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Feb. 10, 2022 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
02:23:09
The Spiritual Void in the West | Rav Arora | EP 225
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And one of the things that I pointed out earlier in my writing last year, which was so influential and a lot of my articles went viral right away, was that race is not a barrier to my success.
I live such a privileged life.
Stop telling me that I suffer from racial disadvantage or that other people have white privilege that's helping them get ahead.
I found that to be totally counterproductive and pathological, that whole narrative of racial grievance.
Why did you regard it that way?
Because I want to take ownership of my own life.
And there is no supernatural force of racism that's keeping me down, right?
Like I can write essays and publish my work in all these influential places.
And I got to talk to you here right now.
And I'm at a fairly young age and I'm doing...
All these important things.
Race has impacted me, yes, but it's not a systemic barrier.
It's not stopping me from succeeding in life.
But that seems to be the narrative perpetuated by so many white people, especially, that there is this overarching force of racial victimization that's at play.
And so I stepped in.
Yeah, well, I think part of that, too, on the part of the white people, let's say, is that they get to have, and this is something that really bothers me about the radical left, You get your privilege and you get to be morally superior because you're standing up for the victim.
So it's like you get to be privileged and a victim at the same time.
It's like, hey, pick one, okay?
Like, maybe it's just too much to be privileged and a victim at the same time.
And that really...
It's not an effective psychological practice.
It's terribly socially divisive, and it's unbelievably hypocritical.
Hi, everyone. everyone.
This is Rav Arora, independent journalist based in Vancouver, Canada, most frequently contributing to the New York Post and the Globe and Mail.
And I am most known for writing about crime, policing, racial identity politics, and vaccine mandates.
The following wide-ranging conversation with Jordan Peterson and I centers on the absence or decline of spiritual experience in Western secular culture.
We specifically talked about how ideological worship and political activism often unknowingly replaces real spiritual practices and contemplative traditions.
Unbeknownst to me at the time of this recording several months ago, this whole conversation gradually inspired my new journalistic adventures in psychedelics, mystical experience, and new interesting mental health treatments.
Over the past few months, I've been exploring the possibilities of human consciousness and inner healing grounded in science and reason.
And my new Substack newsletter titled Noble Truths with Rav Arora documents my experiences with psilocybin mushrooms, mindfulness meditation, and talking to Sam Harris about learning how to live in the present moment and breaking down the mechanics of My new essay,
published today, February 10th, documents my incredibly profound and transformational experience with MDMA therapy, in which I journeyed into the depths of my subconscious mind and gleaned new insights and lessons to apply to my daily life.
And as I write in this essay on MDMA therapy, this whole process mirrors the hero's journey in which the hero has a call to adventure and then eventually the hero, a part of him or herself, dies and then a new transformed self emerges as Jordan Peterson has talked about before several times with respect to psychedelics in particular.
So this whole conversation Inspired my new work and inspired my new newsletter on Substack dedicated to psychedelics and spiritual experience.
So I hope you enjoy this conversation and I hope it similarly sparks a call to adventure for inner transformation in your life.
Way we go.
Nice to see you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you devote a whole chapter in the book about abandoning ideology and political dogmas.
Now, you know, we as humans, we're primed for meta-narratives, right?
Like, we have spiritual impulses that need to be satisfied.
And so, one of the struggles right now is that religion is on the decline, and it has been for a number of decades.
And you refer to Nietzsche in the book about God being dead, and his observation about the rise of totalitarian ideologies coming with the decline in religion, and the various problems that come with that.
And right now, particularly among young people and older people as well, we're seeing politics replace religion.
We're seeing people now replace spiritual metanarratives with ideological metanarratives.
So how do we figure that out?
Perhaps we're seeing that.
That's one hypothesis, and it's one I favor.
I did see polling data at one point, for example, from the Gallup Corporation, indicating that lapsed Catholics were something, some multiple of times more likely to be separatists during the heyday of the Quebec separatist movement.
I lived in Quebec during that period, some of that period, and it did appear to me that nationalism was functioning as a replacement for For lapsed Catholicism.
Quebec was an intensely Catholic country until the 1950s, late 1950s.
So, in some sense, they underwent their transformation to a secular society somewhat later than most other European nations, let's say.
And I thought that was reflected in the tremendous attractiveness of nationalism as a spiritual movement.
One of the things I learned from studying the psychoanalysts, both Freud and Jung in particular, was that Jung, I suppose, had to do with separating ultimate moral authority from the figure of the father.
So you might say that as you mature, it's useful to realize that your particular father, your specific individual father, isn't omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent.
He's another person, and you have to realize that to some degree to become a mature adult.
And so you don't want to confuse your father with the ultimate moral authority.
And in the same sense, it's psychologically dangerous to confuse political explanations and ideologies with religious and spiritual ideologies and movements.
You don't want the political to carry the weight of the spiritual.
I don't think.
I think it's dangerous.
I also believe that ideologies essentially function as crippled religions.
So they have the motive force of religious belief and the attractiveness of religious belief, which I think is actually a necessity for human beings because we're religious by nature.
But they don't have the...
Symbolic complexity that a religion has.
A well-established religion with its mystical elements and its dogmatic elements.
So, now, you say, too, that religious belief is on the decline.
Certainly, organized church attendance in some countries is radically declining.
Christianity is growing at an unbelievable rate in China, for example.
So, it's not necessarily a global phenomenon.
And with regards to abandoning ideology, there's danger in confusing your political beliefs and your religious beliefs, not noting that there's a difference between them.
One of the associated dangers there, I think, especially in totalitarian utopian systems, is the proclivity to raise the leader, whoever that might be, to the status of a demigod.
That certainly happened in the Soviet Union and in Maoist China.
Maybe will happen again in modern China.
Who knows, as the Chinese premier centralizes his authority, which he appears to be doing.
You know, you're supposed to render unto Caesars that which is Caesar and render unto God that which is God.
That's the fundamental ethos that underlies the idea of separation of church and state.
And I think it's a good psychological truth as well.
Right, so it's almost like you can't replace religion with politics.
Like, if you try, you'll only get, let's say, 60% of the way there.
Like, you'll get the community, you'll get the group discussions, you'll get people who are like-minded, who want to make change, want to enact change, but you don't get that spiritual fulfillment at all, right?
You just get the community part of it primarily, right?
Right.
Well, it doesn't seem to me to be the right place to look for that spiritual fulfillment.
Yeah.
I also think in the chapter from Beyond Order, so this is the book that we're discussing, Beyond Order, the problem with ideologies, as far as I'm concerned, is that they're not useful as practical problem-solving guides, mostly.
Most of the problems that beset us are very, very complex, and they need to be decomposed in a sophisticated way into their constituent elements until they're differentiated enough so that partial solutions for some of the problem can arise as a consequence of practical endeavors.
And that requires the willingness to do that kind of detailed thinking.
And it requires the development of specialized expertise.
And ideology can blind you to your own stupidity, and that's actually dangerous.
So we could take the case of poverty, for example, and I think we could all agree that poverty as such is undesirable.
So that's the starting point and the motivation.
Then you might say, well, what is poverty?
And you could conclude that it's lack of money.
And from that you could conclude, because there's an unequal distribution of resources, that if the rich would only loosen their grip on wealth, then there wouldn't be poverty.
And then it's not much of a leap from that to the rich are, by definition, causing poverty and morally culpable for it.
And even though there is some truth to that, some of the time, in some situations, that doesn't mean that it's always true, and it's the only reason all the time.
And then there's an additional danger, which is that you now have a solution, and so you're smart.
You're not the problem, so that you're moral.
You have a convenient enemy, so your dark, unexamined motives have a valid target, which you've already defined as immoral.
And that means that you're more likely to Give rain to violent impulses, let's say, that you should otherwise keep in control.
And that's all very dangerous.
It's not sophisticated.
It's emotionally and motivationally dangerous.
It interferes with proper problem-solving.
It confuses you as to the limits and depth of your own knowledge.
You end up thinking you actually understand how the world works, and you don't understand it at all.
You don't even understand the problems.
Think about poverty.
Okay, so what do you mean by poverty?
Do you mean alcoholism, drug abuse, mental illness, physical illness, lack of education, lack of intelligence, lack of conscientiousness, antisocial behavior, relative poverty, absolute poverty?
Do you mean a corrosive worldview?
Do you mean lack of ability to plan for the future?
Do you mean absolute privation of material goods?
That's all poverty.
And that's just the beginning of a decomposition.
All of those problems are markedly different.
And it isn't obvious that there's one solution that will address...
It's not obvious at all.
In fact, it seems highly improbable that one solution is going to address all of them.
And then there's the complex problem that...
You have a theory that identifies a problem and explains its existence and offers a solution.
And so now you're going to assume that if you could only put that solution in place that you would do that competently and it would produce the result that's intended.
That's wrong.
It's unlikely that you would do it competently because it's very, very difficult to solve a problem.
And even if you did, it's also unlikely that your intervention would produce only the positive result that you intend and nothing else.
Well, that's a lot of problems.
Yeah, right.
And then ideology, I suppose it's the enticement to pride that ideology also produces.
Well, now I have an explanation for how the economic system works.
No, you don't.
You don't know the first thing about it.
You're like a monkey looking at a military helicopter.
Right.
You don't have a clue, and you don't even know it.
Okay, yeah.
So let me just contextualize this topic here.
So among young people here in the West, here in Canada, certainly, and in the United States, members of Gen Z particularly, There's this growing sort of political culture right now where young people are out protesting the patriarchy, protesting against white supremacy, and they've turned that into a religion.
They're fighting against this evil, satanic force of sorts, which is...
White supremacy, or it's, you know, toxic masculinity, or it's transphobia, Islamophobia.
Like, these are the things that they are fighting against primarily, opposed to fighting sort of the monster within.
So there's kind of like an external locus of control here, right?
It's fighting against the external opposed to the internal.
Well, this is why, and I outlined this to some degree in Beyond Order and also in my first book, Maps of Meaning, there are The world is characterized by ignorance and malevolence and danger.
Always, always, always.
It's an existential truth.
And then you might ask yourself, well, if that's the case, how might you best conceptualize that?
Now, you can find malevolence and ignorance at the level of the individual.
And so we would say that's the malevolence and ignorance that characterizes you.
And other individuals.
And it's a viciously powerful and terrifying force.
And then there's the malevolence and ignorance that characterizes social institutions.
That's the great father.
That's the negative aspect of the great father in my terminology.
And that's derived to some degree from Jungian theory, especially through a man named Eric Neumann, who is a brilliant student of Jung.
You're always a victim of the evil tyrant.
And the reason for that is that human beings have a lengthy period of intense socialization.
And that fosters and develops your individuality in some ways, but crushes and maims and distorts and destroys it in all sorts of other ways.
And so, it's a universal tendency to feel oppressed by the evil tyrant.
And it's so powerful symbolically.
It's such a powerful symbolic tendency that people don't even notice that it's a symbolic tendency.
So I've been taken to task, for example, for insisting that We use gendered metaphors to portray the two fundamental attributes of experienced reality.
Chaos and order.
Order is patriarchal.
That's the symbol.
Well, people accept that at face value and don't even notice that they're trapped in a symbolic world.
The very feminists who will criticize me for pointing out that femininity is associated with chaos symbolically...
Accept the idea that masculinity is the proper representation for social order without question and are irritated beyond belief if you point out that things are not so simple.
They're caught in a myth, a religious myth, and they don't even realize it.
And so if you accept that the patriarchy is masculine, well then what's feminine?
Well, the opposite of patriarchy and order, and that's creative chaos.
And that's not my theory.
That's the Taoist theory of being, for example.
It's the ancient Greek chaos and cosmos theory of being.
It's the ideational structure that underlies the first chapters of Genesis, where God makes order out of...
A patriarchal God makes order out of tohu vabohu, which is the primordial chaos.
So...
Now, young people find themselves motivated to stand up against the evil tyrant, and of course they should, because it's at that point, when you're differentiating yourself, that you want to take a look at the group that you're going to pledge allegiance to and note its shortcomings.
But you don't want to be blind while doing that and fail to notice that, well, the social world is full of pathology and danger, malevolence and ignorance, let's say.
