Ancient Wisdom at an Ancient Library

Hello everyone. I had one of the most remarkable opportunities of my life earlier this year on a trip to Greece I took with Ralston College, a new university that I'm associated with in Savannah, Georgia. We went to Samos with the first class for Ralston College, but while I was there, I had the opportunity—or the opportunity was provided to me—to go to Turkey, to the ancient town, the ancient city of Ephesus. There's an old library there which rivaled the Library of Alexandria in the ancient world, so one of the world's first repositories of academic knowledge. Ephesus has been excavated; it's quite a remarkable archaeological excavation, like the city of Pompeii—a huge Greek city thousands of years old, four thousand years old or more, all excavated.

I had the opportunity to give a lecture there on the logos from the Greek perspective. The Turkish authorities were extremely helpful; they lit up the whole city for us at night. I was able to give this lecture to the students at Ralston College and then publicly to all of you in front of this ancient building, this ancient library—all lit up with beautiful LEDs. It was one of the most spectacular things I'd ever seen, and to be on the grounds of this ancient place, to give this lecture was quite the damn thrill, I can tell you that.

You know, Western society really derived from two sources in some real sense—two fundamental sources. Suppose you could add Rome as a third, but there’s a Greek stream and a Judeo-Christian stream, and they both developed the idea of the logos. Logos is the root word of logic. So forget about the Judeo-Christian logos for a minute; on the Greek side, there was this deep idea developed by Greek philosophers that the world had an intrinsic order, that at the bottom of reality itself, especially on the objective front, there was a palpable, discernible, and benevolent order that would make itself accessible to the imagination and intellectual inquiry of human beings, so that we—the cosmos—was comprehensible. Right? That's a great Greek proposition, and that's the proposition of this intrinsic logos.

Now, on top of that, was laid the Judeo-Christian idea of the logos, which was something like the notion that the divine element of the human being was that of courageous exploratory communicator—that's the logos idea. You can see out of the combination of those two ideas that something like science could emerge because you'd have the notion that the universe was intelligible in its fundamental structure—that’s the intrinsic law logos of reality—and then that human beings' logos could interact with that and produce intelligible order. So anyways, I got to talk about the Greek idea of the logos insofar as I understand it, at the foot of the steps of the Ephesus library in this absolutely beautiful locale.

I'd invite you all to listen to the lecture and to enjoy it with any luck, and to find it useful and engaging. It certainly was a great privilege for me to do this; it was definitely one of the highlights of my life, so welcome to that and Merry Christmas. It is a privilege and a pleasure to be here on the steps of the library of Celsius here in the ancient Greek city of Ephesus. It was here that Heraclitus first articulated the idea of the logos as the principle and structure underlying reality itself. It was here that the Apostle John lived and died; "In the beginning was the word."

So it is appropriate that Ralston College should come here as we seek to revive and reinvent the university, as we seek to revive our understanding of ourselves and of the world. It is an immense honor to welcome for his inaugural lecture to our inaugural class, our Chancellor, Dr. Jordan Peterson.

[Music] [Applause]

So this is pretty good, eh? I was thinking today—well, and for a long time—about what I wanted to talk about, and I guess I'm trying to—I'm always trying to bring together a non-ending stream of thought that I've been developing, I would say, for forty years really. I thought I would try to extend that tonight, maybe farther than I've been able to manage before, and this seems to be exactly the right place to do it.

In Stephen's opening remarks, he mentioned that this geographical locale is very tightly associated with the emergence of the idea of the logos, particularly on the Greek side, but also, as it turns out, on the Christian side. It's really the bringing together of the dual concepts of the logos from the Greek and the Christian side that produced, for better or worse—and hopefully for better—the modern world.

I want to walk through some ideas that I've been developing tonight and make comment on them, and see if I can lay them out in something approximating an intelligible form, which would be the right thing to do given that we're talking about the logos. You might think about the logos; it's worthwhile and useful to think about the logos as something like the intrinsic order of the cosmos. Of course, that begs the question in some sense—well, a number of questions. What do you mean by intrinsic? What do you mean by order? What do you mean by cosmos?

You can break the cosmos down to begin with into two sub-categories: macrocosmic and microcosmic. You can think about the microcosm and the macrocosm in a purely objective sense. You could think about the microcosm as the hidden world beneath the resolution of our vision. Of course, there’s an unbelievably active world of hidden complexity at work at levels of resolution much higher than we can see, moving all the way down to the quantum realm. As scientists, we’ve been very good at elucidating the nature of that microcosm.

You can think of the macrocosm as the external world that extends up above us into the objective cosmos itself. But there’s another way of thinking about that that brings the psychological on board. That is that the microcosm is, in some sense, the objective material world that beckons at higher levels of resolution. But the macrocosm is something more conceptual and psychological rather than something objective and external.

That’s a good thing to keep in mind as we move forward through this exercise in thought. Another way of thinking about this—so we can hit the underlying conceptual target from a multitude of different dimensions—you could also think that we’re beset by two mysteries, in some sense. We have the world of what matters and the degree to which the world of what matters is the most real is indeterminate because it depends on how you define reality. If you define reality as that which exists in the objective world, then the world of what matters is not fundamental.

