Jordan Peterson Responds to Critics and Sets the Record Straight on His Controversial Advice
Dr. Jordan Peterson: professor, author, disruptor and controversial figure. He’s a Canadian psychologist whose YouTube lectures and podcasts have taken the internet by storm with more than 50 million views. He often explores – and ignites – fiery discussions on faith, personality, self-empowerment and identity politics. In this interview, Dr. Oz sits down with Dr. Peterson to unravel the truth behind his insights, and face some of his most debated arguments. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
People who think in a collectivist manner or people who are playing identity politics games that insist that your group identity should be your hallmark don't like what I have to say at all.
And they have the reasons.
I'm not a fan of identity politics types.
I think it's a very, very dangerous game.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Jordan Peterson, professor, author, disruptor, and controversial figure.
He's a Canadian psychologist whose YouTube lectures and podcasts have taken the internet by storm with more than 50 million views.
He often explores and ignites fiery discussions on faith, personality, self-empowerment, and identity politics.
Today, Dr. Peterson is here, unraveling the truth behind his insights and to face some of his most debated arguments yet.
Thank you for joining us.
Thanks for the invitation.
So, it is...
An interesting group of insights that you offer us, and I can enter it in many ways, but let me just start with, for me, perhaps the most obvious, which is, what is it that you're saying that's resonating with so many people?
What itch are you scratching?
I think there's probably two.
We've had a long conversation in our culture about the necessity for self-esteem and happiness.
And that's not what I'm talking about.
I tell my audiences and my readers very straightforwardly that life is difficult and that there's a lot of suffering in it and that you have to learn how to conduct yourself in the face of that.
Problem with the pursuit of happiness is that when life's storms come along, happiness disappears, and then you're left with nothing.
And so you need to pursue something that's deeper than happiness.
And if happiness comes along, well then, hooray for you.
You don't want to despise it because it's fleeting, but it's much better to pursue things that are meaningful than things that make you happy.
It's deeper and it orients you more appropriately and it keeps you centered in your own life.
It makes you more useful for your family and your community.
So that's one thing.
And it's a relief to young people to know that the baseline conditions of life are difficult, but that you can still prevail.
So it's a funny message in some sense or a strange message because on the one hand it's somewhat pessimistic.
Now I talk about suffering and malevolence also, but I also emphasize the fact that despite...
Despite that being the base conditions of existence, people are tough enough to prevail.
So that's one element of it.
The other element is the necessity of responsibility.
So a lot of what people find in life that provides them with a sustaining meaning is a consequence of not the pursuit of rights or the pursuit of happiness or the development of self-esteem, but the adoption of responsibility.
And the more responsibility, in some sense, the better.
Responsibility for yourself, for making sure that your life lays itself out like it should.
Responsibility for your family, responsibility for the community.
It's people who take responsibility that are the ones that you admire.
And that's the right pathway through life.
That's where meaning is to be found.
And I think that's probably the crucial issue, is that identification of a profound relationship between responsibility and meaning.
And for many of the people that I'm talking with, It seems like that's the first time that that's been articulated for them.
So speaking about responsibility and meaning and how to make sense of a world where so many people feel isolated, I'll come back to that, that seems so helpful.
And yet you've been a lightning rod in many ways with a lot of harsh comments, especially in the print media.
What is it that your critics are arguing?
Well, I got embroiled in some political dispute, I would say, in my home front in Canada when our government introduced some legislation that purported to be about compassion, which to my way of thinking was about compulsion with regards to speech.
And so that's tangled me up.
But I also think that people aren't necessarily that happy...
With a message of personal responsibility when they're really interested in the mechanics of social change.
Now, my sense is that, well, life is unfair.
Social structures are unfair.
The arbitrary way that illnesses...
Distributed into the population is unfair.
But despite that, the best level of analysis for rectifying that in a practical sense, but also in a psychological sense, is this level of the individual.
And so people who think in a collectivist manner or people who are playing identity politics games that insist that your group identity should be your hallmark don't like what I have to say at all.
And they have their reasons.
I'm not a fan of identity politics types.
I think it's a very, very dangerous game, particularly because it makes us tribal.
And tribal people are very dangerous.
As we degenerate into our tribal groups, the probability of violence increases, as far as I'm concerned.
That's what the anthropological data would suggest as well.
So, the collectivist types don't like me very much.
Clinical psychology.
It's a challenging profession.
You chose it coming out of a rural town in central Canada.
How did that advance your life journey?
What in your life has inspired you to do what you do now?
And especially to take some of the public steps now that are drawing criticism to you, which is always painful.