But the natural world, which you will automatically tend to romanticize if you only believe the patriarchy is evil, the natural world is doing everything it can to kill you every second.
And the only reason you're not dead is because the evil tyrant has a benevolent aspect that protects you in ways that are so deep and profound that you don't begin to understand them.
I mean, you are shielded, as am I, by a nuclear umbrella, for example.
None of which you have to attend to.
And then the other loss, of course, is that Yes, there's evil in the patriarchy.
That's always how things are.
And sometimes it's much worse than other times.
Not right now, by the way.
Not by historical standards.
But it also blinds you to the fact that you're culpable too.
Deeply.
You have...
More ignorance and malevolence in your soul than you'll ever get on top of in your entire life.
And that should be part...
The knowledge of that stops you from being carelessly judgmental.
Carelessly.
You should be judgmental.
You have to differentiate and discriminate between things.
But you shouldn't do it carelessly, and you certainly shouldn't assume that all the fault lies outside, which is the point that you made.
And so ideology is extremely dangerous if it convinces young people that the moral stance is that all malevolence and ignorance lies outside of them.
Right.
Yeah.
What do you think is motivating this kind of hallucinatory interpretation of our society being uniquely racist, sexist, homophobic?
Like, there's this kind of self-delusion going on here where...
Some of it's ignorance.
Right.
And I mentioned this in one of my Colette essays about our society being one of the most free, liberal, open-minded, inclusive societies that has ever existed, right?
It is the most.
The most for ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, transgender folks, all of that.
But yet there's this narrative that...
That, you know, me as a brown person, as an immigrant from India, like somehow I'm more of a victim than you are, that I live under this...
On average, you might be somewhat.
Because it's probably harder to be a minority in any culture than it is to be the majority.
But it isn't accounting for...
It isn't the fundamental determinant of the outcome of your life.
It's one element, and it's an important element.
It's not good for anyone if...
Prejudice doesn't allow us to use all available human capital.
Even from a purely selfish perspective, it's foolish.
And why do we think that?
A lot of it's ignorance.
People don't know, for example, that up until 1880, 95% of the Western world lived below today's UN-established poverty line.
We have no idea how...
Much dramatic improvement has been made in the last 150 years and how absolutely god-awful things were before that.
And we don't know that because we've never been hungry, for example, not for one day.
Right.
Okay.
So now that we've laid out that, yes, we are living in the most free, open-minded, inclusive societies on Earth, then what's driving this?
Well, ignorance is part of it, right?
We just don't know.
And you look around and you see, well, things could be better, so they're bad.
It's like, true, things could be better, and that is bad.
Well, bad compared to what?
Well, certainly bad compared to a hypothetical ideal, right?
But not bad compared to all extant historical comparisons.
But that requires differentiated knowledge.
And once you have the ideology, you don't need the differentiated knowledge because you already have the explanation.
Plus, it's convenient.
You don't have to look at yourself.
And you have an enemy.
And that's the part that scares me the most, you see.
I mean, you don't have to look at yourself.
Yeah, that's bad.
But...
Now you have an enemy, and that enemy is the cause of everything you hate, and now you have all moral justification to go after them, to hurt them, to stop them because they're evil, and to elevate yourself morally as a consequence.
So you have this unearned pathway to moral superiority that's actually dependent on your willingness to unfairly persecute based on your ignorance.
It's terrible.
And universities promote this while you should be an activist.
That's essentially what every 19 year old is taught.
It's like, no, you shouldn't be an activist.
You should get your own house in order.
And then you should cautiously proceed to more difficult things if you dare.
Right, yeah.
And you can be an activist when injustice happens, which it does.
Just the problem that I'm finding right now among young people is the complete fabrication or at least a total exaggeration of injustice happening.
Like, yes, something bad happens.
Yes, if there is an act of racism or sexism, let's fight it.
But this whole idea of our society being governed by these supernatural kind of forces of white supremacy and patriarchy, it's almost like I'm listening to these people, I'm talking to young people.
No, they are supernatural forces in some sense.
I mean, symbolically speaking, white supremacy is satanic.
And the patriarchy is the evil king, and it's got a satanic element too.
And that's the transcendental symbolic locale of malevolence and evil.
And those things have to be contended with, but you have to do that in a sophisticated way.
Or it's better if you do it in a sophisticated way.
You know, there's other technical issues here as well that we have to attend to.
We're so connected that any...
Instance of racial injustice is immediately broadcast across our experiential landscape.
And so if you ask people, the social psychologists have established this, if you ask individuals how much prejudice has interfered with their movement forward, They generally claim that they've been relatively unscathed.
They've emerged relatively unscathed.
But if you ask them to what degree their group has suffered or is still facing impediments, they rate the group victimization as much higher than their own personal victimization.
Well, you hear about all the group victimization, plus now you add to that the fact that we have...
A bias towards negative information.
We find it more informative in some sense, and that's perhaps because we should be alert to areas of danger.
You don't see headlines of racial...
Peaceful, non-eventful racial harmony, which is what exists almost all the time.
It's not news that, you know, I can walk by you, your skin is slightly differently colored than mine, and we can walk by each other on the street without hacking each other to death with machetes.
That's not news.
Thank God.
But how do you make peaceful, you know, infinite instances of peaceful coexistence newsworthy?
Yeah, you can't.
You can do it with historical comparison.
Yeah.
So that's a big problem.
And some of this is probably a positive feedback loop gone astray.
We paid more attention to issues of racial prejudice, and perhaps that was good in many ways.
But because we're doing that, more attention is being paid attention to it, and it becomes more and more salient.
And you can see that that can ease, especially given all the new communication technologies and the rate at which outrageous occurrences can be distributed and our intense difficulty at separating, at establishing base rate.
It's like, well, who knows how many racial incidents of hate there are per day in a given city?
Is that going up or down?
Well, we as individuals, we don't know that.
The historical answer is it's obviously going down, way down, really fast.
Sure, yeah.
And one indication, in my view, of just how rare and marginalized racial prejudice is right now is when people are fabricating claims about racial prejudice or exaggerating them significantly.
So there was a recent shooting in Atlanta that happened, which was horrible.
The Atlanta shooter, he went to three different massage parlors.
And he killed a number of people.
And out of the eight deceased victims, six were Asian women.
And if you look at all of the available evidence right now, and if you read what the actual shooter said about his motivation, he said that it was due to his sexual addiction.
And he was addicted to pornography.
And he also seemed to be kind of a religious fundamentalist type of person who felt guilty and he felt very ashamed about his sex addiction.
And he would go to these massage parlors to get these other illegal sexual services there.
And he felt bad about doing it every time.
But he kept on doing it.
And so there was this circular kind of battle that he was facing.
And so then one day he thought, this temptation is bad.
I know it's bad, but I can't stop myself from doing it.
So why don't I go and just physically murder these people?
Well, that's a really good idea of demonization.
Exactly what I was talking about before.
It's like his problem was within.
There's a societal element to that.
Perhaps the transformation of our society so that pornography is so rapidly accessible, but we can leave that aside for the time being.
He had an internal moral struggle, and instead of dealing with that at the individual level, he demonized the handy enemy, those women who are tempting me in a satanic manner, essentially.
Right.
Right, opposed to my own uncontrolled sexual impulses that I need to get in order, right?
Yes, right, right, precisely.
But so the point that I wanted to make here was about the media response.
Okay, so we just discussed basically, in a nutshell, what the current motivation seems to be here.
But the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, The Guardian, all these big outlets, they all jumped on racism in their headlines.
You know, a racist shooting, America's story of sexualized racism.
And so this other...
Now, some of it's a baseline problem, right?
You said six out of the eight were Asian.
Okay, well, six out of eight of the normal population, the general population, aren't Asian.
And so it looks like a preponderance of Asians.
But then you have to take the local environment into account, while most of the sex workers in that area were Asian.
So then the question is, well, did it deviate from baseline?
But that requires sophisticated thinking to ask that question and willingness to dig in.
And the newspapers, they're becoming, in some sense, desperate.
Yeah.
They're not doing well.
They don't have the resources they once had, and they're very likely to jump on something salient and salacious.
And then, of course, also the most effectively salacious article tends to rise to the top.
So that's another feedback loop that we are caught in and don't know how to regulate.
Right, yeah.
And obviously, you know, six out of eight victims being Asian women, you know, people make this mistake all the time of confusing disparities with discrimination just because...
Well, they make that mistake because sometimes disparities are a consequence of discrimination.
Right.
Sometimes.
Well, and often enough so that it's a reasonable hypothesis, right?
Yeah.
But often, I mean, look...
It's definitely the case that in the United States in particular, Native-born Black Americans are underrepresented in positions of authority, power, and economic dominance.
Right?
Okay.
And so you might say, well, that's a consequence of systemic racism.
And there's no doubt an element of systemic racism.
The question is, how much of the outcome is that accounting for?
Okay, so...
And you might say, well, we could use that as the default hypothesis, given the history of slavery, and it's...
Which is...
acceptable in every possible way morally, although pretty much par for the course for most human societies throughout history.
Right.
And Jim Crow and other discriminatory policies afterwards.
Right.
So you say, well, systemic racism and fair enough.
That's a reasonable hypothesis.
Well, except that there's a disproportionate number of other minorities who are overrepresented in in pinnacle positions.
And in fact, that is compared to the native-born Caucasian group.
Indian Americans, for example, their family income now is almost twice that of the typical median Caucasian family.
Twice!
And the top six or seven are all Southeast Asian.
So then you say, well, if it's systemic racism, what about, you know, maybe you could write off the Indians and the Muslims, because they're more or less Caucasian.
And I don't mean that positively or negatively.
But then the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, they're more visually different than Caucasians, but they're doing just fine too.
And then if you assume systemic racism, it also blinds you to all sorts of other factors, as we already discussed, that might be contributing.
So I know, for example, and I looked into this 20 years ago, that It looks like it's the familial structure and ethos of Southeast Asian first-generation immigrant families that are producing overperformance in their children.
That disappears by the third generation as assimilation completes itself.
So among Southeast Asians, the emphasis on conscientiousness, essentially, perhaps with an additional, what would you call it, positive aspect of Higher likelihood of intact family, two-parent family.
There's this emphasis on conscientiousness, and conscientiousness is essentially hard work.
Southeast Asian students, that's children of first-generation Southeast Asian immigrants, do homework, spend many more hours on homework.
Well, conscientious striving actually does predict success, and the data that I reviewed, this was two decades ago, indicated that The typical Southeast Asian child gains competitive advantage from the conditions of their upbringing that's equivalent to 15 IQ points.
And that's a huge difference.
It's the difference between someone who's normal and someone who's borderline impaired, mentally handicapped.
It's the difference between the typical high school student and the typical college student.
It's a walloping difference.
Well, now, if you're blinded by the fact of racism to everything else, because racism exists, then you're not going to be able to decompose the problem and say, well, look, those Southeast Asians, they're outperforming Southeast Asians who are third generation in the US, also Caucasians, Why?
Well, it looks like there's familial structure issues and an emphasis on work.
Well, you don't want to miss that, man.
It's actually important.
Yeah, and also the attitudes on life.
Like, in my Colette essay, The Peculiar Racist Patriarchy, I looked into different attitudes towards life, towards education.
And one interesting finding that I came across was that if you look at various polls, Asian Americans are most likely to believe in the idea of self-made success.
They're most likely to believe that if you work hard, you can achieve what you want in your life compared to black Americans.
Right, a white supremacist racist trope that's now, what would you say?
Under attack.
Well, it's a form of microaggression that's frowned upon, whose utterance is frowned upon in many universities, formally.
You can't say that, that hard work puts you ahead.
It's a microaggression.
And you can see why.
Look, here's the reason.
It's like, well, there are lots of people who are poor, who are poor and dispossessed, despite the fact that they've worked hard.
They're ill, let's say.
Or they're impaired in their intelligence.
Or they haven't managed an education.
There's all sorts of reasons that hard work isn't going to work.
Even bad luck, various tragedies that happen in your life.
Yeah, you get hit by a bus because you're standing in the wrong place.
That's why you need enough sophistication to look at a multifactorial explanation.