But it’s my observation that we act as if the world of what matters is more real than the world of matter. I think, in some sense, the most compelling evidence for that, even to a skeptic—and it’s a pessimistic form of evidence, but it suffices sometimes—pessimistic evidence is the most potent. The reality of pain is undeniable, and it’s not amenable to rational argumentation. It announces its existence, and for a long time, I think I thought in some real sense that there was no more fundamental reality than pain.

There’s an ethical dimension to that too because if you accept the reality of pain, there seems to come with it an impetus to eliminate unnecessary pain. To some degree, we can understand that as the basis of the moral impulse—and maybe to eliminate the unnecessary pain of the innocent, like the unnecessary pain of children, for example.

We accept the existence of pain as something so real that we will almost instantaneously act on it. I would say that’s especially the case in the case, say, of infants. It isn’t obvious what’s real because it depends, in some sense, on how you define the term. My sense is that what people believe is most accurately reflected not in what they say or in the propositions about the world they lay out, but in how they act. And that’s also something subject to debate, but it’s not a shallow argument to say that your belief is most deeply reflected in your action.

In fact, I think, in some sense, it’s the deepest of arguments. You know perfectly well that you can say one thing and do another, and you also know that you regard people who do that as hypocrites, and you tend to regard what they do as a more profound pointer to what they believe than what they say. So you’ll call them on that too. That means that there are some meanings that we regard as inviolably real.

Now, the reason I concentrated on pain is because it's pretty easy to destroy joy. You can do that with a rational critique, and we’re quite good at that. You can destroy faith, and you can destroy hope, and you can destroy enthusiasm, and you can often do that even with a casual word. But pain is much more resistant to that sort of rational dismissal.

I thought, over the years, thinking as much as I could about unjust pain, let's say, as a fundamental reality, wondering if there is anything more real than that. And then I would say, "Well, yes, there is! That which dispels pain is more real than pain," and that's because to dispel something, you have to be more powerful than that thing in some sense.

Then you can ask yourself, at all sorts of different levels of analysis, what’s capable of dispelling pain? Or at least, let’s say, rendering pain acceptable, which is perhaps not as deep a solution or as desirable a solution, but is also not nothing. I would say that many of the things we regard as cardinal virtues are virtues, in fact, because if you have them on your side, you can, in fact, contend with and perhaps dispel or triumph over or transcend the inevitable pain and suffering of existence.

I think one of the fundamental purposes of education is to provide people with the peers and the allies, to use a word that’s been contaminated so terribly, that enable them to stand up nobly in the face of tragedy and still move forward with what is good in mind. That's a very different purpose than inculcating in people a thoroughly detailed description of the patterns of the objective world.

I’m not saying for a moment that there’s nothing useful about the latter, but the former is, people starve and thirst in desperation without the former, and those are realities. If, as I said, if you start out with the axiomatic assumption that only what is objective is real, well then that argument falls flat. But I think there’s no reason whatsoever not to raise the question of what it is that you’re using to base your axiomatic definition of reality upon.

I think that noting what people do is a very good pointer to the real. So here’s another way of thinking about the logos: for the world to be intelligible, it must consist of patterned regularities. That might be the great discovery of the Greeks, in some sense—that there are patterned regularities superordinate to immediate perception that are, in some sense, more real.

So number would reflect that, for example. Are numbers more or less real than the things they represent? You can make an argument both ways because, again, it depends on your definition of real. But it’s a very difficult argument to make that they’re less real. Partly that’s because if you’re a master of number, there’s almost nothing that’s beyond your grasp.

So if your wisdom, if the depth of your wisdom, is reflected in the utility of your tools, then almost nothing makes you more powerful than to be a master of numbers. That seems to point to an ability to grip some element of a reality that’s more fundamental, that is outside of immediate perception.

One element of the idea of the logos is that there’s an order to the world that’s superordinate to the apparent order, that’s more fundamentally real, and that you can discover that order in contact with the world. That’s the microcosmic world, in some sense, rather than the psychological world. That seems useful. I would say these patterned regularities are of two types—there are patterned regularities of being, and an object is a patterned regularity of being.

One of the things I came to understand as I studied the science of perception is that we don’t see objects; we see patterns and we infer objects. So the pattern recognition is more fundamental than the object recognition. It’s also the case, by the way, that we don’t just see patterns and infer objects; we see useful patterns and infer objects. I don’t mean as a second-order inference; I mean as a direct perception.

It’s quite obvious—sophisticated psychologists of perception have noted that in some real sense, the perception of the meaning of a phenomenon precedes the perception of the phenomenon. And I really mean directly, and there’s also—much of what you see, for example, is very much associated with what you can grip. Because even your vision is tightly associated with the act of gripping because what you need to see is what will give you a grip on the world.

You might say you see the thing and then determine how to grip it, but that’s not how it works. Your retina, for example, which represents patterns in the world, propagates those patterns through your nervous system and manifests itself in such things as preparation for grip. And that’s outside of conscious visual perception, and so you cannot make the case that what you do when you perceive is purely an objective sense data and then sort the world from that.

The neurological investigations have rendered that presumption invalid. Not only that, there’s another problem. Let’s refer to—we’ll do this in two parts. For the world to be intelligible, it must consist of patterned regularities, and there are regularities of being and becoming.

Another issue is, when you encounter the world, do you see what’s there? The answer to that is, well yes, but you also perceive what could be. I would say that what you perceive is an amalgam of the patterned regularities of both being and becoming. You can think about this and make it intelligible if you think about what happens when you wake up in the morning.

