Why You Must Aim at the Highest Possible Good - Jordan Peterson

I try to make the most of the moment, you know, aim up and make the most of the moment. That's the ethos of the Sermon on the Mount, by the way. Aim at the highest goal you can contemplate and then pay attention to the moment, you know, because that, doing that, makes what you're doing so engaging that it chases all the thoughts of mortal self-consciousness from the theater of your imagination. If you're engrossed enough in the moment, and I think you can be engrossed enough in the moment for that to happen, if what you're pursuing is of sufficient value. And I believe it appears to me, for me, that what I'm pursuing is of sufficient value so that that's what happens. You know, like, I'm pretty damn happy to be here. Why wouldn't I be thrilled about this? How could anything possibly be better than this? It's more than all I could hope for in some fundamental sense. And it's the case that because it's more than I could hope for in some fundamental sense, it's more than enough. And enough is something like, it's a sufficient antidote to the terror of mortality. It's like, yeah, finitude, but it's worth it. It makes itself manifest as worth it. And I'm willing to accept that, to fall into that, and to assume that, to assume that that's actually a reflection of the structure of reality itself. And I do believe that that's the case because I believe, as I told you earlier, that the instinct that you have that makes itself manifest as meaningful engagement is the most real thing there is. It's more real than suffering. It's more real than, it might be more real than death itself. Now, I don't know exactly what that means. It's also the antidote to hell. And so, and I believe those things. And what do I mean by believe? I mean I stake my life on them. That's what I mean by believe. And so, I'm trying to carefully walk the path of maximal meaning. And that's a true path. And if you attend to what is meaningful with sufficient rigor, the pathway will make itself clear. When Moses, in the book of Exodus, Moses is walking in the desert and something catches his attention and he goes to investigate. It's the burning bush. It's this bush. It's a tree. It's on fire. But the fire doesn't consume the bush. It's a numinous manifestation. It's like fire itself. It grips his imagination. It's like love. It's like beauty. It grips his imagination. And he attends to it deeply. And out of that deep attention, the voice of God emerges. It's like, that's exactly how the world is constituted. If you attend with sufficient rigor to that which manifests itself as meaningful, within that, you discover the voice of God himself. That's how the world is constituted. And then, with that discovery, you have what is necessary to stave off the terror of death and maybe the terror of hell. And if you have that, then you don't need anything else. And you wouldn't want anything else, certainly not as a substitute. So in terms of being remembered, I don't really think about that in some sense. I presume that if I do what I can now, then I'll be remembered in the proper manner, whatever that might be. And I think that's a useful mode of apprehending your own existence. Like, if you undertake to do what is sufficient in the moment, in the deepest sense, then things will lay themselves out as they should. And you should have faith in that. That's, in some sense, a moral injunction. That's part of assuming, for example, that love is a cardinal virtue and that the truth will set you free. Those are propositions of faith. And they're deep propositions of faith. And if you abide by them rigorously, then you reap the attendant blessings. You're a visionary. And to understand that, you have to reconfigure how you think about the world, because most of you undoubtedly think like scientific materialists, at least in part. You're probably not very good at thinking like scientific materialists, but because very few people think scientifically in a very thorough manner. But still, the basic architecture of your thought is going to be of that not nature. And so, you think there are objects in the world, and you think that you react to the objects, and in a deterministic way. And none of that's true. You don't see objects that are objective. You see patterns that are functional, and they don't determine your action, because you're not a clockwork machine driven by stimulus. All of that's wrong. Imagine what you confront when you wake up in the morning. You might say, well, I wake up in my bedroom, and I confront the furniture. It's like, that's sort of like thinking that, imagine you're at a theater, and you're watching a play, and the stage is set with the props. And the actors come on, and they say their lines, and you say, the props caused that. Like, none of that's even vaguely true. And you know, the props in a play aren't objects either. They're facilitators of the symbolic message of the play. And I think you can say that about the objects in the actual world. They're not objects. They're facilitators of the symbolic meaning of the play. And then what do you confront when you wake up in the morning? Well, it's not the damn furniture in your room. It's the possibility of the day. Now, the possibility of the day makes itself manifest to you, and it presents itself as a problem. How will I interact with what's transforming in front of me in a manner that will bring about the desired end? And you might be very bad at that, which just means you're impulsive, and after the realization of very short-term visions, and so you're more hedonistic and immature in your visionary orientation. Or you're sophisticated, and you integrate the possibility that makes itself manifest to you with a higher order and sophisticated vision. And then you grapple or wrestle with that emergent possibility to realize it. And by doing that, you participate in the creation of the world. And the fact that you're of that kind is the reason, for example, that our culture is predicated on the idea that you're made in the image of God, because God is the spirit that confronts chaos and possibility and transforms it into habitable reality. And that's you, in the microcosm. And that's a divine thing that you're participating in. And you can tell that because if you do it right, it's deeply meaningful. And you can tell that because if you do it right and it's deeply meaningful, the habitable order that you generate from the encounter with chaos and potential is good. And so the word that manifests itself at the beginning of time, the creative word, confronts potential, the tohu vabohu, the wasteland, the water, the deep, all of that symbolic representation of potential, uses truth and love to shape that potential and produces the order that is good. That's why it says in Genesis, repeated over and over after each day of creation, and God saw what he had created and it was good. And so if you're oriented properly in your life, when you contend with the transforming horizon of the future, which is the entrance of becoming into being, that's another way of thinking about it, then you contend with that as a high order ethical actor and you transform that potential into the habitable order that is good. And that's the sine qua non of ethical action. And we all recognize it as such. With many of my clients who were suffering, what we would strive to do was not so much make them happy, because sometimes that wasn't possible, they were so crippled in so many ways, often physically and in pain, but something meaningful. That would keep them going, and keep them from strain, and keep them from thinking homicidal and genocidal thoughts, all of that, and meaning that's the antidote to suffering. The question is, well, how's that best to be found? Well, that's an empirical question. You have to look in your own life and see where meaning glimmers and pursue that.