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March 9, 2018 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:19:50
Swedes want to know: take 2: Ivar Arpi interviews me again
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Last time we spoke, it was not so long ago, but you've
been in the headlights even more since the release of the book and also the beautiful interview with Cathy Newman.
Yeah, well, that seemed to start a whole new plateau, let's say, of interest.
Yeah, I thought that Yes, I've been in the headlines a lot.
A rather unsettling amount, I would say.
And I don't want to dwell on the Cathy Newman interview too much because you've been made to talk so much about it that I think you're probably tired about it.
But just one thing that I think you demonstrated very clearly about yourself and also about The saying that patience is a virtue that you actually, in the end, you won out because you stayed calm and you explained what you actually meant and in the end she lacked words.
And I think that actually was an inspiring example to a lot of people.
Yeah, it seems to have been, although it isn't clear why it was...
It still isn't really clear to me why it became so incredibly widespread.
I mean, I think...
The interview itself on YouTube has something approximating 8 million views.
But if you add the commentaries to that, lots of people have cut it up and commented on it.
I think it's, I suspect it exceeds 20 million.
And there was something about the interview that really attracted a tremendous amount of attention.
So it's very interesting.
It's obviously part and parcel of the political tension that seems to underlie virtually everything right now.
Yeah.
I think it's just like an interview from the platonic ideal states.
If you want an interview that illustrates the culture war and everything that's wrong about not taking your opponent seriously, then you can always show that interview.
It's a great way to just introduce people to what's wrong with the political discourse, I think.
I have a hypothesis to run by you.
Yeah?
Well, so imagine what's happening is this.
We're in the midst of a technological transformation and The online video services are displacing network and cable television and the online Print services are displacing the traditional print media.
So let's say that Okay, so There's increasing desperation on the part of the traditional media and so then let's say that as a consequence of that That additional nervousness and instability first of all many people are leaving second budgets are being cut and Third,
there's increasing desperation to hold on to market share and as a consequence of that more and more articles are polarized because they attract more attention and that that's driving the political polarization in part.
Does that seem reasonable to you?
Yes, I do think that seems reasonable and I do think you also have A greater need for the established media to debunk sort of the people who are popular on YouTube or have podcasts and are free from the big media houses and the TV channels.
So you think it's also direct competition?
Yes, but I'm not sure if it's sort of a conscious effort.
I think also it's incompetent sometimes.
Yes, never underestimate the...
They lump everything together like alt-right, alt-light, extremism, populism, And they have a very hard time discerning what's what and the real Nazis from just people having legitimate ideas and legitimate...
Yeah, well that's another issue, right?
Is that it's in the radical left's interest to lump everyone who opposes their ideological attempts into a single Terrifying category because if if they had to contend with the fact that you can be reasonable centrist or even a reasonable center leftist and Dispute the validity of identity politics as a framework for conducting a political discussion If you have to accept
that reasonable people can do that then you have to accept that reasonable people can object to your ideology and that implies that your ideology isn't reasonable so There's every reason for people on the radical left to not only assume that Their opponents are reprehensible, but to make the case that they're reprehensible without ever bothering to scratch below the surface.
So I think that's happening too.
And then, of course, I never want to let the universities off the hook.
And I think the fact that the universities have allowed and encouraged the growth of radical left ideology and the humanities and the social sciences is absolutely, completely inexcusable.
So it might even prove fatal to the universities.
We'll see about that, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Universities have been around a long time though.
Last we spoke I was doing a piece on how radical Feminism had been mandatory for a course at Lund University and we spoke about that and a professor who was mandated to include Judith Butler in his course and I continued Writing about the universities and it
goes much deeper in Sweden.
If you look at the grants, we have 10 billion kronos which are being distributed from the state and they have the gender mainstreaming that is taking place at universities when it comes to courses and The reading lists and the professors, it's also when it comes to the grants.
So you have to include a gender perspective or at least you have to specify why you don't have a gender perspective.
Right, which is probably fatal.
Yeah, exactly.
So, a friend of mine, I got to know him via his dog, because I have a dog, and so our dogs became friends and then we became friends.
So he made his PhD about wild trouts and, how do you say it, domesticated trouts.
Yeah, so the difference in behavior.
Sounds very boring, but it's actually kind of interesting.
But he was about to not get a grant because he didn't include a gender perspective.
Yeah.
And that's 10 years ago, and now it's spreading.
So I'm getting a lot of stories about that.
So it's crazy.
The universities are really...
It's shifted into second gear here in Sweden, at least.
Yeah, it's the same.
It's happening everywhere in the West, I would say.
Our government just handed down a budget and every, as far as I can tell from the initial response, every government program has to include a gender perspective now in the same manner.
So our government is deciding to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
Well, what's happened is that we've accepted equity.
We've accepted equality of outcome as the measure by which we're going to judge the fairness of an organization's operations.
At the same time, when the social science research is stacking up on the other side of the distribution, to state ever more clearly and with ever less doubt that as you As you flatten out the sociological landscape so that men and women are treated more equally that the difference in their occupational choices widens It's become crystal clear and the the response to that from the
radicals is that pseudoscience Even though the people who are doing these studies aren't conservative There aren't conservatives in the social sciences.
And so people do these studies and they're shocked by the results.
They publish them because they're good scientists, not because these findings buttress their ideological position.
And plus, whose ideological position was it to wish that as you flatten out the sociological and political landscape, you make men and women more different?
Who was hoping for that?
No one was hoping for that.
So as the science stacks up, the legislative and political attempts to silence it and to mount an ideological counterattack, multiply.
We need more gender science now because the differences are accelerating.
So now we need even more.
More of the same.
But I would like to jump into the book, because I read your book, or I didn't really read it, I actually listened to it, which I can really recommend to people, because you did a fantastic job of reading the book by yourself.
Thank you.
It's funny, I was looking at the reviews on Audible, and there's a performance review and a content review.
And the performance review is higher than the content review.
And I don't know what to think about that.
I don't know whether I should be happy about that or not happy about that.
It's not much difference, but I thought it was comical.
I think you should stop writing and you should just be a narrator of books.
I think that's the takeaway.
Well, I'm going to do an audiobook version of Maps of Meaning.
Oh really?
Yes.
That's great.
