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It's Paul. Uh maybe go down memory lane a little bit today. Um I did a last week I did an interview for uh Dan Librant uh on his channel. I thought the conversation went really well. So um I'll you can find you can find the link.
Paul VanderKlay discusses how documentaries and representation embed narrative and worldview, drawing on Jonathan Pageau's analysis of 'The Last Documentary' and Jordan Peterson's lectures.
Key Takeaways
- Documentaries are never purely factual; they are shaped by narrative and directorial choices.
- Perception and language are preconsciously directed by worldview and cultural lineage.
- Hero mythology and stories provide structure for understanding and living one's life.
- Representational forms, including media styles, actively form generations.
What the video covers
- Paul introduces an interview he gave on Dan Librant's channel and mentions Jordan Peterson as a starting point for the discussion.
- He praises Jonathan Pageau's video on the documentary 'The Last Documentary' by Lance Oppenheim, saying it exposes how documentaries are narrative constructions rather than neutral facts.
- Paul argues there is no neutral observer: representation is always motivated by underlying narrative and worldview, and even language encodes these assumptions.
- He notes that documentaries often present themselves as objective, while the director's framing, editing, and camera choices direct the audience's gaze.
- Using Thomas Flight's analysis, he contrasts observational documentary style with more overtly crafted cinematic documentaries.
- He compares fiction based on true events with how audiences participate in stories, linking this to Christian ideas of anticipated participation, such as the resurrection described in Romans 6.
- He discusses reality TV and social media as further forms of self-representation that can dissimulate their intentions.
- Paul reflects on Jordan Peterson's lectures, touching on perception as low resolution and projection-laden, and on the role of hero mythology in giving structure to individual lives.
- He concludes that representational forms shape generational formation, so attention to how stories and media form us matters for culture.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Dan Librant Interview
- 03:00Pageau on The Last Documentary
- 06:40Narrative Behind Representation
- 10:20Observational Documentary Style and Neutrality
- 16:40Reality TV and Self-Representation
- 26:40Peterson, Perception and Projection
- 43:20Hero Mythology and Life Structure
- 53:20Generational Formation Through Media
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
I'll put the link below. I'll probably replay it on my channel too or cut up some clips from it. But I I thought the conversation went really well. and he wanted to talk about Jordan Peterson, which is understandable because of sort
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of how this channel got itself going and I want to talk about Jordan a little bit. Um, it's just it's just the it's just where I stopped watching listening to the video at some point and I turned it on. It's like he's talking about
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animals, you know, animals freezing when they get afraid. Anyway, we'll we'll uh this morning, Jonathan dropped a video that I thought was probably the best these freeze frames. Uh probably the best um overall take on the best articulation of the importance of the
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you can see everything movie. I thought Jonathan just thought Jonathan just nailed it. So, we'll play a little bit of that and talk about that. Then George ends you're end you end up in a kind of maze of mirrors where you don't really
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know what is what is true in the sense of the investigative aspect of what is true. you know, if this documentary was there to show the truth of something, that is, is she guilty? Is she the one?
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And and what I love about this is what the documentary sort of communicates underneath the surface. And what I mean, the one of the real gifts that Jonathan has is being able to articulate this. I mean, this is what he's been
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doing for the last 10 years or so, so no surprise. But he's he's really good at sort of nailing it and articulating it because we do live in this culture where we imagine well there are these facts and then we see the facts and then we
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come to a conclusion about it. But what we're going to have to do is sort of get behind the question of narrative. And as Jonathan notes, there's no representation without underlying narrative that is motivating and creating the representation. And so you don't just
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look at the facts and then just sort of derive this. Now the difficulty is once you say that then people suddenly imagine that it's there's no such people suddenly imagine that the things that we call facts which aren't necessarily
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exactly easy to describe what those are that those are unimportant because we all use them. We all need them. Those are sort of touch points of reality.
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But um you have to understand that all of our representations, including the one that I'm making right now, is part of that overall world and it's all set within context necessary for intelligibility. I'll say it that way.
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Almost like a court would do. and it utterly fails and it also exposes the problem of using representation to try to get to this uh capacity to get to the facts. Right? Um you know we have lived in a world where we use fiction that is
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based on real events and that fiction affects the way that we understand the original u and of course you see this with movies where based on a true story. Okay. Well, what does that mean? It it means that
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why do we like seeing that underneath a movie? First of all, because we have a sense that we want to participate in this world. All of these conversations about, let's say, the we we're just simply stuck with the
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language we inherit. Let's say the the historicity of the physicality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Why do we care about that? We care about that because we anticipate and desire to participate in that resurrection. You can read Romans 6 um about that. So
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that's part of the reason we care about it. And so when we see based on a true story that gives us this little signal that okay maybe this is a story that in some way shape or form I can participate
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on it in it and I can anticipate participation in it in a meaningful way.
