The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

you just published a couple of books myth mythos heroism heroes heroes and there's there's a third one in that trilogy it just escapes my mind.

Troy.

Sherlock Holmes in the second Sherlock Holmes book which is called The Sin of Four says to Watson I remember this it's very interesting he says you know what's in the statistician has shown that we can predict to an extraordinary order of accuracy the behavior of the average man who uses the word man where was now we would have to say human or man or woman be not a mean the average man we can absolutely predict how they will behave but no one has yet and probably never will be able to bet to predict how an individual will behave

and he's working on a new book which I have and have started to read a long ways into it at the moment called The Matter of Things which will be forthcoming at some point in the future and will shape some of our discussion today

in that book what I'm really trying to do with Mary's science and philosophy again they never should have been separated science cannot properly be done by philosophy many without philosophy many scientists and philosophers have commented on this over the years and the divorce has been disastrous for them both you get a mindless kind of science that jumps to very naive conclusions that everything is mechanical and you get a kind of philosophy that thinks it's above dirtying its hands with science now I think each of these parties can benefit from a reprotechmal which is long overdue and it's that that I try to do in this very big book to show how strands of neurology, philosophy and physics and even of world mythologies come together to show the same very similar pictures the same Gestalten the same differences between a world such as the world brought into being by the left hemisphere and a world such as is brought into being by the right hemisphere

and this really is one of the more important differences i would say probably the core difference that as it were one world is real vibrant unknown in part only known and ever to a degree and ever more coming into being and ever more coming into knowledge for the right hemisphere and for the left hemisphere already cold finished known dead put in a book stuffed on the shelf filed away and we now live so much in this virtual represented world partly because we're very much cut off from nature which constantly reminds you of its vivid uncessed and liveliness it confronts you with audacious beauty and vitality all the time partly because we've learnt to cut our minds off from our bodies and so we think in this enormously abstract way and partly because of city life partly because of technology which means we interact with two dimensional screens rather than the three dimensional depths which is in a room when you're with some of which why as you know and i know because we both help patients in our time that it's very important to be in the room with the patient it's a completely different thing that happens from anything you can do on the telephone or even like this

this is from this book mm-hmm there was a time when metal grove and stream the earth and every common sight to me did seem appareled in celestial light the glory and the freshness of a dream yes that's it this is what I'm referring to

He's also written seven novels including the New York Times bestseller Pearl Harbor and has founded Hollywood for Habitat for Humanity

I was in Saint Petersburg and we were doing a scout for a film I wrote called Love and Honor based on a novel that I wrote and in we were finished with the scout we had seen everything that that we were scheduled to see and this young woman who was in her early 30s Russian woman asked if there was anything else we'd like to see because we had some time and I said well I'd love to see some of your churches and she got this quizzical look on her face she was surprised that I don't know a Hollywood director would ask that and she said well I'll take you to my church and I said you've got a church and she said oh yes I'm Christian and I said but you grew up when that was discouraged and I was illegal or your parents Christian as she said no their mothers confirmed atheists her her father was baptized as a child but he's also an atheist and so I said well how did you become Christian and she said there was no beauty I was a young girl walking around and nothing was beautiful and one day I passed the church and I could see candlelight in it and heard music coming out and I went in and I kept going and I kept going and I became a Christian

I think of like a story like tol story wrote a tale called the woodfilling or the woodfilling party and it was about some some Russian soldiers who were fighting I believe they were fighting Afghan or you know Muslim troops and Azerbaijan or in the mountains but they've been in this cold forbidding place for a long long time they've seen all sorts of death and they've gone out to to cut wood and load it far wouldn't load into a wagon and a sniper hits one of them in the leg and he's or it's him in the body and he's bleeding to death and he knows he's dying and they load him on the wood wagon to carry him back while he's still alive but he grabs the lieutenant by the collar and says there are letters from my wife in my boot take them and send them back to my wife social have them and the officer says yeah yeah I will but the dying man knows he won't because he's seen many men die and just pitched into shallow graves and there's just so much death so he says no take them while I'm still alive and then I know you'll do it so the officer gives the order and they strip off the man's boot and cut through his his pant and unwrap the wrappings around his leg that he's done to keep warm and there are the letters but what the officer sees for the first time in months and months maybe years is the bear flesh of a man's leg this white sunless flesh and it's that that reminds him that this is a human being and Tolstoy says he was struck with a terrible dread of the loss of life it and I thought even I remember it was 18 when I read that that this is what an artist does you hold up to us when we've become in your word immune to the two certain things like you watching women it's one time it's many skirts another time it's no bras and other time it's bear midriffs and other time it's something else but you get used to something so nothing it makes you notice and the artist looks for well why can I do that will make people notice to say look here see what you see what's there rather than what you remember

