikov are literally different people
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago actualizes the same realization as Crime and Punishment, but in a non-fiction context
Q&A with Jordan
- Making sacrifices – give up something that can make the future real and better than the present
- Make a “bargain” with reality
- Creation of a “Covenant” – just like modern world and modern example: money
- Money is a negotiation piece
- Dreaming – your brain is running underlying psychological scenarios without threat of physical action
- Experimental situations are portrayed and trialed, mix of the known and unknown
- Confronting fear – conflict with what is unknown, or chaos allows us to create habitable order
- Example: embracing uncomfortable issues with your spouse over important discussions allows you to hash out your challenges and live together in your house