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I'll say it that way. events that are being portrayed. We are also used to the documentary, to reality TV, to the possibility of representing ourselves, representing ourselves, representing others through social media through all these different means. And what the
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documentary is able to expose is the way in which this actually dissimulates that it is not so much an act of revelation of factuality but it actually dissimulates you could say the intention of why it is that we are showing things.
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And this is I think a really wonderful kind of exploration. I think that it will send long waves in culture if people are able to pay attention to the problem that it is exposing.
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and he entitled this the last documentary which when I saw the title I thought bang you just nailed it uh couple weeks ago or so after I'd seen the movie I noted a couple of um YouTube movie critics and one in particular who
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was very upset at this movie because he understood that this was in a sense the last documentary that what this documentary does and Lance Oppenheim has been doing is sort of pulling the cloak off of documentary and saying now you
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know the creator of this documentary is telling a story. He's telling a story with a certain with a certain set of images that conveys certain kinds of things. All right, let's use Thomas Flight's um working this over.
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Information that's being conveyed and there's less of an attempt to craft and draw the audience into an evocative cinematic emotional experience and therefore we tend to think of these documentaries often as being more objective and informational. You also
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find documentarians like Frederick Weisman who stick to what we call the observational style of filmm. His films examine their subject by relying on long neutrally composed takes, scenes with minimal editing and camera movement and no voiceover narration. Here, the camera
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isn't being spoken to directly. Instead, the idea is that it's trying to neutrally observe reality as it is. With this kind of an approach, the director's seeking to deliberately minimize their interference with the scene and therefore the number of opportunities
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they have to manipulate what they're cap and and even of course the language we're all struggling with language here because again our language is forget the fancy Viki words for this but he covered this quite nicely in his work. the the
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language is just simply encoded with [laughter] all of the worldview and you can't get away from it. You know, even even some of the language that Thomas Flight is using here trying to neutally observe real you neutally observe.
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But of course, there's no neutral observer. If you were a fly or if you had placed the supposed security camera uh behind one of the boxes and you can see nothing, there's a neutral observer.
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to be like, "No, move. I want to." Already the meaning is built into the perceptual equipment that we're using to direct our gaze. And of course, what we don't see is that the director is directing our gaze. And that's part of
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the what's embedded in any kind of film portrait and that they are already directing our eyes. Our eyes are pre-directed just like our eyes are pre-directed consciously for us when you walk into the room. A long time ago, I'd
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use these use the um example of if I walked into my office and there was a Bengal tiger that would direct my you know attention right away at the Bengal tiger and my mind would do that. I mean
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you just got all of these things going on. We've talked about them for years.
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As it is this kind of an approach again as it is. Oh. Oh. as if just as it is and and again all the cogs all the conversations we've been doing have been continuing to expose this directors seeking to deliberately
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minimize their interference with this interference again it it's just the assumption it's built into the language that we're just seeing and if the director moves the camera or has a voice over or something that it sort of interferes and and part of the way that
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they get at this is sort of the the use of benality. And so if you're in a certain place in the world, you might see some guy sweeping the walk. You might see another guy having his little cigarette break at
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the door because you're not allowed to smoke in the building. And we're just not seeing the fact that someone has gone to the trouble to place a camera here and then take footage from that camera and edit it and choose this
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scene. And part of the scene's choice is the benality because the benality is a part of the message. There's no getting around the message scene and therefore the number of opportunities they have to manipulate what they're capturing with camera
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angles, movements, or editing. As a result, they're often less attention grabbing, and documentaries made this way demand a strong attention span. But when you're watching them, but of course if they're less less attention grabbing, they are still to a
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degree forming and shaping the attention that you're giving it. They're just better at saying who me am I have I placed the camera here? Have I selected this shot?
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Have I edited this into this for you? Has has any thought? No. no thought is gonna this is all incidental accidental and and partly by just sort of the benality of what I'm showing you.
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Um it's easy to feel like you're watching something that is more inherently truthful that is presenting something closer to an objective reality than maybe. And and again, you just look at these shots and they're just shots of, oh, okay, this is undirected and and
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it's sort of a probably kind of a statistical balancing that your brain is doing and saying I can walk down a street like this is Faniel Hall in Boston. I've been down there myself many times um from very long time ago. But it's just but
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this is just this is this is unedited. This is there's been no intentionality. There's been no shaping and molding.