Well, I've always been obsessed with totalitarianism and authoritarian governments, whether they're on the right or the left.
For years, decades really, I spent almost all of my free time Thinking about what happened in Nazi Germany and in Russia during the Soviet era.
But also in Maoist China.
There were other places as well.
Trying to understand how it was that we could have got off the rails so absolutely terribly.
And I started studying that at the collectivist level, I would say.
Looking for political reasons or economic reasons.
But as I investigated further, those levels of analysis became increasingly...
They weren't providing the answers that I wanted.
I think partly because I was really interested in the notion that there's something to learn from what happened, say, in Nazi Germany.
But there's something to learn at an individual level.
That's my estimation.
I don't think that there were innocent masses of people led astray by a single malevolent leader.
I don't think the fundamental motivations for what happened in Nazi Germany were economic.
And I don't think they were in the Soviet Union either.
As I read more and more about the situations, I realized that the proclivity of individuals to avoid responsibility and to lie, especially about their own lives and about their own experience, were really the reasons that those systems went so far astray.
Now, there were other reasons as well, but those were very important to me because I also thought that The proper lesson in the aftermath of something like Auschwitz is how do I ensure that I live a life such that if I was offered the opportunity to do something terrible by omission or by commission that I wouldn't do it, that I would have enough strength of character to resist.
And so the lessons there for me were psychological.
And that taught me an awful lot about, well, the role of the individual.
People like Viktor Frankl, for example, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, which is a perennial classic and a great book, insisted that a large part of the reason that Germany went off the rails so badly was because individual Germans were so willing to falsify their own experience.
And Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote the Gulag Archipelago, the best document on what happened in the Soviet Union, also made exactly the same argument.
So I got interested in the psychological causes of catastrophic governance, let's say.
And that taught me a lot.
It taught me about responsibility, about the responsibility of the sovereign individual.
And you know, we have an idea in our culture, it's a very powerful idea, that each of us Is of intrinsic value, but that associated with that value is a responsibility.
And we have a responsibility, let's say, for our own integrity and for that of our families, but also of the state.
Because otherwise we wouldn't have the sovereign responsibility and right to vote.
Our whole culture is predicated on the idea that each of us are sufficiently significant so that we can entrust the destiny of the state itself to our decisions.
It's like, well, I believe that.
And I think that that's a correct idea, which is also why I think that systems that are based on that idea function so well like our Western systems do.
But that's a responsibility that has to be taken with dead seriousness, because it means that the good things that you do in your life are truly good and they matter.
They ripple outward way more than you think.
But so do the things you do that aren't good, including the acts of deception that you engage in, perhaps above all else, which would include your willingness to evade responsibility or to push it off to someone else or to play the short term against the long term.
Let me unwrap us a little bit because you're touching on a bunch of things and I think they would all benefit us.
So first of all, let me say I appreciate that you actually put some of your thoughts down into two books, two books that I've read.
The latter is a best-selling book right now.
It's actually number four selling book in the country, 12 Rules for Life, Anecdote to Chaos.
And I am curious how you put that all together.
And let's start off with the basic, which is what's it all about?
What's the goal of life according to some of the more recent pieces you've been writing?
I would say that the goal in life is to conduct yourself so that life improves.
At least so that undue suffering is forestalled.
But more than that, it's to constrain malevolence and suffering to the degree that that's possible.
But then also to work for a positive improvement in things at every level.
And that's how you should orient yourself.
So I saw something you wrote, actually it's in the book in part as well, is to repeat actions that are worthy.
Mm-hmm.
Yes, noble and worthy.
Noble and worthy, yes.
So you sort of figure out what you should do and then just do it, which I think that's an achievable goal.
Most people would think that's laudatory.
That takes me to the next point, which is what's the meaning of life?
I think the meaning is to be found in that.
And as you put things together, and as you take responsibility for things, meaning emerges from that.
And so it emerges from that the same way it emerges from a symphony, in some sense, you know, because a symphony is composed of layers of patterns and they're all working harmoniously together.
And they speak directly to people of meaning, which is why people love music so much.
I mean, every form of music does that.
And it's a model for proper being, which is the placing of all the different levels of reality into harmonious relationship with one another.
And meaning emerges out of that naturally.
And meaning is actually an instinct.
This is another thing that people don't understand, and it's a case I've been able to make, because I know a fair bit about how the brain works.
The twin hemispheres of your brain interact to guide you through life, which is a truism in some sense.
You use your brain to guide you through life, but your brain does that fundamentally by instilling the proper things that you do with a sense of meaning.
