We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God

[Music] thank [Applause] you yeah so I'm very curious about tonight's talk because I have a lot of things buzzing around in my imagination that are related to the topic of identity and I'm very curious to see if I can weave them together so I guess we're going to find [Music] out it's it's a lot of fun to to try to do something like I I do a different lecture every night I have a different question every night it's a lot of fun to see if I can make something coherent out of a genuine investigation you

know it's a kind of a high act but it's very entertaining it's fun to do it with an audience too because and I can see simultaneously if I can manage to push my thought forward in a manner that's coherent but also in a manner that's communicable and comprehensible it's a great privilege to be able to have that opportunity so identity you know we have identity politics right and that's a core element of the culture War so identity has become political so let let's it isn't necessarily the case that identity would be political it could be

psychological it could be sacred it could be it could be uh uh patriotic it could be National there's lots of manners in which identity could manifest itself and it's a mystery that it's become political now it has something to do with what Jonathan made reference to is when the sacred collapses so that's the death of God when the highest order of things collapses it doesn't disappear it it's as if it if it plummets downward and what's happened in our society is that the sacred has become political and that's really bad because there's a space for

the sacred and there's a space for the political that's why you Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto what unto God what is God's and you don't want to confuse the two because if you do then God becomes Caesar and that's not a good thing and Caesar becomes God and that is a much worse thing and so and that's the situation that we're in and so that means and this is part of the conundrum that we have you know and maybe it's part of what nche prognosticated too because he believed that the consequence of

the death of God would be that human beings would have to create their own values and I believe that's wrong I don't believe we can create our own values but to give n is Du which is always an important thing to do because he was a genius it certainly is the case that we have to rethink it seems to be that we have to rethink what identity is from first principles now can we do that successfully we're we're going to find out because the culture war is a war because of the difficulty of rethinking identity

from first principles what is it is it political is it ethnic is it racial is it economic is it desire Jan pointed to that are you nothing but what it is that you want or that or what something within you wants is it subjective like is is your identity only something that you control all of those questions that's like 10 questions every single one of those questions is extraordinarily difficult and we seem to be stuck with all of them so we're going to try tonight to see if we can take identity apart from first principles

and and see where we where we get with it and uh so let's start with something basic one of the things that I thought through deeply when I was a university Professor was how to evaluate someone's writing right when you're evaluating their writing you're evaluating their thinking and the purpose of evaluating their thinking is not so much to grade them to put them in the appropriate bin but to provide them with the corrective feedback that would enable them to become better thinkers right but when you're criticizing someone if you're doing it in a sophisticated way

you're helping them separate the wheat from the chaff I mean one of the things I learned as a grader of essays let's say was that one of the most effective things I could do to students wasn't to Circle what they did wrong which was often 95% of the essay but seriously like our school system does a very bad job of teaching people to write I had super bright kids in the fourth year of University who who they were they were terrible at writing and they could learn quickly cuz they were smart but no one had

ever taught them that was an awful thing to see after 16 years of education one of the things I learned was you know I'd be waiting through a mess of cliches and second rate thought and quasi copying or or no not precisely Claudine Gay's sin let's say but close to it um plagiarism um and then now and then you know it would be it would be as if the students actual genuine intelligence popped up briefly through all the mess and they said something clear and and and useful and you know people do this in your

relationships with them you know all the time is they'll they'll offer you a kind of mishmash of what they think you want or maybe even what they think they want or what they should offer and if you really listen then now and then you'll hear the person say something that they really mean and that's true and if you reward that because you can if you learn to listen if you reward that then more of that will happen now that can be daunting because you got to ask yourself if you really want to know what your

wife thinks of you for example but in the long run it's probably a better idea than finding out in divorce court you know 25 years later so people will hide bits of wheat in the chaff and what you do as a discriminating critic is dispense with the chaf but identify the wheat this is a really important thing to know when you're mentoring people when you're grading but when you're communicating with people in general what you're really looking for if you're wise are things to reward now you dispense with everything that's second rate not because you

want to criticize and get rid of or rise above the person that you're criticizing morally but because you want to get to the wheat and it was frequently the case for example when my students were maybe writing the first essay of the semester that you know 90 literally 95% of what they wrote was just just painful would have been easier just to rewrite the essay than inte grade it you know and so seriously Ser but you know one of the things I noticed is that if I circled a couple of sentences that were genuine thought

the students were so thrilled that someone had noticed when they dared to put their head up above the parit and say something they beli to be true and genuine that the next time they wrote an essay it' be more like 30 or 40% that and then if they got further reward for that assuming they had the talent and the diligence then perhaps by the end of the semester it would be like 90% genuine thought genuine wheat and then they were thrilled about that too because people are thrilled to have the opportunity to offer their best

especially if it's received in the in the right manner people will often obfuscate and produce what's second rate because they're terrified in their heart of hearts that if they did reveal themselves genuinely that which is also a way of making yourself vulnerable because it lets people see who you really are if they did reveal themselves genuinely that that would be rejected and so part of the reason that my students delivered such draw to begin with was because they had a history of having what they offered that was good ignored or condemned and so often they'd