Yes, well that's coming.
That'll be like 25 hours long or something like that.
Probably more.
The first book I read as an audiobook was Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker.
It's like 50 hours or something.
25 hours is not so bad.
Maybe I'm out too, because it's a long book.
I'm probably underestimating the amount of time.
We'll see.
But the rules in your book, I think the first rule, stand up straight with your shoulders back.
I think that's a really, when you read the chapter, it's a really good chapter.
But as last time, when I was about to speak to you, I went into the Jordan Peterson fan groups in Sweden.
And I asked them, what do you think I should ask Jordan?
And then one of the guys was...
He said, I really like the book, but when he says, stand up straight with your shoulders back, I think he should explain more how to do it.
And then a lot of the helpful other guys in the thread started giving him physical exercises.
How to strengthen the muscles between the shoulders.
Pull your shoulders back.
It was like a long thread on how to build your chest up.
And then in the end, after 20 or 30 comments, somebody suggested that maybe Jordan didn't mean it literally.
He also meant it figuratively.
But it was no meanness or anything.
So it wasn't a physical advice.
It was mostly a sort of a psychological advice.
Well, it's a good place where the metaphorical and the literal meet.
Well, and the important part of that chapter, I think, is that I was really trying to make a case, and this is a case that needs to be made over and over and over until people understand it.
There's a book I would recommend that was recently written called The Great Leveler.
Walter Scheidel and it's a study of inequality and it's a brutal book because one of the things Scheidel does is he calculates inequality coefficients like the Gini coefficient which is a measure of inequality economic inequality and he looks over the empirical data to see if there's any relationship between the the left or the right-wing nature of a government and the inequality in the society And so what you'd hope,
because inequality is actually a genuine problem, you'd hope that left-wing governments were better at regulating inequality than right-wing governments.
You'd hope that.
There's no evidence for that whatsoever.
So I'm making a case in chapter one that hierarchies exist.
And because hierarchies exist, inequality exists, or at least the two things are indistinguishable at many levels.
But that you can't blame the existence of hierarchy or inequality on something proximal like capitalism or Western society.
Inequality is the rule, all the way back down to crustaceans.
And so when the Marxists complain about inequality and how intractable it is, well, they have a point.
But when they blame it on capitalism, they're not taking the problem seriously.
It's way worse than the Marxists think.
Because inequality is genuinely a problem.
But it's a problem in a bunch of ways.
The first is that those at the top tend to get more.
And those at the bottom tend to end up with zero.
And zero is really not good.
Now you might say well in a capitalist society in a modern industrial capitalist society People tend not to end up at zero so much and that seems to be true It is definitely the case and and I think Pinker has done a good job of outlining this The people at humanprogress.org are doing a good job of the two It's definitely the case that our modern societies are making the poor much less Absolutely poor So we've decreased poverty worldwide between 2000 and 2012
by 50%.
A massive accomplishment.
We should be partying in the streets about it.
It's an amazing accomplishment.
But inequality is still a problem.
So that chapter is about how deep the problem is.
Now, the suggestion is that To compete in a world where there's unequal outcome your best bet is to take the full tragedy of being Full-frontal essentially right to open yourself up to the catastrophe of existence and to move forward with courage and and and with nobility and with with truth on your tongue That's your best bet and I do believe that now I can give you an example of that We did research on
a program called the Future Authoring Program.
And it's a part of a suite that's offered at selfauthoring.com.
And we did the research.
The idea was to produce psychological interventions that were very cost effective, that could be distributed to many people.
But we wanted to test them, because you never know if your idiot intervention is going to do something good or something bad.
That's like rule number one for a serious social scientist.
Assume your idiot intervention will either be useless or harmful because those are the most likely outcomes, right?
And any social scientist who's truly credible understands that those who don't are not educated properly So anyways, we tested the future authoring program and we mostly tested it in Holland and we did some stratification by group and So in Holland, this was at the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University.
We had thousands of university students do the future authoring program where they laid out a plan for their life.
And they tried to optimize their lives along.
They wanted to consider their friendships, intimate relationships, career choices, educational choices, mental and physical health, use of drugs and alcohol, and use of time productively outside of work to optimize across all those levels.
Then to avoid catastrophic pitfalls so you write about what your life could be like If you could have what you needed in three to five years and then what write about what your life could be like if everything fell apart on you and and Things went bad.
All right, so they all did this exercise now before the exercise the Dutch women were outperforming the Dutch men Let's say the Caucasians and the non Western ethnic minority women were doing worse than the Dutch men and the non Western ethnic minority men were doing worse the worst of all four groups About an 85% performance decrement compared to the Dutch women two years after the intervention they were doing better than the Dutch women Right
man, it blew us away.
We couldn't believe and That's research published with Michaela Shipper and and and and some other colleagues at from Holland and And what was so interesting about that was that a psychological intervention seemed to remove the barriers that were produced by what was hypothetically a sociological barrier.
So it might be that if you're an immigrant to a country that you don't have your story straight because it's so complicated.
So you need a better plan.
And that's part of standing up.
It's like, okay, man, make a plan for the future.
Plan a good future and move forward towards it.
And also one thing that I took away from that chapter is, take yourself seriously, otherwise no one else will.
If you don't stand up for yourself, you will get pushed down and pushed over and not be taken notice of.
I think the way you take yourself seriously is you start to construe yourself as a player in the catastrophe of the world.
No, the world.
And this is a motif.
Twelve Rules for Life, in many ways, is a very dark book, although it has a very optimistic, central message.
The darkness is, life is tragic and tainted by malevolence.
But the optimism is, there's a hell of a lot more to you than you think.
And I think that's a message that's really good for people, because everyone knows that life is a catastrophe that's tainted by malevolence.
Everyone knows that, even if people don't want to admit it.
At the bottom of their heart, they know it.
And I think they also suspect that there's more to them than meets the eye.
So the trick to taking yourself seriously is to understand that your errors count.
They make things worse like it really is the case that it matters whether you get your act together at least because If you're fragmented and disillusioned and resentful and angry and Working to make things worse you really can make them worse The school shooters are a good example of that people who become so nihilistic and and desperate and then angry that you know,
they They they slaughter the innocent in in a in a fit of vengefulness Like that's sort of the bottom end of the dissent for human beings.
