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Sept. 18, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
26:43
Why JORDAN PETERSON Considers Himself a "TRADITIONALIST"

This is a classic interview with Michael Knowles and Jordan Peterson when they discussed parasitic Ideologies and why Jordan Considers himself a "traditionalist." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Dr. Peter, Peterson, thank you for joining us.
My pleasure.
Thanks for the invitation.
Absolutely.
So I want to dive right into it.
I really admire you and I really admire all of your work.
And I agree with very much of what you say.
Let's begin with ideology.
You have said that ideology is a parasite.
That's a sentiment with which I thoroughly agree.
You've explained the conflict between ideology and traditional strains of thought in the West.
I think most people, even on the right, even conservatives, would find that statement startling.
What is so bad about ideology?
Well, it provides a one-size-fits-all answer to every question.
There's a variety of problems with that.
It's a one-sided, biased, one-size-fits-all answer.
The bias depends on your particular ideological stance.
In some ways, biases themselves aren't as bad as you might think because they're not that distinguishable from heuristics, which are simplifications that you need to operate in the world.
We can't operate in the world considering it in all of its complexity.
We have to simplify it.
But there's dangers in the simplifications, and then there's dangers in a consistently biased simplification.
And ideologies are consistently biased simplifications.
Now, they're right sometimes.
You see, part of the reason that the Western democratic systems work is because they allow people who have specified biases to compete in an open market of biases.
A liberal exchange of ideas.
Exactly, exactly.
So, you know, sometimes the right is right.
Sometimes the extreme right is right.
Sometimes the left is right, so to speak, and sometimes the extreme left is right.
The extremes aren't correct, let's say, very often.
Certainly not the extreme left.
Sorry, go ahead.
But there are situations that arise where less generally applicable principles may sporadically hold.
But anyways, the point is that in an open exchange of ideas, you get the opportunity for multiple people to put forward their biased heuristics, their biased oversimplifications, and to engage in the kind of debate that raises the resolution of the question and answer at hand.
And that's necessary because the environment is shifting underneath you all the time.
And so what was right yesterday, what was correct yesterday isn't necessarily correct today.
And so you have to continually engage in negotiation and discussion to stay in the middle, let's say, in the correct place.
Yeah, not to formalize too much, not to abridge too much.
And you bring up there are ideologies on the right.
We see them, they change, some pop up, some fall out of fashion.
But there has been a question for a long time that conservatives have debated.
Can a real conservative be an ideologue?
Or should conservatives ground their view of the world in something more substantive than an ideology?
Well, I think genuine thinkers should ground their worldview in something more substantive than an ideology.
And one of the things that I've studied for a very long period of time is the relationship between, let's say, ideologies, or belief systems for that matter, to the underlying psychological substructures that the psychologist, psychiatrist Carl Jung described as archetypal.
And so you could think of these archetypal ideas Sub-structures as the grand stories by which people conduct their lives.
And they're structured in a very particular way.
They're very balanced stories.
So, for example, in a typical properly constructed archetypal narrative, you have a representation of nature or chaos or the unknown.
Those are symbolic categories that are quite similar.
They sort of represent What exists beyond the safety of the campfire and the town and the city and familiar territory.
You can think about it as the archetype of unexplored territory.
And it's negative and positive at the same time.
It's negative because you better watch your step when you aren't where you think you are because you'll die if you're not careful.
And that's the negative element.
And so nature can be a vicious, brutal force and everyone who's alive and thinks knows that.
By the same token, it's also the place, the unknown, and nature is the place that you can go and explore and find new and wonderful things.
Go west, young man.
Exactly.
That's an interesting one to bring up because we'll return to that.
We'll return to that because there's a counter-narrative to that.
So nature has its positive and negative element.
It's often represented with feminine symbols, by the way.
Mother nature, let's say.
And then culture has the same structure.
There's like the tyrannical king and the benevolent king.
And the tyrannical king is the part of culture that crushes you and destroys you and mangles you and forces you to be a cog in a wheel.
And the benevolent part is the part that educates you and disciplines you and shelters you and teaches you to speak and imbues you with all the facets and traits that a civilized person would have.
And again, a story that doesn't involve both of those forces is incomplete, even though they're contradictory.