Right.
And even, you know, you can control for economic status and still find some of these racial disparities.
So low-income Asian Americans have higher upward mobility compared to low-income Black Americans and White Americans and Hispanic Americans.
Yeah.
And it's probably native-born Black Americans, because Nigerians seem to do pretty well.
And generally speaking, Black immigrants to the United States outperform, just as, let's say, people from the Indian subcontinent outperform native-born Caucasians in the U.S., the immigrant Black population outperforms the native-born Black population in the U.S. by a substantial margin.
Yeah, even if you look in the same city.
So Thomas Sowell has done some great research on this.
The city of Boston, you have the native-born Black Americans and you have the immigrant Black American group.
And the immigrant Black American group, their performance is much higher.
Their education rates, their high school completion, their earnings, they're much higher.
But so in that same city, right, whatever force of systemic racism that exists, it's constant, right?
Because you can't distinguish between somebody from Nigeria versus somebody who's Black, who's black.
Well, you might think that it's actually worse for the immigrants because they have an accent and there are other features that mark them out as strange, different.
Right.
They're unacculturated to the various norms in society, lower rates of English-speaking proficiency.
All those things matter.
but there seems to be this kind of disinclination towards behavioral explanations for success.
There only seems to be sort of external prejudice-based explanations.
Well, part of it is that people are loathe to blame the dispossessed.
Yeah.
And fair enough, but fair enough.
It's reasonable to check yourself against doing that because you can pass the homeless person on the street and say, if you weren't so goddamn useless, you'd get a job.
It's like, well, you know, maybe, but...
Maybe not, and there but for the grace of God go I, which is something always useful to keep in mind.
But the problem with not assuming that individual planning and diligent effort and moral evaluation and ambition matter is that you take away The very tools, you deny the validity of the very tools that could be most effectively used by most individuals who are dispossessed.
And that's a terrible thing to do.
I mean, the reason I emphasize individual responsibility, there's two reasons.
One is, well, you can start right now, right where you are, no matter what you're doing.
So you have that at hand.
Second, if you become more responsible...
You probably won't hurt anyone by doing it, right?
It removes the convenience of the enemy, and that's given how terrible it is for us to generate, say, class-based explanations of enmity or racial-based explanations of enmity.
That's something we really have to step carefully around.
I mean, the worst crimes the human race has ever committed have been generated by class-based hypotheses of malevolence, class or ethnicity-based hypotheses of malevolence.
It's terrible.
And we need to avoid that.
And I don't see that adopting more individual responsibility, even though it's not a cure-all, that's one danger it doesn't pose, in my estimation.
Right, yeah.
And just to go back for a second to the white supremacy discussion and the different racial groups, you know, that whole narrative seems to be on life support right now.
The idea of white supremacy being the governing force of Western society, whether it's the US or Canada.
So one thing that I mentioned in the Quillette essay, the main finding that I was exploring there was the fact that last year, for the first time in history, Asian women had higher earnings than white men did for earnings in 2020.
And where was that?
In the US? In the US. And this was controlling for full-time working Asian women.
So that was the variable that was controlled.
Full-time.
Full-time, yeah.
But that's a staggering finding.
And the difference was very...
It was marginal, but still, there are various gender differences at play here.
But that finding is completely...
It shatters the whole narrative of race and gender, for that matter, and the whole intersectional claim of race plus gender giving you various disadvantages.
So I looked into this.
I went on this about two months.
I looked into the data, and I wanted to answer that question of why are Asian women making more than white men?
What are the explanations?
And A few of the things that I found was that Asian women are least likely to have kids out of wedlock compared to women of other racial groups.
They have less kids on average compared to other groups.
And they tend to have kids later.
So the median age for having kids is about five to ten years later compared to white women, black women, Hispanic women.
And they tend to have No, but you can make a limited moral judgment.
You can say, if you want to be hyper-competitive in the male-dominated capitalist environment, here's the sacrifices that are useful.
It's a bounded moral claim, right?
Because you don't have to say, well, that's how you should be.
Who knows how long you should put off having children?
But if you want to compete economically, that might be a strategy.
That doesn't mean it's an advisable strategy.
No, no.
And that's not the only way to be happy in life too, right?
It's maybe not even the most effective way.
Sure, yeah.
If a woman doesn't want to work so many hours and have less kids and devote so much time towards education, career, right?
That's her choice, right?
But these explanations, these factors that I just laid out for you...
So having more stable families, more financial security, and more time devoted to pursuing a career.
These are the results of having kids later, having...
Less likely to have kids out of wedlock.
These are some of the consequences of these decisions, but these behavioral explanations just seem sort of taboo in a way because the implication there would be that if you make these decisions, if you take responsibility, you can actually achieve success.
It doesn't matter if you're Asian or if you're a woman.
And of course, there is sexism.
Of course, there is anti-Asian bigotry, which seems to be on the rise, by the way, in Canada and the US over the past year since COVID started, right?
All those things exist, but they're not a barrier to success, right?
They don't stop you from getting ahead in life.
But the narrative seems to be that it is, which just seems totally perverse and counterproductive to me.
Well, it has perverse and counterproductive effects, there's no doubt about that, and those can get very badly out of hand.
Any political movements that are motivated by resentment, any actions that are motivated by resentment, are to be viewed with extreme skepticism.
It's a very, very, very dangerous state of mind, resentment.
Right, yeah.
Now, going back to the earlier discussion we were having here about spirituality and young people.
So, observing that young people are becoming increasingly politically active, they're engaging in this protest culture, this fight against these various forces that they've identified.
It's being incentivized by the university, by mainstream media, by Hollywood celebrities, you know, people posting about racism all the time and so there's this exaggerated sense of this problem existing.
So all of that being true, how do young people get out of that position?
How do they find, and this is a question that I really want to ask you here, is how do young people find a value system to adhere to, given that religion is on the decline, given that Religion doesn't seem cool or just for whatever reason, it's not resonating, right?
Ideology is resonating, not religion.
But how do we replace that with something spiritual that fulfills our inner innate desires to strive for, you know, God, the infinite being, the divine, whatever name you want to use for that?
Well, we could take that apart.
I mean, you might say, well, what might you replace an ideology with?
And I would say, well...
A differentiated view of and strategy for life.
And so, when I work with my clients, I never start with high-order problems to begin with, like, how do I orient myself spiritually?
So, let's just leave that aside for a second, okay?
We'll return to it.
So, what do you need to get straight in your life?
Well, you need a job.
Or a career.
Career, preferably, perhaps.
The advantage to a job is that you do it for eight hours, let's say, and you're done.
With a career, you're in it all the time.
Now, you'll make more money, you'll advance up the economic hierarchy, but you're never done with work if you have a career.
And maybe that's what you want.
But in any case, you have to have a job or a career.
Why?
Well, you don't want to starve.
You want to take care of yourself and the people that are dependent on you.
There are practical, obvious practical reasons, but there are psychological reasons too.
I mean, a job gives you something to do every day, just as your career does.
And it also addresses the deep human need to be of value and service to other people.
And so that needs to be attended to.
So if you're a young person, it's like, okay, have a plan.
You need a job and a career.
It would be good if it was something that you could be competent at.
So the smarter you are, pure IQ, the more complex job you can manage.
And then if you add the development of discipline to that, so that's the development of conscientiousness, that can further you.
So you need conscientiousness and intelligence to be competent.
And the more hardworking you are, and the more intelligent, the more complex the job you can manage.
So if you're of average intelligence, which you've probably figured out by the time you're 18 or so, it's going to be very, very difficult for you to be a high-end corporate lawyer unless you work insanely hard.
So your better bet is to pick up a profession that isn't so cognitively demanding that's still useful.
And trades are great as far as I'm concerned.
It's not like tradespeople aren't skilled, and it's not like trades don't require intelligence.
I am not saying that.
But it doesn't require as much abstraction, generally speaking.
Like, if you want to be a lawyer, you have to be hyper-literate, and like 90th percentile literate, fundamentally.
And you have to be able to formulate verbal arguments, or you're going to get crushed by someone who can do it.
Okay, so job and career, you need a plan.
Okay.
Education.
You should be as educated as you are intelligent.
You should have a plan for that.
Yeah.
Okay.
And it should continue because things change quick and you better keep up.
Okay.
So you should have a vision of that.
People don't seem to do well without an intimate relationship.
It'd be good if you could have a family and bring peace to the family that you have, because family is important, extraordinarily important.
Those connections, so intimate relationship and family, whether that's your parents, your siblings, or the family that you start.
You need a plan for that and a vision of that.
You have to take care of your physical and mental health.
You have to regulate your drug and alcohol intake.
You have to figure out how to make productive and meaningful use of the time that's allotted to you outside of your obligations.
That's extraordinarily useful.
And you have to address your philosophical or spiritual slash aesthetic yearnings such as they might be.
Well, so that's better than an ideology.
A plan.
Sure.
Now, you know, and as you climb up your career, as you expand your competence and power, well, then you can get involved in larger scale transformations if that's where your interest takes you.
And so with job and career, you should be competent and interested in it.
That's a good pathway to success.
All right, so...
That's the right place to focus, as far as I'm concerned, if you're a young person.
It's like, well, have a plan.
Have a plan.
Make a plan.
And then educate yourself.
Because you're much more powerful and competent if you're educated.
So why not do it?
Yeah, but the thing is, if you have a plan, that's great.
And young people should have a plan and they should stick to it and they should have a vision for themselves of what they want to do and they should persevere towards that vision.
But the problem is finding meaning.
It's like, what?
Oh, look, you worry about that afterwards.
Look, we outline domains of meaning.
Look, family is meaningful.
Career is meaningful.
You can mentor people.
Helping other people develop, that's extremely meaningful.
A lot of the high-end people that I've seen who are extraordinarily successful in the socioeconomic domain derive a tremendous amount of their meaning from fostering that development among young people.
And so there's micro-meanings to be found in all of those domains.
Now, you still might be searching for something transcendent.
Whether you know it or not, even.
Something you need, the analogy would be like a crush.
When you're striving towards your vision and things don't go your way, tragedy happens, malevolence happens, as you say, and you're suffering in your life, you need some kind of base meta-narrative.
Whether it's prayer or meditation or reading various types of scriptures, something to give you meaning, to give you hope, Faith and trust in something else and just let you know that you're not in this alone, that you can get to where you want.
You need that kind of emotional, spiritual crutch in your life.
And this is what I wanted to ask you about, is that young people seem to have that less and less.
So how do we find that spiritual crutch is the question.
Well, I wouldn't say it's a crutch.
I don't think that's reasonable because any genuine spiritual practice places a tremendous moral burden on its practitioner.
So let's say foundation, a spiritual foundation is what I mean.
Well, and some people need that more than others.
Like if you're the sort of person who are, and I would say that that's likely associated with high trait openness.
That's the creativity dimension.
And so if you find yourself yearning, well, how do you address that?
Literature.
Art.
That's the domain.
And then in that domain, there's the mystical religious domain and the philosophical domain.
Well, reading is your best way into that.
And you also describe the ritual practices, and they can be very useful to people.
I mean, my wife found repetitive prayer of aid when she was undergoing interminable repeated scans for the presence of cancer.
It's like, well, what do you do in a situation like that?
Well, one thing you can do is turn to a ritual.
And you might say, well, that's a crutch.
It's like, well, no, it's a practice.
It's a meditative practice that helps regulate your physiological reactions under extreme duress.
People who think that religious belief is a crutch First of all, they're guilty of something I think is an unbelievable impediment to reasonable progress, which is casual contempt.
Are you sure you know enough about that to be contemptuous of it?
Religious belief has a history that's tens of thousands of years old.
The capacity for religious experience, and perhaps even the need for it, is coded in us biologically.
It's an unbelievably complicated problem and solution.
You don't want to casually dismiss it.
You can read philosophers and great writers and great religious thinkers and great psychoanalysts.
Joseph Campbell, for example, is a great entry place for anyone who wants to take religious thinking seriously.
Right.
And so this is where I'm getting at here.
So you're saying spiritual experience is encoded in our genes.
And I agree with that.
Whether, you know, even people who say they're atheists or they don't believe, you know, I think this is universal for everyone.
