Interview · moment 23 of 26
Cain and Abel, the Implicit Ideal, and the Avengers as Modern Myth
from #249 - Jordan Peterson | The Tim Dillon Show · #249
7 min
Guest
Peterson discusses humanity's built-in relationship with a moral ideal, uses the story of Cain and Abel to describe the divided human soul, and argues that superhero movies like the Avengers now serve as a substitute mythology for the battle between good and evil.
- Biblical truth is literary truth, not scientific truth—science isn't about morality, the Bible is.
- Carl Jung's psychological approach to religious texts emerged from addressing Nietzsche's claim that God was dead.
- Christ is by definition the perfect man, and each person has a relationship with the ideal whether articulated or not.
- Conscience tortures you because you fall short of your ideal—manifesting yourself in accordance with it is the nature of responsibility.
- Religious structures like Christianity work to make the implicit ideal explicit so we can understand and live it more consciously.
- You spontaneously respect or disrespect people, feel awe or contempt—all of this reflects your moral evaluation against an implicit ideal.
- The story of Cain and Abel reveals the dichotomy within the human soul: the part striving toward light and the part rendered cynical and murderous by tragedy.
- Losing Christianity means losing thousands of years of attempting to make implicit moral reality explicit—a catastrophe.
- We replace religious mythology with the Avengers universe, using the most sophisticated computational devices on earth to explore good versus evil in movies costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
- The Avengers franchise isn't mere entertainment—it's a serious exploration of the battle between good and evil that people line up to pay for and find genuinely gripping.