hide under the cliches they'd hide under giving the professor what he wanted to hear so they would get a good grade because they had sickened of the risk of doing something genuine and having it be rejected and that's something else to know in your relationships man you got to be very careful not to punish the people around you that you love for doing something good because you can you can eradicate what's good with punishment quite rapidly and so it's it's it's it's a deep thing to understand that you need to be watching the people around

you all the time to see when they hit the target and to point that out and people love that if you do that to people around you they'll be so thrilled with you you could hardly stand it right cuz people all people but those who are utterly nihilistic and faithless will risk offering something genuine from time to to time in the desperate hope that it is in fact noticed and appreciated and if you can transform yourself into the sort of person who notices that and rewards it then people will bring their best to you and

that's a great deal now you know it's it's demanding in a sense and frightening because if you start to encourage the best in other people and you set that as a standard you more or less have to apply the same criteria to yourself and that can be daunting and so you know we tend to engage in a pathological dance with other people and they offer what second rate to us and we accept it and offer what second rate to them and we do that because we can Sher responsibility and because it lets everybody off the

hook but you know there was a famous Soviet joke typical Russian humor they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work right right that's a brutal joke that's a brutal joke that's the sort of joke that destroys everything right and and did in fact because the Soviets were well on the way to destroying everything when they finally destroyed enough so that they fell apart and thank God that happened without well without the third world war which we seems to be striving mightily to bring back right at the moment by the way okay so what

are you doing when I was thinking through what I was doing when I was grading an essay I was I I was I asked myself you know what what are you doing when you're writing what is a student doing when he or she is writing what are you doing when you when you're thinking and it's so interesting because if you think that through deeply there's never anything that you do even at the micro level there's never any word that you utter there's there's never any letter that you write and I mean a single letter that

isn't infused with the spirit of your entire identity and what that means for example if you're going to write an essay for a university course and you're going to do it right it means that you have to you have to write down the closest approximation to the truth that you can manage and that a very tricky business because to speak or to write the truth means you have to be oriented toward the truth and that you have to have made a practice of that and there isn't anything about that that's temporary or fragmentary it has

to be it has to be part of your identity or maybe it has to be your identity and maybe what you're doing when you encourage people to bring their best to the table and you reward them for those offerings that are genuine is that you're encouraging their identity as upward aiming truth tellers and there's no difference between that and encouraging the manifestation of the logos right that's the same thing the logos being the spirit of the word or the spirit of Christ the spirit of God that Broods on the water the the Deep at the

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your selling that's shopify.com [Music] jbp you know and identity is a very deep very deep phenomenon and questions about identity are very deep problems they go all the way to the bottom or all the way to the top or both and this is the case with every word that you write when you're writing and this is a good thing to know when you're writing you know you might think that it's okay to be casual with your words it's never okay to be casual with your words there's a it's part of the judeo-christian tradition that it

is the word that brings reality itself into being out of potential right and that's that's the truth and what that means is you bloody well better be careful with your words because every word you speak is either a manifestation of the fact that you're made in the image of God or it's a rebellion against that and there's no such thing as trivial communication if there's if you're communicating trivially or you're communicating about something trivial that just means that you've wandered off the path that's all it means it's just as it's it's an analog of this

if if you find people boring that's you right because if you listen to people they are not boring they are so interesting that you want to get away from them right right so there's no trivial there's no trivial use of words okay so now let's take that apart a bit as we investigate identity we could we could do that we could start the investigation with anything you do but I'm going to use the domain of words um because we all talk we all communicate we thinking words it's it's as good a place as any to

start or perhaps better than most what are you doing when you're writing well let's say you're using a pen well you're you're drawing you're drawing letters you're moving the muscles of your hand like at the kind of the highest level of resolution at the most at the most precise the most precise formulation is the act of writing it's a motor act It's actually an action right and you have voluntary control over that but interestingly enough what you're doing at that high resolution level the mechanics of writing as an act that Shades into mystery right because

you can control your hand but you don't know how right like I can move move my fingers but I have no idea which individual muscles I'm moving so that's unconscious it's unknown and unconscious and then well the muscles are made out of cells and they work but I have no idea how they work and if I was in charge of them they wouldn't work and so that's just out of my purview right my Consciousness doesn't enable me to either apprehend or to control my physiology at that level of detail and that's only the beginning of

the level of detail that I don't understand I don't understand how the cells work I certainly don't understand how the proteins and other molecules and and sub organs within the cells work I don't even know what they are and much less perceive them or control them and then those cells and the molecules they're made out of are made out of atoms and they're a mystery and then atoms are made out of subatomic particles and no one knows what in the world those things are and so the reason I'm telling you this there's a very specific

reason is that even if you're a reductive materialist what you can see is that there are elements of what you do let's say what you do is part of your identity there are elements of your identity that shade into mystery right at the material Level you can move your hands but that's about as far down into the physiology as you get there's all these other layers underneath that that who knows how they function um it's taking taken the world a very long time to create something like you that can operate with that degree of unbelievable