But for people who don't have religion, who just have ideology...
Well, the atheists who watch Star Wars...
You know, the atheist materialist types, the engineers, skeptical and unlikely to personalize the world, they get their mythology through science fiction, and they don't even notice it.
But people who don't have that spiritual practice, don't have that religion, who are watching Star Wars...
Participating in protests against white supremacy, how do they find that spiritual experience?
How do they achieve that state?
That's kind of the fundamental thing that I'm wrestling with as our society becomes more and more secular and saturated with technology and political polarization, all these other forces that seem to be distracting us from our inner primal need for spiritual experience.
I would say, to some degree, that's the fundamental unanswered question of our age.
You know, I'm reading this book right now.
Is it The Religion with No Name?
It's about the Eleusinian Mysteries.
I should get that right.
The Immortality Key, the secret history of the religion with no name.
So, the Greeks, Greek society was grounded in a spiritual experience and practice that's centered on Eleusis.
I hope I have that pronounced properly.
The initiates were inducted into the Ellisonian Mysteries.
And this book is one of a long line of books, a relatively long line of books, really started in the 1960s, suggesting that Shamanic experiences, which are tens of thousands of years old, perhaps older, and religious practices in more sophisticated societies that were...
Profoundly influenced and affected by hallucinogenic substances.
It seems highly probable to me.
In fact, I think the evidence is incontrovertible.
We have no idea what to do with that fact.
Now, the hallucinogens, the psychedelic experience adds an experiential element to religious belief, religious thinking.
But we don't know what to make of that.
We don't know what to make of the fact that Apollonian Greece, this shining beacon of rationality, was embedded inside a mystical, psychedelic experience.
Right.
Right.
And so our modern religions, they're experientially dead in a very...
Unfortunate way.
And I really mean that it's unfortunate.
But even the materialism suffers from the same problem.
So what do you mean by that, that they're dead?
What do you mean exactly?
Well, if you go to a rave...
Even if you don't take any substances, the music and the dance can produce an experience that lifts you outside of yourself.
An intense aesthetic experience can do that.
Our religious structures in the West are divorced from that to a degree that I think is untenable over the long term.
We insist upon faith.
We insist upon a faith that the rational atheist types find contemptible and have very powerful arguments at their fingertips to drive home Dawkins and Sam Harris and Hitchens.
Those people are formidable intellectually, and they take apart, at least from their perspective, these preposterous supernatural claims and leave everything in ashes on the ground.
What to do about that?
I don't know.
I mean, I would say that's something I think about all the time.
I mean, I've been talking as well to people like Bjorn Lomborg and Matt Ridley, who are these rational optimists who note that human material progress is progressing Michael Shermer would be in that camp as well.
Human material well-being is progressing at a staggering rate, and we're going to solve a lot of the problems of absolute material deprivation in the next 30 years.
And that data is there, and it's available, but it has almost no compelling nature.
It's the same problem we discussed earlier, that there's not a story there.
When you take your ideologue, your 18-year-old, highly committed ideologue out of the crowd, and you say, look, we're going to incrementally improve our way out of absolute privation over the next 15 years.
So just calm down, do something productive, and wait.
And they say, to hell with you.
What I'm doing is way more exciting.
Which is true.
And so...
We have a real problem.
We don't know how to marry either formalized religious belief, let's say, or even utopian materialism in the Enlightenment manner.
We don't know how to marry that to the Dionysian.
And that's a big...
Now, the thing about an ideology is that that gives you the Dionysian, man.
You can go, you know, so you're part of Black Lives Matter.
You're part of Antifa.
And so what do you do instead of being like 7-Eleven clerk?
And relatively unattractive romantically, by the way, because of that, particularly if you're male, you put on a mask and you take your club and you go out to fight evil and, you know, there's fire and there's noise and there's the terrible tyrannical police and, like, you get to be a hero.
And that's real.
Now, you can say, well, that heroism is misguided.
And I would say it is ultimately considered.
But it's not obvious to me that the desire for adventure that possesses the 7-Eleven clerk who's dissatisfied with his, you know, comfortable satiety, the call to adventure is real.
Well, it's incumbent upon the culture to satisfy the call to adventure.
Right.
Well, we don't know how to do that.
We don't know how to do that.
And so the whole Black Lives Matter thing or fighting against even climate change, white supremacy, the patriarchy, that then becomes the spiritual mission.
Then that becomes the goal.
That becomes the vision opposed to something truly spiritual and religious, right?
So one thing that I wanted to question, one thing I wanted to pose to you here was, so you're saying that in Western religious traditions, So you're saying that they are divorced from spiritual experience?
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah, they're divorced from practical mysticism.
You know, you can...
But that's more of an Eastern type of thing, right?
So like meditation, contemplative practice, that's something that...
Well, there are contemplative practices in the West, but very few people, very few people, they're certainly not popular like yoga.
No.
And there is mystical tradition in the West, but...
In the mass celebration, for example, which is eating the flesh of God, essentially, a very, very, very, very old idea, incredibly powerful idea, to incorporate the divine.
There's a spiritual transformation that's attendant upon that, but it isn't delivering what it promises, and not in any self-evident manner.
And I think that's probably because...
We've lost the technology.
That's my guess.
Strange as that is.
You know, Mircea Eliad, who's a great historian of religion, wrote about shamanism and the typical shamanic experience, which, by the way, is replicated experientially all over the world from the deepest reaches of northern Asia into the Amazonian jungles.
The experience is very similar that the shaman report, remarkably similar, but we have the same biology.
And Eliad believed that The shamanic practitioners who relied on hallucinogens were practicing a debased form of the religious practice.
I have great respect for Eliade.
I learned a lot.
That's another person people can read is Mircea Eliade, if you're interested in spirituality.
He's an absolute genius.
But I think he was wrong.
I think the shamanic tradition was clearly embedded in tens of thousands of years of powerful psychedelic use.
I think the data on that are pretty much clear.
Right, yeah.
And you know, I've been to church many times before and I've been to temples.
And so, you know, I come from an Indian background and my parents were raised with Hindu and Sikh religion in India.
And so I was raised with Sikhism, Hinduism.
I never really resonated with it and I always sort of rebelled against organized religion.
Then came high school and I was developing my identity.
I had these larger questions about existence and about the world.
To some extent, religion did help with that.
I did go to church for this short period of time.
That was very interesting and I learned a lot of things.
Even if I didn't commit to being a Christian, it was still learning the lessons about forgiveness, about mercy, Right, right, right.
Well, some spiritual practice might be better than none.
Sure, but still going to church and I guess, you know, I don't want to sound like I was fully immersed in that environment because I certainly wasn't.
I wasn't practicing as a Christian and obviously people who are practicing Christians, they get something that I've never experienced, right?
So I can't speak to that, but for my limited time going to church and also going to various Sikh and Hindu temples as well, Primarily Sikh temples, which are all over Canada.
Going there, I still didn't feel like I was having that spiritual experience that I wanted to have.
I still felt like there was something lacking.
And so I was very confused for a long period of time.
I talked to Bishop Barron about that sort of thing recently.
I'm going to release that podcast relatively soon.
I think one of the problems that the modern Christian church has...
I'm speaking broadly and out of my place here to some degree is that Part of the reason that young people aren't adhering to the religion is actually because it demands too little.
You know, if you present, and I've seen this with my own undergraduates, the ones that I've taught, because my course, especially Maps of Meaning, which was a primary course I taught for decades, had a very large impact on the people that I was teaching.
And it's full of religious ideas.
It's a psychology of religion course, essentially.
And It was, I mean, what I strove to transmit to my students was a religious idea, which is, look, you're way more than you think, for good and for evil.
And actually, the easiest way to discover that is to take a look at the evil.
You can become convinced of your own evil and terrified of that in a way that's easier than to become convinced of your own good.
In any case, there's more to you than meets the eye.
A lot more.
And you're much more dangerous and promising than you think.
And what that means is that you have an ethical requirement to discipline yourself and turn yourself into something.
Because the world depends on it.
And The churches, they don't say that.
And that's what you have to say to young people.
It's like, get yourself together.
Everything depends on you.
Your decisions are important.
And you asked why people turn to ideology or maybe even to atheism or nihilism.
It's like, it's no trivial matter to take yourself seriously.
Especially when you start to You know, I tried to learn the lesson of the Holocaust, which is what everyone who attempts to derive moral lessons from the Holocaust insists is the right response.
What's the moral lesson?
You're a Nazi.
You better get control of yourself.
You could delight in the torture of other people.
It's very frightening to realize that.
You know, and the church, of course, the Christian church, has a very well-developed model of evil.
It's very sophisticated.
Christianity is very sophisticated in its representation of evil.
Unbelievably sophisticated.
And that's extraordinarily useful and necessary.
And I think the church, I don't think the church demands enough of its young practitioners.
It doesn't offer them enough, and it doesn't scare them enough.
Right.
So I wanted to finish my thought from earlier.
So what I was saying was that participating in organized religion sort of ironically didn't seem enough to fulfill my spiritual impulses.
And I could be speaking, you know, maybe not sort of in a representative way.
Maybe if I did fully immerse in the religious lifestyle, maybe I could have achieved that state.
But for me, it just seems sort of...
I don't want to use superficial.
I don't want to use pejorative terms here, but there was something more that I needed.
And so then I sort of veered down this path of mindfulness meditation and contemplative practice, which did then start to fulfill my spiritual impulses of meditating 10 to 20 minutes a day.
Focusing on all the flurry of thoughts that are appearing in consciousness and how we seem to identify with these thoughts and they completely consume.
You needed to practice.
Yeah.
And that is something else that the Christian church could offer to young people.
It's like, okay, you want to be a Christian.
Okay, what do you do?
Sure.
Maybe you volunteer at a hospital.
You need practice.
It's not just religious belief.
Religious life isn't just belief.
It's not a set of philosophical propositions.
It's also a practice.
And you found some solace and some utility in a spiritual discipline.
And so do many people.
Many people study yoga and meditation.
So what's the Christian equivalent of that?
Well, nothing.
Well, there isn't one that's popularized and detailed and available to people to practice.
There are mystical prayer traditions.
The Catholic rosary is a form of meditative practice.
Right, right.
Yeah, so, okay, so we've established that Western traditions, Western religious traditions, are divorced from spiritual experience, right?
We agree on that.
Well, they're divorced enough so that they don't seem to be, they're not motivating in the same way for, see, you said it yourself, where we talked about this.
Well, let's say you're an ideologue, and you've decided that the patriarchy needs to be smashed.
Well, what do you do?
Well, you go to protests.
Yeah.
Well, that's smoke and fire.
You know, it's dramatic.
Well, if you're a Christian, a young Christian, well, what should you do?
Well, be good.
Well, it's a little vague.
Sure, yeah.
Yeah, and reaching those high states, those different states of consciousness where you're aware of your inner primal impulses and how they can lead you astray, that seems to be something that I'm finding in Eastern spirituality,
in meditation, being aware of my own flaws and how I sort of dupe myself with all this negative thinking and identification with thought and becoming practically a slave to whatever Internally or externally that I'm experiencing, whether it's an impulse to do something, or it's, you know, somebody says something bad, or I don't get the job I want.
And that just completely becomes my reality.
And I don't recognize that that is separate from my own consciousness that I can take a step back and Not let it define my experience, right?
That is something profound that I'm finding within mindfulness meditation.
I think you can do that with prayer.
And I think that's the purpose of prayer is that, well, imagine that you want to engage in a practice that would orient you away from evil and towards the good.
So that's your goal.
Okay, so you can ask yourself, and I would say this is a form of communion with your hypothetical higher self, and perhaps it's through that that you find your relationship with God, something like that, speaking psychologically.
You ask yourself, well, what am I doing that's corrupt and stupid?
That's a prayer.
It's not, oh, I wish I could find my wallet.
You know, when you lose it, you don't pray to God to help you find your wallet.
I mean, I'm making fun of it, but you have to ask the right question.
Well, what's the right question?
How am I stupid and weak in a way that I could change?
And then maybe you ask, well, if I don't want to change, but no, I should.
