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May 2, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:15:26

Jordan Peterson | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 114

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	There's a group of people who, by your own admission, are disaffected and angry and alienated and young.
	And I'm helping them.
	And why is that exactly a problem?
	What is it that I'm supposed to be doing with them?
	Just out of curiosity, what do you think?
	If you had your druthers, would I ignore them?
	Returning to the show today is my very good friend, our very first guest, the man who premiered the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special, Jordan Peterson.
	He returns to discuss his newest book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life, and we're going to jump into as many of the new rules as we have time for today.
	In 2018, this book's predecessor, 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos, along with a slew of viral YouTube videos transformed Jordan into a pop culture luminary.
	Since he has last joined us, he's traveled the world speaking to hundreds of thousands of people, influencing listeners to better understand and take control of their lives.
	A couple of years have passed since 12 Rules for Life was released.
	It continues to live at the top of all the book charts.
	His latest looks to be captivating readers in exactly the same way.
	Recently, leftists had the audacity to paint Jordan as a murderous Nazi in Marvel comics.
	That's just the latest in the swipes the left has taken at him.
	We're going to talk about what it is about Jordan that has made him public enemy number one.
	We'll also discuss how we become our best selves and what causes us to admire others, how you can learn mythology and religion to understand your life, and Jordan's thoughts on love, sex, romance, and relationships in connection to your humanity.
	Hey, hey, and welcome.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
	This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Don't like big tech and the government spying on you?
	Visit ExpressVPN.com slash Ben.
	Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with Jordan.
	The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.
	Go over to dailywire.com, become a member.
	You'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
	Jordan Peterson, thanks so much for joining the show.
	Hi, Ben.
	It's really good to see you.
	Thanks for the invitation.
	It is fantastic to see you.
	Thank you.
	And congratulations on the brand new book.
	The book, of course, is Beyond Order.
	Twelve more rules for life.
	It is moving and it is fulfilling.
	It is a wonderful, wonderful piece of work.
	And I think it's going to be inspirational to a lot of folks.
	Thanks, Ben.
	I appreciate that a lot.
	So let's talk about before we get to the actual content of the books, I want to talk about some of the rules that are in there, which again, I think there's a lot there that people are going to find inspirational and thought provoking.
	Let's talk about the media's treatment of you.
	So the media's treatment of you for a long time, really, since you sort of arose to international prominence, has been this this mode of attack.
	Whether it is the BBC suggesting that you're a vicious sexist, or the New York Times suggesting that you want to force women into marriage, or whether now it is Ta-Nehisi Coates writing comics that portray you as Red Skull, Captain America's rival, the Nazi.
	He's a Nazi character.
	What do you make of these attacks?
	Magic supervillain Nazi, because Nazi, when Nazi isn't enough.
	When comparing you to Hitler isn't enough, there's always Red Skull.
	I think it's kind of hit a limit because the next step is Satan.
	Right, I mean, that's where you go after Red Skull.
	What do I make of it?
	Oh, thank you for your defense, by the way.
	Much appreciated.
	I should say, look, there have been people in the media who've been supportive of me from the beginning.
	I would say in Canada, for example, there's four or five people who I think are among Canada's top journalists who have been firm defenders of me right from the beginning.
	And so it isn't every single person in the mainstream media, although There's a disproportionate number of people in the mainstream media who go after me compared, I think, to my popularity versus unpopularity in the general public.
	I've thought about it a lot.
	I'm not exactly sure what to make of it.
	I certainly wasn't sure what to make of the last Red Skull episode.
	It was absolutely shocking to me.
	It took me about 12 hours to recover because I couldn't believe it was actually real to begin with.
	It was so surreal.
	I found out about it on Twitter.
	Somebody just sent me the cartoon and the first thing I thought was that it was a Photoshop mock-up, you know, just another meme.
	And then I looked into it a bit, and then I was really confused that this had occurred.
	It just seemed, especially when I found out who the author was, you know, so that was a double shock.
	And then I decided, because I'm feeling better and I have my sense of humor back, at least to some degree, and so I decided I'd just play with it instead of Any of the other possible options that were open to me and that's worked out extremely well.
	We've raised about $150,000 for charity because of it.
	But it isn't disappearing.
	It doesn't seem to disappear.
	And every so often somebody comes out of the woodwork and takes another swipe at me and hoping that perhaps, I don't know, hoping, I don't know what, hoping that this will be the time that I finally get wiped out.
	And You know, that's happened three or four times in major media outlets this year alone.
	The woman who interviewed me for GQ, She wrote a couple articles, one in the Atlantic Monthly, Helen Lewis, and she still seems to be quite disappointed in the fact that I exist.
	And Decca Aitken had in the Times in the UK.
	She was quite the piece of work.
	And then this last episode with Tenehisi Coates.
	I thought about it.
	I'll tell you what I think.
	You tell me what you think about this.
	You know, there are people like me, in some ways, like Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, who are public intellectuals, who are standing up against critical race theory and the worst of the leftist propaganda.
	They're rationalists and atheists in the main, scientists, and I have one foot in that camp.
	But I also have a foot in the mythological, dramatic, religious camp.
	And, you know, Nellie Bowles, who's one of the journalists who came after me, she's the one who wrote the Mia Culpa three or four months ago, pointing out that she used her position to destroy people's reputation just so she could attract attention to herself.
	Surprise, surprise.
	And, you know, she called me defender of the patriarchy, which was ironic in some sense, her use of that, but also an insult, at least from her perspective.
	But that's me.
	Both sides of it.
	The rationalist side, the Enlightenment side, and the religious side.
	And so, have at her, boys.
	That's what I think.
	So, I can't think of any other explanation, really.
	No, I think that's right.
	I mean, when I saw what Coates had done in the Captain America comics, and I actually think that it does go to something root about our civilization at this point, because you talk a lot, Jordan, obviously about mythology and the power of myth, and the most American form of myth at this point in time are the comic books, right?
	I mean, graphic novels are the form of American myth, particularly the Marvel Universe, which is the single biggest cinematic universe in movie history at this point.
	Right.
	And to take Captain America, who's the iconic American figure, turn him on his head so that he's opposing some of the stuff that you are saying.
	And what you are saying is reflective of Nazi propaganda.
	What it really does is it does place you in the position of Satan, except that the same people who very often are celebrating Satan in sort of his juxtaposition to God would never treat Satan that way.
	I think that you're worse than Satan because Satan is featured in little Mass X videos as sort of something that ought to be imitated.
	Right.
	There's a celebration of his rebellious spirit.
	Mm hmm.
	Mm hmm.