You might ask yourself, well, what do you perceive when you wake up in the morning and you open your eyes? You might say, well, I perceived my bedroom, and I suppose in some very trivial sense that’s true. Although generally your bedroom is so familiar that you don’t need to perceive it; you’ve already automatized that perception, and it has almost zero functional utility. I suppose you have to perceive it well enough to win your way through it when you step out of bed, but that isn’t really what you perceive—not my experience.

I believe this is a very common experience—is that what you perceive when consciousness dawns in the morning is the horizon of possibility that’s associated with the world in front of you. What you really see, as far as I can tell, is something directly akin to the chaos that God encounters as the word—the logos—at the beginning of time.

There’s a pattern regularity of being; that’s a solid object because it propagates itself across time in this three-dimensional form. But then there’s a cloud of possibility around each object, which is what additional realities it could manifest depending on how you act in relationship to it. And that’s not only true of simple objects because simple objects can be many things.

A heavy drinking mug can also be a weapon, for example, which begs the question of what is that thing? It’s a drinking glass and a weapon, and broken, it’s a knife. Many objects, if not all, have quite a wide cloud of possibility around them, and then the interactions between objects have a tremendously wide distribution of possibility.

That’s the becoming that’s implicit in the being, and I think that’s actually what you confront when you wake up in the morning. Because generally what happens is that as consciousness dawns—and consciousness is an agent that contends with being and its potential transformations—you see arrayed in front of you a set of indeterminate possibilities which you could bring into being as a consequence of your imposition of vision with some degree of effort and energy.

What you do, in some real sense, is prioritizing, rank-ordering the importance of the possibilities that you contend with, maybe even before you get out of bed. I would say, in some real sense, if you’re not doing that, you’re actually not living up to your possibility—that what we really are, rather than automated deterministic machines—and by the way, we can’t be that because the future is indeterminate, and a deterministic machine cannot calculate the proper navigation path through an indeterminate horizon.

You are a visionary that imposes a structure of priorities on a horizon of possibility. That means, in some very real sense—far more than mere metaphoric—that you are, in fact, an embodiment of the logos, the same thing that manifested itself at the beginning of existence itself, and continually manifests itself, in some real sense, as that beginning in the world of your conscious apprehension.

We think of these things as myths or as metaphors, and they are that because there are many things, but they’re also reflective of something so real that even our notions of objective reality, in some real sense, pale in comparison. That’s useful to know.

Now the problem—and this is the problem with the empirical viewpoints—the empirical viewpoint is, in some sense, that what you know, you know as a consequence of sense data. The problem with that proposition is that there is mystery embedded inside the axiomatic presupposition of sense data.

Behavioral psychologists believe that animals—and they tried to model animal behavior using these a priori theories—the animal reacted reflexively to a stimulus, and so that’s a deterministic machine hypothesis. That always bothered me, partly because animals don’t do that.

For example, if you train a rat to run down a maze, it’ll learn how to run down the maze, and then if you bind the legs, the back legs of the rat, and you put its rear end on a wheeled chariot, it will propel itself through the maze on the wheels. Obviously, it didn’t learn that reflexively because there aren’t that many wheeled rats, and they just don’t have that kind of experience.

The rat is perfectly capable of modifying what it learned in this hypothetically deterministic manner to react to an entirely different set of challenges and come up with exactly the same solution. It was an old behaviorist joke that under controlled laboratory conditions, an animal will do exactly what it damn well pleases, and I like that very much.

The problem with the behaviorist theory of stimulus-response was the axiomatic presupposition that the stimulus was given—that you just look at the world and there’s the stimulus right in front of you—that takes no effort, and you merely respond reflexively to it. That’s so wrong that it’s almost done incalculable, because it turns out that perceiving the world is so complex that, in some real sense, not only do we not know how we do it, but it looks impossible.

Part of the reason that it’s impossible—and this is again why empiricism is an incomplete theoretical account of the genesis of knowledge—is that there are literally—or close enough to literally—an infinite number of ways to look at anything. That’s because everything is not only complex and of itself at the microcosmic level, almost beyond imagination, but that everything is also situated in a context, which is actually a determining element of the nature of the thing, and the context, expanded enough, actually takes everything into account.

That makes perception a very weird phenomenon for another reason. I was always amused, for example, when I traveled with my family when I was young on our summer vacations. We used to do things like get out and look at the border between Canada and the United States, and that’s a very weird thing to do because you can actually do it, and you can step across it, and people treat that as if it’s magic in some sense because part of us knows that that border is not there, right? It’s not a part of the objective world.

And yet, well, and yet it is because there you are standing beside it, and then if you look at aerial views, you can see the farmer’s fields and exactly where the border is. So things like borders between countries inhabit this weird space between the objective and the subjective—that’s a magic space. It actually turns out that almost everything we perceive has that degree of magicality about it.

I thought also about such things as people’s proclivity to go to museums, maybe in Nashville, for example, or Memphis, to go look at Elvis Presley’s guitar. You think, well, what exactly are you looking at when you go look at Elvis Presley’s guitar? Because, first of all, it’s a mass-produced guitar, so why not just look at another guitar? And you think, well, that’s not the same thing. It’s like, well, why isn’t it the same thing? Because it’s not.