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This is well you know what the insurance companies would say an act of god something like this but is it actually you cannot have a set of criteria that are going to guarantee an objective factuality this is the kind of conundrum
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I think that that documentary is always kind of throughout its entire history is sort of fighting against this idea but yet audiences take and they've been educated to understands certain criteria of of looking to and then we use the word educated. We've
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been formed. We've been culturally set up to say, "Aha, here is the evidence that this is true and now I can weigh it more." And you know, part of the difficulty is now that we have all of this these new thinking
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machines and as we as normies like me are increasingly sort of brought into the language of the LLM uh machine intelligence world. So we can talk about weights. What do I mean by weights? Well, these these so imagined
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objective descriptions weigh heavier on, you know, some Ridley Scott's take on the Roman Empire. Let's say things are signifying this means this.
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The question is not is a Wiseman film more accurate than an Oenheim film. The question is, is a lockdown camera with minimal editing and no sound design actually a more objective depiction of reality than an evocative stylized cinematic image? It's an interesting one
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because you could ask, what's the difference ethically and stylistically between wise men who would be considered intellectually and probably culturally as close to unimpeachable. Do you know what I mean?
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But yet, nobody would say that about Big Brother. the reality television show. Yet stylistically, there's a lot in common.
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Both a Wiseman documentary and reality TV shows like Big Brother might use locked down wide neutral camera angles to capture certain scenes, but everybody understands, or at least everyone should, that Big Brother is not presenting an objective account of
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reality. Many of the individual clips within a reality TV show present themselves as being a kind of surveillance or a neutral document of what happened. We trust these shows less than a traditional documentary. Not because of the way they are shot, but
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because we don't trust that the goal of the reality TV show producer is to present an accurate portrait of reality.
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We know that their goal is to present something dramatic and entertaining. And we expect them to use music, editing, and even off- camerara manipulation of the environment and the subjects to create more drama. This behind-the-scenes manipulation of these
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kinds of situations is part of what is directly explored thematically in Fielders the Rehearsal and in The Curse, a fictional project about reality TV show producers that he co-created with Benny Safty and Emma Stone. On the surface, you can see everything is
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mostly shot in an observational style. The subjects do not sit down and address the camera directly in interviews.
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There's not traditional voiceover narration telling us what is happening. The cameras are to some extent just sitting there and recording, but the score editing and even the beauty of the compositions and color grade and the presence of one of the directors and
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producers within the scene introduces plenty of opportunities for these filmmakers to be influencing our perception of what is being captured here. Even a Wiseman documentary, despite the fact that we trust it much more as a document of reality than Big
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Brother, could still heavily filter and alter the reality it portrays. The filmmaker still decides exactly when a shot starts and when it ends, and what scenes are juxtaposed before and after what we're watching, along with what does and doesn't make it into the frame.
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These choices, as subtle as they might be, still allow you to shape what's being captured and craft a narrative.
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I'm not saying this to accuse wise men's narratives of inaccuracy. I'm pointing out that anytime a narrative is crafted within a film or anywhere else, there's an opportunity for that narrative to distort the reality it claims to represent. You might be thinking, okay,
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it's not a perfect system, but it's again the frame is to distort to manipulate to and again the the implicit desire within us is that we see we don't even have the language for it truthfully purely unmotivated we we but again all the
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cogsai and everything we said we don't see in an unmotivated way everything you see is preconciously motivated by you and by the lineage and history that have formed you to look the way you do and how it is exposing the fact that
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when representation is used, it is used to bring about an experience and it is used in some ways to make you experience a story. And that is very different from the fact-based notion of exposing what is what really happened, you could say.
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And in the movie, they do amazing they do it in amazing way where they demonstrate on several occasions and at several layers of the documentary how if you change only one word in a sentence, you can change the meaning of that word.
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And so there's a New York Times article at the beginning of the of the movie that is brought up where Elizabeth Holm says that they changed one word in her statement which has to do with the fact that you know in the New York Times
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article it says that that the people believed in the character she she made for herself. I forget exactly how it's phrased. Um and then Elizabeth Holmes said I didn't say for myself I didn't like say that I myself made that
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character that is a character that was made right like they believed in the character. So just these two words this like little change in the statement completely changes the meaning. Then later in the the the in the um in the
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movie when Elizabeth Holmes says that her machine can do the things that you know that she said Fielder realizes that what she means by can is [clears throat] the possibility.
