PETERSON: The Psychology Of The Flood

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+.

The chief causes lie at once in the sins of men and the decrepitude of the world, and the sins there are generally either acts of commission where people do things that they know to be wrong or they fail to do things that they know would be right. It doesn’t really matter. Sins of commission are usually judged more harshly within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but I think there might be a bit of an error in that because sins of omission can be a real catastrophe. 

Here’s a flood idea. There’s this idea that a judgemental being will flood you out if you continue on your wayward ways. It’s one of the examples of Jehovah being a little on the harsh side in the Old Testament, not something that modern people really approve of so much because we like our gods sort of domesticated — let’s put it that way. Unfortunately, that isn’t how it tends to work. But I’ve often thought about the reaction in North America to the hurricane in New Orleans because there’s two ways of reading that. One is mother nature has a little fit and sends a hurricane into New Orleans and wipes everyone out. Isn’t that a catastrophe? And isn’t that an example of our fragility in the face of natural power? But there’s another way of reading it and maybe this is unfair, but it will do for the purpose of illustration. 

The Dutch build dykes to keep the ocean back, and they’re actually pretty effective at that because their country is mostly underwater. It turns out that if you go to Holland, it’s actually not underwater — and so their dykes are working. The Dutch were very organized people, and they better be because their country is supposed to be underwater, so you better be organized if your country’s supposed to be underwater. They are very organized, and they have a rule for their dykes, which is to estimate the worst possible oceanic storm that will come in 10,000 years and make sure that the dykes will withstand that.

From my reading, the Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans built the dykes for a storm every hundred years, and that’s not so good because we live about 80 years. That means the probability that one of those storms is going to come whipping by in a lifespan is pretty damn high. That perhaps wasn’t the wisest of planning, especially because some of New Orleans is actually supposed to be underwater. Worse, New Orleans is a city that’s quite well known for its corruption, so you might also say that a tremendous amount of the money and time and resources that could have and should have and was planned to go towards fixing the problem, didn’t. 

So the hurricane came along and the question is, what bloody well makes you so sure that it was a natural disaster? Because if the infrastructure would’ve been maintained and built to the specifications that were certainly technically possible — and would’ve actually been less expensive in the long run to build, and everyone knew it — and the hurricane came along and wiped out the city, why do you think that’s a natural disaster? To me, that’s a natural example (if you think about it from a metaphorical perspective) of a judgmental God deciding to use a flood to teach a moral lesson. You might say, that’s pretty harsh. What about all those flood survivors? Well, the whole flood thing was kind of harsh. Pointing out that there were steps that could have been taken — and also, that I doubt in the aftermath have been taken, even though everyone knows now exactly what happened — is a diagnosis. But it’s irrelevant because what I’m really trying to tell you is how the mythological stories would line up on this.

You can tell a story about mother nature manifesting her catastrophe and potential for tragedy, or you could tell another story of an absolute failure of the human social structure and the human individual level because of the corruption to address a problem that everyone knew was there. That’s a good example of how the flood comes when you’re not behaving properly.

Watch the lecture in its entirety here.

One of the things that’s quite interesting about the Old Testament and the people who wrote it is that they always assumed that if the flood comes that meant you weren’t prepared — if that’s the rule. It’s like the apriori axiom. You got flooded out? You weren’t prepared enough. Well, how can you tell?

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