The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

The terror management theorist characters, right? Deriving their theories from Ernest Becker.

But he's also deeply wrong. The hero myth that Becker lays out is not an illusion. It's actually the fundamental principle by which adaptation takes place. Because confronting, so confronting a sequence of minor, no, confronting a sequence of minor traumas, let's say is exactly what fortifies you.

And so did the terror management theorists in consequence.

It's also an interesting and compelling alternative to the death anxiety model, because the fundamental enemy in the entropy model isn't death per se.

I don't think all these things we do in life is based on trying to deny death, which is of course Becker's notion.

That's based on Ernest Becker's work The Denial of Death which is a great book I think he's fundamentally wrong, but it's a great book nonetheless he's wrong in a very interesting way and he's very, very smart person.

So The Denial of Death is a great book yeah and I'm familiar with some of the major researchers in in a terror management area. I've met a couple of them and we've had some discussions.

That's why the books called denial of death right at some level you have to deny that that's it right now this and and you have to transform yourself into something symbolic and so one of the arguments that becker made is as humans live in kind of two kind of two worlds we live in the material physical world.

Of course, Melville makes a lot of it in Moby Dick.

I did a course on 'Moby Dick', 'The Darkness', 'Notes from Underground', 'Death in Venice', and 'The Plague', one course.

Now what people will find interesting is we keep saying that anti-racism is in fact racism and I want to give a quote from Kendi's book now this book is How to Be Anti-Racist and he says this the only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.

What these ideas are saying is discrimination is a good thing if it's applied to the group that is the oppressor and in this case it's going to be white kids at our public schools.

They find it useful and they see that I don't have the usual academic contempt for religion. I actually think religion is, at least in the United States, religion on net is a very good thing.

And I had just read his book The Righteous Mind about moral psychology

if we're looking at Genesis I think that we need to put Genesis back in its context if you read Genesis as if it is a contemporary textbook on science I think what you're doing is is wrenching it out of its original context and therefore you're bound to misread it and that's true of not just Genesis is really to have any work that to understand that we need to understand it's genre and we need to understand this context

what is the original context of the Genesis story well the original context it was written in terms of rival stories of creation other stories that were circulating in the ancient world and it was meant to be an answer to those and it uses poetry it uses imagery and that was what all those stories did and the poetry in the imagery I would not set that against truth as if on the one hand you have truth and the other hand you have poetry imagery and story I think that one kind of truth is scientific truth the empirically verifiable but I think it's too narrow to say well the only kind of truth is the empirically verifiable I think truth actually is broader.

Taking apart Genesis like that was really revelatory to me because my differed from the atheist because I approached the text with reverence and ignorance and humility, believing that I was nothing in comparison to what it contained.

the third volume of his five volume commentary on the Torah, The Rational Bible, will be published in the summer of 2021 it's become the best selling Bible commentary in the country

my rational bible which is written with atheists in mind as I write it it is complete it is a use of reason to explain the five books of the Torah the first five books of the bible and Deuteronomy the third volume was coming out this year but Genesis and Exodus are out

So to take the first chapter of the book, which is about courage, Homer's Iliad, this extraordinary work.

Homer realized that when he saw soldiers marching into war they sang songs and those songs made them feel brave, why did those songs make them feel brave, well those songs made them feel part of a larger voice.

And that's a scientific power of song we know that to be the case that when people sing together in choirs they feel braver, they feel more courageous.

And so what Homer did is he said well what if I could give you that power of singing without you actually singing.

And that's of course what the Ilya does it makes you believe that you are listening to the song of a god, sing goddess of the anger.

but all of the qualities of humanity that you describe are sort of they're parsed off near the end of the book into a single chapter as if they're just secondary side effects of some more profound rationality let's say and it's the rationality that's concentrating on material well-being

but he wrote The Better Angels of Our Nature if I remember correctly as well showing that human aggression has decreased substantially over the last number of centuries

So I cite some statistics from Charles Murray's book Coming Apart where one of the most striking ones from that book is that in 1960, 95% of children born in the US regardless of social class, socioeconomic status were raised by both of their birth parents.

and there's a terrific book by Charlie Murray called 'Coming Apart' in which he goes through an analyzes by zip code and says that people from elite universities marry people from elite universities and live in zip codes with people from elite universities

i posted this video the other day and she's a defector from north korea and we went through her story and she wrote this book called uh um in order to live which is a harrowing book although i don't think it's as harrowing to read as it is harrowing to talk to her but in any case her book ends in 2016 so i asked her what did she do after 2016 and she went through high school and university in south korea high school and all the primary school in one year locked herself in a room basically and went through it all in one year and then went to a south korean university and they're hard to south korean universities and then after she wrote her book which was inspired by the way by george orwell's Animal Farm was very interesting she went to columbia to take humanities degree

I was reading this Animal Farm not even knowing what that is and it was I was seeing my grandmother in those all the pigs and these young pigs the when they like later when those young pigs born you don't even know what life was beforehand didn't even know the alternative life looks like right because the first biggest words of faith speak out.