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Yeah. I love that part of the movie because the more she's talking, it's basically like, well, I'm just sort of offering the computer and the companies would have to do the programming that would actually make it work. And I'm
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just sitting here thinking you're such a con artist. And so the machine because it's a platform, it has the capacity to basically uh analyze any disease, but it doesn't mean that it's actually doing it now. you have to basically fill up the
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the the data so that the machine will come to do it. And so she seems to imply that when she says that the machine can do this, she means in potential and what people are hearing and one of the reason
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why she was condemned is that what people understood that the that was meant by that was that in actuality that the machine can do this. And so just now now it's even the same word that even the same word with one little difference
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of interpretation of that one word you actually totally flip the meaning of the of of the sentence. You completely invert the meaning of the sentence. And this of course is taken up later when Fielder himself seems to misremember one
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word in her testimony in the prison, you know, and he hesitates. And not only does he hesitate in the meaning of the word, but when the actress is playing the text, the way that she plays the text will and
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it's so true as as Jonathan says later, it says the movie just gets so meta because he brings in the actress who played um Elizabeth Holmes and wild movie. Now again, we sort of imagine what this movie will do. And this is
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where it's sort of I think about Steve and and Kale doing their monitoring the situation. It's sort of imagining that we're going to watch this movie and we're going to cross a line of demarcation and the world will be different.
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It's it takes way way more to have that happen than to just watch a movie.
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Again, it's sort of analogous to, oh, we saw the little tic tac on the screen from the military and now now what?
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And again, I go back to the example of the Columbian Exchange that it was the accumulation of, oh, Columbus bumped into these islands out there that that news will slowly drift throughout Europe, partly animated and provoked by the printing press. And I'll how now
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information now we're beginning to read information. And we have part of the power of text on page, text on paper is that I give it to you, you give it to me that we sort of feels objective and it's
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like wow those same letters, that same type set, it's like multiplied and everybody can see the same thing and and it just reinforces that we're seeing directly. And of course this is this is really setting up the enlightenment and
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really setting up sort of the elkian imagination of the table tabular roa that we have this blank slate and then we read it directly on the page and it's imprinted us and it can be reproducted sort reproduced sort of like mass
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culture and it all goes out but it's not just news that Columbus lands on Hispanola and you know starts a colony and begins exploring and others explore.
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It's it's the fact that well they start bringing people over but they're different and they're not even surviving. They talk different languages and they eat different foods and it's a very alien. It would be it would be as
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if we went to the moon or Mars and found humanoid beings that that more or less ate the same thing but not exactly. And and we could like have sex with and have children with but but that's not exactly
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what we you know we're used to. And then um and but then we can go to these places and we can fairly easily and quickly terraform them. But then we have this other you know tersian fever as it
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was called in the Columbian exchange which was malaria because suddenly we're connecting different parts of the world and diseases are starting to move around and and then of course well sugar comes over to the new world and tobacco comes
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over from the new world and and suddenly you get this again colombian exchange. Now potatoes suddenly become you know the the primary food source for many places in Western Europe and sweet potatoes in China and you basically have
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this transformation of the entire globe at a very deep level in the cumulative sense and then the world basically changes slowly and it changes slowly as as each generation sort of gets transformed and it's the reason we have these generation
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gaps and of course they're They're uneven. Uh Jordan Hall had um a really nice I if I can find it. Jordan writes, "It's come to my attention that many people are unclear on the concept of a generation. They don't know what the
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generations are or why such a concept has meaning. I've considered this idea deeply for a few decades and thought I'd drop my sense of the matter. It's a very quick write up, so don't expect much.
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The human generation is not defined by chronology and is not an arbitrary thing drawn up by historians, demographers or anthropologists. The best way to understand it is by means of the concept of a zeitgeist or the spirit of the
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time. The idea is that a zeitgeist is a real thing as real as culture, language, a sports team. That people who live in a particular zeitgeist are meaningful meaningfully formed by it and that the zeitgeist changes over time often
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discontinuously. And that's exactly what's happened. And what's what's happening with something like you can see everything. It's just sort of slowly morphing our zeitgeist. You know, 1492 Columbus gets there and 1516 Martin Luther writes 95 thesis. And of course before that um
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can't think of his name. Um you've got the the the polyglide of the New Testament where you can look at um where you can look at the Vulgate, you can look at a Greek text, you can look at
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notes comparing it and suddenly people are seeing and these these things that areas these things that are forming take time and and they not only change us as individuals because none of us are disconnected. We're all connected with
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others and so we sort of have to change together. And you know that's what I I see happening in at least my relational circles both in real on the ground at Living Stones in terms of my church and
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the estuary groups that I participate in but also in terms of the TLC via YouTube and Signal groups and family relations and it's all the mixture of these things. And so we're all together and and we're just sort of changing, but
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it's it's not even by any means. I'm changing in ways my children aren't changing, but they've been formed by a world that I haven't been formed in. And you have all of this going on all at the same time.
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For example, if you're not a boomer, you were born in 1946. you are a boomer because your childhoods would was designed by the post-war zeitgeist and um and not for example by the post Kennedy zeitgeist. Literally there was not an actual change in the
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nature of reality that occurred somewhere in the mid-40s or there was an actual change in the nature of reality that occurred somewhere in the mid-40s that made life after that point different in the same way that a mass shift from everyone
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speaking French to everyone speaking English would make life different. Kids brought up in the latter era would speak English as their mother tongue. And then there's an actual change in reality that occurred around JFK's assassination that led to effectively a different world.