	Yeah.
	Your foot in that religious inspirational worldview does differentiate you from a lot of the other people who the left has somewhat targeted but has decided is not really worthwhile.
	That's why I think that the way that you were described in that comic book for people who missed it.
	Basically, the implication was that Red Skull was driving people to join Hydra by issuing his ten rules for order and talking about the greatness of civilization.
	And how you should make your room.
	And all of this stuff is driving many on the left up a wall, specifically because it's inspirational.
	The left knows that when it comes to driving the human heart, it's not enough to be a rationalist.
	You actually have to offer an inspirational program.
	And I think this is the great irony, is that folks like Coates, they do offer an inspirational program, but their inspirational program is an inspiration to tear down exactly the institutions of Western civilization you defend, which is why he has created this dichotomy.
	Yeah, well, it's something that everyone needs to take seriously across the political spectrum.
	I mean, it's quite clear that we need a story along with our politics.
	And that's because The human heart demands an adventure, and that's especially true if you're young.
	You know, the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who's a genius, a recognized genius, he has a stage of development.
	He posited the last stage of development.
	As in adolescence, as the messianic stage.
	It isn't talked about much in developmental psychology literature.
	I mean, Piaget was actually trying to reconcile religion and science.
	That was his life's work.
	And he investigated the development of ethics.
	empirically, in an attempt to bridge the gap between the is and ought.
	And he was very, very serious about that, and it drove his whole enterprise.
	In any case, he pointed out that there is a stage of development in late adolescence that he called the messianic stage, where people are looking for—I suppose they're catalyzing their identity at the broadest possible level, which we would describe as religious.
	I don't care if you're religious or not, that's irrelevant to this discussion.
	At the point, at the highest level of generality, your identity, the best language to describe your identity happens to be religious, which is why we have a religious language, speaking purely from a psychological perspective.
	And what that means is that there has to be a call to adventure in order to keep people motivated to move forward in their life, both as individuals and as members of society.
	Look, George Orwell really knew this about the fascists, for example.
	Orwell was a profound anti-fascist.
	I mean, profound in the emotional sense and also in the analytic sense.
	But he recognized very early and had the courage also to point out that the Nazis had conjured up a mythos.
	That was unbelievably powerful and that the rationalist West had nothing in its armament to contend with that.
	And fascism in some senses, it's more difficult to mount a rational defense against than communism because the fascists do use non-verbal appeal and Hitler used fire and imagery and fashion and architecture and art and culture in the broadest sense to move his political platform forward.
	The leftists, especially in the US, are quite good at the dramatic end of politics, you know, and the Antifa riots, that sort of thing, the Black Lives Matter protests.
	They're appealing to young people.
	And you can imagine, I always remember, I saw this kid in Montreal once, he was about 17, and he was dressed in punk clothes.
	He's a big kid, six foot five, like a big powerful kid.
	And he was standing on the corner of this outdoor shopping mall with two pink shopping bags in his hand.
	And he looked like a fool, and it was partly because he felt like a fool, because there he was, this like monster, standing there with these pink shopping bags.
	And I looked at him and I thought, geez, you know, if you went and offered him an overseas adventure, A warlike overseas adventure.
	He'd drop those damn bags and he'd be gone in a second.
	And no wonder!
	And so it's incumbent on us to realize that that call to adventure is necessary and that it has to be built in in some manner into our political thinking.
	The left is very, very good at that.
	They're much better, the radical left, they're much better than the left centrists, and they're much better than the centrist right.
	Now Trump managed that to some degree with his populism, but Not to the same degree as the intellectuals, the dramatic intellectuals on the left.
	I think that this points to some serious problems at the heart of sort of classical liberalism.
	And I consider myself a conservative socially and a classical liberal when it comes to the role of government.
	But it does point to some real problems with the heart of classical liberalism and the rationalist enlightenment side of the argument that there is no greater appeal to the human heart other than sort of what works and pragmatism.
	And there has to be something on the other end of that.
	I want to ask you about that.
	In just one second, Jordan.
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	So Jordan, you were speaking a moment ago about the sort of lack of meaning that people are looking for, particularly young men.
	And it really is a big thing that young men seem to have lost meaning.
	Postmodernism killed the scientific rationalist world.
	And the postmodernists have decided to substitute for that a certain utopian vision of the remolding of American society in terms of what they call equity, but really amounts to tribal dynamics.
	And you see this over and over, the radical left pushing its own version of utopianism.
	Classical liberals have been wrong-footed, I think.
	By the need for something more fulfilling, which is why classical liberalism always relied on an unspoken assumption that you were going to find meaning in your family, you were going to find meaning in religious community, you were going to find meaning in bettering your social life outside of government.
	But when that unspoken understanding just dissipated, when religion started to fall apart, all that was left was, well, let's just be rational with one another.
	There's not much inspiring there, and I think that's why you see that across the board, a drive toward irrationalism, a certain level of romanticism dominating the society to the point where irrationalism is much more prized than rationalism.
	If you make a rational point, if you cite data, very often this is now considered not only in politic, but damaging and dangerous.
	The other thing that ideology does, and the radical leftists are also very good at this, is that it provides you with a locale, a convenient locale for the existence of evil.
	And so, if you reflexively identify the patriarchy with evil, well, first of all, that's a powerful idea.
	It's independent of its broad merit.
	It's true.
	Now, it's not the only truth, and it's not the complete truth, but it's true.
	The reason it's true is because every hierarchical system degenerates, tends to degenerate in the direction of power.
	And all hierarchical systems are less than they could be.
	And that's partly because of the possibility that power and deceit will corrupt them, but also partly because we're willfully blind and deceitful in our own personal lives.
	And so when you tell young people that the cause of the trouble they see around them in the world, and maybe even the disquiet in their own heart, is the malevolent inadequacy of their society, that rings true.
	And they don't hear the rest of the story, you know, and it's the rest of the story that I've been trying to tell.
	They don't hear the story that, yeah, don't forget about the evil and corruption that exists in your own heart, and don't forget about the fact that nature This wondrous goddess as portrayed by the anti-human environmentalists, and by that I don't mean all environmentalists, by the way, that wonderful goddess nature is also trying to make you ill and kill you at all times.
	But the story that corruption exists in hierarchical structure and that that's a consequence of malevolence, the malevolent use of power and deceit, that's true.
	So it's very motivating, especially if you're young and you're looking for an adventure.
	Now, it's also too convenient, which is one of its tremendous dangers, because unless you're taught to look within and identify the malevolence there as the primary moral obligation, Then you now have an excuse and a moral justification to take out all of your negative emotion, your hostility, your resentment, everything about you that's unexamined on the demonic enemy.
