This transcription is extracted from the interview of Jordan Peterson by Margaret Hoover of NPR’s Firing Line, posted on YouTube in mid-December 2018. In this interview, Ms. Hoover confronts Peterson with the question Liam Warner posed in his National Review article earlier in 2018: “God, yes or no?”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDtcDpbwe90
MH: I want to ask you about your personal faith. Christians who watch you have listened closely over the last two years about whether you self-identify as a Christian or not. And the National Review has – which was also the publication that William F. Buckley founded – has written about you the following:
“..the effect is that the intellectual idol of millions of people is punting on the most important question in the world. … It is a question of literal, metaphysical truth before this question of psychology. Peterson has said that he behaves as if God exists, but he lectures as if He doesn’t. It would be helpful for his fans and himself if he addressed the heart of the West’s crisis in meaning: God, yes or no?”
Why not take on this question of the existence of God?
JP: Because it’s not something to reduce to a sound-byte, fundamentally.
MH: But your lectures are two hours long.
JP: This is true, but when you’re talking about the most important questions that people have ever asked, then two hours isn’t very long, apparently. People will watch them. So I’m not prepared to say things in any other way than I’ve already said them. You know, it isn’t obvious what belief means. People think that what they believe is what they SAY they believe. I don’t believe that. I believe that what people believe is what they act out. And so I said, I act as if God exists. That’s a sufficient statement, as far I’m concerned. Now what’s the old saying? By their fruits ye shall know them. Same idea. Right? It’s a matter of action, and a matter of commitment. It’s not a matter of me parading out my explicit statements about a metaphysical reality that’s virtually IMPOSSIBLE to comprehend. You RISK, when you reduce, and I’m not willing to do that. And I’m not interested in providing people with easy answers, INCLUDING ME! So…
MH: There’s a question of whether you’re working it out yourself.
JP: Of COURSE! And everyone who’s honest is working it out themselves. None of us have incontrovertible knowledge about what transcends our understanding. You know, like, I certainly do think I’ve learned things. I’ve learned that the deeper I go into the Biblical stories, and to religious mythology in general, cross-culturally, the less I see any bottom. You can go into it forever, and I’ve learned an immense amount doing that, and much of it has transformed my life. So. And I also believe that the West is grounded on the metaphysical presupposition that human beings have a spark of the divine in them, and I don’t think there’s a truer way of saying that, and I also believe that it’s true. Now, what that means with regards to the ultimate metaphysical realities that ground the entire world, I dare not say! Because I DON’T KNOW! So I tend to try to say what I know, and to leave the rest alone. And there’s plenty I don’t know, and plenty I can’t talk about. So, but I’m talking about what I CAN. I’m not interested in joining a club, regardless of what the club is. So I’m not going to make statements of reflecting a certainty that I don’t have. So.
MH: What is your approach to truth?
JP: My approach. I try to not say things that make me weak. All right, and I didn’t know this, but…
MH: What does that mean?
JP: If you pay attention to what you say, and I mean pay attention to it, if you pay attention to how the words make you feel, then you can tell when you’re saying something that is founded on a rock, and not on sand. And that’s what you should do. And that means you have to pay attention to EVERY WORD YOU SAY. And there’s a rule here. The rule is something like this: you can plot your way through life, you can plot and scheme your way through life. You can do what’s expedient, let’s say, instead of what’s meaningful. Or you can say what you believe to be true, and you can take the consequences. And that’s as far as I’m concerned, that’s the fundamental call to responsibility.
MH: Why are you afraid of being weak?
JP: Well, the weakness I was referring to. Well, it’s essentially fear of Hell. If you make yourself weak, life is very hard. If you make yourself weak and suffer stupidly because of it, you will become bitter, and once you become bitter, you’ll become vengeful, and after vengeful, there is no limit. That’s one of the things I learned from studying totalitarianism in the 20th century. Because I studied it from the psychological perspective, I wasn’t interested in the mass movements. I was interested in the motivations of the cruelest Auschwitz guards. What was he up to? Or the person who went and shot up the elementary school in Connecticut. What was he up to, exactly? Just exactly where did he dwell, and why? It’s well, like, weakness made him suffer stupidly, and that made him cruel, and that was just the beginning. And so, that weakness. If you make yourself weak by engaging in deceit. If you fail to take responsibility, then you transform yourself into something that cannot bear to endure this structure of existence. And you will torture yourself. And that leads to very bad places.