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Those who were uh infants in 1963, that's me, or born thereafter were formed by that different world. I was 3 months old when JFK was assassinated.
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The zeitgeist changes a variety of things. and and and this just continues on through the generations and all of this is moving so that when you have a documentary like this, things start to change, but it's very slow and it's very subtle and it's very
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uneven. And part of the reason we're doing all this talking with one another and sharing with one another and um that's that's what's been happening either in your little village or once the printing press starts happening or once you first um tobacco what's that
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and and just read in you know not soon after the Columbian exchange the the Europeans are very concerned with what this new thing tobacco is doing to their culture and doing to their people because they're all very much addicted
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to it and then of course sugar comes along And then you know once a a certain degree of shipping technology takes over now suddenly um you don't just have to enslave people in the city next door you can enslave people from a different
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continent and it's sort of easy to track them because they have a different skin color and I mean just layer after layer after layer after layer and it's all just moving through us and around us and changing us even if sometimes the
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changes are so slow we don't perceive them, but they're happening. Now, right after I finished listening to Jonathan's video this morning, Algo served up for me this video from Jordan Peterson. And immediately, a whole bunch of things. First of all, it's a Peterson
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Academy lecture. I know that they've been sort of um releasing the first episode of it to try to get people into the Peterson Academy and subscribe. There was somebody who's been at least at least one guy's been doing a
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channel. He's sort of been making a YouTube channel about his experience with the Peterson Academy and releasing basically grades on particular this this course was good. This course wasn't so good. I'm I'm tempted. They have their Black Friday sale. I'm tempted to pay
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for it for a year. Not because I want to see the courses so much, because I'm not convinced that they can really out compete YouTube plus Audible. You know, I've seen some of the first episodes and then I'd go and I'd buy the book and I'd
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listen to the audio book and I was thinking, I'm going to get more from my Audible subscription than I am from necessarily watching the eight lectures.
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Part of the critique of the lectures has been there only eight classes and you only get so far and they're visibly striking and stunning, etc., etc. But this sort of prompted for me, oh yeah, Jordan. Oh, yeah, Jordan. And also the
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the interview that I Well, there's the there's the there's the thumbnail for it right there. Um [laughter] he he sent me the collaborator link and I looked at the thumbnail and I just chuckled and I said, "That's quite a
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thumbnail." And he said, "Oh, should I take it down?" I said, "No, no, no. Far be it from me to to critique other people's clickbaity uh thumbnails and titles." Um even though I'm not sure, well, it's complicated. Um
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but it was a great conversation. I really enjoyed the conversation. I thought it really went well, but it was like, oh yeah, you know, this all sort of got started around Jordan.
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And so then I sort of cruised over to his channel and thought, well, what's going on over his channel? I haven't been there for a while. And 8.85 million subs, trying to think about last time I was paying much attention to his
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channel, it had sort of 5 million subs. So, he's like added 3 million subs since then. And and that for me just sort of gave me an appreciation for sort of the layers and levels that I mean reality is very deep and you know 8
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billion people on the planet 8 million is a very tiny subset of 8 billion and of course those subscriber numbers don't mean necessarily what many imagine them to mean. And then I looked at his videos and you know you know healthy numbers
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and I think most of these videos are um they start with Peter but most of these videos are these lectures that he was giving when he was still on tour. And so I don't know when like some of these things some of these
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lectures from Peterson Academy were filmed. Maybe if I subscribed they would say this was filmed at such such date. I hope so because it's kind of help helpful to notice and I haven't watched hardly I haven't watched anything from
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Jordan for a very long time and you can tell that because I really haven't commented on it. You you sort of know a lot of what I watch because I tend to comment on it at least in terms of the
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kinds of things that I talk about on my channel. Um why no one wants you around but you know they they they're doing a good job. 650K, 250K, you know, so you know, good for them for, you know,
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there's the biblical series which is really foundational and you look at the millions of views, 14 million views on the first one. Um, so, you know, it's all all continuing on. So, I thought um I thought I finished up PJO's
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video and I was doing my Levy walk, my exercise, and um thought, well, let's see. Let's see what's Let's see what's happening.
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Let's see what's happening with this. Most of your perceptions are low resolution and and in fact, I was just saying that to someone recently because we're talking about perception and there's all of this projecting that we do. and where he's, you know,
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obviously visibly aged, you can still see some of the old Jordan in there, which is just a delight to see. Um, you don't know that till they fail.