Well, then you ask yourself, well, how is it that I could take a step forward to wanting to change?
And so you can see, even if you only speak psychologically, you posit an ideal within yourself that you can commune with.
And then you ask that ideal to guide you.
Well, that will work.
That'll work.
Now, it may not be unerring or infallible, but you'll get better at it across time.
And what that might mean is that God speaks more clearly to you across time.
Right.
But again, the absence of spiritual experience within Christianity and other Western traditions, that seems to be an interesting place we're at right now.
So we've established that.
So are you saying that, in some ways, Christianity and other Western traditions aren't fulfilling our fundamental, innate spiritual impulses?
Is that what you're saying?
Because you seem to be, you know, throughout your years...
Well, why would people be leaving the church?
Like, we see these unbelievably...
Impressive, magnificent cathedrals emptying.
Well, there's something wrong.
We're doing something wrong.
Well, something wrong within the church or something wrong within society, right?
The other increased political polarization, the rise of technology, other secular ideas.
Yeah, both, right.
Well, the church is us, after all.
These medieval people spent vast fortunes and unbelievable effort making these incredible places of worship.
They're so beautiful that it's beyond comprehension.
And what's happening inside them is so insipid that no one will attend.
Well, that's wrong.
Look, I learned something when I was a clinical psychologist about talking to my clients.
If it was boring...
It's the same with podcasts.
If it's boring, you're doing it wrong.
There's a lie in it somewhere.
So, you know, we're having a reasonably intense conversation.
This is going well.
We're both engaged.
We're doing it right.
Now, maybe we're not doing it as well as it could be done, but here we are and we're in it.
Well, if that experience isn't being offered by the church, then the church is doing it wrong.
Well, what's right?
Well, I don't know.
Well, maybe I know a bit.
I did a lot of lectures on the Bible, public lectures, and they've been popular.
Can I put my finger on why?
Not easily.
I took them seriously.
I took them seriously, I suppose.
Now, is that to say the church doesn't?
Yeah, it is to say that.
Yeah.
The seriousness actually matters.
Like I took the story of Cain and Abel seriously.
I studied it for years, trying to figure out what the hell it meant.
The story of Adam and Eve, the story of Abraham.
And those things have to be made alive.
If you don't make them alive, then you're doing it wrong.
And as soon as they come alive, then they attract people.
Right.
It seems like we're touching on this disconnect, this difference between religion and spirituality.
They're not the same.
They can be the same, but here we're saying they're not the same.
Well, they need to be melded.
That's the Dionysian and Apollonian marriage that Nietzsche spoke of.
But it's also the place where dogma and spirit...
Look, spiritual experience without structure can make you insane.
Right.
It's very, very dangerous.
But dogmatic structure, bereft of the mysticism and spiritual, is dead.
It's a corpse.
And the proper balance is somewhere in the middle.
And we've known that as a species forever.
I mean, the Egyptians regarded the highest god, and so he was the embodiment of the principle of sovereignty itself.
He was Horus, who was the eye, the capacity to pay attention, allied with Osiris, who was the patriarch.
So it was this living dynamism between lived experience, Dionysian experience even, and intense, emotional, highly motivated, and structure.
Well, that's where valuable religious experience, the most valuable religious experience occurs.
It doesn't tear you into bits, which is the problem with unbridled mysticism, and the problem with psychedelics.
I mean, when psychedelics were reintroduced to our society, it caused a tornado, a hurricane.
We had no idea what to do with them.
And so we made them illegal immediately.
It's like, wow, we don't know what to do with these things.
They've been reintroduced into our culture after an absence of several thousand years.
We have no idea how to deal with whatever they are, and we have no idea what they are.
We have no idea.
I would argue, just as a side note, that the closest thing to psychedelic experience is in meditative practice, primarily mindfulness meditation.
People have talked about this...
Ancient yogis, and Sam Harris talks about this as well, about reaching states of consciousness in consistent discipline practices of meditation that is akin or almost identical to psychedelic experience, which is very powerful.
And that's a different whole conversation.
So you're saying the spiritual absence within Christianity, that's a problem that you're identifying, and that's a big problem you're saying, right?
It's a catastrophe!
It's a catastrophe.
Nietzsche knew this 150 years ago.
He said, God is dead and we have killed him.
We'll never find enough water to wash away all the blood.
So modern Christianity, you're saying, is not centered on spirituality, and that's a problem, just to be clear.
I'm not saying it's not centered on it exactly, and I'm not criticizing it as if I'm the man with the answers or as an outsider.
It's our problem as Westerners, let's say, that our central religious core has been hollowed out.
And it's the fault of everyone.
The church practitioners, the religious authorities, it's their fault.
But it's also the fault of those of us who are, let's say, alienated from the church.
We haven't managed the proper spiritual relationship with existence.
We haven't managed that.
And that's a terrible catastrophe.
Interesting, right.
It's vitally important.
It's more important than anything else.
It's the most important thing.
Right, yeah.
It's just interesting to see you make this observation, which I completely agree with, but you always seem to be a proponent of religion, speaking good about religion, doing lectures and debating Sam Harris about these things while he is identifying problems within religion, yet you now...
Well, the problem with the materialist atheists is they don't leave people with anything.
You know, Dawkins, for example, who I respect, especially, I respect his intellect and his verbal capacity, but...
His conclusion is essentially, well, it's a clockwork universe that's meaningless.
Well, you know, people take that sort of thing seriously.
And it isn't obvious what you do when you're a serious nihilist.
But it looks to me that if you're a serious nihilist, what you do is not good.
It's not good to yourself.
But it's also not that good to other people.
And so...
And to think of all we've left behind, the whole shamanic tradition and its ancient, ancient, ancient roots, and the Greek mysteries and Christianity, to leave that all behind and to say, well, that was nothing but primitive superstition, that's that casual contempt that I was talking about.
It's like, those people weren't stupid.
And what you don't know about religious experience would fill many, many, many books out.
Right, right.
So don't just casually dismiss it.
And perhaps that spiritual experience is preserved within various Eastern traditions, like Buddhism and Hinduism, again, with the whole meditation.
Well, pieces of it are, certainly.
I mean, there's no shortage of Westerners going to the Amazonian jungle to go.
Reacquaint themselves with shamanic traditions.
And that's actually how psychedelics were reintroduced into Western culture.
It was Gordon Wasson and his crew who found magic mushrooms in Mexico, and that launched the entire psychedelic revolution.
We re-established contact with our lost shamanic past.
We have no idea what the consequences of that will be, and no way of formulating it intellectually in a manner that's We don't know what to do with it.
Right.
So you're always a proponent of Judeo-Christian values in our society, of some kind of religious structure that we have, right?
You're always a proponent of that, but right now you're also identifying this fundamental disconnect, this kind of pathology almost within, we're talking about Christianity specifically.
Is that fair to say?
Yes.
Okay.
Do you see that as a disconnect, that you're always sort of arguing in favor of religion when you're debating Sam Harris, but you still identify this pathology that exists?
The father is always dying or dead, and it's always your job to revitalize him.
Always.
You can't leave the past behind.
We are the past.
We're old, as human beings.
We've been around a long time.
We can't just leave the past behind.
So you go back with some humility, and you think, well, we'll sift among the ashes, and if we can find some treasure...
Thank God we need it.
And look, I'm watching people like Lomberg and Matt Ridley.
And I just spoke with Marion Toopey, who runs humanprogress.org.
He's another incremental materialist optimist.
I say this with all respect.
I'm thrilled, as everyone should be, that 200,000 people are being lifted out of abject poverty every day.
But we see that happening.
At the same time, we see this spiritual malaise grip the West to such a degree that we're undermining our own presuppositions.
Right.
And we seem actively involved in this process of destruction.
And I would say, well, perhaps that's partly because these axioms are being challenged by people who are angry for...
For valid and invalid reasons, and we cannot mount a counter-defense.
We're too weak to defend ourselves.
Well, that's not good.
Especially because I do believe that the West...
Got many, many things right.
And I think the evidence for that is clear.
Individual autonomy, even the protesters, when they go out and protest, are acting out the proposition that the West got things right, because they wouldn't regard themselves as autonomous individual agents who have a political responsibility if they weren't saturated in Western thinking.
Right, yeah.
That is the great irony there.
And by the way, have you ever tried mindfulness meditation?
Have you gone down that Eastern consciousness kind of road?
Have you been there?
Or have you not explored that in depth?
I would say yes and no.
I mean, as a clinical practitioner, I did mindfulness meditation all the time.
And I do that during podcasts and interviews.
You do it during interviews?
Okay.
Yes, because I watch.
I watch.
And all I'm trying to do is watch and say what I think.
That's it.
I don't have an ulterior motive in mind, except to pay as much attention as I possibly can to what's happening, and to respond in as untrammeled a manner as I can possibly manage.
Right.
Okay.
So you've thoroughly engaged with mindfulness meditation.
Well, I don't sit by myself in contemplation.
I do it in the way that I just described and try to fall into the conversation.
And that was very useful to me as a clinical practitioner.
And it's been extremely useful, I would say, as a speaker and also as, you know, I'm doing all these podcast interviews and that sort of thing.
And when they go well, they're...
They go well.
And that's why.
It's attention.
I learned from my studies of Egypt, of ancient Egypt, that the eye is sacred, to pay attention.
Not to think.
It's different.
It's a different thing.
Right, yeah.
And ultimately, the barrier between meditating, sitting down and focusing on your thoughts versus living your life, that barrier is artificial, right?
Well, the goal is to be mindful in your day-to-day practices.
Exactly, yeah.
The barrier is artificial between sitting down and practicing versus...
Living your life.
You see people who meditate so much consistently, yet if something irritates them, they're yelling right away and they're screaming on the top of their lungs.
Right.
Well, people ask me sometimes how I can maintain control of myself in provocative interviews, for example, where there's lots at stake.
And the answer to that is what I just said, is that I'm paying attention and I'm doing my best to say whatever is appropriate to that particular situation.
I can do that better sometimes.
You know, I get peevish and irritable when I'm off my feed, let's say.
But when it works, it really works.
Right, yeah.
I guess the thing that I was curious about here, and maybe this is unanswerable to some extent, but I was wondering if you've ever derived any spiritual experience from mindfulness meditation, but maybe that's something that in the future you might try.
Well, I've had powerful religious experiences, I would say, as a consequence of of attentional focus that's like that.
I made this piece of art called The Meaning of Music, which is my logo, essentially, and It took me four months to make it.
I carved it out of foam core.
It's about eight inches thick, about 20 layers thick, and it's about six by six.
And I was trying to understand the meaning of music.
It was an exploration.
And I had an intense religious experience while looking at it and listening to Mozart's 41st Symphony at the same time.
I was completely transported.
It was...
My pupils dilated completely.
It was an overwhelming experience.
That particular experience happened to me three times in my life.
Wow.
Okay.
And that was the consequence, you're saying, of the mindfulness practice?
Well, I kind of opened my mind.
I thought I was looking at this thing that I had produced, which was also a Mandela.
It's a three-dimensional Mandela.
And people who've studied Jung will know something about what that means.
Mandela is a symbol of potential.
It's a symbol of the higher self.
It's a symbol of possibility.
It's a symbol of structure.
I was meditating on this Mandela, which moved because that's how I designed it.
It moves visually like music does and listening intently to music.
Music is intrinsically meaningful.
And what happened was that that sense of intrinsic meaning magnified itself intensely.
And that was the basis of the experience.
And it just knocked me over.
It was a complete transformation of consciousness.
And I thought I was in a different state of mind.
I thought, well, I could be like this all the time.
And then I thought, well, I wouldn't know how to conduct myself if that was the case.
And then it dissipated.
But it gave me a glimpse of something I certainly don't understand, but certainly see.
Yeah, maybe something akin to a psychedelic experience.
Yeah, that's what I was going to say.
And I do want to dig deeper into this intersection of spirituality, religion, meditation, art, this kind of thing.
But I do want to move on to the more important stuff here.
Good luck!
Let's talk about victimhood here.
Victim culture.
So why do you think victimhood is so attractive right now in our culture?
Why are so many young people and also older people identifying as victims along gender lines, racial lines, or just in general too?