It's really terrible You get the sense in a I'm going to divide this question because you deal a lot with Christianity and Christian thought, mostly with the Old Testament but also with the New Testament and the Christian motifs.
But you get the sense from your book and from your teachings and when you talk about this that We can really create hell for ourselves in this world.
We have no problem with creating a variety of hells for ourselves and for others.
So that's within our grasp.
That's within our grasp, you bet.
That's exactly right, is that hell is definitely within our grasp.
Hell is within our grasp and I think with our ingenuity we can invent many kinds of hells.
But I would also...
Do you think there's a...
Do we have the capacity to create paradise on Earth?
Do you think is that within our grasp?
I think that that's what we struggle upwards toward.
You know, I was thinking recently about this...
This image came to mind of St.
Joseph's Oratorio in Montreal, which is a huge religious building.
It's one of the biggest...
I don't think it's a cathedral because I think it's an oratorio, although I don't know technically the difference.
But it's one of the biggest religious edifices in the world, and it was built in the latter half of the 20th century, which is quite interesting because most buildings of religious significance weren't built that late.
But anyways, it's up on Mount Royal, so it's up on the hill.
So it's the city on the hill, right?
It's the universal city on the hill.
It's an image of perfection.
It's lattice-like stonework, lit like the interior of a forest, devoted towards the glory of being and God.
So it's an image of paradise, we could say.
And then it's at the top of the hill and you climb up to it as a consequence of a very large staircase set into the hill.
And pilgrims went there quite regularly in the 20th century who were often physically disabled and so they would struggle up the hill on their crutches or Or with their damaged limbs and with their illnesses.
And so they would struggle up the hill towards the heavenly city, essentially.
And that's what we're to do.
That's correct.
It's a drama that people were acting out.
Now, St.
Joseph's also happens to be full of crutches that people left there.
For which is quite interesting to see but but it doesn't that doesn't matter in some sense so much as the symbolic Meaning is all these damaged people who were carrying a terrible load like they weren't just Subject to the normative tragedy of being they were also physically disabled would go there and struggle up these hundreds of stairs As they were trying to ascend instead of descending and it's like well We can certainly believe in hell if we have any sense If you don't believe that human beings can create hell,
then you're a child.
You're a naive child.
You know nothing.
You know nothing about history or yourself.
And you say, well, can we bring paradise into being?
Well, no, but maybe we can at least walk up the hill away from hell.
And who knows what we could do if we took it seriously?
If we took the idea that we needed to shoulder our burden nobly and with truth, if we took that seriously, as serious as the hell should make you take it, who knows what we could accomplish?
You know, as I said, we've lifted...
We've reduced the poverty rate in the world by 50% from the year 2000 to the year 2012.
And something like 300,000 people are being attached to the power grid now worldwide.
I don't remember if it's a week or a day, but either of those metrics is still pretty good.
The fastest growing economies are in Africa.
Like, you know, we've made amazing strides in the last 50 years and they seem to be accelerating.
And so I don't know what the upper limit for us is if we don't dissolve ourselves into idiot identity politics and start a civil war.
I think one of the reasons why we have a very...
I certainly do, but I think people in general do as well, have a very easy time imagining horrible, horrible things and daydreaming about horrible things, horrible things that could happen to you, horrible things that you could do.
But it's very hard to imagine heaven, for example.
Dante's Inferno.
I think he wrote about heaven as well.
I don't remember.
Yes, definitely.
That's a really boring book.
It's like angels in white dresses singing and stuff like that.
And it doesn't sound like heaven to me.
But hell sounds like hell.
Right.
But I think that's interesting because, you know, I would say Mainstream Christians, especially on the Protestant end, have tried to force hell out of the human imagination over the last hundred years, maybe as a way of making Christianity more marketable, although I don't think it's worked.
But I do think that belief in hell Metaphorically, let's say, although I tell you if you're in one of those situations, it feels eternal.
So that's something to keep in mind too.
But I think it's unbelievably salutary because even though we can't imagine heaven so clearly, we can certainly say, well, at least it's not Auschwitz.
Right?
We can all agree on that.
Whatever it is, it's as far away from Auschwitz as you can get.
And that's a direction, you know?
It's not as specific as you might like it to be.
But that's also why I've been suggesting to people that they think about this locally.
It's like, okay, we're not so sure what the utopia might be.
And we know that collectively, presuming a utopia also seems to be a dangerous thing.
But there are stupid things that you're doing to make your life and the life of people around you more wretched and miserable than necessary.
And it's hypothetically the case that you could stop doing some of them.
So there's a good place to start.
It's nice and humble.
It's like you're less than you could be and you know it.
And there's things you could do about that and you know it.
So maybe it would be okay to take a step in the right direction.
I think you say in the book and you often return to the basic truth and you say that you arrive at this when you contemplated the horribleness of the 20th century with Auschwitz and the Gulag and that life is suffering and you can't reduce away the pain of existence.
And there's no totalitarian that can reduce away that.
You can just forbid it.
You know, in Venezuela now, it's illegal to list the cause of the death of a child as starvation in the hospitals.
Oh, that's convenient.
Oh yes, isn't that something?
Isn't that something?
So there we go.
Now we've got the utopia.
It's now illegal to die of starvation in a hospital in Venezuela.
Or at least to have it listed.
And that's exactly it, man.
There's a little slice of hell for you.
Yeah, but I would say that it's easier to move away from, it's not easy, but it's easier to stop causing harm and causing suffering than to arrive at bliss.
So that's sort of a basic, we are very bad at, people are pretty bad at Having eternal bliss in this life.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it's not easy to conceptualize what it would be.
I mean, you do taste it at times, you know, you taste it with music.
And of course, that's why there's imagery of angels and the heavenly hosts singing.
Because people do get a taste of what paradise might be like when they listen to music, which is why music is so powerful for people, because it speaks of a kind of transcendent harmony of the layers of being, and it engages a person in that.
And you get that as well when you're engaged in what you're doing, deeply engaged in what you're doing and finding meaningful.
I mean, stepping rapidly away from hell might be a form of bliss, you know, to know that at minimum you're not contributing to the terrible suffering of the world and maybe you're doing something to lift the burden in a positive way.
I mean, it's really complicated because...