And then on top of that is the individual.
And in an archetypal story, the individual has a heroic element and an adversarial element.
And so in Christianity, that's represented by the, say, eternal conflict between Christ and Satan, if you're thinking about it psychologically.
It's reflected in the story of Cain and Abel as well and in typical hostile brother stories, very common narrative tropes.
And so a comprehensive view of the world offers a representation of all of those elements.
Whereas an ideology, what an ideology does is slice that representation into a partial formulation.
So, for example, when feminists talk about the patriarchy, they essentially assume that the social world is only a negative force.
It's only tyrannical.
Well, it is tyrannical, but it's not only tyrannical, right?
Try as I might, we cannot force an only tyrannical patriarchy on them.
That's right.
That's exactly it.
There's too much pushback, right?
And I mean, to think about the social structures in the West as fundamentally tyrannical means that you're either, well, ideologically possessed to the degree that's almost incomprehensible or that you know absolutely nothing whatsoever about history or the current world.
And those may not be mutually exclusive.
You may be ideologically possessed and ignorant.
Well, and you said go West, young man.
Okay, so let me unravel that a bit.
So...
That's the frontier narrative.
So the frontier narrative is untamed nature, positive culture, positive individual.
So it's the heroic individual spreading the benefits of benevolent culture into the wild, untamed wilderness.
Okay, so that's an ideology and it's a powerful one because it draws on these underlying archetypal symbolic themes that are deeply motivational and meaningful to people.
But the counter-narrative emerged to that.
Let's say that was the narrative that settled the United States.
Okay, but the counter-narrative emerged and that's the environmental narrative.
The environmental narrative is benevolent nature, toxic culture, adversarial individual.
So this essential ideological environmental narrative is terrible human beings that are cancer on the planet are spreading their toxic patriarchy and raping mother nature.
And I think it's no coincidence, by the way, that the environmental movement as we see it today really sprung up in the 90s in the wake of the fall of communism.
There was the major ideology of the left that crumbled before our eyes, and now this new ideology of environmentalism seems to have largely taken its position of prominence.
Well, see, that's an interesting observation.
No, I don't disagree.
I don't disagree, and I think it's actually one of the things that really pollutes the Argument about environmental sustainability.
Obviously, exploiting the planet, let's say, in a way that produces unsustainable externalized costs is a bad idea.
Clearly.
Now, the time frame matters, but it's clearly a bad idea.
The problem is that it's almost impossible to engage in a discussion about environmental sustainability without also simultaneously engaging in a discussion that's anti-capitalist.
And so for me, as soon as an environmentalist becomes anti-capitalist, then I can't trust them as an environmentalist because I don't know if their environmentalism – it usually is a cover for their neo-Marxism or another ideology.
That's precisely right.
Yeah, it just pollutes the damn problem and it's really a bad – well, because you can make a very strong case for a conservative environmentalism.
A conservationism, sure.
Yeah, the word is right there.
That's exactly it.
Well, exactly.
And, you know, the conservatives, part of the conservative ethos is try not to do anything too stupid.
Whereas you could say that the liberal ethos is try actively to improve things, you know, and that's great.
And act as stupidly as you may, yeah, in order to do it.
Well, the problem is that on the liberal end of things, and this is a temperamental problem, is that Many ideas that are designed to generate solutions to problems actually generate more problems, right?
And so an informed conservative says something like, well, yeah, there's a problem there.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves and presume that we actually know how to fix it in a way that won't just make it worse.
Right, right.
And for me, I'm kind of temperamentally predisposed to be more on the liberal left end of things from a personality perspective because I'm high in a trait called openness, which is a good predictor of, say, liberalism and more left-wing thinking, although I'm also high in conscientiousness, which is a good predictor of more right-wing thinking.
But what really convinced me To become more of a traditionalist, I would say, was this realization of unintended consequences, is that it's very, very difficult to make alterations to a complex system in a manner that doesn't make the system function worse instead of better.
And so I think, generally speaking, that especially when you're perturbing extraordinarily complex social systems, that you should be firmly aware of the limits of your intelligence and the probability of your biased interpretations.
Of course.
And I love that you've brought up this term traditionalism.