	And of course, that degenerates with extraordinary rapidity, as we've seen over and over and over.
	So it's up to the centrists on both sides to deal with this.
	I've been talking to a lot of the optimist, rationalist types on my podcast, Matt Ridley and Bjorn Longberg and, well, and Haidt and Pinker.
	More recently, Lomborg and Ridley and Marion Toopey, who's written a lovely book on human progress, 10 Things Everyone Needs to Know About Human Progress.
	It's something like that, huh?
	Anyways, one of the things we discussed consistently was the difficulty in promoting The message that all three of these men are very aware of, which is that from a material perspective, in terms of absolute privation worldwide, humanity is way better off on virtually every dimension you could possibly measure than ever.
	And most of that improvement has occurred in the last 40 years, and it's been revolutionary in its speed.
	And no one knows this.
	And so it's very important to try to think through why that is.
	That's such a positive message.
	Now, I talked to Russell Brand about this, and I'm bringing him up for a reason.
	He's a lefty by temperament and by heart.
	His first objection, but he's very thoughtful and quick, his first objection, you know, I pointed out all this data showing that by every possible objective measure, everything is way better than it was certainly a hundred years ago, but certainly even 20 years ago.
	Even on the environmental front, in the main.
	And he said, well, what about disparity of distribution?
	So there's the problem of absolute level of wealth, let's say.
	That's improving.
	But there is still tremendous disparity.
	And of course, that is fair enough.
	You could even point out that the role of the left is to provide a conscientious voice for That's constantly attending to the fact of continuing disparity regardless of absolute level of wealth.
	And fair enough.
	But having said all that, it's a great mystery that incremental optimism is not sufficiently motivating.
	And you can't just wish human nature is going to change.
	It's not going to change.
	We got to tell a better story.
	And I also think that's why I'm a target.
	I think.
	It's because I am actually trying to tell a better story and I'm actually having some success with it.
	So I totally agree with that.
	And that really does bring us to the book, because one of the things that folks should know about all of your books is that they are very intimate, very personal.
	You talk about yourself, but you also speak in a way that most writers do not.
	You use second-person pronouns.
	I mean, you speak directly to the reader.
	You say, you feel this way, you think this way.
	And a lot of people read that and say, I do think that way.
	This is a person who's speaking directly to me in a way that mainstream political books very often do not.
	They consider me sort of a widget in whatever ideology they're pushing or they're considering the value of systems or not systems, but you sort of end around that and I think that in many ways that's what members of the left find so threatening is because if you're a member of the left and you believe that all individuals are essentially just the outgrowths of institutions and therefore that all change by individuals is going to be insufficient and that it must be societal change that creates individual change,
	You're a threat because you're telling people, well, you know, the systems can certainly get better, but the main threat to you is you.
	And that is a deeply threatening message to people.
	And if people find fulfillment in that message, then the left really does have a problem because if people start improving their lives within the system.
	And not blaming the system for their problems.
	And instead, recognizing that they can improve their lives.
	That's what members of the Left hate most of all.
	You know, you talk about in the book, Jordan, the fact that people are constantly coming up to you and they're saying things like, you know, I was leading a dissolute life, I read your book, I started taking your advice, and I've turned it around, and now I'm doing much better in life.
	And, you know, I'm blessed to have much the same experience from a lot of people who listen to the show.
	people who have been homeless, who now have graduated Harvard Law School, people who were single moms and then decided to take a college course and figure out their lives, people who have made mistakes and turned their mistakes around.
	And to me, those are inspirational stories.
	I think that because those inspirational stories exist, that I think is why people find you to be such a threat.
	It's because so many people are inspired by the stuff that you say and change their life individually without putting all of their ire and focus on a system that the left is mainly focused on tearing down.
	I defy anyone to go read 10,000 comments on my YouTube channels and not come away with a much better, with a much refreshed view of human nature.
	.
	The comments are In the main, unbelievably positive, and not in a naive sense.
	They're positive in a thoughtful sense, and in a communal sense, because the people who are making comments on the lectures are also commenting on each other.
	And there is ideological babble on both sides.
	I would say that's probably 5% of the comments.
	And generally, I believe they're written by people who didn't actually watch the lecture because they're often out of context.
	But in any case, 95% of the comments are thoughtful, but also extremely positive, which is very rare in a social media comment landscape, which tends to be very, very toxic.
	And so I think that's absolutely great.
	And it certainly has that impact on me when I read it.
	But then, here's something else that I've observed in the media attacks that have been directed towards me.
	They're not just directed towards me.
	Well, first, they're directed to who they think I am, so that's kind of interesting to begin with.
	But more than directed to me, and more perniciously, is that they're directed to those who are hypothetically following me.
	I don't regard myself as someone with followers.
	I regard myself as someone with viewers, listeners, and readers.
	And that's different.
	But in any case, my typical follower—so goes the story—is a disaffected, angry, young, white male.
	And for a while, I, in some sense, pushed back against that and said, My audience is about 70% male, but YouTube skews male, so that's perhaps part of the reason.
	And I see no evidence that it's particularly limited racially or ethnically, especially when I see my lecture crowds and when I meet people on the street.
	But then I started to realize that that was the wrong response.
	The right response is, why does it disturb you so much?
	That there's a group of people who, by your own admission, are disaffected, and angry, and alienated, and young, and I'm helping them, and why is that exactly a problem?
	What is it that I'm supposed to be doing with them, just out of curiosity?
	What do you think?
	If you had your druthers, would I ignore them?
	Would no one talk to them?
	Is that actually what you want?
	Well, the answer seems quite clear, that that is exactly what's wanted.
	That's what's held forth because there's this implicit assumption in all of this critique that in my very act of aid, I'm doing something immoral.
	Immoral enough to be parodied, let's say, as Red Skull.
	And so just what the hell's going on here?
	It's like, why is that now fodder for parody or slander, precisely?
	I mean, do you debate the fact that I'm helping?
	Well, you go read the comments yourself and see what you think.
	And then I thought about that a bunch, too.
	I thought, well, what is it with men, the men that I'm speaking to, let's say?
	Why are they responding positively?
	Why do they come to my lectures, the biblical lectures even, which is very surprising, right?
	Because what the hell are men doing at a biblical lecture, especially young men, especially when they could go do anything else and they have to pay for it?
	It's like, what are they doing coming to this lecture?
	Well, if the patriarchy is an evil tyranny, then the appropriate attitude towards any male ambition is to not treat it as ambition, but to treat it as nascent drive to tyrannical power, which is certainly what Foucault would recommend, for example, or Derrida, because it's all power.