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And and again, just it reminds you of a lot of the really helpful stuff that I learned from him eight years ago watching his ideas. And and that idea is very much in keeping with you can see everything. He's basically saying you're
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not you're not seeing a lot. You're mostly seeing what you're projecting on the world, how you're shaping the world, how you're forming the world. And and you have to do that in order to sort of bring those things together.
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Your world view is always complete when you're not panicking because the presumption that your world view is complete is the reason you're not panicking.
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That's another great line. It's a really great line. Now, the thing about and I've done, you know, playing around with shorts and things like that. Um, I mean, you can have these tiny little they're like candies almost. They're just like they're just
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like super salient and super sweet and and that observation right there that you know if you're not panicking it means that your world view your maps are functioning sufficiently that the alarm bells aren't going off. It gives you a
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sense of what schizophrenics and other people who are you know terribly tortured have to deal with.
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Your world view is always complete when you're not panicking. Because the presumption that your world view is complete is the reason you're not panicking.
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Man becomes aware of the sacred because it shows itself as something wholly different from the profane.
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And you know, wonderful treatment of a wonderful book. And so I I see this and it's like maybe I should take this course. That would be really good. But part of me knows myself. I'm so ADHD.
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Well, if I basically say, "Okay, I'm going to see this course through and read the book." That would probably do me some good. And then part of me thinks like, "Well, I'll probably have to wait until I retire." So, I've got this
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mythical I've got this mythical season called retirement that is just a few years away. And I imagine that I'll have all of this extra time to devote myself to doing the kinds of things I want to do. And another part of me is like, "No,
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you won't. No, you won't. you're um you're way too deep into all kinds of things.
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This is a revolutionary book. Like I've read it probably five times. Every time I read it, I think it's better.
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Even the religious among us. So So now take the conversation that we just had about presentation and compare this with let's say compare it with this. Hi there.
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So, welcome to Maps of Meaning. I'm I'm going to tell you a story to begin with and then we'll take a break and after the break then I'll give you more details about the class structure.
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If you want to know more about the class structure, all you have to do is go look at the syllabus online. Um, if you type my name into Google, you'll get my website and then all the courses are
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listed there and then you just go to the course website and it tells you everything you need to know. I'll give you just a brief overview for now. Um, so in other words, Petersons have been running Peterson Academy for quite a
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while except he was doing it within University of Toronto. And again, even though on one level we know everything that we just talked about with respect to Thomas Flight and Jonathan PJO and representation and presentation, we know that in some ways the difference
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between this and this isn't nothing, but it's also not exactly the difference between zero and 100. Now this has I mean this is just even just a teaser in the west tend to be reductionist materialist atheists in our presumptions
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about what the world is. you have to abandon that every time I read it. I and and I don't I don't want to run over what he just said right there because what he just said right there is so
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important. And the point that I' I've been making for years that we don't escape all of this formation that is in us even when we say okay I believe in Jesus. Well, I believe in Jesus with all of this other stuff
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that's been created. And this has been true for people in the 15th century and people in the 17th century and people in the 19th century. And I mean it's it's just how we are and it's inescapable.
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I think it's better. Even the religious among us in the west tend to be reductionist materialist atheists in our presumptions about what the world is. You have to abandon that if you're going to understand daily.
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So does the and of course there's no abandoning [laughter] it. You can't just say okay I'll abandon that. You just sort of have to keep a watch on it and know that it's there but you can't even really
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do much about it. Just like in a sense you can't really do much about there's a main textbook which I presume you may have already purchased and perhaps not. It's available at the bookstore. And then there's some adjunct
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readings that are listed on the website that are scientific papers that serve as appropriate additional background material mostly concentrating on neuroscience material. Um, and so that's the readings and the order of the readings is also laid out on the website.
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uh in terms of assignments there are three three three and a half in a sense but the first one is uh I've developed some writing exercises over the last few years for students and um they're on a website right now called
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self-authoring.com which you don't have to worry about because you have access to the programs through this course website. Um I'll tell you about the two writing um the personal writing essays first. So there's a lot of evidence that has
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accred over the last 15 or 20 years some of it stemming from the psychoanalytic tradition that all right I want to tell you a story and there's a bunch of reasons I want to tell you this story and one is is
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because the story illustrates very well how unbelievably profound archetypal revelations manifest themselves in very very simple form.