complexity that can have some conscious control over that there's all that mystery underneath what we're capable of consciously apprehending so our ident is shade into the mysterious as we move down into the material realm okay so that's a good way of thinking about it we have a conscious domain that we can apprehend there's a mystery on the material side okay then you're writing a you're writing down letters one by one you're doing that to craft words right and so you you choose the words carefully if you're wise what do the words mean and why do

you choose those words well that's complicated because each word no letter has a meaning right a letter needs to be combined with other letters before you get any meaning words have meaning but the meaning is partial and context dependent right that doesn't mean words are meaningless but it it does mean that in order to understand what they mean you have to assess them in relationship to other words and so a word is a unit of meaning but barely a phrase phrase starts to be a little more meaningful and a sentence is even more meaningful than

a phrase and then you understand the meaning of a sentence in the context of something like a paragraph like what a paragraph should be is a collection of sentences that address an idea coherently and if you're listen to someone who's sophisticated speaking they'll speak in paragraphs and the sentences within the paragraphs will have some relation of meaning to one another otherwise the person is you think the person is all over the place let's say and could be and the more coherent you are as a personality the more the the more sophisticated your ability to erect

structures of meaning at broader and broader levels of sophistication and so a very sophisticated speaker or writer will pick the right word and put it in the right phrase and put that phrase in the right sentence this the sentence will be an ACC urate representation of the aim of the thought it'll have a certain Rhythm a poetic rhythm um it'll have a certain Beauty it'll have the proper relationship with the other sentences that surround it that'll make up a paragraph then the paragraphs themselves have a harmonious relationship with one another so that when you read

paragraph one and then you read paragraph 2 paragraph 1 informs paragraph 2 and paragraph 2 perverts ly also informs paragraph 1 right and so part of this is a question of where's the meaning in a text and the answer is well the meaning is at multiple levels simultaneously it's like the meaning of the world it's not something you can exactly point to because it's everywhere in this entire hierarchy at once right so now you have the paragraphs in relationship to one another and maybe they make up something like chapters and then the chapters are arranged

into a book and then you might think well the book is the unit of meaning but that's not exactly right because you interpret every book you read in relationship to all the other books you ever read and not just the other books that you've read but all the people you've met and all the discussions you've had and every thought you've ever managed to create and every word you've ever uttered all that bears on the meaning of the book and then all that knowledge that you have is a reflection of well the sum total of human

knowledge as it's encapsulated let's say in words you've you you you will have sampled that as an encultured creature as a speaker of your language and as a reader of the texts of your culture and you're a partial reflection of that body of literature and it's the interaction between you as a embodiment of that body of literature and the specific text that reveals the meaning of the text but but that's not all that isn't where it stops because the Corpus of human knowledge in so far as it's written is a reflection of the social structure

of humanity itself the history of humanity that's a reflection of the psychobiology of the human and the natural order and that's a reflection of the material order and that's a reflection of the cosmic order and all of that operating at the same time is that's all all of that is operating at the same time with every single thing that you do and it's the relationship between all of those levels simultaneously that's your identity and so it's no wonder that when identity collapses let's say at the highest levels that the problem is overwhelming because in some

way in some mysterious way everything that you do every micro behavior that you make manifest is a reflection of the entire order of things all the way from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic and possibly Beyond because it's the religious presumption that even if you stretched your identity to the further reaches of the cosmic order that's not far enough because the creator of the cosmic order is held to to be outside of time and space itself outside of the realm of the conceptual and so your relationship to that ultimate Transcendent element also plays a role in

determining everything you do so well you can see that you can see that in a sense as a religious Vision because all of a sudden you can Envision what you do at in relationship to all of those levels and see that that's the full reality of every gesture you make let's say and so that's overwhelming but there's no reason to assume that an accurate apprehension of who you actually are would be anything other than overwhelming I mean you're very complicated creature and God only knows what you're up to or or who you are or what

you are in the final analysis it's not like we know and it's it's certainly not the case that you're divorced in any simple sense from everything else I mean you're certainly not divorced from other people and if you are well God help you because it's very bitter and horrible existence to to exist in isolation and that also highlights something it it highlights the fact that whatever your identity is it's not merely subjective you know and this is something that our culture is we're just tearing ourselves apart about that at the moment because I I mean

that because what what you want from other people is you want their desires to take you and the world into account right it can't there's no possible way that things can work if if it's not only all about you let's say but worse than that it's all about whatever fragment of you it's a biological instinctual fragment that happens to have the upper hand subjectively within you at the moment that's just there's no community in that right there's no consideration for other people there's no future in that there's only the immediate now right and so that

proclamation of radical subjective identity based on desire is the reduction of that whole cosm tree because that's what that is to a fragment of you now and to hell with everything else and and I use that language very carefully because the pursuit of that subjective identity is the worship of that subjective identity that is a pathway to hell and the reason it's a pathway to hell is because it doesn't give a damn for the future other people and so if we all generate identities that have no consideration for other people or even for your future