	And so if you see some young man trying to stand up and better himself in any dimension, You're not going to trust that.
	You're going to identify that as the manifestation of tyrannical power.
	And clearly, if the patriarchy is a malevolent tyrant, then any sign of the desire to contribute to it should be at minimum not encouraged, but more subtly criticized and discouraged at every possible opportunity.
	And that's our culture.
	So in a second, I want to get to a lot of the thoughts here that we've been talking about are embedded in some of the rules that you talk about in your book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life, which of course is breaking all sales records as per your usual.
	This is the way that Jordan's books sell at this point.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Alrighty, Jordan, so I want to jump into some of the rules that you talk about in the book Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life, because, again, there's a lot of depth here and a lot of nuance that I think that a lot of people want to deny you, which is usually the way this thing sort of goes, is that if you have a lot of people who follow what you do and you have a general worldview opposed to that of many in the media, then you are robbed of all nuance and everything turns immediately into you're a right-wing patriarchal fascist.
	That's just what it boils down to.
	It's always you're evil, stupid, or incompetent.
	Those are the three slurs that are usually tossed out there.
	Yes, who happens somewhat oddly to take things like Harry Potter seriously.
	So it's another reason that it's not that easy to pigeonhole me.
	It's like, okay, I'm all those things, but now I'm taking Pop culture, seriously.
	I'm thinking that when people are reading Harry Potter, they're not just fools, that this isn't trivial.
	Just like the Marvel universe isn't trivial.
	People wouldn't be spending billions of dollars on it if it was trivial.
	They wouldn't be reading, you know, half a dozen 600-page books when they're 10 years old, which is what happened with Harry Potter if it was trivial.
	And so the other thing that happens is the mainstream critics of the type we've been describing just wave their hands about that and say, you know, I'm wandering off into some But that's not the case at all.
	I'm taking this very, very seriously.
	And when something happens like the Harry Potter phenomenon or the Captain Marvel, Marvel Universe phenomena, anyone with any sense who's a sociological or psychological observer is going to try to get to the bottom of that.
	And so I'm doing that with the books.
	But, you know, like I said, the consequence of that is it's just hand-waving.
	Well, yeah, I mean, that's part and parcel of an entire gaslighting effort by the media to radically shift culture.
	And then when you note that culture has radically shifted, then they say, how dare you notice that culture is radically shifting?
	Or if you point out that something is quite popular, it may have a deeper meaning.
	They know that.
	That's why they're making it.
	That's why they're monetizing it.
	But the moment you point it out, they say, how dare you even pay attention to the fact that this is an important thing in culture?
	This just shows that you're silly.
	It's all honestly a childish gaslighting game.
	But I want to get to some of the rules in the book.
	The first rule that you talk about, Jordan, is not to carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.
	And here, this is really a post-partisan message.
	It's a recognition That conservatives respect for tradition, respect for the past is really a respect for institutions that have been built up over the course of thousands of years in conjunction with an increasingly good understanding of human nature.
	And that has to be balanced with a recognition that we can't get so tied up in these rules that it becomes impossible to extricate ourselves from them.
	We can't fossilize.
	these rules and turn them into something that is that is unchangeable in any way that in essence we should be cautious about changing the rules of society they should be changeable so we shouldn't obliterate them but we also have to you have to know the rules of the game before you can change the rules of the game and if you're playing uh if you're playing calvin ball and calvin and hobbs and the rules of the chain the game change every second that's not a game anymore that's just an exercise of power but you also have to recognize that sometimes the rules do have to change how do you balance those two things well i think the first thing
	you do is vow to tell the truth so that you don't foul yourself up And then I think you pay attention to what manifests itself to you as meaningful.
	Because I think that meaning—I literally think, and I think this empirically as well as spiritually, let's say—I believe that the instinct of meaning signifies the optimal information processing function of the nervous system.
	So when you're balanced properly between order and novelty, or order and chaos, that that manifests itself to you as deep engagement.
	And that's a signal.
	And it's not merely cognitive.
	It's way deeper than that.
	It's a signal that you're in the right place doing the right thing at the right time.
	And everyone wants that, and everyone wants that all the time.
	Images of paradise are representations of that state of being.
	So it's there for you, but there are preconditions.
	And one of the preconditions is that you strive to do the best.
	To aim at the best.
	And that has to be your fundamental ethos.
	And it's a decision that, despite all of the calamities of being, that your primary ethical obligation is to work for the betterment of yourself and others.
	And that's a very complex decision because there's so much of you that's twisted and turned against existence itself because of its suffering and complexity.
	It's very hard to get your head straight about that.
	And so you get warped and twisted by resentment and deceit and temptations of various sorts.
	So that has to be straightened out so that you are aiming in the right direction.
	Once you manage that, or perhaps in conjunction with that, you have to watch what you say.
	You have to say what you believe to be true.
	Not because you're trying to accomplish something specific with what you're saying, but because you're attempting to represent what's happening in front of you as accurately as you possibly can, and let go of the consequences.
	And then you search for the engagement that that produces.
	And this is one of the things I love about long-form podcasts, is that when a conversation takes off properly and it's dynamic and unscripted, Both of the participants are striving to keep that sense of engagement constantly at play.
	And if they do that, then the conversation is engaging and deep and gets as deep as the people involved can manage.
	And they'll pull the entire audience along for the ride.
	And everyone is thrilled about that.
	That's Logos.
	That's the manifestation of Logos.
	And it's deeply meaningful.
	There's nothing more meaningful than that.
	And that's a sign that you've got that balance right.
	You want to be there all the time.
	That's the goal is to be there all the time.
	Of course, that's a lofty goal and very difficult to attain, but that's the end game.
	So Jordan, in a second, I want to ask you, how do people aim for the best and how do we define the best such that we don't fall into sort of a radical subjectivism where we all define the best for ourselves and the best can mean anything we want it to mean?
	I'm going to ask you about that in just one second first.
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	Alrighty, so Jordan, I was asking about how we aim for the best and how do we define the best such that we don't fall into a sort of subjectivism trap where the best is just whatever I feel like is the best for me or the best for the universe, but in my own particular viewpoint.
	Is there such a thing as an objective best that we're all searching for?
	There's a transpersonal best.
	I don't know if it's objective.
	I think we need a third category, which is something like transpersonal subjective.
	So it's the same across people, but it still manifests itself in the subjective domain.
	There's a technical problem with being selfish, because you might say, well, it's myself against others, and I could just do what was good for me.