You don't want everything to be easy.
That's not a good idea for utopia.
Everything's blissful and easy, and all you're doing is laying back and eating peeled grapes.
You know, there's nothing to that that would last more than a week.
You need an adventure, and you need a struggle.
But perhaps we could have the adventure and the struggle without the pointless suffering and malevolence.
We could at least aim at that.
And who knows what we might transmute that into.
At least we might be able to transmute it into lives that are meaningful despite their suffering.
That would be a good start.
And I do believe that that's a I believe that that's an attainable reality.
I believe that we are strong enough as in our essence to rise above the tragedy of existence and to live nobly and with purpose and honorably.
I believe we can do that.
And so that's why I think 12 Rules for Life is a fundamentally optimistic book because I also think that that's a believable message.
No one's going to believe that, well, we're going to eradicate suffering and malevolence.
It's like, no, I don't think so.
But we can constrain it within the confines of our own being.
And that's good enough.
That's a good start.
About...
In rule number eight, you say, tell the truth.
That's rule number eight.
You should tell the truth, at least don't lie.
And you write that it is our responsibility to see what is before our eyes courageously and to learn from it, even if it seems horrible, even if the horror of seeing it damages our consciousness and half blinds us.
And I just thought about that for a while and I reflected about when ISIS invaded Iraq in 2014, I think it was, or 2015, 2014 it was.
And I was one of the few who wrote about what was following that right then, because nobody thought they would take over such a large part of Iraq.
And then I was watching loads of videos of mass killings and decapitations and murders and I had contact with eyewitnesses via a journalist whose name is Nurekino.
And it was horrible, really, really horrible.
It's the most horrible things I've ever seen.
And because I had contact with Nurikino, who had family members down there, Assyrians, Christians, who were being murdered and driven from their homes, And this was even before Sinjar, where they took the sex slaves and they murdered the whole people of Yazidis.
Yazidis, yeah.
Yeah.
So it was a really horrible episode for them.
I mean, of course, that's the big deal.
But I felt I had a responsibility to see this for myself, not just listen to journalists who hadn't seen it, because I was writing about it a lot myself.
And I could feel it changing me, because this is the absolute, as close to absolute darkness as I've ever come, because it was not historical.
These were people, some younger than me, some older, but it was happening as I was watching it.
And then I thought about the quote by Nietzsche, if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you, and I really felt that.
I was thinking about this when I read your book, and I thought that I would ask you, how can you be certain that you can defeat the darkness when you face that?
I don't think that you can be certain that you can.
You say, well, if you go to face the dragon to get the gold, it wouldn't be a dragon if it couldn't eat you.
The issue isn't that you're certain of success.
The issue is that you don't have a better pathway.
And so if you're going to confront the dragon of chaos, say, and dare to attain the gold, then you have to put yourself on the line for it.
But paradoxically, it seems the more you're willing to put yourself on the line for it, the higher the probability of your success, which is also the part of opening yourself up to the catastrophe.
That's why Christianity has increasingly occupied the theater of my imagination, because there's this idea that, even speaking psychologically, that whatever Christ represents, whatever that image is,
it is in part The call to accept the catastrophe of existence to accept it voluntarily because the fundamental story is that Christ went to his torturous betrayal with his eyes open Right and well,
that's a hell of a thing It's no wonder that image has never left people's imagination because that's there isn't you can't ask any more of someone than that And you might say, well, is it okay that everything will be asked of us?
And the answer is, it doesn't matter.
Because everything is going to be asked of you.
Like, you're going to die.
You're going to have to accept that.
In one form or another.
The question is, how?
Well, the answer is, well, you have to open your arms.
You have to accept it.
You know, and there's an idea in the New Testament that if you can love fate deeply enough, you can transcend You can transcend the limitations of your mortality.
It's something like that.
And, you know, that strikes me as a plausible possibility.
Now, you said when you were watching all those things that that changed you.
Yeah.
What do you mean?
What did it change?
You realize, at least I did, that what you're facing is something real and If evil has meaning, if there is evil, that is evil.
Then you have a terrorist attack in Sweden and you start to think, what would I do if I were in that situation?
You speak to people who have relatives there and you realize that You're very lucky that you're living in Sweden and not there, because I think it would not be very hard to take up arms against these people.
Well, that's the thing.
You realize things about yourself if you gaze into that abyss.
Well, you know, the terrible thing too is, and this is a motif again that also runs through 12 Rules for Life, is that, well, let's say...
I'll give you a personal example.
So when I heard about what happened in Cologne on New Year's Eve.
See, I had a situation where my son was mugged.
number of years ago and he was mugged by a gang of kids that were brought into our neighborhood as a favor to them so that they could play basketball in a local Boys and Girls Club and there was about six or seven of them 18 years old and they mugged my 13 year old son and took his his I think they took his cell phone and And he came home and he was shaken up,
mostly with anger, because he couldn't believe that six 18-year-old young men could be so cowardly that they would gang up on a 13-year-old kid.
So for him it was a betrayal of humanity, apart from being afraid, but mostly it was anger on his part.
And I was absolutely outraged.
So I contacted the police and I contacted the nearby club that had sponsored the kids and I said, look, this is what happened.
And they did nothing about it.
The club knew who it was and wouldn't release the names because of confidentiality and all sorts of other nonsense.
And I had this fantasy that went on for weeks about standing outside the Boys and Girls Club and waiting for those kids with a lead pipe because I was not happy.
But, you know, I was...
And I couldn't pursue it with any degree of legal...
I couldn't pursue it to the degree that I wanted to in the legal framework because at the same time my daughter was very ill and that was taking precedence, but you know I had these terrible fantasies come up over and over the very very dark fantasies and You know I talked it over with my son because I told him what was happening in my imagination because I wanted to let him know that this really bothered me that he was attacked and that I wasn't going to put up with it,
but I also understood that that's not I think I would have been a very weak man to not have had those feelings.
And then you think, well, lots of times it's the better man that takes up arms.
But it isn't necessarily the best man who takes up arms.
Because maybe there's a place past that.
You might say, well, it's naivety and cowardice that stops you from defending yourself.
You know, and then you transcend naivety and cowardice and then you become dangerous.
But maybe you can transcend dangerous.
Maybe there's a place past that.