self for that matter because you know perfectly well that if you're only ruled by your immediate subjective whim now all you're going to do is something stupid that's going to get you in terrible trouble in a week or a month or you know in a year or 5 years down the road if you have an iota of wisdom everything that you do in the present is bounded by your understanding of the repercussions of that action as they Cascade into the future and there's not much difference between that say taking your future self into account carefully

there's not a lot of difference between that and taking other people into account you know in in a harmonious marriage for example presuming such a thing exists it's something to aim for at least in a harmonious man marriage there isn't a lot of difference between taking care of your wife say or wife taking care of her husband and the husband taking care of himself All Things Considered or vice versa because well the thing about being married to someone is well they're there right now but they're also there tomorrow and they're there next week and they're

there next month and next year and so everything you do with them or to them it sticks around and so conducting yourself so that their welfare is let's say your highest consideration their genuine welfare that's not what they want or even exactly what they need but their highest welfare there's not much difference between making that highest welfare your aim and treating your future self optimally you know because there's you know this perfectly well because there's almost no hell that's more miserable than a really bad marriage because it's so immediate and it's right there and it's

there all the time and so you know if you conduct yourself in your own life so that it's all about you and you're married and so your wife takes second place the probability that your relationship is going to transform itself into something that makes all about you hell is like it's 100% this is also why it's so useless to be selfish it's like what do you mean selfish exactly this Christmas as we celebrate the gift of life you have an opportunity to share the same gift with a mother and her baby imagine a young woman

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you're selfish right we we think well selfish means that it's about me it's like no it's way worse than that because it could be about you in the higher sense right it could be about you in a way that took you tomorrow and you next week and next month and into the future into account that's kind of maturity right if you're mature you're not bound to the present and so you could be selfish in a way that was sophisticated so that you didn't do stupid things right now because they're entertaining or because they Rectify a

desire that would get you in trouble in the future So when you say someone's selfish that isn't EXA exactly what you mean you mean that they're bound to the present in a way that makes them only the Servants of their immediate desire right and that's a form of radical immaturity right because that's a mode of being that's characteristic let's say of two-year-olds before well before they have any cortical maturation at all before they're sophisticated social agents before they understand that the future exists before they're able to take other people into account and so the notion

that your identity is subjective in that narrow sense so that you only you can Define it for example or that you should be the servant of your own desires that's you're not the servant of your own desires you're the slave of your own desires if they're local and immediate and you don't have the discipline or the wherewithal to control that you're not the master of your own fate you're not acting out your subjective self you're just the prisoner of the instincts of a two-year-old and but the Warped the instincts of a warped 2-year-old who should

have been two when they were two and not when they're 40 right so so I this identity so why did we get obsessed with the idea of subjective identity well I think this is where you know I thought for a long time if I had to classify myself politically I thought for a long time that I was a classic liberal and to some degree and I mean really in the classic sense I don't mean in the Progressive sense whatever that is um that the liberal philosophy is essentially the presumption that the Cardinal level of identity

in a political system should be the individual right and there's some things to be said about that I think that a political system that shifts to the group as the Locust of identity is very dangerous and unstable so if it starts to become about race for example or ethnicity or gender sex let's say like we should say sex and if the if the emphasis is on the group then you get the war of groups against groups and that's not good and the individual the individual who capable of suffering gets subjugated to the group and groups

get elevated above one another that's a very bad solution but the atomistic individual solution is also not good the thing about classic liberalism right that that insistence on the Primacy of the subjective is and the the classic liberals knew this that only works in a society well that's the question when does that work and the classic liberals they kind of knew this they knew that the presumption that the individual was Sovereign could be treated as Sovereign and could be treated as the Cardinal unit of analysis and could be treated as the local let's say of

Divine Right natural rights that was only sustainable in a culture that was intrinsically moral right so let's say that's why for example your nation is established as one nation under God you can Pur you can pursue your individual happiness but only that only works if collectively and individually you're doing something like aiming up and what that would mean is that that that surround I described as characteristic of identity right sort of stretching up into the cosmic order that's intact and functioning now I would say a society that's integrated in relationship to its religious story has

that surround and people who are acting out the ethic that might be associated with that religious surround can treat themselves as individuals but if the surround disappears then every individual Wars against every other individual right it things devolve into chaos you need a Unity of belief in the Transcendent in order for the individual to be the proper unit of analysis and then of course that begs the question and that's certainly the question of our time well what is that Transcendent surround how do you conceptualize that that's another question about what constitutes identity so let's dig

into that a little bit what beliefs presumptions elements of identity are NE necessary so that the individual can be free and Sovereign all right I used to ask my students for example why they were writing an essay why are you bothering with this right what's your motivation well the the thoroughly indoctrinated and thoughtless students would say well to get a grade and I had students who literally could not think beyond that they they had no idea that there might be some utility in either thinking or writing outside of the Practical consequences of getting the grade

and I'm not saying that to denigrate the students I'm saying that to indict the education system because these were students these this was mostly at the University of Toronto where this happened these were these were very high caliber students so they were the beneficiaries let's say of 15 year beneficiaries of 15 years of education and many of them had no idea that thinking was useful right well and it is a bit of a mystery it's like why think well if you think before you act you decrease the probability that you'll do something cataclysmically stupid so