And that meaning is, it's not something that's just a surface.
It's not on the surface of the world in some sense.
It's the deepest instinct that you have.
It's associated with a phenomenon that Russian neuropsychologists discovered back in the 1960s called the orienting reflex.
And the orienting reflex is what orients you towards things of interest.
And that happens unconsciously.
And so if something happens around you that's of significance, often something you don't expect, say something somewhat chaotic, you'll orient towards it and that attracts your attention.
And then as you investigate what that is, that's associated with the sense of meaning.
And if you put what you're investigating into proper order, then that meaning continues to reveal itself.
So you can use meaning as a guide to proper being.
But you have to also be very careful to conduct yourself honestly if you're going to do that.
Because...
If you conduct yourself dishonestly, then you pathologize the mechanisms that orient you.
I'm thinking about, in my own life, how I've tried to apply some of these insights.
If I just try to be a little bit better today than I was yesterday, along the lines that you're speaking to, try to create that symphony, but be a little better at it today than yesterday.
And like everybody watching right now, not compare myself to somebody else, but rather compare myself to the future version of me.
Is that a rational way?
That's a rule.
That's rule four, right?
It's rule four.
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
Well, it's not only...
But I think it's also practical.
And one of the things about what I do, including my book, is that I'm always trying to take high-level abstract truths, you know, fundamental truths, and to make them concrete and practical so that you can implement them in your day-to-day life.
Because it's the connection between those...
Abstractions and practical action that really cements their meaning and makes them comprehensible.
And this idea of incremental improvement is a great one.
Now, if there are things about your life that are bothering you, things about the world that are bothering you, then you want to decompose them into solvable sub-problems.
And you do this, if you have a child, this is the sort of thing that you do naturally, right?
Because you want to set your child a challenge that's sufficiently challenging to push them forward in their development and So that makes it meaningful for the child.
That puts them in the zone of proximal development, which is where proper maturation takes place.
They'll find that intrinsically meaningful.
You want to make it challenging, but also with a reasonable probability of success.
And there's an art to that.
So you want to set yourself a task that's difficult, but not so difficult you can't attain it.
And then what happens is that you step up improvement across time, incrementally.
And there's also a certain element of humility to it, right?
Which is...
Don't bite off more than you can chew.
Don't set grandiose goals, but incremental improvement will get you a tremendous distance.
I'll be right back with Dr. Jordan Peterson.
We've got lots more to talk about.
When I'm on the stage, I've often said that pain is inevitable.
You're going to have pain.
How much suffering comes in that pain, you actually have a fair amount of control over.
You can't make it go away, to your point.
It's part of life.
Your thoughts around suffering, that you began to touch on, have been incredibly provocative for a lot of people.
Wildly debated.
I think in part because in our modern world, we don't like to acknowledge that kind of suffering can afflict us.
We think something's wrong with us if we have that kind of suffering.
So how is it productive to focus on suffering the way you do?
Well, there is something wrong with us if we're suffering.
There's something wrong with the world because it's an indication that things aren't set in the order they hypothetically could be set if there's undue suffering.
And so that is a call to action, and it's a painful call to action.
No, but it's a universal problem.
Suffering is built into the structure of existence in some sense, and the fact that you're suffering doesn't mean that there's something...
Isolated about you that's at fault, right?
Which is an important...
This is why the doctrine of original sin was actually quite useful, because everyone makes mistakes and everyone falls short of the glory of God, let's say.
It speaks of original sin, if you don't mind.
And this is, again, all the monotheistic religions share this, but it exists in other traditions as well.
Well, it's a way of universalizing everyone's felt sense that they don't live up to their responsibility properly.
Because you're not all you could be.
And unless you understand that that's everyone's problem, every single person has that issue, then it's easy to become discouraged and crushed by that.
And the major advantage, I think, to making a case very strongly that one of the fundamental realities of life is its suffering, is that it's actually a relief to people to hear that.
Because they suspect it.
Well, they know it.
But no one's forthright about it.
It's like, yeah, life is suffering.
Okay, fine.
So where does that leave us?
Well, here's where it leaves us.
It turns out that even though life is suffering, if you're sufficiently courageous and forthright and honest, let's say, in your approach, and you don't shy away, what you'll find is that there's something within you that will respond to the challenge of suffering with the development of ability that will transcend the suffering.
So the pessimism is, yeah, well, life is rife with problems at every level.
But the upside is, if you turn and confront that voluntarily, that you'll find something in yourself that can develop and master that.
And so the optimism is nested in the pessimism.