The reason is, is that the guitar is not merely something—and this is the thing you perceive—it’s not merely something made up of the guitar atoms, let’s say, in the guitar molecules; it’s also an artifact that was embedded in a context across a period of time, and that embeddedness of that artifact is part of what you perceive when you see an artifact like a celebrity something—a celebrity owned or the relic of a saint, let’s say.

You can say, well, that’s all an overlay on top of perception, and that would be fine, except that’s wrong. There’s no data, so to speak, that supports that viewpoint; that’s not how perception works. Perception is unbelievably complicated, so we see regularities of being, and some of those impediments and affordances, which is the technical term, we tend to perceive as objects.

But we also see the possibilities of being. But the problem with that is that the world of objects, potentially relevant objects, and the world of possibility is vast beyond our comprehension.

So then we have another problem that emerges as a consequence of that—which is a key and signal problem—and the fact that it has been solved precipitously and carelessly, hastily, is actually the reason for the culture war that’s raging today. That is that we have to prioritize our perceptions.

We have to prioritize our perceptions to get access to the sense data that hypothetically informs us. We have to see the world through a system of value. Why would I say a system of value? Well, a system of value is a system of priorities, right? Because to value something is to make it more important than other things that it’s being compared to.

Why do you need a hierarchy of perceptual priority in order to see? The answer is, well, you can’t see everything at once. You can only see one thing at a time. Which thing? The answer is the thing you think is most important to see at that moment. Then the question is, well, and this is the question—is why is that the most important thing to see at the moment?

Imagine this is true in the auditory domain, in the tactile domain— all sensory domains. You think that perception is a passive action and that we act upon the consequences of our perception, and this is just not true at all. There’s no level of the analysis of perception, neurophysiologically, where you can separate action from perception.

For example, when you’re looking at the world—although you don’t know this—your eyes are moving back and forth very quickly. They have to move; if they stop moving for more than a tenth of a second, you go blind because you saturate the neurons that are using to perceive so intensely with the repetitive stimulation that they just shut down.

At a micro level, your eyes are vibrating like mad, and then there are saccades above that that are still unconscious that are less rapid and wider. Then, voluntarily, you have voluntary eye fields in the frontal cortex. You move your eyes voluntarily to point to what you want to see, and you do that because the center part of your vision, your foveal neuron, is exceptionally high resolution.

Each center vision foveal neuron is connected directly to 10,000 neurons in the primary visual cortex, and then each of those ten thousand is connected to another ten thousand. It’s very expensive neural physiological real estate. If all of your vision was as intensely high resolution as your phobia—which is a very small part of your retina—you’d have to have a brain like an alien because half your brain at any given moment, especially for human beings, is actually taken up with the problem of resolving the world into conscious vision.

That’s all motorically dependent, and so in some sense, in a real sense, seeing is very much akin to feeling out your—you know, if you’re investigating the structure of something like this column, if you close your eyes, you can build a visual image of the column.

Blind people, by the way, many of them can draw, just so you know, even if they’ve been blind from birth, because they present—they generate visual representations of the world. They just don’t have light and color, but they still have the sense of the three-dimensional structure of the world. They know what the shape of objects are; they can see their loved ones' faces by using their hands as eyes, and we use our eyes as hands as well because we feel out the world with our hands or with our eyes.

So don’t be thinking that it’s passive perception and then an overlay of prioritization and action. The problem of prioritization goes all the way down to the micro level with regards to perception. Okay, so now you have to prioritize your perceptions. Why? There are too many things to look at, and you can’t look at everything at once.

So then the question is, well, how do you prioritize your perceptions? The answer is, well, you make one thing at every moment that actually allows you to act— even to move your eyes, even in a restaurant, to focus in on the conversation that your first date is having with you as opposed to all the other conversations that are going on around you. That’s all dependent on motor action.

In the auditory perception system, to prioritize what you’re seeing indicates that you exist within a hierarchy of value. Why a hierarchy? Well, because everything has to exist in your perceptual structure in relationship to everything else. So, let’s take the example of the date. Why are you listening to what your new potential partner is saying rather than the background conversations? You might say, well, I want to hear what she has to say.

Well, then you might ask, well, why? You might say, well, I want to be polite. You might say, why? Well, I like this girl, and I would like to explore the possibility of a relationship. Why? Well, because I believe that having a relationship with someone is valuable. That’s a subset of the notion that having relationships is valuable.

That’s a subset of the notion perhaps of having stable, long-term, loving, monogamous relationships as the highest form of relationship. That’s a subset of the notion that, well, as you progress through life, one of the things you do is find a partner and establish a family and perhaps have children and contribute to the community in that way.

That’s part of being a good citizen, let’s say, and that’s part of being a good person. Then there’s an outside nesting of that too because one question might be: well, what do you mean to be a good person? Of course, that’s the problem of the logos, and the answer to that would be something like: well, I want to be the proper mediator between possibility and actuality such that the best possible actuality can be manifested by the possibility that I confront.

Every bloody thing you do, everything you see is either nested in a unified hierarchy like that or it’s not. So let’s say what happens if it’s not. Well, we actually know what happens if it’s not. Let’s say you’re not unified psychologically in your value orientation. What’s the consequence? Well, entropy—that’s the first consequence.

It’s like, are you doing one thing which you know what you’re doing and can commit yourself to and can actually undertake, or are you so confused that you need to do fifteen things at the same time, and you don’t know which of them is most important? The importance, by the way, is diluted by the multiplicity, right? Because if you pick something out, it’s singularly important, you actually elevate it as important.