And well, let's hope there is.
You say that...
I'm not sure if it's in the book, but you said it before, that you have to develop some teeth.
Because you shouldn't mistake weakness for virtue.
Right.
But in Christianity, one thing that I've struggled with, Christianity, is that the meek shall inherit the earth from the other cheek.
Yeah, I looked at that quote.
This is the otherworldliness of Christianity that I find very hard to accept.
I'm not sure if it's a temperamental...
No, it's a mistranslation.
Because Meek, I looked that up.
That's a line that always bothered me.
And when I did these biblical lectures last year, which I'm going to continue, by the way, as soon as I can possibly manage it, I looked up that line.
There's a couple of lines that really, really, I couldn't forget them.
The poor will always be with us.
That was one.
To those who have everything, more shall be given.
From those who have nothing, everything will be taken away.
That's a rough one.
And then the meek shall inherit the earth.
But meek is the wrong...
The word has slipped over time.
It isn't what it meant.
If you go back into the original...
If you go back to the original text, let's say, here's a better translation...
Those who have swords and know how to use them but keep them sheathed will inherit the world.
Okay.
Right.
That's a little bit different.
But also the turn the other cheek thing in Christianity.
Yeah, well that goes along with that resist not evil.
But look, I can tell you some things I've learned about that too.
So I'll give you two examples.
So You know, there's been a lot of points for me in the last 18 months where things could have gone badly wrong So for example, I went to McMaster University about a year ago or thereabouts and there was a big demonstration and it was quite obnoxious I mean There was about 200 people there that were to see me to came to see me in about 50 protesters likely and They drowned me out completely and and and there was a handful of them who were really I would say really not good people
like most of them were just foolish kids and Foolish self-righteous kids who were deluded by their idiot professors and by their own resentment But there were four or five people there who would have been perfectly happy in that crowd that you described that descended into Iraq And I can tell who they were by looking at them.
You know, they were people that just...
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I I I believe that I could see what they were and There were two of them behind me woman and a man the woman wasn't quite so bad But the man was pretty bad and they were blaring air horns at me an air horn at me and close enough to damage my hearing Which I was not the least bit impressed about and I told them I said look you can blow your damn air horn,
but if you get it too close to me Well, I went I went and had a word with the police at that point but you know So it was quite provoking and pushy, but I knew that most of it was foolishness.
I mostly watched and I tried to give my talk and it was completely drowned out and then we had to leave and I gave the rest of my talk outside.
But, you know, all of that was filmed and then it was put up on YouTube.
And all of the consequence of that, holding my temper, all of the consequence of that was positive.
And that's one thing I've really learned.
And it is associated with this idea of resist not evil and also of turning the other cheek.
It's not like you can't respond.
It's that you don't.
And then with that Cathy Newman interview, you know, it's the same thing.
It's a good, really good example of that is that, you know, and maybe I managed it because I have had quite a bit of experience now dealing with hostile people and hostile press, let's say.
But I was able, fortunately, to stay detached and maybe even with a bit of a sense of humor.
During the interview and not take it personally and not get offended by it even though what was happening was deeply wrong There was an element of being able to be detached about it and that worked, you know, like I didn't really fight with her.
I didn't allow her to Set the linguistic agenda, let's say But I didn't defend myself any more than was absolutely necessary, you know?
It's minimal necessary force, something like that.
And that was overwhelmingly well-received.
Yeah, I think the detachment sometimes is when you're in a public situation, it's different if you meet someone in the streets,
if you're one-on-one and they say stuff to you, or if you're at a dinner in a personal setting or something, or when you're in a public setting, it's basically You're on a scene, so you can be detached, because it's not really the whole you that is there.
It's an avatar of yourself, so to speak, or a role you inhabit.
So you can have patience.
Not you, you, but I mean, as a person, you don't have to take it so personally.
I think that people make that mistake and they take it very personally.
Yeah, well that's that's the thing too is like it's not easy to know when you should take something personally and when you shouldn't like I can give you a good example of that too from politics like years ago Who was running for I think it was Mondale I think so I might have this wrong, but he was He was governor of Massachusetts now who was that who ran for governor of Massachusetts?
Anyways It wasn't Mondale, I don't believe, but it doesn't matter.
He was governor of Massachusetts and he had released a prisoner, or his prison system had released a prisoner who immediately raped someone.
And he was being raped over the coals on a TV show about the fact that this has happened.
I think the rapist's name was Willie Horton, if I remember correctly.
Dukakis was it was Dukakis when Dukakis was running for president and a journalist asked him well, how would you feel if Willie Horton had raped your wife or your daughter and Dukakis gave a very I would say Placid answer and it it was one of the things that ensured he was not going to be elected president president and what he should have said was My imagination would immediately
go to the darkest possible place Because I'm a civilized person and understand that that pathway leads to nothing but mayhem I'd be willing to let the legal system take that moral obligation from my shoulders Because otherwise everything gets worse That's the right response.
The first response is Mess with my family at your peril And the second response is, yeah, but I don't get to start a feud.
I don't get to destabilize the entire society in my pursuit of what you might regard as justifiable revenge, right?
And so that's part of that idea of having a sword but keeping it sheathed, right?
And it is the opposite of...
And I talk about that in Rule 11, right?
Don't bother children when they're skateboarding, which is in part I suppose a bit of a diatribe against the idea that the way that you make men good is by making them weak.
It's a really Uninformed and and Naive uninformed and malicious idea all of those things at the same time you you make men good by making them unbelievably strong and dangerous and then asking them politely to hold themselves in abeyance at all times and also I think Dangerous is just an effect of being strong.
I mean it's not something, if you are strong then you have the capacity to be dangerous.
Right.
It's not something separate from being strong.
Right, well and see there's something that people have misinterpreted sometimes when they've heard you, that they think you're calling for sort of the brutish Hyper-masculine kind of men, but that's not what I've heard you say.
What I've heard you say is that if you have somebody who's confident and you're strong in your convictions and you speak the truth and you're not afraid to To protest when something is wrong and stand up for yourself and stand up for people who are weaker, they need your protection, then you're strong and then you can be dangerous.
Yes, and being strong enough to...
They've heard that you're starting a testosterone cult or something, I'm not sure.
Right, right, right.
Well, of course, that's exactly...