	There's a technical problem with that, which I outline in both books, but in particular in Beyond Order, is that, well, if it's, let's say you're only acting In accordance with what's good for you.
	Well, which you do you mean exactly?
	Do you mean you in the next five minutes?
	Or the next ten minutes?
	Or the next day?
	Or the next week?
	Or month?
	Or year?
	Or five years?
	Etcetera.
	You get the picture.
	There's the you that extends at multiple levels of temporal resolution.
	And that's a group.
	That you.
	I mean, you're an old person.
	Not yet, but you will be.
	You could say that if you were enlightened, selfish, you'd act in a manner now that is best for your 80-year-old self.
	And so if you take yourself seriously as an entity that exists collectively across time, then you're faced with the problem of the collective instantly, even if you're highly selfish.
	So I don't think that there is a selfishness that's logically juxtaposed against the interest of the collective.
	And I do think that there are emergent ethics that are inevitable.
	I think you see them cross species, even to some degree.
	There are playable and non-playable games.
	That's a good way of looking at it, because a game is an iterated series of interactions.
	And out of iterated series of interactions, ethics emerges.
	And it emerges with a structure, and we recognize this structure.
	One way we recognize it, I believe—and this is also assuming that your eyes are open and you're not lying to yourself to a greater degree—you'll be struck with admiration for certain people.
	That grips you.
	Well, why?
	Well, that's the manifestation of the instinct to imitate.
	It grips you with admiration.
	It's the same sense of meaning.
	It's because that person is doing something that signals to you the place that you should advance to.
	And our cognitive architecture is predicated on imitation to a degree that's almost impossible to overstate. And that sense of awe, which is an elevation of the sense of meaning, is manifested when the admirable makes itself present. And that's not really cognitive. It's not something you think through.
	It's something that grabs you. Now, you can make it explicit. You can decompose it. You can take it apart. The idea of worship, when the idea of worship is taken seriously, it's the injunction to imitate.
	It's to find the highest thing you can possibly find to admire, and then to imitate that.
	And that grip, that's the worship.
	That's the awe.
	And that's an instinct and it's related to the fact that we live in social hierarchies and that we admire those who have progressed in the hierarchy in the direction of the goals that we are striving to attain.
	It's all built unbelievably deeply into our biology.
	to a degree that hasn't been appreciated yet or taken sufficiently seriously.
	That religious instinct is real.
	It's real.
	It's more real than anything else.
	So Jordan, one of the things that you talk about, and this is what so many people have, I think, honed in on, and I think a lot of people find it threatening, is the fact that one of your main messages in all of this is that the way that you're gonna find meaning and the people who you're gonna wanna imitate are the people who take on the most responsibility.
	And in a society that focuses a lot on rights and very, very little on duties, that is a super countercultural message.
	And the fact that it's resonating with young people, It has to scare the living hell out of a lot of people because the simple fact is that so much of our society is predicated on the idea that it is actually, in some ways, antisocial to take on responsibility.
	That taking on responsibility defeats the purpose of the infrastructures that we've created to relieve you of the responsibility.
	So if you say, no, I don't want your help.
	I feel that your help is enervating me.
	And my job in life is to shy away from that supposedly helping hand that actually is crippling my ability to care for myself and my family.
	that scares a lot of folks who are invested in these systems, but you really preach responsibility.
	And I think that's right.
	I mean, I can't think of a single person that I admire who is a person who shirks, in fact, I find it hard to believe that there's anybody who people admire, whose main goal in life is to shirk responsibility and engage in personal pleasure.
	As much as people may talk about that, it's just not something people naturally admire.
	You can see that admiration sometimes.
	So you can think about the film, rebel without a cause, for example.
	There's the romantic rebel who shirks duty because—but the real reason is he's standing up for a higher responsibility and refusing, like, blind, pathological conformity.
	And so you can get around the responsibility problem that way and admire, you know, creative rebellion, something like that.
	But those few exceptions apart, I ask my readers just to think for themselves about that.
	It's like, well, who do you admire?
	And when do you admire yourself?
	When do you have some self-respect?
	And when does your conscience bother you?
	Do you have self-respect when you're shouldering your responsibilities or when you're abdicating them?
	You might say, well, I don't have any responsibilities.
	It's like, well, do you have any goals?
	Well, I don't have any goals.
	Well, then you don't have a life.
	It's like you can't even act.
	You have to have goals.
	That just doesn't work.
	That isn't a statement that works in the world.
	If you have goals, you have a responsibility.
	The responsibility is to progress towards the goals.
	You can even change the goals if you want, but you can't get rid of the fact that you have a responsibility to move towards your goals.
	And you can say, well, I'll just dispense with goals.
	It's like, well, unless you're like the Buddha, good luck with that.
	And even in the Buddha's case, I mean, he had nirvana at his fingertips, but rejected it to go back to redeem the world.
	The only instance we know of, essentially, mythologically or otherwise, where there was a detachment from goals and nirvana attained as a consequence, the consequence of that still was the adoption of responsibility, the rejection of nirvana as a solitary pursuit.
	And then you think about your own life and the life of your parents.
	Well, where do you find your meaning?
	In your intimate relationship, is the responsibility there?
	Well, if it's a relationship that's based on trust and love and fidelity, your children, your parents, people who depend on you, you're not going to have that?
	Well, that's a responsibility.
	And wouldn't it be something if that's where the meaning was?
	Well, it is, and this is my experience.
	I've really been thinking about this lately, about where the deepest meaning is.
	I was talking to this guy, Chris Williams, a while back, and he's got this kind of new podcast in the UK.
	I was really struck when he interviewed me because he spoke, when he asked me questions, he had no speech errors.
	No ums, likes, you knows, no pauses in attention, nothing.
	I asked him about that and he said he had been practicing being precise in his speech for six years and had really mastered that.
	In any case, before he started this podcast, which is called Modern Wisdom, he was a successful young man in the sort of quasi-celebrity way that The culture might offer as a icon for admiration.
	He worked in nightlife, and he's an attractive guy, and he had money, and he had women, and he had material success.
	And good for him, as far as I'm concerned.
	That's a lot better than failure.
	But he started to pursue something that was deeper, and the podcast came out of that, and he started attending to what he was saying.
	I talked to him about The deep sense of satisfaction, meaning that I have when people tell me that they've done something positive in their life and that I had some influence on that or something I said had some influence on that, it's overwhelmingly significant.
	And he said he had exactly the same experience.
	It's like, what if it was the case?
	All cynicism defeated with this proposition.
	That there isn't anything that would actually make you feel more engaged in your life than taking the opportunity to take the best in someone else and encourage that development.