And that's extremely helpful to people, especially people who are struggling because they think, oh my God, life is so difficult.
I don't know if I can stand this.
There must be something wrong with me.
Does anybody else feel this way?
And you can say, yes.
Everyone feels that way at some time.
And it is as bad as you think, but you're more than you think you are.
You're more than you think you are.
And what I really like about this, too, is it's very much in keeping with the clinical data.
So, for example, what you do as a clinician, as a clinical psychologist, as a psychiatrist, as any...
Mental health professional who's well-trained is if people are afraid of something, afraid of something that's standing in their way as an obstacle, like maybe you're trying to develop your career and you're afraid of public speaking.
Well, I could try to calm you down about your fear and protect you from the challenge that would be associated with public speaking.
You say, well, you never have to do that.
Or I could say, no, no, look.
You have to learn to present yourself more effectively in public if you're going to develop your career.
And you're afraid of it.
So let's break down what you're afraid of into 10 steps or 20 steps until we can find a step that's small enough so that you can actually master it.
Let's assume that with three years of diligent practice that you could become a competent public speaker, at least one that isn't terrified.
With five years you could become an expert.
And let's decide how relevant that is to your future prosperity and thriving.
And then let's assume that if you...
Break it down properly and take it on step by step in this incremental way that we discussed that you'll actually master every single bit of it.
And the thing that's cool about that is all the clinical evidence shows it works.
And not only that, that's actually how you learn in life.
When you bring a child to the playground and the child is apprehensive about making new friends, you say, okay, well, look, kiddo.
Stick around me for a minute or two and just watch what's going on.
And the child will calm down.
Say, okay, now go five feet away.
Just go out there a little bit and just see how it goes.
And stay out there as long as you can.
And if you need to come back for a hug, then no problem.
So then the child can go out ten feet.
They come back.
Say, okay, well now, maybe just go over there and watch those kids.
And the child will go out and then come back.
And so that's it.
The child's going out to where they're afraid.
Seeing that they can master it, and then coming back.
So this seems so self-evident that I'm left wondering, well, did people know this 100 years ago?
This issue of taking responsibility, which I think is part of the pain that people feel, because...
It's not something we expect a lot.
People don't realize that it seems to help a lot in most scenarios.
You sort of own it because you control your destiny.
So there's this wisdom we hadn't forgot.
You spoke about original sin.
These are stories that are thousands of years old, Adam and Eve, right?
These are constructs that are archetypal to us, are fundamental to who our species is, and somehow it seems to slip from us.
Well, you know, knowledge is coded in different ways.
So, a good example, someone who's a good example acts out for you how you should be.
And a good story portrays that dramatically.
But an articulated representation tells you exactly why it explains it.
And so, some of this needs to be more articulated than it has been.
Because we've become detached, in some sense, from our underlying examples and our stories.
Partly because they've been criticized so much.
But I think we're at a point where developing this more articulated knowledge is necessary.
Just so I make sure everyone's clear on this, what I'm taking away is, it's a balancing act between the rights you deserve and the responsibility that you must take.
And if that balances off in society...
And we do seem to focus a lot on people's rights, which is instinctive to who we are, but we often don't match it up with the responsibility that comes along with that.
Which is exactly why I think that what I'm talking about is falling on receptive ears, is because you actually cannot have a prolonged discussion of rights without having an equally prolonged discussion of responsibilities for a variety of reasons.
First of all, The actual reason that you have rights is so that you can discharge your responsibilities.
It's not the other way around.
It's like you're granted rights by everyone around you.
No, it's not granted exactly.
It's part of the purpose of your rights in some sense is so that you can be given an autonomous space That's protected, in which you can manifest what's necessary about you in the world that's a contribution to it.
So I have to leave a space for you so that you can make your contribution for yourself, so you can take care of yourself, so that you can shoulder responsibility for your family, and so that you can serve the community the best way that you can.
And I don't want to set up a society that will interfere with that.
And then there's the association that we already talked about between responsibility and meaning, which is absolutely crucial.
And so the responsibility element is more important than the rights element as far as I'm concerned, or it certainly is at this point in time.
And people know this.
They instinctively know it.
And yet, the role of the victim...
Which is a painful role to have because something bad happened to you to be a victim.
But it's something that society struggles with.
So what about people who feel like they're a victim?
They're right.
They're victimizers too.
Everybody is a strange mixture of victim and victimizer.
Lots of terrible things happen to people that aren't justifiable in some sense.
You know, well, illness strikes people randomly.