that's that's the issue that's why you want your thought criticized because if you have a stupid idea and you act it out then terrible things will happen to you and maybe if you discuss your stupid idea with someone who loves you they'll point out critically why it's stupid which will hurt your feelings but you won't die right and so parents do that for teenagers all the time right and mostly they don't die as a consequence so so what are you doing when you're you're writing well you're you're writing why are you writing the essay well

let's say on the philosophical side to improve your thinking okay I'm going to leave that aside for a moment we'll return to that idea I I'll just walk through this a little more practically well I have to complete the essay to get marked and then I have do why do you care if you get a mark well I can't pass the course unless I get a mark is why do you care if you pass the course well if I don't pass the course I can't finish my year well why do you care about that well

if I don't finish the year then I can't get my degree and so well who why do you care about your degree but there's an infinite regress in questioning here why do you care about your degree students start to get uncomfortable if you push them to that point cuz they often have been on a kind of automatic track right it's that especially if they're conscientious students they went to University because well that's the thing you do if you're smart once you graduate from high school it used to be the thing you do if you're smart

now I don't know what you do if you're smart maybe you go to Peterson Academy so well $300,000 to become an idiot not istic Marxist seems like a very bad deal to me so I think it'd just be more fun to become a nihilist at the bar you know so be cheaper too probably better for you neurologically in the final analysis anyways so you want to get your degree okay well why why bother well because you want to get a job okay well why why do you want to get a job well you need a

job to keep Body and Soul together but there's more to it than that right you maybe want a job that Peaks your interest and compels you so it's focused on something what something important to you something that has some meaning to you and then maybe if the person is wise they're also thinking well you know I need to take my place as a respon responsble social agent and if if I have a job well maybe I can attract a husband or a wife and you know maybe I can provide for my children so maybe the

career is nested in something like what what service to community service to family hopefully now you know that there could also be well I'd like to make a boatload of money and pursue my hedonistic whims in consequence which is a delusional dream but you know young people can certain and older people can certainly have that and then you might say well why why do you want to grow up let's say if we assume that establishing some responsibility and taking care of people as part of maturation and that's a tricky question why bother maturing and so

that's the question addressed in the story of Peter Pan right so Peter Pan is he's pan pan is the god of everything god of the Wilderness God of wild Instinct and Peter Pan is an eternal child right and he's got this pan-like nature because to be a child is to be under the sway of primordial Instinct and there is something attractive about that it's very spontaneous like there's something very attractive about little kids right I mean they're terrible little barbarians and they cannot govern themselves like there are no societies of successful 2-year-olds right so well

this is a really important thing to understand because you know people are enamored of the Purity and Brilliance of their toddlers And I can understand that because they are remarkable but they're also they're not adults and so they they're not self-governing they're not autonomous they can't take care of themselves and so all that wonder is fine but it doesn't work right it it has to be replaced by maturity okay but is the sacrifice of the spontaneity of childhood worth the burden of maturity this is the problem that Peter Pan wrestles with now he has Tinkerbell

who I like to think of as the porn fairy and so cuz she doesn't really exist she's kind of an attractive little sprite but an enticing and she flits around but she's imaginary and so she doesn't really require any real commitment and so porn fairy works out quite nicely in that regard and it's certainly the case that being enticed by the porn fairy is a way of continuing a kind of pathological immaturity and foregoing a certain kind of responsibility because it means the possibility of sexual gratification with no relationship and with no adult status and

you might say well who the hell cares like if it gratifies my immediate whim then why not do it um and you'd especially believe that if your identity was that you were nothing but your immediate desire and so and you know pornography is like 30% of internet traffic it's this is not some trivial little social detail this is a major problem you know and we're so what would you say we're so accustomed to the Pathology of pornography that we don't even notice what a cataclysmic problem it actually represents we just given up even being concerned

about it except you know on the periphery so that's not good cuz it's an immense enticement to this sort of hedonistic immaturity that is one of the consequences of the collapse of our identity and so but that isn't the only issue that Peter Pan wrestles with now you remember you may remember in the story that he makes friends with this girl Wendy and Wendy's an actual girl and Wendy decides she's going to grow up an age right and she gets married and she has children and Peter Pan remains in Neverland which is where everyone immature

lives in a land that doesn't exist and he's King Of The Lost Boys which is a kind of King but if all your subjects are Lost Boys And you're the king that kind of means you're the most hopeless of the worst of the Lost Boys not not it's like being the Tyrant of a totalitarian state it's like well are you the most successful or the least successful and I would say if you rule over hell you're the least successful devil in hell not the most successful devil and so that's a good thing to know about

tyrants and so Peter Pan maintains childhood he refuses to move to maturity he satisfies himself with the imaginary feminine foregoing any relationship with a real woman a sacrificial relationship with a real woman well why sacrificial death of childhood death of immaturity the necessity to forego all other sexual opportunities all that's sacrificial sacrificial in relationship to what maturity and responsibility well why bother with that well that's the Dilemma that Captain Hook confronts Peter Pan with because Captain Hook is a brutal barbaric power mad dominating Tyrant and when Peter Pan looks to adulthood and sees the face