If fifteen things all of a sudden become equally important, they’re all 115th as important because if they weren’t, you wouldn’t have a problem sequencing them, and that means they’re not motivating. One of the consequences of that is that there’s no positive emotion because positive emotion—the joy, there are a couple of types of positive emotion—I won’t talk about satiation, but enthusiasm and joy, happiness—let’s say—is 100% dependent, as far as we can tell, on observations that you’re progressing towards a valued goal.

It’s not attainment-focused. That’s satiation. You get something you want and you’re satisfied about it. That’s a whole different neurochemical system, but enthusiasm and joy that people associate with happiness manifest itself when you’re moving towards a valued goal. If you don’t prioritize your goals because you don’t exist within a structure of value, then you have no positive emotion.

Positive emotion is half of forward-moving motivation. Well, in fact, in terms of forward movement, it’s almost all the motivation because the embodied manifestation of positive emotion is the movement towards a valued goal. That’s what it is; that’s why you have the positive emotion—because you are a creature that can move towards goals, and the emotional signaling of that is positive emotion: no goal, no positive emotion; no hierarchy of goals, dilution or eradication of positive motion.

Because if you’re confused enough and you have a hundred goals and you can’t prioritize them, then every goal has one percent of the significance necessary to really move you forward. To be maximally motivated, you need to know why you’re doing what you’re doing all the way up Jacob’s Ladder—all the way up.

That brings us to the notion of the macrocosm—that’s the heavenly hierarchy, and in some sense, it’s a psychological macrocosm, although not in all senses because it brings society into the purview. So here’s a proposition: any system of priorities is a structure of values.

You may or may not accept the proposition that you have to hierarchically arrange your perceptions. You also, by the way, have to do the same thing on the action front because if you’re inclined to do ten things at once, you can do none, and consciousness, by the way, is a very narrow channel. We generally can only concentrate on one thing at a time.

The reason for that, in some sense, is because we can only act out one thing at a time. Not only do you have to prioritize your perceptions—which are action-based anyway—you also have to prioritize what you’re going to do, because you have to do the first thing first, and then the second thing, and the third thing. That’s obviously a structure of priority, and the structure of priority is the structure of comparative value.

A hierarchical structure of comparative value is an ethic. What that means, as far as I can tell—and this is something, if it’s true, is that we cannot see the world except through an ethic. I mean that literally, as well as metaphorically. You literally cannot see the world or act in it. You cannot perceive the world except through a structure—a hierarchy—a hierarchical structure of value, which is an ethic.

Then I would say, here’s something else to chew on for like twenty years: a story is a verbal description of a hierarchy of perceptual and action prioritization. The reason that we’re so attracted to stories is because it’s so difficult to perceive and act in the world that we’re hungry, at the level of soul, for a narrative that represents to us a hierarchical ethos that we could embody as a model for emulation.

And so that’s what our stories are. They are mortals the ritual models for emulation, most fundamentally. The anti-hero story? Well, that’s easy enough to contend with. It’s like: watch this person who ends up in catastrophe and hell and do the opposite of whatever it is they’re doing.

That’s a powerful lesson because there’s something very compelling, as we said before, about very powerful negative emotion. Even if you don’t believe in heaven, you might be able to conjure up a belief in hell, and if you can’t, I would say, well, you’re either not using your imagination or you’re hiding, or so far you’re just lucky, but I wouldn’t expect that to last.

You can certainly see the catastrophe and even the hellish catastrophe beckoning, and you might plot a route that would make that the least likely seems to be a good idea. Part of the reason that we’re fascinated by villains and super villains, for that example, or part of the reason we’re fascinated and endlessly so with figures like Lucifer and Satan is because we’re attempting to flesh out the nature of the antithesis to the worst kind of hierarchy of values, and that’s gripping to us.

It’s gripping to us. Now there’s more to it as well because we also will turn our attention to the negative to fortify ourselves against the negative in preparation for confrontation with the negative. We can do that through use of fiction, and that’s what we’re doing, for example, at least in part, when we do such strange things as amuse ourselves with horror films.

Any system of priorities is a structure of values, that’s an ethic. It’s hierarchical because one thing has to be put before many things, and things have to be done in sequence, and everything has to proceed in some sense in an intelligible manner towards the highest possible goal. The alternative to that is not only the radical unhappiness that I already described, which is the destruction of any possibility of enthusiastic engagement with life in a meaningful sense on the positive front, but the other price you pay for being confused about your ethic is anxiety—most particularly anxiety. Because anxiety is actually a signal of entropy in perception and action.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t know where you are, and you don’t know where you’re going. If you’re in a place where you don’t and you don’t know where you are or where you’re going, you’re in danger because that’s unmapped territory. God only knows what lurks in unmapped territory. You can think about that biologically—if you’re somewhere you don’t understand and you don’t know where you’re going, there’s always the possibility of predation.

But you can think about it metaphysically too, and that’s worthwhile. If you’re so confused and disoriented that you don’t know where you are or where you’re going, there are predators of the spirit who are much worse than snakes that are waiting in wait for you. The probability that you’ll move from aimless, hopeless, joyless anxiety to nihilism, corrosive bitterness, and genocidal fantasy in the fundamental extreme is very high, and so that’s possession by a predator of the spirit in the desert of the soul, and that’s real.