I actually made the case a couple days ago that I think Donald Trump himself, maybe counterintuitively, exhibits many aspects of traditionalism in the Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott sort of sense of things.
And I wonder if now, as you've noted, channeling Nietzsche, that at a certain point in our culture, God died for our cultural purposes and ideology replaced it.
Where are we now?
Are we in a post-ideological age?
Is God striking back against Nietzsche and his followers?
Well, that's a good question.
Well, the thing is, one of the things that's really necessary to note about Nietzsche is that I'm paraphrasing, but the full phrase is something like...
God is dead, we have killed him, and we'll never find enough water to wash away the blood.
And that was associated with thoughts he had at the same time, that the consequence of the death of this traditional value structure, the idea of a transcendent moral structure, and ultimate moral responsibility, would be replaced by two things.
One would be a kind of hopeless nihilism.
And the other would be a swing, especially into leftist totalitarianism, which he directly predicted, as did Dostoevsky, although that wasn't the only logical totalitarian outcome.
Of course.
So, I mean, he had that nailed.
It's actually one of the most amazing prescient predictions that I've ever encountered.
You, in your...
Description of ideology and your description of traditionalism, of symbols, of the symbolized, of the logos as transcendent and divine.
If I didn't know any better, I would guess that you were a Catholic.
You sound an awful lot like a Catholic, and I wanted to know if you had any thoughts about that description.
Well, it's hard to tell, you know.
Well, if you aren't yet a Catholic, can I be your godfather eventually?
Well, the Orthodox, I've been contacted by a number of Orthodox Jews who think that I'm pretty much an Orthodox Jew, and A lot of Orthodox Christians who think that I'm pretty much an Orthodox Christian, and also a number of Mormons who think...
Or no, sorry, not...
No, who were they?
Jehovah's Witness.
I can't remember.
No, it wasn't Jehovah's Witnesses.
I don't remember.
Scientologist.
It's been funny.
It's because I've been contacted by people from a lot of different denominations, and they've said the same thing, which is that I'm putting the finger on what they believe is at the core of their belief system.
Mm-hmm.
I've been looking at this primarily from a psychological perspective.
I'm not denying or even commenting on the underlying metaphysical realities, technically speaking, because it's outside of my domain of competence.
I'm not denying their existence or making a case for their existence in my public presentations.
But one thing I have discovered is that there's something really fundamentally important about the idea of the Logos, because the Logos is the idea that the individual The soul of the individual and the value of that soul transcends the value of the state.
And that's an amazing proposition.
I think that's the central Western proposition is that the state itself has no final dominion over the individual.
Certainly right.
We may appeal to heaven as General Washington once put on a flag.
And the reason that that's so psychologically significant as far as I'm concerned is that the state, and this has been Realized by a number of cultures in a variety of different ways.
The state has a tendency to become too static, right?
State and static are obviously the same word.
And without the dynamic consciousness of the individual continually transforming and expanding the boundaries of the state, the state collapses into a type of totalitarian rigidity and then everyone dies.
So if you don't keep the state subservient in some sense to the free consciousness, and that's the moral consciousness of the dedicated citizen, then everything goes to hell and very, very rapidly and almost literally.
Because, I mean, if you look at places like, you know, Stalinist Soviet Union, and especially in the 1930s, and Mao's China and Cambodia and these places where these totalitarian systems got the upper hand, I mean, to describe them as hellish is an understatement, I would say.
Yeah, it's a world of lies.
It's a world of lies that wreaks havoc and hell.
Well, that's the other thing that's so interesting, is that the really informed commentators on those totalitarian states have drawn a very direct causal path between the proclivity of the individual citizen to falsify their own experience, so to lie by commission and omission, and the emergence of these totalitarian states.
Wow.
What they essentially make isn't an economic case or a political case.
They make a psychological and ethical case.
And that's especially well documented.
Well, Viktor Frankl does a pretty good job of that in Man's Search for Meaning.
And Vaclav Havel made the same sort of connection.
So did Gandhi.
But I think it's been best laid out, well, partly by Tolstoy, who was a huge influence on Gandhi, but most particularly, I would say, by Solzhenitsyn in his documentations of the Gulag Archipelago.
