Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson)

What does a seventy-year-old man who has never left his father's tent have in common with the first murder ever committed? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson works through the story of Cain and Abel and arrives somewhere nobody expects: a precise, almost clinical account of how resentment is manufactured, step by step, in an ordinary person who believes he has been treated unfairly. Along the way he explains why Freud and Jung both thought Nietzsche's solution was impossible, why your reputation is a better place to store wealth than your bank account, what you are actually doing when you tell your son it matters how he plays the game, and the one experiment he ran on himself that he says is worth the price of the ticket on its own. Then Konstantin Kisin comes out to argue that none of it requires God at all, and the conversation turns to the pill, the family, and a question about what has to change in a culture before a technology becomes thinkable. The story of Cain and Abel turns out to be less about an ancient crime than about a door you have already been offered, and whether you opened it. This lecture was filmed on April 9, 2024, in New York City, New York.

We think of this evil as Marxism. In reality, Marxism is nothing more or less than the current instantiation of a much more ancient evil: possession by the envious and hateful spirit that drove Cain to murder his brother Abel. The great book of Genesis thus portrays mankind as riven by an eternal fratricidal conflict. Those who reject genuine sacrifice become embittered by their subsequent failure ("rejection by God"). Instead of repenting and changing, they turn to revenge. And who do they target? Those who strive to do well and offer what is best. I can't believe how much wisdom the author of Genesis 4 compressed into that story's few sentences. You might even come to believe that God Himself had a hand in it. Truly: it's uncanny. The first two human beings born into history are, respectively, a good, honest productive man and his brother, who allows himself to be consumed by resentment and the desire to destroy. Communism, in a nutshell.

Hi, everybody. I’m pleased to let you know that we’re going to release a lecture a week from my extensive tour archive, beginning this Sunday and then repeating every Sunday after that. This allows me to do something interesting and useful while I’m otherwise incapacitated. My health is such at the moment that I can’t really return to podcasting or public lecturing. But we recorded these with the express intention of preparing them for release, and we’ve all determined that this is a very good time to do that. So that’s what’s going to happen. I hope you find them useful and compelling. They’ll be particularly attractive to those of you who liked my early YouTube work that was very lecture focused. It’s a return to my roots, I suppose, in some ways. And I’m as happy as I can be under the current circumstances, given my ill health, to be participating in this process and to have these lectures prepared for release. Thanks a lot for your continued attention and support. - Dr. Jordan B. Peterson