So a system of priorities is a structure of values—an ethic, a narrative—and that would include a drama as the description of a structure of values or an ethic or a set of priorities. We see and act out the world through what Wind described as a narrative. Now that’s interesting; that’s an interesting—if that’s true, it’s very interesting.

It’s interesting partly because you know the post-modernists—who I don't admire, generally speaking—they figured this out. They figured out that we likely see the world through a story and that that might even be true for scientists, is that a scientist—and Carl Jung believed this too, by the way—is that science takes place within a surrounding narrative.

Now what the post-modernists did, the French post-modernists in particular, and then the Americans through Yale, most particularly, they leapt from the problem which was: how do we perceive? Solution: we see the world through a narrative, to narrow a solution which is that we prioritize our perceptions and our actions by imposing a narrative of power and dominance, and they swiped that from the Marxists, and that is simply not true.

There is no evidence for that; animals don’t even do that in their social communities, or when they do, they erect unstable and extremely violent social hierarchies. There’s no evidence whatsoever that hierarchies predicated on a narrative of power function productively even for the people that impose the narrative of power. People have objected to me, “Well, what about dictators?” Solid. It’s like, here’s something to think about: imagine you set up something like hell around you.

We could think about the Soviet Union in that regard, and you’re a minion in hell. You’re not Stalin. Are you more successful or less successful if you’re Stalin? I would say being the biggest devil in the worst hell is actually the most cataclysmic failure, not a mark of the success of your ethos of power.

The ethos that’s set up against that is very complicated, and it is the ethos, in some real sense, of the logos. The logos is the antithesis to the Luciferian presumption of dominance and power, and it’s harder to formulate, which is why we’ve been wrestling with it and are doing that tonight as well in this place where it’s been wrestled with forever. It’s harder to formulate; it’s not uni-dimensional. It’s the union of multiple virtues, and so it’s a tricky thing to grip, and it’s so tricky that we don’t have it fully articulated.

We’ve approached it, I would say, through narrative, and one of the things I’ve come to realize about the biblical narrative—and this is what I’m writing my next book about, which is called "We Who Wrestle with God," and I suppose this lecture is a pre-preview of that, of the ideas in that book— we characterize that which must exist at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of attentional prioritization with the characterization of the divine in narrative.

You might say, well, what’s divine? Well, we could define it technically. Divine is that which is deepest; what’s deepest? That which most other things depend on. That’s a good definition of depth. A deep and profound piece of literature—Milton is the foundation stone for many branches of literature. There are many literary products you can’t understand without understanding Milton, and you can’t understand Milton without understanding the Biblical corpus, which is even deeper and, in that sense, more profound given the metaphoric relationship between the idea of profundity and depth.

Why is the biblical corpus deep? Well, it’s an attempt to flesh out, using narrative characterization, the nature of the spirit that has to inhabit the highest place in the hierarchy of attentional and action priority. And so why would I say spirit? Well, because it’s embodied; it’s something embodied. It’s not a description of the world; it’s a pattern you enact and embody.

When you’re called to God and the logos through the biblical corpus, you’re called to allow yourself to be possessed by the spirit that represents the union of awe-inspiring, imitable virtues. Then you might say, well, what are those? I can walk through some of them just so you get a sense of this. I don’t want to do it exhaustively.

In the opening chapters of Genesis, which is where the idea of the logos is highlighted above all else in some real sense, you have this notion that whatever God is uses whatever the logos is to extract habitable order from potential. The tohuva bohu—that’s the chaos—is a weird intermingling, in the linguistic sense, of chaotic possibility of the world per se with confusion and psychological disorientation.

It’s an amalgam—that chaos. It’s the chaos you feel when a plenitude of possibilities opens up in front of you, which is destabilizing and psychologically challenging, especially if the purview of possibility is beyond your ability to contend with. You can see the massive possibility conjoined with a sense of anxiety—that’s too much possibility to bring order to that.

You cast your attention upon it, and you prioritize it, and God imposes a benevolent order upon that chaotic possibility, extracts from that chaotic possibility the habitable order that is good. The reason that the habitable order that’s extracted is good is because God uses the logos, which is something like a combination of orientation towards the highest possible good, which you could think of as love and truth.

One way of characterizing the imitable manifestation of the logos is that it’s the nexus of love and truth. I think it’s truth embodied in love or embedded in love, with love being superordinate. But that’s a partial description, and it’s disembodied and abstract in some sense and doesn’t have the grip necessary to compel you to act to imitate.

What you see in the biblical corpus are continual representations of the spirit that must occupy the highest place in the hierarchy of imitable, mimicable action as a pattern that possesses your perceptions and actions and calls you into the world. For example, in the story of Adam and Eve. Once Adam and Eve are thrown out of the garden because they become prematurely self-conscious and prideful, in some real sense, God is presented as the spirit that you walk with when you walk unself-consciously in relationship to the highest in the garden.

That’s actually an experiential reference as you imagine you’re having a particularly good day in a particularly beautiful garden, like the day we had today. It’s like, are you closer to God? Well, the answer is experientially, well yes, because you feel that your existence is imbued with a deep sense of appropriate significance. That’s not a rational, secondarily-derived argument; it’s primary. It’s a primary experience.