For people who are afraid of or hate competence, like to confuse it with tyranny.
Joe Rogan is kind of an interesting example in that regard.
There's a guy named Jocko Willink who's got an increasingly popular podcast.
Willink is a very tough guy.
He's very physically intimidating and I would say psychologically intimidating.
He's like a comic book character.
How he looks and what he has done in real life.
Right, exactly.
He's smart too.
Well, there's also that.
That's exactly right.
He's articulate in all of those things.
And he told me quite clearly that he could have easily been like a hyper-delinquent when he was a kid, but decided that he was...
Because he's an aggressive guy.
And he decided he was going to be a good person instead.
And you can't be a good person without the capacity for malevolence, interestingly enough.
And maybe that's one of the reasons, if you think about it, Metaphysically, let's say, I mean, one question is always be, well, why is there evil in the world?
And I mean, this is only a partial answer, but it's possible that you cannot fully develop your capacity for good without also developing your capacity for evil.
Because you have to be able to do things, even if you won't do them.
I mean, even if it's a matter of learning how to withstand temptation, until you're in a position where that temptation is real, you're not withstanding anything.
So, you know, if you're not sleeping with a hundred women a year because they're not lining up to sleep with you, that doesn't make you moral.
It just makes you undesirable.
Yeah.
Yeah, probably.
I also think this is perhaps one of the reasons that bad guys are so...
People want to be the bad guy and they find bad guys interesting in movies and in TV series and also this is actually a part of Christianity which I think is very interesting is that the prodigal,
the sheep that's returning to the herd and the prodigal son and you find that in The most awful criminal who's starting to have doubts.
That's one of the best characters in movies.
The awful villain who's having second thoughts and then in the end turns out to have a heart of gold.
Yes, yes, yes.
But if you are the lamb, that's a much more boring movie.
Like the lamb who's never done anything wrong.
You can't.
You can't, because you can't.
Yeah, well, there's an interesting scene in Revelation.
So, in Revelation, which is a very strange book, it's like a hallucinogenic trip.
In fact, I think it probably is a hallucinogenic trip.
That's my suspicions.
So, Christ comes back with a sword in his mouth and he judges humanity.
So he's very merciful in the Gospels, but in Revelation, he's the ultimate judge.
And the reason for that is that any ideal is a judge, right?
If you hold something up as an ideal, then you're reflected poorly in the mirror of that ideal.
So it's instantly a judge.
There are far more damned than saved in the Revelation story.
But Christ tells people when He judges them, I'm paraphrasing, but the meaning is appropriate.
If you're hot, that's okay.
That's commendable.
If you're cold, that's okay.
But if you're lukewarm, then I'll vomit you out of my mouth.
That's the line.
And that's so interesting because, again, it's an echo of what you just described.
It's like, there's no virtue in non-commitment, right?
There's no virtue in weak harmlessness.
In fact, and you see that, too.
I mean, when Hannah Arendt wrote her book on Eichmann in Jerusalem, it's Eichmann in Jerusalem, I believe, The Banality of Evil, she talked about Eichmann, and Eichmann was one of these characters who was a lamb, right?
He wasn't your spectacular cartoon book villain.
He was the harmless kind of soft guy next door who sort of went along to get along, and he happened to be in a hierarchy where the goal was to eradicate the Jews, but who was he to question the hierarchy?
No, and so she titled her book The Benality of Evil, and I always thought she had the title backwards.
It should have been The Evil of Benality.
Oh yeah, that's a...
I haven't thought of that.
Yeah, that's a deep thought.
I read a couple of Christian critiques of your thoughts and your book, and one of the critiques was that you think that Because people have within their grasp to do good and evil by themselves, you're committing to a Christian heresy called Pelagianism.
See, I don't really believe that.
I don't really believe that.
I mean, but it's very difficult.
I'm just going to finish because in the Christian Orthodoxy then you can only do good because of our sinful nature.
You can only do good by the grace of God.
So if we are not sinful in our nature, if we deny that, then we are basically having We're committing vanity because we think we are so strong by ourselves.
So that's a claim that I've seen being thrown, and that's actually a critique that I thought that I would like to hear you respond to.
I think it's a good critique, but it's an unbelievably deep problem.
So the first thing I would say, you can only speak metaphorically about such things in some sense.
So I would say, the Christian claim is that Christ's sacrifice redeemed us.
And so I would say, that's true, but we still have to do the work.
And you might say, well, how can both of those things be the case simultaneously?
And the answer is, well, it depends on your view of time.
So, and I can't explain it any deeper than that, so I'm not going to because it would take forever, but I would also say I do believe that you should step forward to do good humbly.
I do believe that if you're going to step forward to do good that you should do it well guided by the divine images.
I do believe that you're likely to err in your judgment of what's good, which is why I entitled the chapter, Don't Tell the Truth or At Least Don't Lie.
It isn't obvious to me that you can discern the truth, but it is obvious to me that sometimes you know when you're lying.
And you can stop doing that.
And so I I think that those critiques are now but then I would also invert the criticism and I would say that part of the danger of Modern Western Christianity in particular.
I don't think this is quite the same with the Orthodox Christian types is that By assuming that everything good is done by the grace of God You reduce the burden of the imitation of Christ.
The question is, what does it mean to believe in Christ?
Let's say.
And one answer to that would be to say, I regard the statement that Christ's crucifixion redeemed me.
I regard that statement as true.
Say, I'm a Christian.
Okay, well that's one definition.
Here's another definition.
Pick up your cross and walk up the goddamn hill.
And that's the proper definition as far as I'm concerned.
And this is a Nietzschean criticism of institutionalized Christianity, which is that it made the moral burden too light.
Because the burden is supposed to be Confront evil.
Constrain it in your own heart.
Accept the tragedy of being.
Pick up the load of mortality and walk uphill.
It's like, God, that's rough, man.
So, and then Jung wrote about that, you know, because he was interested in the Nietzschean critique.
And he said, look, you got to understand that you can be cynical about the Catholics and their idea that You've been redeemed by an external source, say.
It's not precisely that clear.
We'll parody a bit for the sake of argument.
And maybe you can also be cynical about the idea that you can go in and confess and receive absolution and walk out sin-free.