I mean, not entirely randomly, obviously, but there's a large random element in it.
Where you're thrown into existence as a consequence of your birth.
Existentialists, especially in the 1950s, talked about that all the time.
They talked about it as thrownness, that you're sort of thrown into reality with your particular set of predispositions and weaknesses.
And then there's going to be times in your life where things twist in a manner that's unfair to you, that you're not getting your just desserts.
But that goes along with all sorts of Unequally distributed privileges as well.
And so that's the arbitrary nature of existence.
But you can't allow those sorts of things to define you because it's not that useful strategically.
When you're playing a card game, you're dealt a hand of cards.
Well, what do you do?
You play the hand the best you can.
Why?
Because all the hands are equal?
No!
Because you don't have a better strategy than playing the hand that you're dealt the best you can.
And that doesn't even mean it'll be a winning strategy.
But because people don't always win, sometimes we lose, and sometimes we lose painfully, and sometimes we lose painfully and unjustly.
That's not the point.
The point is you don't have a better strategy, and neither does anyone else.
And then it's also not so obvious how privilege and victimization are distributed.
You know, if you take someone who's doing quite well in life, And you scratch underneath the surface, you generally don't have to scratch very far until you find one or more profound tragedies of the past or perhaps of the present.
No matter how well protected you are in the world, you're still subject to illness, you're still subject to aging, you're still subject to the dissolution of your relationships, the death of your dreams, death itself.
So...
Vulnerability is built into the structure of existence.
Now, if you start to regard yourself as a hapless victim, or even worse, an unfairly victimized victim, well, then things go very badly sideways for you.
It's not a good strategy.
You end up resentful.
You end up angry.
You end up vengeful.
You end up hostile.
And that's just the beginning.
Things can get far more out of hand than that.
So strategically, it's a bad game.
It's better to take responsibility for the hand that you've been dealt.
You've got no better protection in life than doing that.
We'll be back with more from Dr. Jordan Peterson.
This is where a lot of folks in the modern West get unsettled.
Because we have been brought up to believe that we need to be compassionate to each other.
And you point out that sometimes that compassion, I don't know if it encourages weakness or it's another word for weakness.
And I'd love if you could open that up for me because it is the kind of discussion that gets folks really unsettled.
Feeling sorry for someone is not a moral virtue.
You know, morality is much more complex than mere reflexive empathy.
So I would say, when is reflexive empathy useful?
That's easy.
You're a mother.
Your child is under six months old.
Reflexive empathy is the right reaction.
And I think that that's why it's such a powerful, motivating force as well.
You know, a child under six months old is always right.
The child's in distress, always right.
You're wrong.
The child's right.
No matter why the child is distressed, it's your problem, and you should do something about it, and it's not the infant's fault.
Right.
Okay, now, we have a very lengthy dependency period as human beings, and that means that infants...
30, 40 years for something.
Well, well, yes, exactly, exactly.
And so, because of that intense dependency, that empathic circuitry has to be very, very powerful.
but it can easily be utilized in a domain that's outside of its proper purview.
And unreflexive empathy is not a moral virtue.
And just because you feel sorry for someone, you are not a good person.
Now, that might be a subcomponent of being a good person, but it's very frequently the case that complex problems require sophisticated, complex planning, thinking, and analysis, which is why we invented science, for example, which is why we invented sophisticated social policy and all of that.
And it's certainly not the case that everything that's good in the medium to long run looks so good in the short term.
I mean, you think about when you're disciplining a child.
Which you have to do, because one of your responsibilities as a parent is to produce a child, help produce a child who is disciplined and who's socially acceptable to everyone else, which is your fundamental responsibility.
Whenever you discipline a child, you cause short-term distress for the benefit of the medium to the long run.
And that runs contrary to reflexive empathy.
You need more than empathy to get by in the world.
So it's unsophisticated thinking to assume that, first of all, that reflexive empathy towards those who are hypothetically unfairly victimized constitutes a moral virtue.
It's not that simple, and it can be very, very dangerous, because you can undermine people by inappropriately feeling sorry for them.
It's not helpful.
So, as I was listening to a bunch of the different talks that you've given, I was caught off guard by a comment you made in a series on the Bible.
And this is an important issue because a lot of folks read the meek shall inherit the earth and have a belief that it means the weak will inherit the earth.
Certainly what I thought.
And you stunned me by arguing that That the word meek didn't really mean what we thought it was.
I looked at a bunch of different translations.
Yeah, and my conclusion was, well, you know, words get translated multiple times and they shift their meaning across time, and so ancient texts are hard to interpret, and it requires a fair bit of study.