Part of what the biblical corpus is trying to do is to lay out the nature of the spirit that inhabits you when you’re oriented towards the highest possible good and to point out that that’s phenomenological; it’s experiential; it’s existential; it’s embodied—it’s not a secondary overlay of the description of the nature of the world on the world. That’s not what the biblical corpus is trying to do.

In the story of Cain and Abel, what’s God? God is that which calls you to make the appropriate sacrifices and calls you on it when you don’t. Try to escape that and see what happens. We know perfectly well, perfectly well, that that’s a pathway to hell. You might say, I don’t believe in hell, and I would say that means you don’t know anything.

Noah, who is God, or what is God in the story of Noah? The spirit that calls the wise to prepare in the face of crisis. Do you abide by that or not? Well, you do if you’re wise, and you do if you care about the people around you. Abraham, what’s God? The spirit that calls the inappropriately luxuriating out to the terrible adventure of their life and then requires of them the highest possible sacrifice to obtain the highest possible goal.

In Exodus, what’s God? The spirit that lays tyranny to waste—the spirit that guides you through the desert of the soul—the spirit that orients you towards the promised land and imbues you with the enthusiasm that allows you to make your way out of the tyranny and through the desert, and so on. In each story is part of a circumambulation, a narrative circumambulation, that’s attempting to represent the union of virtues that could be embodied in perception and action that constitute the pinnacle of the pyramid.

And that, by the way, pyramid— that’s Mount Sinai! That’s the proper hierarchical organization of society—that’s the aesthetic model for the construction of the Ark of the Covenant. It’s all of that simultaneously. It’s the Egyptian pyramid with the gold cap. The question is, what’s the cap? What’s at the highest? Well, that is the mystery. What should be placed in the highest place?

We already said well, something better be because if nothing's placed in the highest place, then there’s nothing in the highest place. What’s the consequence of that? Well, to return to that theme: anomy, anxiety, overwhelming dread, psychological destabilization, and the absence of joy. There is no escaping from that except by solving the problem. But it’s worse than that, because this hierarchy of perceptual prioritization unites us socially.

So here we are in a theater, and we’ve seen many examples of theaters today, including the amphitheater, where it’s a concentric circle that focuses everyone’s attention on the same spectacle. Well, that’s the definition of a culture, is that everyone’s attention is focused on the same spectacle. The hierarchy of perceptual prioritization and action that unites you psychologically is also the same structure that unites us socially.

That means the kingdom of God is within and without simultaneously in some most fundamental sense. You might say, well, we don’t need a superordinate ethic to unite us. I would say, okay, then we’re not united. So what are we if we’re not united? The answer is, well, we’re a house divided against itself.

What’s the consequence of that? Everyone—that’s the Hobbesian nightmare, right? That’s not the noble savage; that’s the Hobbesian nightmare. It’s like you and I, we cannot play together; we cannot focus our attention on the same point and cooperate, and compete amicably, peacefully, productively, and generously towards that point. And that’s not nothing.

That’s the death of God; that’s the rise of nihilism; that’s the emergence of a corrosive and destabilizing and deep cynicism. It’s the death of joy and enthusiasm. So we might say, well, what do we have in the absence of God? If God is the spirit that animates us to action and perception in relationship to the highest good, and the answer is we have the catastrophe of the death of God that Nietzsche referred to when he announced the death of God and said simultaneously that we were the murderers of all murderers, and that we would never find the water to wash away the blood.

And that is definitely the situation we’re in now. And hopefully, hopefully we’ll all wake up enough at the individual level to play out that catastrophe of valuelessness within our own souls and render the judgment that’s necessary upon each of us in ourselves by our own voluntary ascent, or we’ll act out the failure to do that in the external world.

That’s the decision, as far as I can tell, that, in some real sense, and maybe in a sense that’s more real than ever before in the entire history of the world, even though this battle has been playing out eternally, that’s the choice that confronts us now.

I learned from Carl Jung, he said after the Second World War and the rise of weapons of mass destruction that the fundamental danger that confronts humanity is now psychological or spiritual in part because we are so technologically powerful that we cannot possibly survive in the primitive ethical condition that still obtains. Our scientific and descriptive capacity has expanded immensely over the last four hundred years to the point where we’re a planetary force of creation and destruction, but our ethical endeavor, to say the least, languished.

You might observe that children given dangerous tools die, so we have these dangerous tools, and that means, as far as I can tell, that we better become the people that can wield them with wisdom. That’s going to mean, like it’s always meant, a return to the source—a willingness to rescue the dead father from the belly of the beast—a willingness to make conscious the nature of our hierarchy of perceptual priority, let’s say, and to understand that that’s a reality that might be superordinate to what we normally and have been taught to view as reality itself.

The biblical notion that, in some sense, the word is the precursor to being itself actually turns out to be true, and it’s a terrifying idea because it means, in some real sense—and I also believe this to be the case, and I think it’s also reflective of the deep notion of the logos—that what that means is that in some cosmic sense, it’s on you.

We have this notion that human beings, men and women alike, are formulated in the image of God, in the image of the logos, and we believe that. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s an axiom of our laws; it’s an axiom of our constitutional system, certainly in a country like Britain or America, any of the western democracies, and to a large degree any country that can function at all.

There’s the presumption that each person is a locus of divine value. You think, well, do you want to live in a society that assumes that, or do you want to live in a society that doesn’t? Then you might also ask, do you want to have friends that assume that of you, or do you want to have friends that don’t?

