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5 min readThe Call to Adventure and the Reality of Evil
Jordan Peterson opens this lecture with a stark personal confession: when he was a university student, he sometimes had the impulse to stab the person in front of him with a pen. He had never done anything violent in his life, but the mere fact that such a thought could enter his mind was deeply unsettling. That unsettling realization—that the capacity for evil lives inside every ordinary person—became the organizing problem of his intellectual life.
The Reality of Evil as a Personal Problem
Peterson's investigation into evil began when he was thirteen, reading Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, and Dostoevsky after learning about Nazi Germany. But the problem became real to him through two encounters in a maximum security prison. The first was a nondescript man who had shot two police officers in the back of the head—one while the officer described having two young children. The man looked completely ordinary. The second was a psychopathic narcissist who had memorized an entire deck of cards while shuffling and later helped batter a suspected snitch's leg into pulp with a lead pipe.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Episode Introduction** - Peterson announces the third lecture from his tour, focusing on the story of Abraham and the conceptualization of life as a romantic adventure.
- 2 (02:37) **Peterson's Personal Entry into Biblical Stories** - He explains his journey from studying totalitarianism and the problem of evil to analyzing biblical narratives.
- 3 (09:17) **Encountering Evil in a Maximum Security Prison** - Peterson recounts two visits that made the reality of evil personal and concrete.
- 4 (17:16) **Confronting His Own Capacity for Evil** - Peterson describes dark impulses he experienced while studying totalitarianism, leading to a personal realization.
- 5 (21:52) **Two Convictions: Evil is Real and Personal** - Peterson summarizes his core findings from this personal investigation.
- 6 (25:10) **The Landscape of Good and Evil as the Landscape of Stories** - He argues that the dissolution of God leaves the reality of evil, which implies a transcendent good, and that this moral landscape is the domain of stories.
- 7 (38:10) **The Call of Abraham: Leaving the Father's House** - Peterson begins the detailed exegesis of the Abraham story, starting with the command to leave home.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
What does a 75-year-old man leaving his father's house for the first time have to do with the darkest question a human being can ask about themselves? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson traces a single obsession — how ordinary people commit extraordinary evil — from a teenage encounter with books about Nazi Germany and the Soviet gulag, through unsettling visits to a maximum security prison, to a startling personal reckoning with his own capacity for darkness. What he found waiting at the bottom of that question wasn't despair, but something far more unexpected: an ancient story about calling, sacrifice, and the kind of adventure that makes the weight of being alive feel worth carrying. The story of Abraham turns out to be less about faith in the conventional sense and far more about a question you already know the answer to — whether you're listening.
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