of Captain Hook he thinks I don't want any part of that and Captain Hook is worse than a mere Tyrant because he's he's a coward as well and what's he afraid of well he's afraid of death and time and how do you know that well what chases him what's a crocodile and the crocodile is a predator and time is the ultimate predator and the crocodile's already got a Taste of him just like it has a taste of all of us which is why he's missing a hand and it has a clock in its stomach that's

ticking and so hook is a tyrant because he's terrified of predatory time he's terrified of his own mortality that makes him power mad and then Peter Pan looks at Captain Hook and he thinks yeah no that's not for me but he thinks that's a moral decision but really what he's doing is maintaining his own immaturity so he can stay magic and not take any responsibility are you tired of feeling sluggish run down or just not your best self take control of your health and vitality today with balance of nature with balance of nature there's never

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idea of mature responsibility right it's actually a catastrophe that Peter Pan stays hedonistic and immature it's not someone's opinion that that's not a good thing it's it's it's not a sustainable mode of being in any way it leads to his own pathological degeneration across time there's implications in the Peter Pan text continually that his most likely outcome is suicide and his refusal to mature is a form of suicide anyway because he's killing his best future self that's what you do when you remain immature right is you kill your best future self and if you do

that then the Temptation for actual suicide is eventually going to to loom large because your life will be so miserable as a consequence of your isolated and unproductive loneliness that the weight of existence will become unbearable to you and so there's nothing in that that's okay right it's not just an alternative pathway that hedonistic immaturity it's a complete bloody catastrophe and it's not only a catastrophe subjectively although that's not good it's a catastrophe socially because well Wendy loves Peter Pan but she doesn't get to marry him because he decides to stay in Neverland and so

that's not good for her and so the he the immature hedonist terrified of the patriarchal Tyrant let's say not only Dooms himself to a motive Behavior that's that that that culminates in something like suicidally distressed nihilism but also violates the the order of the relationship between men and women because he ref refuses to grow up to become the sort of person that a woman could establish a relationship with and of course that demolishes any possibility of future family and so in so far as part of what gives your life meaning across time as my wife

pointed out when she started to talk is the fact that you have children that you might love so that's a good deal for you and them and then grandchildren as well is you cut all that off off and then what the hell are you going to do when you're 40 or 50 or 60 and isolated and alone and still terminally immature so the probability that that's going to be a good time for you is pretty low it's not going to be a good time for anyone that knows you that's for sure because what the hell

good are you and it's worse than that because the bitterness that will Ur to you as a consequence of that pathway to failure that conse of failing to make the right sacrifices is that you'll become bitter and dangerous and so that's not good socially and so and none of that there's none of that that's morally relative right that's as that's as Stark a fact as anything you could ever hope to run across or maybe the starkest of facts and so you write the essay and you get the grade and you get your degree so you

can have your career so you can mature so you can be useful to yourself now and your future self and so you can be useful to your wife and your children and so that you can extend yourself across time and if you do that properly then well then that isn't where it ends because maybe you're also a model for other people you're a mentor for other people at least by example and maybe by practice right and you establish a mode of being that if replicated by others stabilizes the whole social order and makes it trustworthy

and productive and then everybody can trust each other and cooperate and if they all trust each other and cooperate then they can do impossible things together and they can make the Desert Bloom and everyone can Thrive and so that's a good deal we know that one of the best predictors of long-term success from a psychological perspective is trait conscientiousness it's not as good a predictor as in as native intelligence let's say but it's a good predictor and you want to hire conscientious people for most jobs and conscientious people are willing to forego immediate gratification to

take care of the future that's a sacrificial gesture they'll let go of what they want and need right now to stabilize things in the long run and for other people and that's the very definition of maturity in fact it's likely that the reason we have a cortex let's say the top part of our brain that makes us specifically human is so that we can replace the immediate demands for gratification of our base instincts with a long what would you say a a mode of vision and action that takes not only ourselves our narrow selves into

account but the iterating future and other people right so that's what that's and that's what you're trying to encourage in your children when they mature so they can take turns and share and play with other children and be good sports you know the sort of good sports that help their teammates develop and not just them and that can share the glory in Victory and can tolerate defeat with some degree of nobility and all of that's well what's the alternative that bitter resent resentful immature temper tantrum that's the alternative that's there's nothing in that that's acceptable

or good and there's nothing about that that's arbitrary again those are Stark Facts of Life okay so what that implies is that at the higher levels of your identity let's say out in the realm of ma maturity the things you're doing locally like right now the words you're saying the gesture you make they're associated with this hierarchy of value that extends out into the future in the community and at and as you near the uppermost reaches It's associated with something like mature responsibility but that's not yet why be mature and responsible because you can ask

the same question again well we laid out the alternative immature and irresponsible that's not going to be very good for you it's going to cause a lot of pain and misery it's going to culminate in hopelessness and it's going to be pretty bad for everyone else well what would be the alternative to that let's say well what are you pursuing when you're pursuing mature responsibility well you could think about it in terms of Duty right duty to the Future and duty to other people that's a kind of a conservative approach to the idea of maturation