The same thing might apply to the people that you love—in your actions towards them, how are you treating them? If you treat them properly—and I can’t see, even speaking merely psychologically—that you can love someone and not treat them in some most fundamental sense like they’re a divine locus of value. I think those are the same thing, and you can quibble about the linguistic representation necessary to derive that conclusion, but have it your way.

You’re going to act out your decisions one way or another. You’re going to learn in the world just exactly what attitude you should bring to bear if you want to elevate those around you and simultaneously do the same to yourself. You will find that if you do that to the degree you do that, you are treating each person as if they’re a divine locus of value and responsibility, and that’s a terrifying thing too, because I read something once—I don’t remember who said it—that God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

I read commentaries on that idea indirectly, obliquely, by Dostoevsky and Soren Kierkegaard and Jung as well, perhaps above all else, stating that we are each a center of the world. We each have a cosmic role to play, and you can think about it this way, and this is a useful way to think about it: you have potential within you to match the potential that’s without, let’s say, and we all upgrade ourselves and call ourselves out on our failure to manifest that which was within us.

Here’s a proposition for you: the world is languishing to the degree that you are not all you could be, and that could really be the truth. To the degree that we’re made in the image of God and made in the image of logos, and also the entity that has to undergo the tragic death that’s represented by Christ and maybe the encounter with hell that’s part of the story of the resurrection—that’s us. That’s what we face.

I’ll conclude my discussion of the characterization of the spirit that occupies the pinnacle of the hierarchy of attentional priority with the story of the passion, which is the full embracing of the catastrophe of life. That’s what it calls us to. Religious or not, one thing you might notice is that a good proportion of the entire planet has been obsessed with the figure of the crucifixion and the story of the passion for two thousand years.

Even as an unbeliever—whatever that means—you have to take that seriously. Now you can write it off as a delusion. Freud tried to do that, and so did Marx, but you have to ask yourself, well, if it’s a delusion, why didn’t people pick just something happy to look at instead of something utterly dreadful? I say utterly dreadful because, and this is the truth as far as I can tell, what the passion is, is a distillation of tragedy.

Imagine that in order to contend with your life, you have to be willing to embrace its darkest elements. You might say, why? I’d say, well hey, the darkest elements are there, and they’re coming, and if you’re not prepared, it’s going to be far worse than it has to be at minimum, and maybe it’ll just lead to your destruction in ways that are worse than death, and that's a high probability.

In order to live fully, you have to confront life fully, and that means you have to accept the unjust sacrifice of the innocent, in some real sense—and that’s you. And that’s not even enough, you see. In the Christian passion—why is it the ultimate tragedy? Well, tragedy is undeserved catastrophe, let’s say. Well, then you amplify the catastrophe: youthful death, torturous death, death with foreknowledge, humiliating death, death at the hands of the mob, death as a consequence of betrayal, death in the purview of your mother’s vision, death despite your innocence, death despite your moral virtue, death despite the moral virtue that you have that everyone knows about and recognizes and still sentences you to death.

Death at the hand of a tyrant, death at the hand of a nihilist—and that’s not enough, because in the cloud of myth that surrounds the characterization of the embodied logos—and that’s Christ—following the radical acceptance of death is the radical confrontation with hell. That’s the harrowing of hell, and the story there says, in order to open yourself up maximally to the possibilities of life, not only do you have to contend with the tragedy of your own innocent sacrifice and be on board with that fully or pay the price, but you have to confront the Gates of Hell itself.

You might say, well, what does that mean? Our culture has been obsessed, in principle, since the end of the Second World War, with what happened in Nazi Germany, and that's as good an example of hell as anything that could be presented to the corpus of unbelievers who disavow any recognition of hell. If what happened in the Nazi death camps isn’t enough hell for you, I’d suggest that you update your prioritization of perception and value because it was certainly enough hell to be convincing if you look at it thoroughly.

One of the things I tried to do when I studied the Holocaust and also the events in the gulag was to put myself in the position not of the victim and certainly not of the heroic rescuer, but of the perpetrator. With a bit of meditation, you can discover pretty damn rapidly that you could be a perfectly effective torturing Auschwitz camp guard, and that’s a hell of a thing to contend with.

I would say, in some real sense, that’s worse than contending with death. I would also say that if you don’t do it, you cannot stop it. If you’re unwilling to see the part of you—and that's a Luciferian part in the most fundamental sense—if you’re unwilling to face that, to the degree that you’re unwilling to face that, that’s the spirit that possesses you.

In a world like our world, that is not something that we can continue to do and get away with it. So we’re all called together here at Ephesus, which is quite remarkable for us all to be here. What are we called to do? Wake up! We have a moral burden to bear, and that’s the adventure of our life.

That’s the other thing so interesting about the Abrahamic story—is that God calls Abraham out of his luxurious slumber and sends him into a catastrophe—tyranny, starvation, war, brutal—but he has the adventure of his life! You might say, well, it’s the adventure of your life that justifies the catastrophe of your life; it’s not some simple-minded juvenile hedonism or desire for comfort; that’s not what we’re built for.

We’re built for the adventure of our lives, and where do you find that? You find that in orienting yourself to the highest possible good in all ways and speaking the truth forthrightly along that pathway. Thank you very much!

Join me again in thanking Dr. Peterson for joining us tonight.