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form because I'm going to read you a story that's written for four-year-olds and it's a variant of the oldest story that humanity has ever told and we know that we know what the oldest writings are that we've been able to dredge up
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and translate and this is a variant of a story called the I don't know how to pronounce this properly um the Anumeish which was a Sumerian story from thousands of years ago that that's actually quite nicely documented. We
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have the tablets and so forth and they were discovered in the late 1800s. But you know perhaps what's different about this representation is we have a high degree of confidence that we sort of know what else is in the room. Now
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whether the room is empty or full I don't know. I can look at uh let's see this was from 11 years ago and and so I I sort of imagine that there are students sitting there of course if you go to later lectures you
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can see a lot of the students the camera sort of moves around um but there are students sitting there and just by virtue of what he's saying they're the students are anxious about okay what are the assignments, what's my grade going
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to be? And of course, Jordan was one of the most popular teachers at the at the university. And um but then you go to this. And part of why I'm tempted to sign up for it is I just want to um I'm not as
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interested in the content because again I'm not convinced I will do better paying them $300 for a year than just what I'm already buying in terms of audible books and finding on YouTube, especially with my ADHD going all over.
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But um I'm more interested in this is this should surprise nobody given what I've been doing for the last eight years. I'm more interested in the students.
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I'm more interested in the kinds of people that are going to this and why.
Speaker A
Here's the fella. Welcome back everyone. I joined the Peterson Academy August 2024 when Access first opened up and now I have been using the platform for 2 years. When I joined, there were 18 courses. Most of the features they were promising didn't
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exist yet. And nobody really knew whether this thing was going to become a serious educational institution or just a collection of online lectures. 2 years later, I think we finally have an answer. So today I'm going to explain
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what the Peterson Academy actually is, what I've learned from it, what they've improved, what they still haven't solved, and where it absolutely does not replace university, and whether I think the experiment worked. So for those of you who watched my 1 month or one year
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of Peterson Academy videos, you might know that I dropped out of university when I was about 19 years old. I didn't really align with the politics of my university and that was a big reason why I dropped out. But I just didn't feel
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like I was getting an education there. Could have been the university I was going at. Could have been the the professors that I had. I just felt like I was learning more in my own time watching.
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All right. So auto died versus being on somebody's track. It's more at least going to watch. What time is it?
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Cosmos live and speak. It does in so far as you're orienting yourself and navigating through it. It directs your attention. There are things that are flat and dead. Those are profane things.
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And then there are things that capture you. Life is not possible without an opening toward the transcendent. Even if you live in a profane world, the breakthrough of what's not contained in that conceptual structure, that's a revelation of the sacred.
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If you pay enough attention, the you know part of the cynicism that we have is again the more produced it is.
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This is part of what Thomas Flight was saying. The more produced it is, the more we suspect, the more we sort of see the hand of the creator.
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Whereas if we're looking at something like this, it's a it's a variant of a hero story as well. And the hero stories are the story of human beings fundamentally. A hero myth is the story of the of the
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individual in society. And so the reason that hero mythology for example is so absolutely potent is because it provides the grammatical structure for for for understanding your life and laying it out in the world. So this is a small
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variant of that and it it's it'll give you an idea as we walk through it how this sort of information is transmitted.
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It'll give you some indication of how it is that you understand such information even though you don't know that you understand it because this story obviously is about something completely fictional and fantastic right it's as you can tell it's a story about a dragon
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and of course I mean how many of you have watched a movie about a dragon in the last year yeah is there anybody who hasn't okay you haven't you haven't that's good that's amazing that you could actually avoid that.
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And even just at that little interchange sparked joy for me because you just you just it part of what was so delightful about the early years was on one hand again we're looking at like the representation the show but those
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little idiosyncratic moments that that we feel as genuine. And of course they're they're they're formed too. who they're set within context or all that. But you just when he says that, you could just tell that inside of him there is a
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teacher that is is really motivated and joy is brought to him directly with contact with students.
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And again, I've said this how many times over the years, you know, some of the biggest tragedy that happened in this whole Jordan Peterson episode was these two careers that he seemed to really enjoy and he was very good at and
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fruitful with. And the same is true of a lot of the people in that IDW period who sort of lost their vocations. you know, this being a classroom teacher and being a a clinical psychologist, you know, I've heard, you know, back in
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the day especially, I heard from people who were um patients of his and people who were students of his and just how much they enjoyed him in that context.
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And you know, so I would imagine some people would have imagined that it would have been a better track for me if um you know, my YouTube channel had blown up and I had given up pastoring at Living Stones and I would have become an
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a full-time YouTuber and been interviewing all of the big current names And you know, and then it's like, I'm going to give up being a pastor for being a television interviewer.
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First of all, why are we lacking in television interviews? We're certainly not lacking in either category, but which fits me? And then the questions, which fits me best in terms of my vocation?
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Because again, just that little moment, dragon. Of course. I mean, how many of you have watched a movie about a dragon in the last year?
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And and he wants to know. I mean, he really wants to know. And he knows it's a sample and he knows all that.