But my interpretation was those who have swords and know how to use them but choose to keep them sheathed will inherit the earth.
And that's a much better idea as far as I'm concerned because it means that you have a moral obligation to be strong and dangerous, both of those.
But to harness that and to use it in the service of good So it's associated with a complex set of ideas.
But that principle right there is a stark differentiator of you from much of the material that I read.
Generally, it's purely about compassion.
You use the word victimhood, but a lot of folks do feel it's a virtue, to feel a story for others, because usually behind that is, I'll do something.
Virtue is not that easy.
No.
That's the problem, is that we wouldn't have to think if empathy guided us properly.
But it doesn't.
It guides us properly in some very specific conditions.
It can also make us very dangerous because, and there's good experimental literature on this, if you're very sensitive to an in-group's claims, whatever they might be, that makes you very hostile to perceived out-group members.
In-group, out-group, people within your tribe versus outside your tribe.
Well, within whatever group it is that you're identifying with at that moment.
You know, so empathy drives that in-group identification.
It's like, okay, well, what about the out-group?
Oh, those are predatory.
Those are predators.
We better be hard on them.
You know, it's a mother bears compassion that gets you eaten.
So we can't be thinking that empathy is an untrammeled virtue.
There's no evidence for that whatsoever.
The psychoanalysts knew this perfectly well as well, when we were still wise enough to attend to their more profound realizations.
And that's the motif of the devouring parent.
The devouring mother is a more general trope.
And that's someone who will do absolutely everything for you all the time so that you never have to rely on yourself for anything.
That's not good.
No, there's rules.
For example, if you're dealing with the elderly in an old folks home, here's a rule.
Never do anything for one of your clients they can do themselves.
Why?
Because they're already struggling with the loss of their independence.
And you want to help them maintain that independence as long as possible.
And that might mean sitting by while someone struggles to do up their buttons, for example.
And this is the same if you're maybe helping your three-year-old dress themselves.
It's like, yeah, yeah, you can put on the buttons a lot faster.
Let me help you with that.
It's like, no, you struggle with that.
You master it.
And I'll keep my empathy to myself.
Thank you very much.
So that I can help you maintain your independence.
And that suffocating mother is Ursula.
That's right.
In Little Mermaid.
Yes.
So these motifs still sneak into our culture.
Sure.
Why?
You see it in Sleeping Beauty as well in the Disney movie where the evil queen plans to keep Prince Charming locked in her basement, fundamentally, chained up until he's so old he's useless.
And she's the force that stops him from making an alliance with the young woman and having his life.
I'll just keep you chained up here where you'll be safe.
It's like, no, you don't need that.
What did Freud say?
I think it was Freud.
The good mother necessarily fails.
Because as your child emerges, as your child develops, you're a perfect mother up until six months.
You take care of your child's every need.
Somewhere between six and nine months, the child starts to crawl around, starts to become a bit autonomous, starts to be able to do little things on his or her own.
You back off.
Every time the child steps forward, you step backwards.
And maybe you step backwards a little faster even to motivate your child to step forward.
And then what you're saying is, it isn't you I care about.
It's who you could be.
And see, that's another thing that I'm talking to young men and young women about.
It's like, it isn't you I care about.
It's who you could be.
You think, well, that's pretty harsh.
It's like, not when you're talking to 18-year-olds.
It's like they have their whole life ahead of them.
Whose side should you be on?
The 18-year-old kid who's confused.
Oh, you're okay the way you are.
It's like, no, you're not.
You're not even close to okay the way you are.
You haven't even started.
You're not who you could be physically.
You're not who you could be spiritually.
You're not educated to the degree you could be.
You could really be something, man.
You've got 60 years to work on it.
Get the hell at it.
That's way better.
That's a way more positive message, even though it's got that strange harshness about it.
Because it's judgmental.
Every ideal is a judge.
You can't get away from it, right?
Or with it.
You put something up as an ideal that it stares down at you and says, you are not what you could be.
Every great piece of art does that.
And to tell young people, it's like, no, no, you're not okay the way you are.
That's why we have universities.
That's why we have training programs.
It's like you don't know enough to go out there and change the world.
You're not out there Waving placards around and telling people how to behave.
Get your act together.
Learn some skills.
Educate yourself.
Learn how to speak.
Learn how to conduct yourself.
Learn how to stand up.
Make yourself a force in the world.
There's way more to you than you think.
You appreciate why that message would resonate with some but scare the heck out of others.
You scare the heck out of everybody.
No, that's what they say.
Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.