1700-page case is that the reason that the totalitarian state got the upper hand in the Soviet Union was fundamentally because too many citizens decided that it was in their best short-term interest to lie about everything, including their own suffering.
To lie to themselves.
I think you put it one way.
I may have read this from you or from someone else that to the utopian, suffering is heresy.
The acknowledgement of suffering is heresy.
I know.
Well, that's a really great definition of hell.
Hell is the place where you're in pain and you're punished for admitting it.
You can't even admit it to yourself.
Of course.
And we have all these discussions about which pronouns we should use, which bathrooms people can use.
They seem to be really highly politicized for precisely this purpose.
They say it's trivial.
It's just a little lie that we're telling each other.
What's the big deal?
But that is the big deal.
When we live in enough lies, when we lie even about our own suffering, you end up in a totalitarian state.
Well, and you're the totalitarian.
And you are, yeah, that's precisely right.
You are the oppressor, right.
See, I mean, one of the things that Solzhenitsyn documents in the Gulag Archipelago is his realization that he was his own tyrant.
You know, and it's so fascinating because he wrote the Gulag Archipelago when he was in the prison camps, and he basically memorized the book.
And that's, you know, to memorize a 1700-page book is really something that is...
It's inconceivable, especially a book like that.
And he didn't write the book until he was struck very hard by the realization that his ethical faults had directly contributed to the situation that he found himself in.
And interestingly enough, too, he said that he came to that realization in large part, although not solely, by watching the very few people that he saw in the prison camps resist the The lie, the demand for lies on the part of their jailers.
He said most of those people had a deeply rooted religious faith, and that seemed to enable them to refuse to cooperate with the authorities when that cooperation was demanded, which would also preclude them partaking in such roles as being camp trustees.
Because in the gulag system, interestingly enough, Most of the positions of tyranny were held by the prisoners themselves, which is – now, there is a great definition of hell.
Hell is a prison where all the prison guards are prisoners.
That's precisely right, which actually I suppose is the Christian definition of hell, certainly Milton's definition of hell.
This does bring up another point, which is – If we are to look at the man in the mirror and take responsibility for ourselves and recognize that much of our suffering and our oppression comes from within and our own ethical failures, then I have to ask, this has been a meme going around the internet for a long time, do I really have to clean up my room?
Well, you don't have to, but you have to suffer the consequences.
That's not a great alternative.
Well, that's the thing, is that, you know, it's...
In many situations in life, you get to pick your poison, right?
And that's really worthwhile knowing because it isn't that there's a pathway that you can take that's going to make your life, well, let's call it simple and happy because life, whatever life is, it's not simple and happy.
Certainly not those things, right?
No, it's complex and tragic and you can ennoble that with a certain mode of being and that mode of being has to be associated with A willingness to abide by the truth.
I don't even really think about these things as ethical commandments in some sense.
And it's something that's also struck me as I've become more and more familiar with biblical writings is that most of the time they're simple statements of fact.
So imagine...
You know, reality has a structure.
It's complex, and you can tell it has a structure because it punishes you very badly when you do some things you shouldn't do.
Like, you know, toddlers learn very rapidly not to stand up underneath tables when they're first learning to walk.
Don't touch the burner on the stove.
Exactly.
And the table is always hard, and the burner always burns.
And so you can learn to avoid those things because they're, you know, they're cut and dried.
They're walls.
No, unfortunately, I've lost my train of thought.
That's fine.
When I imagine the suffering of every time I push the burner, that also makes me lose it as well.
I would like to...
Oh, yes.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Yes, okay.
Well, the thing is, is that...
Those elements of suffering are built into the structure of the world.
The structure of the world is real.
And the problem with lying is that you replace accurate perception of the structure of the world with a wish, an arrogant wish.
Like the wish is that you could have things the way that you want them.
On my terms.
That's exactly it.
The arrogant part is on my terms and I'll get away with it.
And it's such an absurd proposition because the probability that you can bend the structure of reality in your favor Without having it snap back and hit you in the face, which is, I suppose, in some sense a definition of God in a perverse way, it's zero.
In my clinical practice, and I swear that this is the case, and I would say also in my private life, observing people over long periods of time, I have never seen anyone get away with anything.