	What if that is what we're actually like?
	I think that is what we're like.
	I believe that.
	And I see it.
	I see it happening all over.
	And so, That's not power, eh?
	If our hierarchies are actually based on that most fundamentally, and the best people I've seen who are very successful in their hierarchies are people who take their mentoring, for example, not only with dead seriousness, but take tremendous pleasure in it.
	Well, what if that's the operative principle?
	What if the postmodern critique of hierarchy is so wrong that it's actually the opposite?
	Now, that doesn't mean it can't be corrupted.
	Institutions get corrupted by deceit and by power all the time, but that doesn't mean that that's their central essence.
	So I tell young people, you know, maybe responsibility.
	That's where you'll find what you need, what you desperately need.
	And I don't say that because I'm shaking a stick at them.
	I'm saying that because that looks to me like it might be the case.
	So That seems to work.
	I mean, again, it seems to work.
	Jordan, in one second, I want to ask you a little bit about something that you're saying here, you know, mentoring and teaching and the role of that in a society that really has decided that those who attempt to mentor, those who attempt to teach, are violating a personal sense of authenticity.
	I want to ask you about that in just one second.
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	So, Jordan, you were talking about the power of mentoring, the power of, and fulfillment more than power, of helping people achieve the best in themselves.
	And this brings me to, I think, a deeper question about the nature of identity in the modern world.
	There's a book I've found myself citing frequently these days by Carl Truman called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
	And his basic proposition is that the failure of Western civilization over the course of the last several decades is largely attributable to a false version of what constitutes the self.
	His basic case is that most people understand this innately with regard to their own children.
	That children are innocent and children are cute and children are barbarians and it is your job as a parent to civilize children and to civilize children means exactly what it sounds like.
	It is to take children and then to enmesh them in a framework of rules and values that make them better people.
	And so identity is what grows out of the interaction between yourself and a society that surrounds you and a set of rules that are meant to make you better and allow you to practice to get better at being you and at helping others and is acting as a citizen within a functional society.
	The modern version of self is almost precisely the opposite, and that is that true meaning is not to be found in the interaction between you and society.
	True meaning is to be found in your authentic self, free of society's constraints.
	So every sort of constraint that could be placed on your notion of authentic self-identification is a barrier to happiness.
	And so biology can be a barrier to happiness.
	If you're a man, you believe you're a woman.
	This means that you're a woman, and anybody who says differently, even using objective measures like biology, This person is actually a threat to you.
	If you are a believer that children ought to be enmeshed in a system of religious values that propagates...
	It has been propagating the notion of basic morality for several thousand years.
	That is an imposition on you as an authentic human being, that the authentic person is the person who is free of society, who's free of civilization, sort of Rousseauian, natural, savage, living, completely absent all of the restrictions of the surrounding society.
	And when you talk about, you know, the power of mentorship and the power of teaching, you're assuming that identity is really more formed or more properly formed Yes, that's a very complicated question, and so I'll take it apart a couple of ways.
	than it is by simply looking within and finding the fulfillment you seek only within?
	Yes, that's a very complicated question, and so I'll take it apart a couple of ways.
	I just had an outstanding scientist on my podcast, and he's the world's foremost authority on the development of aggression, male and female, and there are different patterns.
	And so he was a Rousseauian to begin with.
	he believed that we're born good, essentially, and that we learn aggression through modeling, through all sorts of pathways, but fundamentally that it's learned.
	But he's conducted studies for four decades, longitudinal studies with thousands and thousands of children.
	He like ate up 30% of the social science research budget in Quebec at one point.
	Huge studies, top rate.
	He won the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for criminology in 2017.
	But he had his view completely turned around.
	And so here's the facts.
	So aggression is there right from the beginning.
	So let's say that drive to power.
	And he defined aggression very specifically, measurably, kicking, hitting, biting, and stealing, which you can observe in children as young as two.
	The motivation for such things is there earlier than two, but children aren't very mobile before that, so they can't really manifest them.
	If you group children together, In groups of the same age, the most violent people are two-year-olds, by a lot.
	Okay, but having said that, 30% of two-year-olds virtually are never aggressive.
	50% use aggression some of the time, and 17% use it chronically.
	And they're disproportionately male, and disproportionately from families that are headed by very young, disturbed, single mothers.
	And some of that's poor prenatal care in pregnancy, and some of it's postnatal lack of socialization.
	That's how it appears.
	And he's done intervention studies showing that if you support these women, that you can moderate that outcome.
	But we won't talk about that.
	Here's the crucial thing.
	Across the board, those three categories of children—nonviolent, sometimes violent, and chronically violent—across the board, except for the nonviolent ones, of course, because they're not violent, the level of aggression decreases with age, dramatically, even among the most violent children.
	So the fundamental consequence of socialization is peace, not aggression.
	Okay.
	There's a subset of the violent kids who don't get socialized by the age of four.
	They're much more likely to be antisocial, criminal delinquents, and long-term violent criminals.
	And partly that's because if they're not socialized by the age of four, they can't make friends.
	And friends are the fundamental agents of socialization.
	from four onwards, increasingly.
	And so if you get knocked out of the peer group because you can't reciprocate and use violence as a strategy, then you fall further and further behind and become more and more alienated.
	And so the Rousseauian view has its pluses because 30% of kids aren't violent at all.
	But the Hobbesian view, which is that we're born in a chaotic and aggressive state of nature every Dog for himself, let's say, also has its truth.
	But what's so interesting is that as children are socialized, the level of aggression goes down.
	Now, you see, if power was an effective strategy, what would happen is that the most successful kids would become more aggressive with time.
	And that isn't what happens at all.
	So we're way too complicated to only rely on ourselves.
	We're social to the core.
	I mean, and it's a tenet.
	It's so interesting because it's a tenet, particularly of philosophy on the left, that human beings are almost infinitely malleable socially.
	So how can you believe that and also not believe that socialization is a main pathway to genuine authenticity?
	You can't believe.
	Well, you can because you can believe both of those things at the same time and nothing horrible will happen to you, but they're still logically contradictory.
	So, no, we flower inside institutions.
	They're not our enemy.
	It's a myth, Ben.
	It's a myth.
	It's the same thing.
	It's the tyrannical patriarchy killing the natural soul.
	It's like, yes, because every society demands its pound of flesh.
	And we're all crushed and bent and warped by our socialization insofar as it was based on deceit and power and insofar as our institutions were inadequate.
	That's true, but it's not enough of the truth.
	It's not enough.
	Look at our very language.
	Every word we speak was invented by other people.
	Every word we speak, we've agreed on the meaning.