There seems to be this push against victimhood.
Personal responsibility, and there's all these psychological and sociological factors at play here that are incentivized within the culture, within the media, within Hollywood, and all these things.
So that's kind of this cultural pathology that I've identified here, and I want to hear your thoughts on that.
Well, you should always start by giving the devil his due, right?
Okay.
Okay, so one source of moral action is empathy.
Clearly.
And we admire and even hold sacred the empathic capacities of a mother caring for an infant, right?
It's a primary religious symbol in many cultures.
Certainly, you see it in Christianity with Mary and Christ, but it's not unique to Christianity.
And any society that doesn't hold the mother and infant as a sacred image is doomed, obviously.
Because that means you don't like mothers and children.
And so that is doom, literally.
So we can say, well, practice empathy.
And you can see that that's as if...
Insofar as morality can be encapsulated in one statement, that's not bad.
But it can't be encapsulated in one statement.
It's too complicated.
There isn't only one dimension of morality, but that is an important one.
And so, well, you can't be too empathetic.
Well, yes, you can degenerate into sentimentality, and you can do too much for people, and you can over-mother them.
So it has its boundaries, but they're very difficult to identify.
And the opposite of empathy looks like predation.
So somebody who's in a car accident, who's going through a difficult time, yes, you want to care for them, be empathetic, but at a certain point, they need that force of self-determination to take action and get better themselves from their physical injury.
Well, that's the tension, isn't it?
And it's the tension that every parent faces.
It's like, well, you have to take care of your infant, but as the infant matures, you retract the care.
And if you don't, the empathy...
The reflexive empathy that you would show towards an infant is downright pathological if you're dealing with a three-year-old, and absolutely counterproductive if you're dealing with a competent adult, let's say.
Somebody who's rehabilitating from an injury or drug addiction, right?
Empathy is not limitless, right?
There are constraints at play here.
And there is some virtue in personal responsibility, obviously, and letting go of empathy.
Yes, well, that's also why we even have two personality dimensions that are separate.
We have agreeableness, which is basically the empathy dimension.
And we have conscientiousness, which is basically the effortful striving dimension or something like that.
And they're both sources of moral virtue.
So back to victimhood culture.
Why is it so attractive?
Why are so many people identifying as victims?
Well, the first part of it is people don't necessarily regard themselves as victims.
The activist types, they tend to regard themselves as spokespeople for the victims.
Well, right.
So they see an ethical, an altruistic, ethical motivation in that and regard it as admirable.
And to some degree, it is subject to the constraints that we already discussed, but those are important constraints.
Mm-hmm.
So, it's just not good enough.
That's the thing.
And it has this marked disadvantage.
And then, you know, there's all the ways that it can be manipulated and shifted and twisted and used counter-productively.
And that's highly probable, unless you have a saint doing it.
But the first level of attraction is, well, it is a pathway to moral attraction.
It is a valid pathway.
And if you don't have a more valid pathway offered to you, then, you know, compassion for the dispossessed is not a bad first pass approximation.
But it's not good enough.
And so, you know, that's maybe why you should go to university.
It's like, well, you've got to figure out what's better than mere reflexive empathy.
And, you know, there's the unearned...
First of all, what makes you think that you're a spokesperson for the oppressed?
What makes you think that you have that right?
Why should anyone take you seriously?
How do you know you've got the message right?
Why do you think you have the solution at hand?
How do you know you're not more dangerous than the problem itself?
How do you know that your dark and unexamined motivations aren't blinding you?
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, that's the issue, but...
You know, as I said, you give the devil his due, and the empathic striving is a valid source of moral endeavor.
Right, yeah.
And we can look specifically on the racial dimension, and maybe this can elucidate some of the underlying cultural pathology that's at play here.
So, in my experience as a young person of color, somebody who's been tormented, bullied for his skin color in elementary school, all things which, you know, I went through a hell of a time in elementary school for looking different and being...
I'm mocked in so many different ways.
And I used to wear a turban on the top of my head as well, you know, being of Sikh background.
And so that was always a point of being bullied and, you know, people saying, you know, Indian people are dirty and, you know, you're brown and, you know, sort of...
Yeah, well, you're going to get sorely tested if you're different because if you look at act like everyone else, you're not a mystery.
But if you don't, then you are a mystery.
And how do children solve mysteries?
Well, that's easy.
They poke at them and see what happens.
So that's what happened to you.
It's like you had a turban.
It's like, who's this?
Well, let's make fun of them and see what happens.
Because if you want to find out who someone is, one way of doing it is by making fun of them.
And if they can take, and I'm not saying this is justifiable, and I'm not saying anything at all about, but generally speaking, the better you are at taking a joke, the less you'll get tormented, all things considered.
And so it is a reasonable exploratory mechanism, although it can go completely out of hand.
But it's understandable.
Yeah, right.
So I would say there is a sign of progress here.
The fact that after elementary school, I wasn't really bullied for my skin color, and eventually I did cut off my hair for various religious reasons.
I didn't really resonate with people.
And, you know, if you hadn't been harassed for being a Sikh, there's pretty high probability that the kids who are prone to bullying would have picked something else about you and tortured you about that.
And it might not have been as horrible as your ethnic identity, say, but most kids are subject to a substantial amount of provocative bullying.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
And just putting aside the religious part of it, which is sort of another area of exploration, just the skin color part of it.
Let's look at that.
So in ninth grade, I remember this one incident.
And the reason why I remember this right now is because I mentioned this in my column from today in the New York Post about cancel culture, about victimhood, about racial transgressions and all these things.
And I remember in grade nine, Being in this classroom where two white boys basically singled me out and they said, you Indian people are dirty and just all sorts of things of using my racial identity as a point of targeting me for my various social issues.
Eccentric behaviors, my various, you know, problems and flaws that I had using race as like...
Yeah, the dirty element, that's really telling because one of the things that regulates our intergroup behavior is disgust sensitivity, not fear.
And this is something everyone should know.
We aren't really afraid of strangers.
However, we are easily disgusted by them.
And that's worse because you destroy disgusting things.
It's disgust, not fear.
It's a major political discovery that's only been made in the last 30 years.
So the dirty element, that's really crucial.
And also, it's a terrible thing to be accused of, right?
You're a contaminating agent.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
Yeah.
And I remember being totally paralyzed in that situation.
It was ninth grade.
All of the other white peers and classmates, they were sort of paralyzed, too.
They didn't want to speak up for me.
And so I left the room crying.
Probably didn't know how.
Yeah, and it was ninth grade, too.
So it was embarrassing to be crying in ninth grade.
Oh, absolutely.
You're a teenager, right?
But so the point of saying that was that, yes, racism exists.
We should acknowledge that.
And racism has impacted my life at the margins, I would say, in various individual incidents.
Obviously, I know of people who are bullied far more, people who are white for being fat, for just being socially awkward, various other sort of things that can be used as targets for bullying.
Yeah, about 75% of children have one observable physiological abnormality that can be used as the focal point for bullies.
Exactly, yeah.
So the point that I want to make here is that, yes, racism exists and it has impacted me at the margins, but this is sort of how I came to be sort of where I am right now.
So last year I started writing about white privilege, intersectionality, The ideas of systemic racism, and I noticed this pathology of like, okay, I'm a person of color.
Yes, I've experienced racism, but I don't identify as a victim, but it's incentivized for me to be a victim, for me to be protesting against white supremacy, of being this victim of systemic racism.
Well, it gives you an easy, as we discussed, an easy pathway to unearned moral superiority.
Which is really attractive because earned moral superiority is unbelievably difficult, right?
I mean, there's nothing more difficult than the attempt to be a good person.
That's hard.
And so if you can just be a good person because you believe the right three things, well, how convenient is that?
And that's another reason for when people do take on the role of victim.
Plus, they can wield a club righteously.
That's an extraordinarily attractive option.
Right.
One of the things that I pointed out earlier in my writing last year, which was so influential and a lot of my articles went viral right away, was that Race is not a barrier to my success.
I live such a privileged life.
Stop telling me that I suffer from racial disadvantage or that other people have white privilege that's helping them get ahead.
I found that to be totally counterproductive and pathological.
Why did you regard it that way?
Because I want to take ownership of my own life.
And there is no supernatural force of racism that's keeping me down, right?
Like I can write essays and publish my work in all these influential places and I get to talk to you here right now and I'm at a fairly young age and I'm doing All these important things.
Race has impacted me, yes, but it's not a systemic barrier.
It's not stopping me from succeeding in life.
But that seems to be the narrative perpetuated by so many white people, especially, that there is this overarching force of racial victimization that's at play.
And so I stepped in.
Yeah, well, I think part of that, too, on the part of the white people, let's say, is that they get to have, and this is something that really bothers me about the radical left, You get your privilege and you get to be morally superior because you're standing up for the victim.
So it's like you get to be privileged and a victim at the same time.
It's like, hey, pick one, okay?
Like, maybe it's just too much to be privileged and a victim at the same time.
And that really...
It's not an effective psychological practice.
It's terribly socially divisive.
And it's unbelievably hypocritical.
You know, anybody who stands up and says, well, you know, I'm a professor.
The system that produced me was so racist or was so prejudiced that it's racist.
It's like, okay, you just admitted you have no moral claim to your position.
Resign.
Yeah.
Now.
Right.
Right.
Otherwise, I wouldn't say shut up, because no.
Right.
People need to talk, and they need to express their opinions, but...
If your statement is that the system that produced you, say, as a professor, is so systemically prejudiced that it's racist, you don't have a valid claim.
You're actually an incompetent fraud.
You've just said that.
Yeah, yeah.
Who's being paid far beyond your competence for reasons that have nothing to do with your ability.
The only...
Truly ethical thing to do if that's true is to stop doing what you're doing and go find a job that you're actually qualified to do.
Yeah, and I'm glad you brought this up here because one of my earliest critics was the editor of my local newspaper here for the Chilwack Progress.
His name is Paul Henderson.
And initially he was critiquing my work and a very progressive guy.
And that's fine, but he disagreed with me rejecting the traditional narratives of white privilege and systemic racism.
And that was great that he was critiquing my work.
But then Then, you know, he was targeting me for being associated with alt-right, that my articles rejecting these racial grievance narratives are alt-right, which is just a euphemism for white supremacy, right?
And one of the things that...
So he wrote this column, I remember, last summer, where it was titled something like, Dear White People, Dear Straight White Males in Our City.
And so many people read this.
And I remember...
I'm reading this vividly.
And one of the arguments that he made was that throughout history and even today, straight white males have The dominant power in our society.
And he's a straight white male.
And so he's saying, it's time for us to listen to people of color.
It's time for us to step down and let them achieve some success in our society.
And the irony was that he's a straight white male saying that and either, like you said, resign for your unearned position or even...
Listening to people of color.
I remember this explicitly in the column.
Listen to people of color.
Listen to their struggles.
And this whole stereotype of people of color being victims, it's like, I'm a person of color.
Does my perspective matter?
And the answer is no.
It's the individual activists.
It's the people who align themselves with left-wing ideologies that align with Well, you know, your status as a minority immigrant to Canada means that you have some things to say to someone like me, let's say, that I might benefit by hearing.
But to think of that as something that's going to constitute an insuperable barrier between us...
And to think about that as fundamentally what you have to bring to the table, that's unbelievably demeaning.
I'm not talking to you because you're young or because you're a racial minority.
But I'm listening to you about your experience of those things.
But that certainly doesn't...
It would be horrible.
It would be horrible if that's...
How I conceived of you.
I mean, the reason I'm talking to you, well, it's because you asked.
That's part of it.
But, you know, you're a bright, young character, and you've managed some accomplishments, and that's kind of interesting to me.
And you have a developing voice.
You're a competent writer.
You're credible, despite your youth, let's say.
And so...
And I wanted to hear what you had to say and what questions you wanted to formulate.
That's why I'm talking to you.
And it would be really something if the only reason I'm talking to you were for reasons that would make you easily replaceable by someone exactly your age and background.
It's like, who cares about you?
Bring in the next young Sikh.
Because they're all the same anyways.
Right, right.
And there's this assumption with these racial narratives that you, Jordan Peterson, as a white man, you have a fundamental advantage in our society because you are white compared to me.