It always comes back to haunt them in one form or another.
And they may not realize or understand the causal connection.
Sometimes that's what psychotherapy is about.
But the causal connections are there.
And that's the sort of thing that Solzhenitsyn detailed in the Gulag Archipelago.
It's so weird because he was a victim of Hitler because he was on the front lines.
And then he was a victim of Stalin.
And I mean, if you want to make a case for being a victim...
He had a rough go of it.
That's for sure.
Right.
But instead, he decided that he was going to take the responsibility on himself.
And become one of the greatest men of the century, right?
Well, that's the thing that's so incomprehensible, is that that book really was...
There was a few death blows to the integrity of the communist system, but from an articulated and...
And verbal perspective and intellectual perspective, nothing topped the gulag archipelago.
It took the substructure out from underneath any moral claim that communism had.
Just a glimpse of reality does it.
I know I said that was the last question, but I actually have one more.
This is a very practical question.
For young people or people who are wandering around in these shallow ideologies and this sort of nihilism and living in lies, whatever you want to call it, what advice would you give to them?
Is it go worship God?
Is it read the Bible?
Is it accept the tragic fact of life?
How can they pull themselves out of the mire and wash all that blood off of us that Nietzsche said we'd never get off?
Well, you know, Carl Jung said something that is quite similar to Solzhenitsyn's prescription which was that with a sufficient moral effort psychoanalysis was unnecessary.
I would say that the best advice that I might give to people Is that they try to stop saying things that make them weak, which is a variant of trying to learn not to lie.
Because if you pay attention, if you pay attention, Nietzsche said, who among us has never sacrificed himself for the sake of his good name?
And what he meant by that was, well, you know, you're in a social circumstance and you act in a manner that's different than how you actually feel, or you refuse to put forward your viewpoint, or you can't, or, you know, you falsify yourself.
And Some of that, you know, is akin to being socialized, let's say.
But put that aside.
I'm thinking about the falsification part.
It's like, if you watch yourself very carefully, if you watch what you say, and I would include your nonverbal behavior in that category, you'll see that certain things that you say put solid ground under your feet, and certain things turn the ground that you're standing on into quicksand.
And you can feel that in an embodied sense.
It's something Carl Rogers, who's a great psychiatrist, psychologist, I realized quite, I guess, probably in the 50s or the 40s, and that there was an embodied sense.
And in some sense, that would be equivalent to the voice of conscience.
And so you know when you're betraying yourself.
You know when you're weakening yourself.
And if you start to pay attention to that, you can learn to stop doing that.
It's interesting, because I was just reading Socrates' Apology, which is the description of the trial that eventually ended in his death, and his reaction to that, his heroic reaction to that.
He talked about the thing that differentiated him from other people.
And he said, well, he had this internal voice, which he called a daemon, which obviously is related to the word demon, but it wasn't that.
It's an internal spirit, an internal voice.
And he always listened to it.
And it never told him what to do, but it told him what not to do.
And so if the internal voice objected to something he was doing or saying, he would stop.
He would stop doing it.
He would stop doing it.
He'd reformulate it.
And so the reason he didn't defend himself at his trial, interestingly enough, is because his internal voice, and leave, because really they just wanted him to get the hell out of Athens because he was a troublemaker.
So they warned him long ahead that he was going to be tried and found guilty, essentially.
And his friends told him to leave, and he went and consulted his daemon, and it said, no, don't leave.
And he thought like, well, what the hell?
What do I do now?
Yeah, exactly.
And then he thought it through.
And he thought, well, he was getting very old.
And maybe the gods had granted him the opportunity to step out of life gracefully and put his affairs in order and so on.
You know, I mean, you can think about it as a rationalization, but it was Socrates that we're talking about.
So I wouldn't do that too quickly.
I must say, my internal voice is telling me not to end this interview for several more hours, because it is just so illuminating, and I could talk to you all day long.
But unfortunately, the voice of Ben Shapiro in the next room saying that we need to close off the show is...
The one that writes my check.
So unfortunately, we'll have to end it here.
Dr.
Peterson, thank you so much for coming on.
This has been a wonderful discussion and I hope that we can have you back.
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