But what you have to understand is the church is somewhat merciful in its endeavors because it's trying to also free people from the intolerable consciousness of their own insufficiency.
Because I could say to you, well, you need to bear the weight of all your transgressions.
It's like, Jesus, really?
With no mercy?
That's how we're going to play this?
Who could tolerate that?
And the Catholics at least say, well, look, you're fallible.
You're going to make all sorts of mistakes.
It's going to happen over and over.
At least you can go in and have the burden lifted from you time to time.
You're supposed to play it straight.
You're supposed to go in and actually confess and repent and try to do better in the future.
But at least you don't have to drag your catastrophic past self along with you every step of the way.
So, anyways, I'm not trying to elevate human beings to the status of demigods, you know, but I guess I am suggesting that we could at least participate in that to the degree that we're willing to hoist our own burdens.
I do think we should do that with humility and without thinking that we can see the way forward so clearly.
I do think we can walk away from Auschwitz, though.
Yeah, I think so, too.
I would also...
I know this has been a recurring question for you and I'm not sure if I asked it the last time really.
It's about truth and how you return to some parts of Christianity, at least, has been true.
You said the truth of the individual, I think you said.
My question is, how can myth be true?
For C.S. Lewis, when he accepted that Christianity was true for him, it was like a mixture.
He was talked into it by Tolkien, and I don't remember the other guy's name, but another friend.
And he said the combination of the myth of a dying god.
He always loved the dying gods, like Dionysus and And Balder.
But in Christ, he combined the dying God motif and the myth with an actual historical figure.
He actually said that this is not just a myth, it's a true myth.
It's true.
Because it's also historical.
And then he said that, and then you distinguish, if you watch from the outside and analyze it, well of course you can see that it's You can see similarities as a scientist, but from the inside you can see the truth.
So that was his view of it.
Here's a strange possibility.
One of the things that's happened to me as I've delved farther and farther into religious stories is that I've found continually that their depth is inexhaustible.
And at some point it becomes Less impossible that they're true than it is impossible that they're not true.
Something like that.
Now, okay.
Now, I'm not...
So there are truths in Genesis that are unfathomably deep.
Now and I've outlined them to the best of my ability in the biblical series that I did now I don't know how to reconcile those truths with with with science with the scientific view of the world that the the view the The fact that the universe is 14 billion years old and that we've crawled our way up from the sludge in the mud I don't know how those things coexist precisely.
I know that there are truths that guide behavior and there are truths that describe the material world.
But I certainly don't think that the truths that we have that describe the material world are final truths, because I don't think our materialist viewpoint is accurate.
It's accurate for some purposes, obviously.
And I am a practicing scientist and an informed one I would say I don't believe that people act as if they confront a material reality I believe that people act as if they confront an infinite realm of possibility one pole of which is heaven and the other pole of which is hell and I believe that we treat each other as if that's the world that we live in because we upbraid each other for not upholding our moral duty And we understand what that means and we upbraid
ourselves for being less than we could and so we confront a world of potential and we don't have a good model for that and the mythological descriptions describe the human being as the eternal confronter of a world of potential and there's something about that that's accurate Now with regards to this Christian story specifically, I do think the idea that that eternal myth was made historically concrete is one of the things about Christianity that's unutterably powerful.
I don't know what the limits are, but let's say that What you're called upon to do until in life is to open yourself up to the tragedy of being Completely to to accept it to welcome it even even to love it if you can do that And that's no easy thing you watched Iraq being invaded There's no easy way of loving that there's no easy way of saying yes to that but your job in some sense as a as a Incarnated finite
creature is to say yes to the possibilities of being in every possible way The question is well, what's the upper limit to that?
Like what are the transformations that are possible as a consequence of doing that?
And the answer to that is we don't know the Christian story is in part an investigation of that if you're willing to accept your If you're willing to accept the brutality of the mob, the betrayal of your friends, the torture of your existence, and your unjust death, if you're willing to accept that and welcome it, what happens to you?
And the answer is, try it and find out.
I think I'm going to pass on just that.
Yeah, well, you did that in part, you know, when you decided to immerse yourself in what was happening in Iraq, you know, you could have looked away.
Yeah, and I often find that my role as a journalist, or I'm not a real journalist, I'm an editorial writer, but it's sort of a mist between me and some reality.
So I can do it as a...
take on my...
My jackets and then I watch the reality through that lens.
So it sort of shields me from some of it.
That's the advantage of having a well-developed persona from the Jungian perspective.
You put on an image like Superman puts on Clark Kent.
That's why superheroes always have a normative alter ego.
They have to be able to live in the normal world, right?
So you need to have an element of yourself that can exist.
Well, that can act as a mask between you and the world, I suppose.
That's what a persona is.
But I mean, to the degree that you're able to open your eyes.
You know, Nietzsche also said you could determine the depth of a man's character by observing how much truth he's willing to tolerate.
Yeah.
Right, right.
Which is, you know, you think, well, how can that be associated with the idea of the truth will set you free?
It's like, well, it might set you free, but it will take you places you're not sure you want to go first.
Yeah.
It's sort of a cliche now, but in the movie Matrix when Neo wakes up and he's flushed down like a drain pipe and then he's woken up into this awful, awful world and that's reality.
That's the truth.
Yeah, that's the underworld.
Yeah, and it's an awful truth.
That's really bleak, but hopefully the truth is not that bleak all the time.
Yeah, well, you know, there's an older well the funny thing is there's an older Christian idea too that when Christ was crucified He went and harrowed hell before he rose to heaven It's like there is this idea that you don't go up without going down and I really do believe that's true and I think that maybe see One of the images in Genesis that's really hard to understand is that when God throws Adam and Eve out of paradise,
He puts an angel at the gates of paradise with flaming swords to bar the way.
You might think, well why would God bar the way to paradise with flaming swords?
Maybe the flaming swords cut all the dead wood off before you step through the gate and if you're all dead wood then there's nothing left of you once the flaming swords are done with you and to observe what you observe with the Iraq invasion that's a set of flaming swords you know because what you're watching is what human beings are like and you happen to be one and to the degree that you're like that that's you doing that That's a hell of a thing to realize.
You think, well, what's the right response to watching that?
And I would say, to stop being an evil person.
And that's no simple thing.