	Everything we do is social to the core.
	That's not all our enemy.
	That's a myth.
	It's Peter Pan versus Captain Hook.
	And Peter Pan never grows up.
	And the patriarchy isn't Captain Hook.
	Crooks are Captain Hook.
	Jordan, in just a second, I want to ask about your definition of ideology, because one of the slurs that has been thrown at you is that you are some sort of ideologue, but you say in your book that it's important to abandon ideology.
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	Alrighty, Jordan.
	So in your book, you talk about abandoning ideology and the importance of being able to be, I think, almost playful with ideology a little bit.
	And I think this is something with which I deeply agree.
	You know, listen, I'm a committed conservative in terms of my social values.
	I'm very committed to my values as far as where I think the role of government lies and doesn't lie.
	But one of the points that you make is that it's very important to avoid being a rigid ideologue to the point where you're completely inflexible, to the point where your ideology completely throws out all the evidence on any proposition and prevents you from being able to see truth.
	Well, it depends on whether you want to solve problems or be right.
	You can't be both of those.
	And that's one of the tremendous advantages of science.
	If you want to be a scientist, you have to abandon being right.
	You have to be wrong all the time and learn.
	And often learn that the opposite of what you presumed was true.
	And the same is true if you're a real engineer.
	In my first book, Maps of Meaning, I tried to provide a technical definition of ideology.
	And so I developed what I thought was a map of meaning, hence the name of the book, which is that It's predicated on the idea that we inhabit stories, that we look at the world through a story, which is why stories are so attractive to us.
	A story is about people in action going from one place to a more desirable place.
	That's our life.
	We're going from one place to a more desirable place, and that's punctuated by catastrophes of various magnitude, and we have to cope with those catastrophes.
	That's like the rise and fall of Israel in the Old Testament, so it's got that structure, and it's the story of the individual and of society.
	Well, there are characters you meet along the way, and you need to know about all the characters.
	You need to know about the positive element of nature.
	That's what the environmentalists worship.
	Gaia, in her beauty and benevolence and plenitude.
	That echoes through representations of Mary, for example, in Christianity.
	I'm not reducing one to the other.
	I'm just pointing out how these things interplay.
	There's the negative element of nature.
	That's the witch, that's the swamp, that's death and disease and mortality, the forces that are conspiring in the natural world to destroy us.
	And the social world is the same.
	There's a benevolent element, the wise king, and a tyrannical element, the tyrant.
	And in the individual, there's the heroic And the adversary, the hero and the adversary, that's Christ and Satan.
	That's played out all the time, especially in pop culture.
	The hostile brother motif is unbelievably common.
	Thor and Loki is an example.
	Batman and Joker.
	Superman and Lex Luthor.
	It's there everywhere.
	It's there because we all contend with the malevolence in our own soul.
	That's part of why it's there.
	So, a religious structure represents all of that.
	A comprehensive philosophy represents all of that.
	You see that in Freud.
	Freud had a representation in his thought system of every single one of those categories.
	So, the ego was bipolar.
	The superego, the social world, was bipolar.
	The id, the natural world, was bipolar.
	Freud covered the territory, and so he could sneak mythology back into science because he got his Story, right.
	And ideology just takes fragments of that, and it derives its power from the underlying religious truth.
	So you're a rebellious hero rejecting the demands that society makes on you because of its corrupt and deceitful and tyrannical nature.
	It's like, yes, true.
	But it's an ideology because it's not true enough.
	It's missing the rest of the story.
	And so you need the rest of the story.
	It's not optional to know this.
	You don't know it and you're in big trouble.
	So, for example, if you don't understand that there's malevolence in your own soul and you only see it in the external world, you're not going to be able to adapt to the external world.
	It's going to turn itself into your enemy.
	You're going to Never grow up because you won't adopt any responsibility, because you can't distinguish it from tyranny.
	These things have real consequences.
	You know, and if you only see nature as benevolent, then you have no appreciation for what society is protecting you from, and you have no sense of the fundamental fragility of human beings.
	So, an ideology parasitizes a religious trope.
	That's what it does.
	That's why it has power.
	And so it appeals to us instinctively, because it's a half-truth or a quarter-truth, but it's a quarter-truth.
	So I tried in Maps of Meaning to say, look, here's the entire symbolic world.
	And you need to understand it so you don't fall prey to partial misrepresentations.
	So that's part of it.
	The other part is, the problem with an ideology is it doesn't actually tell you what to do.
	Not if you actually want to solve a problem.
	So with Tremblay, for example, when he was studying aggression, he had to decompose his original a priori assumptions, which were basically Rousseauian.
	People are good and they learn to be aggressive.
	He had to learn in high resolution.
	And then he realized that, well, one thing you could do to decrease some manifestations of aggression among some children, some of the time, was to provide single mothers who were young and poorly educated and who manifested signs of psychopathology, which doctors can pick up very, very easily, provide them with support during pregnancy in the first year or two of their life, and their children are much more likely to
	fall out of the violent category, and the long-term return on investment is extremely positive.
	Now that's high-resolution thinking.
	He actually wanted to solve the problem.
	The ideology just tells you what to think about everything, so you're always right, and someone else is always wrong, and even worse, they're evil, and that's where things go out of control.
	As soon as the evil person isn't you, you're on shaky ground.
	Now, you know, I've been criticized, too, because I stress personal responsibility.
	It's not like I don't stress social responsibility.
	It's like, but you're loose cannon, man.
	Get yourself tied down.
	Straighten yourself the hell up.
	See if you can say what you believe to be true and open your eyes.
	And then take on some responsibility in a manner that will make you suffer if you're wrong.
	And then, if you can survive that trial by fire, which you can define, then maybe you can dare to start moving the dials and levers of the broader world.
	It's more a call to humility than a denial of social responsibility.
	Of course, you're unbelievably responsible for your society and should do what you can to improve it, but you bloody well better make sure that you've got yourself together If you're going to go and do that, because other people will suffer for your mistakes.
	So Jordan, one of the things that you talk about in the book, which is, I think, really wonderful, and I hadn't heard you talk about it a lot before, you've done it in some of your lectures, but it hasn't been the main theme, is sort of the relationship question.
	How do you maintain romance in your relationship?
	And as a dude who's been married for almost 13 years at this point, I can say that it is very, very good advice.
	I mean, the amount of work that has to go into a relationship to keep a relationship functioning at a high level is tremendous.
	And that's not what you are sold in the media.
	What you're sold in the media is number one, the happily ever after wedding ending.
	But even that is now hackneyed.