right is that you it stops being about you it starts being about your family your town your state your nation patriotism comes out of that right you're serving some higher order traditional structure and it's the traditional structure that binds everyone together if it's functioning properly but there's more to maturity than that there's more to it than that because being able to Bear your duty to Bear up under your duty and to be responsible doesn't exhaust the realm of your of the possibility of your identity and so once we Step Beyond mere maturity we start to

step into the Transcendent realm that touches on the religious so think about the story of The Hobbit we think about an adventure story right so we're attracted to adventure stories that portray a hero now a hero can be a king who is the embodiment of the stable and just state but that's typically not a hero in a hero story a hero story a hero in a hero story is usually an adventurer right so you see that for example in The Hobbit you see that in The Lion King because the hero of the Lion King isn't

Musta Mustafa the Father the Hero Of The Lion King is Simba who's the son the son is the hero that's a good way of thinking but that's very typical in literary representations the father is necessary but the son is the hero you see that echoed in the Christian story because Christ is the hero of the biblical Corpus at least from the Christian Perspective and that's an element of the Divine the Sun and it's the element of the Divine that's associated with Adventure okay so let's let's walk through that let's take a more prosaic adventure story

that would be the Hobbit is a good example everybody knows that story so The Hobbit is this sort of non-descript every man there's nothing remarkable about him in any real in any obvious sense he's certainly not a wizard he's he's not an elf he's not magic he's a good DC recent beginner that's a good that's a good way of conceptualizing him he lives in this circumscribed area right so in both the Lord of the Rings and in The Hobbit the Shire is it's sort of like your neighborhood if it was only full of naive people

and all those naive people know that that IE of soron is gathering in the distance constantly that's China as far as I can tell that all in eye of the tyrannical state right that's over the horizon the terrible dragon that has the capability of destroying everything that's lurking out Beyond what's really apprehensible and all the ordinary people in the Shire want nothing to do with that they want to have their circumscribed lives and you can understand that and one of the things that makes The Hobbit himself let's say attractive as a character is because he

does have that pull towards tranquil Domesticity and that's not a vice it's only a vice when you insist upon that when the times don't allow for that right and it's questionable at the moment for example whether the times allow for that so far yes but I wouldn't count on that continuing not unless we become more assiduous adventurers so what happens to The Hobbit well he's called out by a magical agent it's Gandalf in this case to have an adventure okay so what does that mean what's a magical agent a magical agent is one of those

things that you encounter in your life that transforms your aim it transforms your identity so you can imagine that you have a stable identity from time to time you kind of know who you are but then imagine that well fair enough but what about the possibility of further development right because if you were really who you could be you only you wouldn't only be what you are properly you'd also be moving toward something more right and so if your character is fully developed sort of at the outer edges of your identity Beyond mere maturity you're

not only mature and responsible you're an agent that's transforming itself into something that's even better and what happens in your life is there are magical occurrences that transform your a and sometimes those are people that you meet that are mentors or who inspire you in some way or sometimes it's the call of your conscience there's something bothering you deeply and you decide to pursue that sometimes it's someone you fall in love with or an opportunity that falls in your lap and that requires you to sacrifice who you are so that you can take the next

step to become who you might be and that's what's portrayed in the story of The Hobbit in a mythological manner because The Hobbit goes outside his zone of comfort like Abraham in the Old Testament and has to develop elements of his character that he had regarded as undesirable even The Hobbit himself has to become a thief in order to become a hero and and what does that mean it means that you never know when you might need the darker sides of your character integrated at within you in a manner that doesn't terrify you in order

to make to take the next step forward you know if you're not a bit of a monster and you encounter a monster you're going to lose so you need to have some of the monster within you that's what happens to Harry Potter right that's why he is able to attain ascendance over Voldemort he has a piece of Voldemort's Soul hidden inside him right you can call on the part of you that has the capacity for mayhe to protect you and those you love when Mayhem comes threatening but that has to be developed and that's a

terrifying thing morally because it's easy to be dutiful and narrow and not allow that capacity to reveal itself but you never know when you're going to need it and you're definitely going to need it when the dragons come flying in and so well why the dragon because that's what the Hobbit eventually has to confront and that's the oldest story of mankind the confrontation with the dragon literally we the oldest story we have is the enuma Elish from Mesopotamia and it's the story of the combat with the dragon the hero of the anumi Alish confronts the

cosmic dragon and makes the world out of its pieces right something echoed in the Old Testament stories in the representation of Jehovah as the force that triumphs over the Leviathan what does the future hold for business ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers bull market bare Market rates will rise rates will fall can somebody please invent a crystal ball until then over 38,000 businesses have found a way to futureproof their operations with netw Suite by Oracle the number one Cloud Erp imagine having your accounting financial management inventory and HR all seamlessly integrated into one