I have a disadvantage because I'm of a certain skin color here, right?
Yeah, well, I probably do have a bit of an edge there, all things considered.
Well, I'm not sure about that.
Well, it might not be true.
It might not be true now.
It might not be true.
I've certainly seen in academia, if you're a white male, a young white male, it's like, forget it.
Forget it.
Your probability that you're going to find a high-end academic job, which is very difficult and unlikely to begin with, is vanishingly small.
And it's not impossible, but you have to be hyper, hyper competent.
So there are places, there's definitely places where maleness and being Caucasian are working against you.
It's definitely the case in academia.
It has been for 25 years, maybe longer.
Right.
I just mean, you know, this idea of white privilege is that because I'm part of the majority culture, I'm never the stranger as long as I stay in my own culture.
And that deprives me of certain experiences, but it's easier, obviously.
So we can leave some residual amount of explanation for success being, you know, arbitrary racial prejudice.
That's fine.
I think it's reasonable to argue about how much of it's there and whether it's flipped around entirely, because it might have by now.
Right, yeah.
And I certainly have seen in organizations, law firms, for example, I worked with a lot of law firms, and if they have a high-powered minority female, they'll bend themselves into knots to keep her, and as they should, because if she's hyper-competent, like, great!
Hyper-competent people are rare, but...
And I've worked with women, Asian women mostly, who faced all sorts of obstacles within law firms.
You know, angry men who were competing with them, getting in their way in all sorts of ways.
So that still exists.
But that was more at the level of one-to-one competition.
The firm itself generally did absolutely everything they could to allow the career to develop.
Right.
Right, yeah.
So it's not universally advantageous to be a minority.
That's one of my arguments.
So, yes, being a person of color in a majority white classroom, yes, I've experienced prejudice because of that.
But in other spaces, being a minority is seen as a benefit, right, when applying for various jobs.
You know, there's so much data on this, too, in the United States of being...
Of being Black and being...
No, you definitely have an advantage if you're a female and you're applying for an academic position.
That's clear and it's been that way for a long time.
With SAT scores, there's affirmative action in place.
If you're Black and you're qualified and you have...
You meet the sort of minimum criteria.
You have a much higher chance of being admitted to Harvard, Yale, big law firms, big tech, Google.
You have a much higher likelihood of being accepted or getting the job compared to a white person standing with equal credentials.
If you're Black or if you're a minority, you have much more likelihood of getting...
Well, unless you're Asian and trying to get into Harvard.
Yeah, Asians, yeah, that's where...
Well, that's why I see this so interesting, because I think a lot of this intersectional nonsense is going to be Caucasians, especially male Caucasians, they're not in the argument.
They can't solve the argument.
This is going to be settled amongst the minorities.
That's how it looks to me.
Right, right, yeah.
With victimhood, we've talked about the cultural part of it.
This is the crucial part, asking about your experiences here.
I'm going to segue into you now.
Clearly, you're not 100% recovered right now, as you've said.
I think you've said 40% before.
5%.
Right now, I've had a good week, a much better week.
I was diagnosed with sleep apnea only three weeks ago.
I was waking up I was stopping breathing 25 times an hour.
Wow.
And so I have no idea what...
But since I have a machine now that regulates my breathing, and now I'm praying that this is actually the problem.
But I've felt much better since I've had this machine.
Right.
And the data suggests that you continue to get better over about a 40-day period.
It's only been about a week.
So, you know, maybe finally the finger has been put on at least part of it.
And so...
Yeah, and I've been in excruciating pain, with unbelievably high levels of anxiety.
Unbearable.
And then I also had a movement disorder, which I wouldn't wish on Hitler himself for 10 minutes.
It was absolutely intolerable.
Right.
And I just talked to my wife about all this this week.
I'm bitter.
I'm angry.
I'm resentful.
All of those things.
I shake my fist at God.
It's like, what's the justice in this?
Trying to scour my conscience to see what I've done wrong.
And so that's all victim.
That's all victimhood.
But it's not helpful.
I'm doing my best to drop that.
You know, life is unfair to many, many people.
And I think, well, this is a special kind of unfairness.
And it probably is.
But, you know, that's not rare.
Special unfairness is not rare.
Mm hmm.
Tolstoy said, you know, every happy family is happy the same way, but every unhappy family is unhappy in their own unique way.
And I think unjust suffering is like that.
It's arbitrary and unfair.
None of the victim responses have been productive for me.
I've tried to fight them off.
So the temptation, the attraction is always there, you know, because of what we face.
You know, how can you, your parents died in an automobile accident, you're 13.
How can you avoid feeling like a victim?
You are a victim.
You are a victim.
Yes, yes.
But then you think, well, I'm a victim, and therefore my anger, resentment, hostility is justified.
And really, it's anger at God, fundamentally.
Resentment at its core is anger, or at the conditions of being, let's say, which, for all intents and purposes, is equivalent psychologically to God.
You shake your fist and say, how can things be this way?
And fair enough.
Like, I understand that, but it's not helpful.
And it does me damage.
I can see that, even though it's very difficult to escape from it.
You know, when I can barely stand up, which is not an uncommon experience, and I can't even imagine how I'm going to get through the next hour, much less the next day or the next week, which I don't even think about because it's like an infinite landscape of pain.
That anger and resentment, they spring to mind instantly, but it's not...
There's nothing in it that's helpful.
Yeah.
Okay, so you just basically answered the question because we talked about this before this podcast, which was how do you defeat the temptation for victimhood of developing that mindset?
So you're continually struggling with this internal psychological turmoil of, like you said, battling with God and dealing with this unfair, just extraordinarily unfair and And painful situation that you're in, to put it mildly, even.
Yeah, I mean, I've looked at my contribution to it, at least insofar as I could.
I took benzodiazepines, and that seems to have been ill-advised.
I'm very sensitive to benzodiazepine withdrawal.
I mean, when I took them, I was really sick.
I was insomniac for...
A long time, weeks, three weeks.
I was freezing.
I couldn't get enough clothes on.
My blood pressure was so low, I couldn't stand up.
I was like terror, in absolute terror.
I have no idea what happened.
And then I went to the doctor and was prescribed this medication.
And I slept, and I felt better.
And I didn't think much of it.
My life was very stressful at that point.
And that turned out to be a very bad decision.
But I... But, but, it turned out to be a bad decision.
I didn't do it without cause.
I was genuinely ill.
And so severely, I didn't know if I'd be able to return to work or conduct any of my, uphold any of my responsibilities.
So, you know, I've looked at that.
Why did you start?
Oh yeah, you were really sick.
Well, why did you continue?
Well, your life was stressful and you didn't I wasn't aware of how dangerous this could be for some people.
Right.
So you've been at this extremity of battling with the victimhood mindset, right?
Because dealing with what you're dealing with is infinitely worse than dealing with racism or...
Well, maybe.
I mean, racism can get pretty bad, you know?
Sure, sure.
I mean, sort of like my experiences, like dealing with racist people in society, that's one aspect of it.
Or other forms of suffering in your life, of being broke, of being...
All sorts of other things.
You've been at the extreme state, based on what you're describing.
Well, it was extreme enough for me.
If it was any more extreme, it would have killed me.
Right, exactly.
I couldn't believe many days.
Many, many days in the last two years.
I truly believed that I would die before the end of the day.
Wow.
I just couldn't see how I could possibly...
Be that impaired and live.
It turns out you're a lot tougher than you even want to be sometimes.
Yeah, you're right about that.
A lot more resilient.
I mean, people are very, very tough sometimes.
I don't mean morally or anything like that.
I just mean you're not that easy to kill.
So how did this unimaginably difficult period in your life, how did it change your...
Your perceptions of spirituality or your relationship with God, religion?
How did that change?
Because that's something that's really important because some people, like I described earlier, when they're suffering a lot in their life, when tragedy happens, they tend to use religion as a kind of crutch.
So people who don't normally pray, something bad happens, then they go to religion searching for answers.
You know, why am I suffering?
Yeah.
Other people, when they're experiencing tremendous hardship, they lose their faith.
They're like, my mom died in a car accident.
Where the fuck is God?
Does God exist?
Why am I experiencing this?
And even if he does exist, why should I be his friend?
Exactly, yeah.
So you can go sort of both ways, either becoming more religious in some ways or becoming nihilistic, cynical, misanthropic about society.
So I'm curious where you lie in that spectrum.
Well, What I learned was that even though I had already concluded intellectually that there was nothing good about nihilism and bitterness and resentment, that it was unbelievably dangerous and that it isn't justified under any circumstances.
And then I entered these extreme circumstances and I thought, well, this justifies it.
It's like I can't see how anybody could be in this situation and not shake their fist at God and in outrage.
But I really, really thought it through and talked to my wife about it.
And all I could conclude was that that was wrong, is that it didn't justify it.
There was nothing good in it.
There was nothing helpful in it.
All it was doing was hurting me.
It was interfering with whatever good I still might be able to do in the world.
You know, the last chapter of my new book is Be Grateful in Spite of Your Suffering.
And that was a chapter I, you know, worked on and was doubtful about and returned to and was like thoroughly what irate about and felt hypocritical about and so on and so forth, the full gamut of emotional responses.
It's the right thing to do.
To be grateful.
And I'm not claiming this for myself.
It's tightly allied with a kind of existential courage.
It's a decision.
Undoubtedly, there are people who've been pushed farther in the domain of pain than me.
Burn victims, people suffer unimaginable agony, and I would never dare to compare my pain to pain.
Someone else's extraordinary pain, it was certainly far worse than every day that I spent in the last two years was worse than any day I had before that, by a huge margin.
So for me, it was...
Well, like I said, if it had gone any more extreme, I can't imagine that I would have lived through it.
Okay, so the first conclusion was, you're still under those conditions.
You orient yourself upward, and you try to do good in the world.
If you fall prey to resentment and anger and hostility, however justified it is, Not even however rationalized, but however justified.
Even if an objective observer would say, well, no wonder you feel that way.
It's not helpful.
So there is no good in it.
That's what you said.
I see no good in it.
But then I wonder, like, I would agree with you.
I'm inclined to agree with that, that there's no good in that, but...
But there's the old cliched adage about going through hard times, revealing certain silver linings and certain benefits that you may not see in the moment.
So are you open to that possibility of, in the future, some I guess this thing we already discussed, I would say, is of benefit.
Whether that benefit justifies what I went through, I would say, so would I repeat what I went through and still going through for that matter?
I mean, I've only been feeling somewhat better for five, six days.
I wouldn't repeat it to learn that.
Maybe you're still learning something.
Maybe there's still something that's to come, some realization.
I mean, I'm not saying that's the case.
I know you're not.
Well, God only knows, right?
I mean, it wasn't until this last week that I really thought that through and realized that however extreme my pain, which was diffuse, it didn't justify resentment.
It didn't justify ingratitude.
It certainly didn't make those things work.
But then the other thing that I did realize was...
And people have commented on that being a difference between this book and the first book.
The second book is more communitarian.
There's less humor in it because I just wasn't up to humor, you know.
But there's more emphasis on...
cooperation and the social role in ethical behaviour.
And I think that's partly a consequence of me observing How far above the call of duty my friends and my family went while they were caring for me.
And not only my friends and my family, but medical personnel and the general public who've been...
Well, the general public.
My viewers, readers, and listeners, let's say, have been unbelievably loyal and supportive.
And so I've seen this outpouring of love...
From, you know, at the micro level within my family, and from my friends, and from people I don't know, but who I communicate with, that's, well, that saved my life, for sure.
There's no doubt about that.
Multiple times, many, many times, and has really, you know, I saw my father-in-law years ago, sort of a man-about-town kind of guy, He's extroverted and gregarious and amusing and a real character.
Everyone in my small town knew him.
He's still alive.
His wife developed prefrontal dementia and he took care of her over 15 years.
Right, and you mentioned this in the book.
Yeah, he did a stellar, an admirable job.
I mean, it just floored me how...
How he did that with no complaints and allowing help and loving her throughout her lengthy, lengthy decline.
That was staggering to me to witness.
I thought, I'm not sure I could do that.