	Now the idea is that there is no happily ever after, that basically you're a fool if you get married and that true happiness lies in changing partners on a fairly routine basis.
	But that's not the case that you make at all.
	You make the case that happiness is going to lie and fulfillment more importantly is going to lie in the hard work of putting romance into your relationship.
	And people, I think, when they get into this thing, they don't know how much work it is to even do the sort of thing where you have to plan romance into your life, particularly after you have kids.
	It's a reality.
	I had a lot of clinical experience, you know, and I had men in my practice who were very successful, serially sexually active.
	And It didn't work for them very well.
	Now, I would say, very forthrightly, if I had two men and all other things being equal, one was capable of serial sexual relationships and was attractive enough to manage that, and the other wasn't, that the person who managed to do that is more successful.
	I believe that.
	So, if you're abstinent because you're incapable, that is not a virtue.
	But you can't divorce something as miraculous as sexuality from your life.
	How are you going to do that?
	Well, you can trivialize it.
	It's nothing.
	Well, OK, well, then you have nothing.
	So good luck with that.
	You're going to take one of the deepest sources of meaning that's available to you and turn it into nothing.
	Well, that's its own punishment.
	Well, so then you integrate it into your life.
	Well, what do you want for your life?
	I mean, do you want to be... What is it that you want from sex?
	Do you want intimacy?
	Do you want closeness?
	Do you even want the experience to be of high quality?
	Do you want the person to pay attention to you?
	Well, they're going to have to care for you.
	I mean, lust will get you somewhere, and it's not nothing.
	But it's by no means everything.
	And everyone knows this.
	People are lonely.
	And they need someone to communicate with, and they need someone to tie themselves together with, so their lives make a rope. They need someone to communicate with when times are good and to share their triumphs, and they need someone to share their catastrophes, and they need a framework that's stable so that they can have children. And, well, why would you have children? It's like, that's a stupid question. It's like, well, what else are you going to do?
	You know, I mean, there aren't that many things that make up your life and intimate relationships.
	That's 20% of your life or 30% of your life.
	Children, that's 20% of your life.
	Now, you can get away with neither of those, but you better have a walloping career or a tremendous aptitude at something.
	Creative and remarkable.
	And maybe you can do that, maybe that'll be enough for you, but I've seen that unidimensionality work out well very, very, very, very, very rarely.
	So, and you have children because you won't have, you'll never have the opportunity in your life to have as high quality a relationship with anyone as you could potentially have with your child.
	So are you going to forego that?
	Well, you can, but What's left for you then?
	All this cynicism.
	You know what?
	It's aimed against blind obedience.
	It's like, fair enough, okay?
	So I would take a cynic over someone who's blindly obedient any day.
	Especially a cynic who was once blindly obedient.
	Because at least then they had managed that.
	But if you're really cynical, you move past cynicism.
	You doubt your doubt, and you start to notice And then you engage in your life.
	And so young people are being sold a shoddy bill of goods.
	Even if you're successful at what you pursue, say serial sexual satisfaction, Tinder, you're a hot Tinder item.
	It's like, well, if you're a male and you're attractive and you have an endless array of willing females, it's a gateway to psychopathy as far as I'm concerned.
	Because you have to divorce your sexuality from the humanity of the people that you're engaged with sexually.
	Well, all that's going to do is make you hard and bitter.
	And I wouldn't recommend it.
	So, and it's not casual moralizing.
	You know, I'm not suggesting that naive abstinence is the right solution.
	But we're not doing a good job, Ben, of communicating the fundamental values of life to our young people.
	I got a story to tell you, man.
	I talked to this woman this week, Yeonmi Park, and she wrote a book called In Order to Live.
	She's an escapee from North Korea.
	And, like, she had quite the life, man.
	Like, starvation, then slavery.
	That kind of sums up her life.
	She had to sell her own mother.
	Whom she loved.
	I mean, just think about that for like 15 minutes and see where it gets you.
	And she was literally a slave in China.
	And she struggled through all that and ended up in South Korea and went to a South Korean university.
	She did all her education in one year.
	Elementary, junior high, and high school in one year.
	Passed the GED and got into a competitive South Korean university.
	It's like, this is quite the girl.
	And her book, it wraps up in 2015.
	So I asked her about what's happened in recent years.
	She went to Columbia University.
	So imagine this girl struggles out of North Korea.
	and slavery and pursues her education and gets to go to an Ivy League school in New York.
	It's like the pinnacle of her ambition.
	She was drastically affected by George Orwell's Animal Farm when she was in South Korea.
	It's one of the first classic books she read and that's what made her decide to write and to speak.
	So she can understand the value of the humanities like virtually no one else can.
	She went to Columbia.
	I said, well, how was that?
	She said, it was a complete waste of time and money.
	And I said, well, wait a second.
	You can't really mean that.
	Surely, in your four years studying humanities at Columbia, you must have had one professor or one course that spoke to you, you know, the way that the books that you were reading spoke to you.
	The person made the attempt to push past the limitations of the institution and mentored you.
	She mentioned one human biology class where she learned about evolution, but said that that was all twisted by political correctness near the end, and that was all she could muster up for four years.
	She said that she felt just about as Stymied in her freedom of speech at Columbia University studying humanities as she did in bloody North Korea.
	That's what we're doing to our young people.
	It's so appalling.
	So appalling.
	There's so much that people can be offered.
	This richness of the past, so much that's desperately necessary.
	This isn't optional.
	The idea that man does not live by bread alone.
	That's not religious claptrap!
	That's... Ha!
	She said she was in this room in South Korea, little room, full of books.
	She studied so hard she had to go to the hospital because she forgot to eat.
	I said, a little room isn't little if it's full of books.
	So, Jordan, in a second I wanna ask you a few final questions, starting with the theme that you talk about very often of gratitude in spite of suffering, and also I wanna ask you about the changing cultural standards and more, as you mentioned, that we're abandoning so much in the past.
	Is there a natural limit to that?
	Or is that something that's going to have to be actively fought back against?
	But if you'd like to hear Jordan's answers, you have to be a Daily Wire member.
	Head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the rest of our conversation over there.
	Well, Jordan, it's always an honor and a pleasure to have you on the program again, folks.
	You need to go out and buy Jordan's brand new book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life.
	It is a fantastic sequel to a fantastic book.
	Jordan, thanks so much for joining the show, and it's great to see you.
	Thanks, Ben.
	It was really good to see you and thanks for everything.
	Our technical director is Austin Stevens, and our assistant director is Pavel Wydowski.
	Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
	Editing is by Jim Nickel.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
	Hair and makeup is by Fabiola Cristina.
	Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

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