That's when I realized oh everybody was responsible and that's when I started thinking about speaking out.

they even have dad narrating the gulag archipelago what a time to be alive every month members get access to one out of thousands of audiobooks plus full access to a selection of audible titles just download and stream wherever whenever there's a 30 day trial for newcomers as well if you enjoy this podcast is hard to imagine you wouldn't enjoy listening to great books as well make a change in 2022 visit audible dot com slash Peterson or text Peterson to 500 500 that's audible dot com slash Peterson or text Peterson to 500 500

so in such an interesting manner because Job has absolutely every reason to lift his middle finger towards the sky and to curse God I mean God literally bets Satan that Satan can't take Job out you know and that's that's a pretty rough situation right and but I think the moral of the story is something like no matter what happens to you in your life and this is a this is a bitch of the thing to say no no matter what happens to you in your life no matter how deep the degradation and the suffering you are called upon to maintain faith in the essential goodness of being and to orient yourself upward you know and that's that's a hell of a thing to ask of people but the alternative seems to be degeneration into a kind of hopeless and bitter misery

God approves jobes rebellion rather than the three friends comfort at the end of The Book of Job god says an amazing thing he says to the three friends i burn with anger against you because you have not spoken rightly about me as my servant job has but what they said was so much more. Simply orthodox it's in the rest of the bible god is great and god is good let us thank him for our food amen and job who admitted his words were wild because the sufferings are so great is accusing god and wishing that he could take him to court. And yet god approves that honest rebellion on jobes part rather than the comfortable acceptance on the part of the three friends does he ask you must have loved that.

it is a grand theory of where they see our entire society going

it's a terrible book

it is full of platitudes

it's also a terrible book

I spent yesterday reading about a third of Klaus Schwab's book, um the great reset

it was quite a it's a remarkably vacuous book

there really isn't an idea that's solid in the whole first third

it's very very low resolution and vague just as you'd expect given that it's driven by an ideological agenda

Foucault was really really smart like his book The Order of Things is a real work of genius especially the first half he needed an editor in the second half but the first half is quite brilliant he was super smart but as far as I can tell reading Foucault every single thing he put his intellect to was it attempt to justify his his essential perversion his desire to utilize his sexual behavior in whatever manner he saw fit regardless of the cost to anyone children or other men because he was notoriously promiscuous after he knew he had AIDS you know and that was and that was just one of his many sins I see in Foucault the perfect example of someone who subordinated his intellect which he was very proud of to nothing but the whims of his sexual drive and that was his god Priapus was Foucault's god kind of a satanic Priapus you know and so and I see that on the left it's like well why why are you opposed to traditional masculinity well it's because it's oppressive it's like yeah maybe maybe it's because if you accept the the doctrines of discipline you wouldn't be able to gratify every god damn women that entered your mind the second it entered your mind and then that's the definition of self that's emerged among the radicals I am what I am which is by the way what God says to Moses I am what I am moment to moment and why do you have no right to interfere with that because I want to be allowed to do whatever the hell I want to whoever I want at any given moment like with no thought whatsoever even for my own preservation you know and I think I think we see that celebrated we see that ethos celebrated in pride season and it's not flute that it's called pride season

if you're writing a book about modeling as well as reading the neuropsychology of anxiety The Order of Things is very much worth reading

The Order of Things is quite a careful book

Well that's why I wanted to bring this up because there is a religious impulse that's lurking behind the technological enterprise that's associated let's say with the fantasizing about life and other planets I mean you see this pop up everywhere so for example the I the uh the superman the dc comics character superman is another good example of that and you right because superman has sky parents and he's essentially a technological god who ends up who ends up on earth and you see the same thing replicated with well the marvel universe in many ways with thor and loki I know they're drawing from nor norse mythology obviously there but the idea still lurks there and I'm wondering if it's that subversion like a juvenile it's a juvenile subversion of the religious instinct that drives these fantasies of extra planetary salvation at the hands of aliens or perhaps destruction for that matter so I'm wondering if you if you have any thoughts about whether that might be part of the reason why such concern was regarded for such a long time as as less than serious or even frivolous

the grok that Musk's AI is named after is a remnant of that kind of thinking right because grok was the mode of apprehension used by I think Valentine Smith in Stranger in a Strange Land Robert Heinlein's book and it was basically a sky savior who was humanoid that came from I didn't know that Mars to oh yes that's very see see see well that's why I wanted to bring this up because there is a religious impulse that's lurking behind the technological enterprise that's associated let's say with the fantasizing about life and other planets I mean you see this pop up everywhere so for example the I the uh the superman the dc comics character superman is another good example of that and you right because superman has sky parents and he's essentially a technological god who ends up who ends up on earth and you see the same thing replicated with well the marvel universe in many ways with thor and loki I know they're drawing from nor norse mythology obviously there but the idea still lurks there and I'm wondering if it's that subversion like a juvenile it's a juvenile subversion of the religious instinct that drives these fantasies of extra planetary salvation at the hands of aliens or perhaps destruction for that matter so I'm wondering if you if you have any thoughts about whether that might be part of the reason why such concern was regarded for such a long time as as less than serious or even frivolous

Heinlein does the same thing with 'Stranger in a Strange Land'.

Musk named his AI 'Grock' after Valentine Smith.

Konstantin Kisin is a Russian-British satirist, social commentator, and co-host of the TRIGGERnometry Youtube show. He is also the author of "An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West," a Sunday Times bestseller.

And his book, An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West is a Sunday Times bestseller.

In the book of Revelation, you see the whore of Babylon immediate...Or even the selling of women in short-term relationships for sexual purposes.

If you were neither hot nor cold I will spit you out of my mouth and so his harshest judgment isn't reserved for outright unrepentant committed sinners and certainly not for people who are 100% committed to the courage of their faith but. But to the judgment is harshest for people who play both ends against the middle and who won't commit

"Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis" (book) https://www.amazon.com/Zombies-Western-Culture-Twenty-First-Century/dp/1783743298

He's the first author of the book Zombies in Western Culture, a 21st century crisis which integrates psychology and cognitive science to address the meaning crisis in western society.