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Yeah. Is there anybody who hasn't? Okay. You haven't? You haven't? That's good. That's amazing that See, see right there. Right there. It's bang this little spark. And again, it just I knew I was queuing up for it, but it brought
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me joy again because just a tiny little insight. And then then what is what is lost when you're doing this cuz because you just sort of can't fabricate it really. Existence of the transcendent makes itself known.
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So the sacred and the profane, the nature of religion is one of the great works of the 20th century. It's not as well known as it should be.
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And of course, you just look around and you notice that these are not 18 and 19 year olds and 20 year olds. These are people who are maybe some of them are in that age group, but this is adult
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learning. Let's call it that. Um, and and that's absolutely fine. I love it. I do it. I in some ways am doing it on YouTube. I get that. But it's not the same as being embedded in a university
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where yeah, you have this huge stream of students coming through. But in that huge stream of students, you'll you'll make personal connection and relationship with a few of them. And then some of them will come in and they'll be your grad students. And
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again, Peterson has mentioned many times that one of the biggest things that he missed was that relationships with grad students because then you have a much more enduring relationship with them.
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And then you have all the contextuality and um and and that's it's it's that tapestry that makes life so rich. And YouTube can't really deliver that.
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There's a variety of reasons for that. One of which is that it's a hard book to crack because the worldview that is put forward in the book is completely coherent but it's almost entirely foreign to modern people. So that's one reason
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not exactly conceptual difficulty because once you know a few key things the book becomes understandable but radically different nominological frame.
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That's a good way of thinking about it. And again you can having watched so much of him in the past I mean you can see the old Jordan is still in there and it's in there in the turns of phrases
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and it's in there in just the subtle cues of emotion that are in there. you know, it's practiced and he's, you know, he doesn't dress like that and uh here you could actually avoid that. So, you know, so so you know, that's kind of
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strange because of course those things don't exist. And so you might ask yourself what what accounts for their absolutely enduring popularity and even their cult-like popularity because you see that with with um both in Harry Potter because there's a dragon in her m
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multiple dragons in Harry Potter, right? In the second volume, there's the bassilisk that lives underneath the school, which is a very a very archetypal idea. And then, of course, there's the hobbit and and there's how to train your dragon. And it's like
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there's dragons in Sleeping Beauty. And like there's dragons everywhere. And of course, that's why this boy has this problem. He sees them everywhere. And people say, "Well, there's no such thing." So, okay. So, so we're going to walk through this and
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I'm going to explain to you some of what it means. So the first thing that's kind of interesting about this illustration and I don't know if the author Jack Kent or the illustrator knew this but if you look at traditional representations of
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this figure called a neurobos which is a like a world encircling serpent it's very very frequent that the thing the the entity has a twist in its tail and from what I've been able to understand that twist represents infinity. So the
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dragon in part is something that represents what's be what's continually beyond our realm of knowledge.
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And you know maybe I don't watch it because it's review. You know I've I've watched this before from him and I remember the the excitement of because he covered a lot of things that I wasn't some of the stuff I was familiar with.
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That's why the biblical lectures were so interesting to me because I was familiar with the biblical material but I was interested in the take that he had. and he was bringing other new things into it and um you know I really also enjoyed
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the the the biblical seminars but frustrated that and I wasn't frustrated that they were behind the Daily Wire payw wall that I had to pay for it. I I don't have a problem paying for content. I buy books. I I pay
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YouTube premium. I buy courses. I I do that. I don't have a problem paying for it.
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My frustration is that I can't chew it with you. Again, going back to Jordan Hall's conversations about generation. Now, now if you read Jesus will at at times talk about this generation, this generation.
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Of course, a lot of exeetical ink is spilled on, okay, what do we mean by generation? Well, I think in many ways it's meant what what Jordan Hall is getting at because part of the reason that I like it sort of available for
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free and out there on YouTube is that well now we can form and become a generation even in the midst of all of these questions about representation because [snorts] even the the mode and the style of representation forms us
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and and even though The difference between this and this isn't necessarily evil or wrong or bad or anything like that.
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There's there's plenty of nuance and plenty of particularity and plenty of they're different and the world is richer for them both.
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you know, I'd want to watch this, you know, on my big screen TV and um well, I probably couldn't because nobody else in the family wants to watch it, but um and and then if I was walking on the levey,
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in some ways this is more appropriate because there's just visually less. And so I appreciate them, you know, putting the quotes up and, you know, doing all the visual things. That's value. That's expanding the ba the bandwidth. That's
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expanding the resolution. And, you know, it's it's not bad, good, yes, no, but it's all in there.
Speaker A
Maybe that's enough for now. Leave a comment.
Topics:documentaryrepresentationnarrativeJordan PetersonJonathan Pageauworldviewmedia criticismhero mythologyPaul VanderKlaygenerational formation