There's real truth in that.
See, I think, and this is what scared me.
I learned from studying Auschwitz and the terrible things that I studied for many, many years, that I was responsible for them.
And I believe that.
Yes, because it comes down to individual integrity.
All of these things.
If the state is corrupting around you, that's on you.
It's your responsibility.
You think, well, how can I take on that responsibility?
It's like, be more than you are.
So how could you not be afraid of that?
Well, of course you'd want to shy away from that.
But the alternative is far worse.
It's far worse to let things degenerate.
Like you have a chance, you have the opportunity to contend with the structure of reality and to set things right.
You can do that if you take it on voluntarily.
And that's a terrible burden to confront suffering and malevolence, especially given the degree of malevolence.
It's a terrible thing to confront.
The alternative is worse.
Let things slide.
You just see where you end up there.
At least you have a fighting chance if you're a contender, right?
You're in the ring, and you can do it.
That's the thing.
That's what makes me so fundamentally optimistic about people, is that the problems that confront us are most infinite in their catastrophic consequences.
But there's something within us that's even greater than that.
And so that's the fundamental reality.
You don't get to that either unless you start with what's so terrible.
Say, life is rife with suffering and injustice.
And we make it worse with our malevolence.
It's terrible.
Okay, well that's horrible.
Who can withstand that?
It's like, yeah, well if you look inside that you see that something beckons and what beckons is the possibility of what you could become if you confront that.
And that's what we need to know.
And that's, I think, integrally tied up with our most Fundamental religious convictions.
We know that people have an indomitable divine spirit.
How do you call that forth?
Well, by challenging it.
It's not going to come out without that.
You're not going to be who you could be without pushing yourself to your limit.
Because why wouldn't you be?
It's not like it's easy.
You have to be compelled in some sense.
You have to be challenged.
And that's why you do your children no favors by overprotecting them.
Quite the contrary.
Why does that message make you so emotional?
What were you like at age 18?
You're in Saskatchewan.
Alberta at that time, yeah.
Well, I was thinking about the sorts of things that we're talking about now.
I've been thinking about them ever since I can remember.
But, you know, I've got better at thinking about them across time.
But I was...
I had a lot of the problems, I suppose, that the typical 18-year-old would have.
I drank a lot.
I came from this little town in northern Alberta.
Heavy drinking.
I started drinking when I was 14. So I was quite a partier.
I was confused existentially, I would say.
I wasn't sure what the proper direction in life was.
I was very much obsessed with the problem of the Cold War.
That's never really gone away because that seemed to me to be just a kind of insanity that I didn't know how to fathom.
And, you know, it was all of that, and I was obsessed with reading and obsessed with learning, and so that was what all drove me in this direction.
And then as I started to develop these ideas, like, I had to let go of things.
You know, one of the ideas that I've been promoting to people is that you have to let the dead wood burn off, and you do that by, you do that as a consequence of necessity in the pursuit of responsibility.
When I started writing seriously, I had to stop drinking.
Because I couldn't think properly.
So that was it.
It was either like, you're going to do one of these or the other.
You're either going to continue wasting your time.
I was having a fine time.
I was in graduate school and I had a very social...
I was very, very social.
And a lot of that involved drinking and that sort of thing.
Couldn't do both.
Especially when I was editing.
I couldn't get my thoughts down pristinely enough, precisely enough.
Plus, the emotional magnitude of the things that I was dealing with were more overwhelming if I was, well, in the aftermath of a party.
So I decided when I was like 25 or so to just stop.
I've been caught off guard by how politicized you've become.
And as I read of your youth, I know that you had your runners with religion, which a lot of people do.
You actually got politically active, but on the left, not the right.
Help me understand what went down.
Well, in the little town I grew up in, the member of parliament, the provincial parliament, equivalent to American state, was a democratic socialist.
He was the only one in the entire province.
Everyone else was conservative, which would be sort of moderate republican, I would say.
And...
There's something to be said for political voice for the working class and for the dispossessed.
And it certainly is the case that hierarchical structures, the hierarchical structures that compose our society, do produce dispossession.
They stack people up at the bottom.
And so people at the bottom need to have a political voice.
And so I was very attracted to that end of the political spectrum.
But as I came to investigate some of the problems I've been discussing more deeply, I started to understand that mere economic rectification was insufficient.
That that wasn't the level of analysis that was appropriate for my inquiry anyways.
Translated, redistribution of income doesn't work.
Well, think about it this way.
The guaranteed basic income idea.
It's like, well, that's predicated on the idea that man lives by bread alone.