Kenneth Jones and Tima oak and Dismantling Racism workbook 2001 God only knows what that is but it's everywhere the characteristics of white supremacy culture perfectionism which is an element of conscientiousness which is a fundamental trait sense of urgency defensiveness quantity over quality worship of the written word paternalism either or thinking notice this is all written in words by the way power hoarding fear of open conflict individualism which seems to be run somewhat counter to the fear of open conflict progress is bigger and more objectivity right to comfort yeah it's quite the grab bag of conceptually unrelated items it's incoherent at every possible level of analysis as well as being it's it's impossible to parody.

Dostoevsky touches on this and this is where I really learned this when I first encountered this idea, you know, Dostoevsky and notes from underground, says, look, this is something you have to understand. If you gave people everything they need so that they had nothing to do but eat cakes and busy themselves with the continuation of the species, if they were so happy that nothing but bubbles of bliss would appear on the surface of the water that they were in, they would smash it all to pieces just so that something adventurous and unique could happen.

I'm reading these wonderful books by this priest Walter Chesa. I kind of if you know that name. He died in 1984, but for 23 years he was a prisoner in the Soviet system. So he was arrested in 1939 right when the war got going with the Germans and make a long story short. He was in Lubbionk, a prison for five years in Moscow basically in solitary confinement. Then he was sent for 15 years or so to Siberia, to the worst work camps, you know. And he describes it in his book called With God and Russia in this kind of bold just straightforward way. But all through it, he says, okay, I went into Russian to be a missionary to announce the gospel. It's not the way I expected it to be. I didn't expect to be in a prison camp, but okay, this is what God has willed obviously at least his permissive will is that I be here. So I'll do what I can. And so for 23 years this man set up when he was in solitary, a Jesuit program of prayer and he would go through his day, he had the prayers of the mass memorized. Then when he gets to the camps they would smuggle in little bits of bread and wine so he would say mass on a little table clandestinely, you know, and he would minister in his own quiet way to the people around him. I'm telling that story because in the most horrific circumstances, in a way he never saw coming, he said okay, but I'll try to be a saint here. I'll try to be Christ bear the sufferings of those around me and bring the grace of God. He was finally sprung in 1963, JFK was involved in getting him out with a prisoner exchange. As he left Russia, he's the plane's taking off and he did the center of the cross over the country, bless the country. And it's incredibly moving story because it's not at all flashy. It's told in a really almost bland manner but it's someone who decided no, I'm going to go in the depths. I'm going to deal with what I've been given and it's horrific. I'm in a Soviet Siberian concentration camp doing hard labor but I'll be Christ for the people here. That's it. I mean, that's the adventure. There's the hero's journey that he went on.

I was reading oddly enough I got a book sent to me by Bishop Baron the first draft of a book and it's written by a couple of professors it's called Jordan Peterson God in Christianity the search for a meaningful life by Dr Christopher Cax or Dr. Matthew Preciousc word on fire institute to Catholic response to my biblical series and hopefully they won't be too upset about me talking about it today but I won't talk about it that much the book itself it was rather a shock to me.

if you want to read a book that will completely make you insane then you could read Jung's eye on and it's a study of Christian symbolism and astrology which doesn't sound particularly dangerous but or or even particularly necessary to read I suppose but Jung describes the the juxtapositIon of astrological and Christian symbolism and it's a brilliant book and it's terrifying because he he outlines the concordance between the levels of symbolism over several thousand years and it's obvious when you read the book that no one plotted this it's not a conspiracy whatever is going on to make that concordance occur isn't something that we understand and it seems to be best understood as one of these situations where the narrative and the objective touch

as long as we put it with 'Notes from Underground' which I just taught for a course I did a course on literature in the meaning crisis and so I used 'Notes'...

but then there's another thing that seems to be voluntary necessity which which is what his book is about 'Reasons for Love', love is a voluntary necessity.