One of the things with these people that goes there and joins the Islamic State is that they are not all evil.
They are just...
A lot of them are evil, of course, and they are psychopaths.
And I mean, if you are a psychopath and you really want to do violence, then that's a great place to be.
And you can probably do great there.
But there are also people joining that really want to do good.
They just really have a really twisted sense of what's good.
And that's one of the most depressing things about Islamic State is that some of the people that go there, they do horrible things and then they regret themselves.
But I mean, how could you let them back into society after what they've done?
How can they let themselves back?
Yeah, so the power of ideas is that you can convert people that under other circumstances would have done good and they become the tools of evil instead.
Well, this is partly why I tried in some sense or I allowed in some sense 12 rules and my lectures as well to be so harsh because imagine that there are many young men who are looking for an adventure They need an adventure, right?
They need an adventure and maybe their normative life is sufficiently soft and undemanding so that they could recede into a kind of domestic Unconsciousness as an alternative, but there's nothing in that except a prolonged prolonged non-existence self-contempt and bitterness Right.
It's not good.
You need to be called to an adventure and so I would say well look And this is what ideologies offer young people is the call to an adventure, but it's a false adventure I would say instead look you want an adventure is open up your eyes Open up your eyes to what the world's really like and then take your place in it as a Productive awake attentive and truthful being and see how far you can walk uphill That's an adventure.
It's the alternative to the call to war Because the call to war is an adventure.
William James said 130, 140 years ago, we need a moral equivalent to war.
And it touches on exactly what you're saying, is these kids who are lost, let's say, and maybe somewhat bitter and resentful as a consequence, they see in ISIS a call to adventure.
Well, You know, I understand that.
I saw this kid once in Montreal in an outside shopping mall.
He was about six foot five and he was dressed up like a punk rocker, you know?
And he was standing on the corner with two pink shopping bags in his hand.
And I thought what a ridiculous figure he cut because he was all dressed up like a Viking, right?
He was ready to go out there and have his damn adventure and What he was doing instead was standing in an outdoor shopping mall with two pink shopping bags It's like come up to a kid like that and you say hey You want to go get into some trouble some interesting trouble?
He's gonna like throw those shopping bags away and come with you instantly It's like, okay, well, you need some interesting trouble.
Well, what could that be?
Well, here's something.
Get your act together.
Discipline yourself.
Look at the world.
See if you can find a problem to solve.
Grow up!
You know, and what's so interesting, or one of the things that's been so interesting to me to observe as a consequence of what I've been talking about is just how many people are starving for that message.
Yeah, you know I have after my talks now say I was in LA and about 700 people lined up afterwards to have a book signed and They all the vast majority of them have a story to tell and so the little exchanges I have with people are very intense,
you know because they want to have a minute to tell me what's happening and Or 30 seconds even and they say look here was 10 things going terribly wrong with my life and And I've been trying to aim up and say what I have to say and everything's much better.
Thank you very much.
And I think, God, good work.
And then the next person comes up and says the same thing.
And I've got like 25,000 letters that have said that since August.
And so, you know, there is a way of calling people to an adventure that perhaps isn't destructive.
They have enough right in front of them to have a great adventure if they're willing, let's say, to try not to lie and to tell the truth and to aim uphill.
Maybe that adventure is right in front of us.
Maybe that's part of the process of engendering paradise.
To find the adventure in paradise.
To find the divine adventure in every individual life.
That's that union of the divine and the historical in Christianity too, right?
It's to make the archetype real.
Yeah, I think also the rule number six.
Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
I think that also you begin with yourself and you start to be the change, so to speak.
And that's a way out of Being bitter against the world, at least not to begin with.
At least that's right.
It's a start.
You can say to yourself, look, everything looks pretty terrible to me.
What the hell?
How can it be this way?
But then you can take the next step and say, yeah, maybe I'm not everything I could be.
So how about if I try to be everything I could be and then think about it again later?
Because the alternative to that is just a catastrophe, right?
Yeah, and I think that's the key to dignity, really.
You can be dignified even if you're not the best, you're not the strongest, you're not the most beautiful.
If you set yourself in order and you take yourself seriously, then you can have dignity and other people will notice it and you will notice it.
Yes.
That's a great place to start from and to strive for, really.
That's one of the best things about your book really, that you bring dignity into I think you bring dignity into people's lives with this book and with your lectures.
And that's one of the takeaways I have from speaking with people.
Because after the last interview I did and then people read the piece I wrote and then a lot of people thanked me for introducing you to them in Sweden.
And that's been one of the recurring themes.
They feel so much stronger in themselves, some of them at least.
I think that's a great observation.
I mean, you know, our society is weak because we think about happiness.
Why don't we think about dignity?
Why don't we think about nobility?
Why don't we think about truth and responsibility or beauty?
All of those things.
They're the values that sustain you through suffering.
Happiness cannot do that.
Not that happiness is to be...
There's no utility in contempt for happiness.
Thank God if it comes.
But dignity...
I mean, we can't even...
When is the last time you heard someone talk about that?
It's not even part of the public discourse.
And it's so crucial.
I think also happiness is more of a by-product than an end product.
It's not something you...
If you strive for it too much, you won't get it.
Do you mean just dignity or happiness?
Happiness.
Yes, definitely.
Definitely.
Well, you might say, if you strive for dignity and truth, sometimes you'll be rewarded with happiness.
Yeah.
Right.
That's a grace of God, that happiness.
That's not something you can conjure up on your own.
Good luck trying!
Yeah.
So I think I've taken up almost soon two hours of your time.
I will write a piece about your book and I will have a mixed interview with a review of the book.
And also, I was writing this piece about 18,000 characters and I was just so stressed out and I was telling my wife It's like fighting a hydra.
It's like new heads coming up all the time and she was just laughing at me like, oh you read too much Jordan Peterson now.
He's invaded your language.
Yes, well that's a terrible thing with regards to archetypal stories is that once you hear them there's no getting rid of them.
But my wife has also read your book so we've talked a lot about you.
Well say hello to her for me and maybe we can bump into each other when I come to Sweden.
Yeah, you should really come.
I'm coming in the fall.
I would love to meet.
But I'll stay in touch with regards to when I'm done with the text and everything.
Great.
Nice talking with you.
Nice talking to you.
Okay.
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