PETERSON: Sodom And Gomorrah

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Series exploring the psychological significance of the biblical stories in the book of Genesis. You can now listen to or watch the lecture series on DailyWire+.

“And the men rose up from thence, and looked toward Sodom: and Abraham went with them to bring them on the way. And the Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I’m about to do; Seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him?” I guess God is talking to himself here, or maybe he’s talking to the angels, but I think he’s trying to make a decision. “For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord, to do justice and judgment; that the Lord may bring upon Abraham that which he hath spoken of him. And the Lord said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous, I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which has come unto me; and if not, I will know.”

We don’t know what’s happened in Sodom and Gomorrah, but we know that God’s got wind of it, and that’s not good. We know that sin means to miss the mark, and so we know that whatever has happened in Sodom and Gomorrah means that something about the natural ethical order of things has been seriously violated. There’s a strong intimation in the Old Testament, which I think by the way, is completely correct, that if the proper order of being is violated — and that’s something like the balance between chaos and order — then all hell will break loose.

One of the things I can tell you from reading a very comprehensive set of myths from around the world is that, that’s a conclusion human beings have come to everywhere. Stay on the goddamned path and be careful because if you start to mess around and you deviate — especially if you know that you’re deviating — things are not going to go well for you. That idea is everywhere, and I think it’s right. I think the idea is right because there aren’t that many ways of doing things right, and there’s a lot of ways of doing things wrong. If you do things wrong, the consequences of doing them wrong can be truly catastrophic.

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One of the things I learned from reading Viktor Frankl first — but then Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who I think did a deeper job, and Václav Havel thought the same thing — was that these people were very much trying to understand what happened in places like Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” is a particularly good analysis of what happened in the Soviet Union, and his conclusion is a 2,100 page conclusion — and it’s hammered home with a hammer. It’s a book that everyone should read, assuming that you can read a 2,100 page scream because that’s basically what it is.

First of all, what he does is document just how terrible things were in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959. No matter how terrible you think they were, unless you know the stories, they were a lot more terrible than that. They were terrible personally because everyone lied. They were terrible in families because two out of five people were government informers. They were terrible among friends because no one could tell each other the truth. They were terrible socially because the whole system was corrupt; it ran on slave labor. They were terrible philosophically because the doctrine of man upon which the state was founded was hopeless and nihilistic, and they were murderous, destructive, and genocidal.

They got it wrong at every single level of analysis simultaneously. And the question is, why? Solzhenitsyn’s answer, and to some degree, Viktor Frankl’s answer as well, and Vaclav Havel, and I would say also Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi, all ended up in the same conceptual sphere. The answer was because individual people lived crooked lives because individual people swallowed lies and spoke them and didn’t stand up for the truth. And the corruption that spread from each individual pulled the entire state mechanism into that corruption, and made everything into hell.

There are other theories — obedience. That’s kind of the Milgram idea that it’s easy to make human beings obedient to people in authority. I’ve explored that idea quite a bit with regards to what happened, for example, in the Nazi concentration camps. Yes, you can set circumstances up so that people

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