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cat and it's a predatory bird and it's a predatory reptile and it's and it's and it's fire which is its own form of Predator because fire is a primordial threat and so a dragon is an amalgamation of everything terrifying into one figure and the hero who exists at the Ultimate Edge of identity is the ordinary person who takes it upon himself to transform himself into the hero who can confront the dragon and Prevail and what does prevail mean well it means to gain the treasure that the dragon eternally guards and that's the next level of

identity that hero story on the outer edges of what would you say the cosmic reaches of human identity but that's not the outermost limit and you see as you move farther out or farther down or farther up pick your metaphor you wander into territory that's increasingly religious in nature and so let me lay out a level of identity that's even beyond the mythological hero and the easiest way to do that is to use the Christian passion as the example what's the ultimate predator death and evil so that's that's what would you say that would be

a abstraction of the idea of Predator right so death is the clock in the belly of the crocodile right and malevolence well the worst Predator is the Predator who isn't merely an animal that has its next meal in mind but someone who or something that wants to take you out in the manner that makes you suffer most pointlessly let's say so there's the combination of death and malevolence is something like the ultimate Challenge or the ultimate predator and so that's a it's like the king of all dragons that's a reasonable way of thinking about it

death and malevolence itself and so the ultimate hero is the person who determines to confront the ultimate forces of Destruction voluntarily and that's the story that's encapsulated in the Christian passion well why well because it's a story of it's an it's an ultimate story it's the story of the ultimate exposure to the furthest reaches of mortal catastrophe so you you just think it through I mean rationally not asking for any suspension of disbelief here I'm I'm telling you how this story of identity works so it's a terrible thing to die that's tragedy it's a worst

thing to Die Young it's a worst thing to die after being tormented when you're young it's a worse thing to die if you're tormented if you're tormented at the hands of your own people and you're betrayed by your best friend and your own people choose to torment you even when they could have picked someone they knew to be a villain to substitute for you even though they knew he was a villain and knew you were good it's worse to face that fate at the hands of your own mob if behind that fate there is a

foreign Tyrant who occupies your land right the the barbar Empire of Rome in in the story of the Christian passion it's worse to have all that happen to you when you're young it's worse to have it happen to you when you're young in front of the people who love you particularly your mother it's worse to have all of that happen in the most unfair and torturous possible manner which was the crucifixion because that's why the Romans designed that punishment and that wasn't bad enough because crucifixion wasn't sufficient to satisfy the bloodthirst of the mob so

Christ had to undergo a fling before being crucified and none of that's bad enough yet because the worst possible tragedy is all that but not only all that all that inflicted on the least possible deserving person right so that's an ultimate tragedy and that's not enough yet and so the we're really stretching out to the furthest possible reaches of identity there's a Christian tradition that after Christ is crucified because all of that's not enough he has to descend into hell itself and what does that mean it means that at the ultimate reaches of human identity

it's not only the confrontation with catastrophe and death that required but the full-fledged confrontation with malevolence itself and then the ultimate hero is the person who can do that voluntarily without being corrupted well maintaining his upward aim that's identity all of that's identity right that's that Jacob's Ladder that stretches up from the Earth to the heavens right that that situates every person in the confines of a Heavenly hierarchy with that ultimate heroic sacrificial gesture at the Pinnacle well why well the person who dares the ultimate gains the ultimate reward well that's represented in the gospel

text say the resurrection that's represented as the reconciliation of God and man right as the antithesis to death and evil and it is the case that to the degree that each person is capable of voluntarily taking on the burden of being unto themselves and moving forward and upward despite that catastrophe that death is overcome and evil defeated and so all of that's true and the collapse of that truth leaves us in a situation where our entire identities are up for question now the alternative to that is something terrible because the alternative is coming to understand

what identity means and coming to understand that means coming to understand what I just described is that that's the burden that's placed on people who want to get to the bottom of what constitutes identity right is that you're called upon to maintain your upward aim regardless of the catastrophe of life and the promise is that if you do that voluntarily the spirit of the cosmic order will walk with you while you do it right and that seems right because we know practically we know psychologically that you become braver and better with every decision you make

to confront what obstacle terrifies and Terri I you and stops you in your tracks right you develop into more of what you could be by constantly confronting the things that challenge you most deeply and there's no end to that and in principle there's no end to the amount of development that can emerge as a consequence of that and that's another part of that upward spiraling Jacob's Ladder that leads up into the incomprehensible reaches of the Divine itself and so and then what you have in that is just as you Fade Into incomprehensibility on the material

end of things you Fade Into compr incomprehensibility at the Transcendent end of things too and that what your identity is is the thing that Bridges the gap between Earth and Heaven and really and that's who we are and that's what we need to understand to set things right and and that's a much better story than you can do whatever you want whenever you want with anyone you want and to hell with the consequences but it's a terrible burden it's a terrible thing to realize that that Adventure is your moral responsibility and that if you accept

it then you set the world right and if you reject it then you destroy yourself and everything around you and we're at a state now where we need to understand all that and not only understand it but act it out with every word with every gesture right with every impulse with every with every fiber of our being so that we can bring the order that's good into being in the world and that's an investigation into identity from first principles thank you very much [Music]