It isn't obvious to me that he's doing something that I'm capable of doing.
And I certainly felt that way about My friends, many friends, my immediate family, my kids, my wife, my parents, but my sister-in-law, an old college friend who's still walking with me virtually every day, and then relative strangers that we hired to help To help with my care, also.
Yeah.
I'm in a state of jaw-dropping admiration for the capacity of people to love.
Yeah, amazing.
So I saw it more deeply into that.
Right.
Now, I'm not saying that made it all worthwhile.
It's like, no, no, not so far.
I certainly wouldn't have drawn that conclusion, but that's not the point.
Right.
Here I am, this guy.
I'm a clinical psychologist.
I got tangled up with benzodiazepines.
I'm talking to people about getting their house in order and things collapsed around me.
The irony is almost unbearable.
That was part of what made this so difficult.
It was not only the pain, the physical pain, but this absurd paradox that And yet, people have forgiven me.
Right, yeah.
Right, yeah.
Right now we're jumping.
I'm amazed.
I'm amazed.
You know, we say that culture has no capacity for forgiveness.
You know, you hear that about cancel culture and about people that are being eradicated for making one mistake and we have to learn to forgive.
It's like, I experienced a lot of forgiveness.
And then again, you know, when I've been attacked in the press, when people have gone after my reputation with all guns blazing, that's for sure, you know, Our lives, my family's life was punctuated over the last five years with two week periods where I've been attacked for something accused of something like, you know, Wanting the government to distribute nubile women to undeserving men to preserve social harmony.
All these things that look absolutely reprehensible being compared to Hitler, etc, etc.
There's always a two week period after that blows up where we have no idea if I'm done at that point.
And yet...
The support that I've received has been continuous.
And so why that is, I don't know.
I think I have hypotheses.
I mean, I include myself in the audience of reprobates to whom I'm lecturing.
I don't assume that, you know, I abide by all these rules.
They're targets for attainment.
And hopefully that...
You know, has protected me at least to some degree against the perception of undue moral superiority.
Yeah, you sort of answered my first question, and then you answered one of the other questions that I was going to ask, which was the irony here of the guy who we're supposed to go to for advice, for self-help, wisdom, somebody who's supposed to teach us how to put our house in order, has his house completely collapsed, at least psychologically speaking.
Physically too!
And so this is what I wanted to pose to you, and you've sort of answered this, you know, from a devil's advocate perspective.
Many people on the left were saying this, especially many prominent journalists, critics, intellectuals, like, this guy is a complete fraud.
Like, he went through, like, all this stuff.
He's completely destroyed.
He can barely, you know, get his speech in order and talk.
Like, so much suffering going on.
And so why should we read his book about getting our own lives in order?
Maybe this guy should take a year or two, get his life in order, fix whatever he's going through, and then we can listen to his wisdom afterwards, but not right now while he's dealing with this immense hardship.
And again, I'm not saying that, but that's one of the main criticisms of your new book, without even reading it, is that you're trying to teach the world, you're trying to impart your values onto the world, yet you have gone through this Period where you've become completely destroyed and petrified by these psychological, physical problems that you've dealt with.
Yeah, right.
Well, believe me, I've tortured myself about that plenty.
Yeah, and I'm glad you see that irony.
You said there is an irony there.
Yeah, well, you have to be pretty blind not to see that.
I mean, it's been a source of constant torment.
And I was very apprehensive about writing this book, or certainly about releasing it.
But...
But what's your response to that critique?
people i'm encouraging what's your response to that critique though that because you're going through this much because you well if we have your you don't have your house in order so to speak in one way why should we listen to you that's the well i guess the first thing would be is that it isn't self-evident that whatever happened to me was a consequence of not having my house in order i mean if someone has cancer you don't come up to them and say well you know if you
if you would have just you know acted more ethically that you know you deserve what you get You've got this cancer.
It's obviously your fault.
It's like, well, whatever happened to me, whatever my illness is or was, wasn't as clear-cut in some sense as cancer.
So the edges are fuzzy, but...
But...
Everyone is susceptible to be cut off at the knees at any moment.
That happens.
And you can protect yourself against that to some degree by putting your life in order and by living properly.
But that doesn't mean that you're fully protected from it.
We all die.
We all get sick.
And so if we can't communicate with anyone...
then we can't communicate with anyone.
And so does that mean we're also radically imperfect that we have nothing to offer?
And no, it means we're also radically imperfect that we should be careful, but we're, Yeah.
And I have my inadequacies.
And, you know, you can say, well, look what he did.
He should have known better.
It's like, that's possible.
It isn't self-evident to me what I did wrong.
I've had this propensity for depression forever.
It appears familial.
It's affected all my male relatives on my dad's side pretty much very, very intensely.
Yeah.
And my children, my daughter, not my son, he seems completely free of it.
Thank God.
Oh, so you've had this for a while.
This is a natural...
Well, I've had this propensity for depression for a very long time, right?
Probably from the time I was about eight years old, maybe earlier than that, a long, long time.
Right, yeah.
Does that relate to you sort of being more serious in general?
Lots of people have said, we've never seen Jordan Peterson laugh a lot.
There was that one time where you laughed really hard on Theovan's podcast, and people were like, oh, that was cool.
Well, you know, it's funny because I'm...
Look, since I've been launched into the public eye, let's say, or launched myself or whatever, since I've become notorious, my life has been very complex.
And so the...
The levity has declined.
The playfulness has declined.
And it's really unfortunate.
I'm a very playful person.
All I did with my kids was play with them and laugh with them and joke with them.
When I get together with my son and my daughter and we're healthy, which is quite rare because my daughter's very ill very much of the time.
All we do is laugh and make fun and play.
You know, when I tried to bring that to my lectures, before making them public, let's say, you know, I leavened my seriousness with jokes.
I can't tell a joke to save my life, but I can say funny things.
And I like talking to comedians.
And so if you had known me before, you would have thought that I was one of the most playful people you'd ever met.
But, you know, since 2016, things have been complicated, to say the least.
I mean, my daughter was extremely ill, my wife was extremely ill, and we thought for sure she was going to die.
She had a cancer that only 200 people, only 200 cases have ever been reported, and every single one of those people died.
Wow.
And then she had terrible surgical complications that appeared that they were going to be fatal.
And so she lived on the edge of life and death for five months.
And that was just after I got back from Switzerland, being in the hospital with my daughter to have her ankle replaced.
Yeah, wow.
And then at the same time, I had this meteoric rise to public health.
Notoriety, fame, which hasn't slowed down at all.
In fact, seems in some sense to be accelerating.
I mean, we use social media a lot.
And so we're accelerating it, I suppose, to some degree, trying to communicate and to learn all these technologies.
But, you know, my reputation was on the line.
In an international way, dozens of times and generally, what I've observed in people's lives is if something like that happens to them once on a local scale, that's enough to traumatize them.
And that happened to me like every week, it's happened to me every week, essentially, in multiple countries, for like five years.
So, you know, so people can look at that and think, well, he should have managed it better.
It's like, well, okay, fair enough.
You try it.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
See how you do.
I don't even want to say that.
I don't want to say that.
Because I wouldn't wish this on anyone.
Right.
I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't think...
I wouldn't wish it on anyone for any reason.
And I'm not complaining.
Like, I mean...
And you know, you might also ask, well, why do you think you have the right to continue?
Because really, that's the question.
Why do you think you have the right to continue?
It's like, well, I don't necessarily think that.
I certainly doubted it.
Profoundly.
I thought, well, I'll get back on my feet.
So what did I do first?
Some podcasts.
It's like, well, do people find this useful?
Will they find it useful?
Yeah.
How will they respond?
Well, positively.
Okay, I'll do another one.
How will they respond?
Well, positively.
So I think, well, I'm either going to curl up and die, or I'm going to continue.
And so I'm continuing.
And you still have your wisdom intact, like as we're talking right now.
Well, that's up to people to decide.
I say what I believe to be true.
And if people find it useful, well, good.
But they're deciding that you still have that intact, right?
You're still a useful figure despite...
Well, that's what they tell me.
I watch the comments and they say, well, you know, you are okay.
And I listen to...
I talk to my parents.
Actually, I talk to my parents every night.
They're in their 80s and they keep an eye on what I'm doing and they're encouraging, thank God.
And, you know, I'm doing what I've done before.
I'm doing what I've always done.
I'm trying to figure things out.
And to communicate about that.
And lots of people are along for the ride.
And an ever-growing number.
I mean, we have...
Translation slated for 13 languages, all be launched this month.
And we're using social media to break down all the talks into one minute, two minute, five minute segments.
And we have a real unbelievably qualified and able person doing that, communicate with young people on TikTok and all these social media platforms.
Yeah.
And if people find it useful, it's up to them to decide.
Yeah.
Okay.
We have two loose ends here to tie.
We have a couple of things that you've touched on which were related to my question.
So in the book...
We have to stop real quick.
It's much later than I thought.
Oh, wow.
Totally lost track.
Well, that's good, isn't it?
But it does mean that we'll have to wrap up.
Okay.
Should I end off on, I guess, one of the questions?
Sure.
That I have?
Okay.
Sure.
Yeah.
So in the book, you state that you're frequently plagued with doubts about the role that you play.
Many people see you as this kind of avatar that's science-oriented, religion-inspired, that is supposed to help us with our own lives.
And you've touched so many people, obviously.
And I can talk about so many people personally, one person in particular.
That I met last year, a 17-year-old girl at the time.
She was going through an abusive relationship, and she was listening to your lectures during that time.
Eventually, she escaped this relationship through watching your lectures and mustering that self-determination, that confidence, and that assertiveness to make that decision of not being psychologically held hostage to this person.
Many people I tweeted this out last night.
Many people have this caricature of you having a male-dominated audience for men 25 and older or whatever, but this was a young girl who was deeply, deeply touched by you, and I just remember it vividly, and I never forget it.
So...
How do you make sense of this role that you have?
Do you consider it a moral responsibility to empower people, to give them the psychological wisdom to take action and find the self-determination?
Not to give it to them, but to help them find it.
That's your role you consider that to be?
Yes, that's my moral obligation.
That's everyone's moral obligation.
But not everyone, though.
Like, for you, it's different, because you're an author, you're a public speaker, right?
You have the role now to tell your wisdom on millions of people, right?
Very different from anybody else.
I hope to engage in a collaborative process of finding wisdom with millions of people.
Yes.
Well, I have my PhD.
I taught at Harvard.
I'm an educated person.
I'm a product of the best universities in the world.
I'm the inheritor of the Western tradition.
I'm a defender of that.
So you think you have that responsibility to keep on going?
No, I know.
I know I have that responsibility.
Right.
Clearly.
I mean, that's what you do with your privilege.
Right.
Right?
You turn your privilege into responsibility.
Yeah.
Okay.
What else would you do with it?
Be ashamed of it?
Hide it?
Right.
Right.
Especially because you're- Punish other people for it?
Yeah.
And you're helping so many people too, right?
So it's working, right?
It's not just some people are listening.
So many people, young girls, older men, people in their marriages, people who are young, people like me who have listened to your stuff.
And in large part, you know, me being in this place, you know, being 20 and writing for some of the biggest publications right now, it's been through listening to your lectures throughout high school and learning so much.
Learning so much, right?
It's because of you.
Even just from an intellectual perspective, like listening to your lectures on Marxism, postmodernism, quoting you in my university essays and my lectures.
That must have gone down well.
Yeah, yeah.
But in the Collette essay, I had your video.
Oh, there's an interesting...
Eric, my producer, 1,064,000 females have watched our videos on YouTube within the last 28 days.
Way to be, Eric.
That's a great stat.
That's incredible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But yeah, just to finish off, you've inspired me in so many ways, man.
Just intellectually, in so many ways.
It's a privilege.
I'm so happy to hear it.
Good work, man.
Keep it up.
Who knows who you could be?
You're only 20.
You get your act together, man.
You're an unstoppable force.
Yeah.
And I thank you for that.
My pleasure.
So please always think about that.
Always know the amount of people that you're touching is truly near infinite.
So you should know that.
Thank you.
Worked great, man.
Thanks.
You bet.
My pleasure.
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