Well, that isn't how it works, and I've certainly seen that in my clinical practice.
I've had clients, especially addicts, if you gave them money, they would die.
And the reason for that, like one guy that I remember in particular, I liked him quite a bit.
He had a bad cocaine problem.
And as long as he was flat broke, he wasn't dead.
But as soon as he was on disability, as soon as his disability check came in, he was face down in a ditch three days later.
So, Well, and you think, well, maybe that's a consequence of his overwhelming poverty, etc.
You could come up with some social reason for that path that he took.
But it wasn't, by any stretch of the imagination, that simple.
It's like, people need purpose more than money, even.
I mean, obviously, we don't want people starving.
And actually, we're doing a pretty good job of solving that problem worldwide.
You know, the UN projects that there won't be anyone in absolute poverty by the year 2030, which is really quite the bloody miracle, that's for sure.
So we're doing a pretty good job of getting rid of abject privation.
But then, it isn't the provision of material well-being with ease that allows people to live properly, even though a certain amount of material wealth is a necessary precondition.
It's purpose.
That's a much more difficult problem to solve.
It's like we need something to grapple with.
We need a meaning to justify our lives.
And some of that is to be found in the struggle against privation and malevolence.
The mere offering of material sustenance to people isn't going to solve the problem.
Dostoevsky knew this 150 years ago.
He said if he gave people everything they wanted...
So all they had to do was eat cakes and busy themselves with the continuation of the species.
The first thing they do is smash it all to hell so that something interesting could happen.
So that's our fatal flaw and salvation, both of that.
That wanting to contend rather than to sit back and have everything taken care of.
So how do we get...
An 18-year-old to understand what Dostoevsky wrote 150 years ago.
How do you get a 38 or a 58-year-old, which is my age, to understand how to take responsibility?
No, we have discussions like this.
You know, and you make the case to people as well.
So I've been touring around.
My wife and I have gone to 60 cities now since January of this year.
And I've been speaking to audiences that average 2,500 people.
And I deliver a lecture that's very much like this conversation.
It's like, lay out the structure of life, the fact that it's rife with suffering and malevolence, that we erect hierarchies in an attempt to deal with that, to deal with those problems, because they're too alike, that the hierarchies dispossess people, and so we have to take care of the dispossessed as well, and to draw the relationship between meaning and responsibility.
And the audiences are...
wrapped as a consequence of that.
And I'm always listening to my audiences.
When are they silent?
Because you know, when everyone in an audience is silent, then everyone's in the same place.
That's a meaningful place.
They're all lined up.
And they line up on this axis of responsibility and meaning.
So there's a hole in our culture where this information hasn't been provided.
But it was there at times in our history, which has been the thing that I struggle with, which is the issue of sacrifice.
It's so paradoxical, right?
Why would me giving of myself to you make me feel better?
It does seem, like most of the time, if I have money, I give you some of my money, I have less money.
But you're arguing that if I understand true sacrifice and I sacrifice myself for something that has meaning...
Well, part of it is, you know, human beings discovered time.
That's one of the things that makes us very peculiar creatures.
To be aware of our own mortality is a consequence of the discovery of time, right?
We can see how we extend out into the future.
And so that makes us very strange creatures as selfish creatures.
Because you actually can't be narrowly selfish and survive.
And here's the reason.
You have to take care of yourself now.
So let's say, well, then you can pursue impulsive pleasure, perhaps at the expense of other people.
And why not?
Well, here's one reason why not.
There isn't just you now There's you tomorrow.
There's you next week.
There's you next month and next year and 10 years from now.
And so if you conduct yourself in a manner in the present that interferes with your future selves, then that's a downhill trip for you.
And so taking care of yourself in the future and taking care of other people actually turns out to be exactly the same thing because you're actually a community of people that's distributed across time.
And so if you act in your own best interest, Then you're going to sacrifice some of the present for the future.
And that was one of the great discoveries of mankind, right?
Which is something that I also concentrate on in 12 Rules, because I'm really interested in the issue of sacrifice.
Why would you give up something now...
Why would you ever give up something now voluntarily?
The answer is sometimes if you give up something now, and often something you love, something you're very in love with even, perhaps not for the best reasons, then you can make a bargain with the future.
And that bargain with the future isn't any different than the bargain you make with other people.
So...
That narrow selfishness is blindness to time and context.
And there's nothing about it that's good.
And I do think the musical example is a really good one.
Like in a musical piece, every note has to fit with every other note across the entire span of the piece.
Well, that's what your life needs to be like.
How you act with me right now has to be in harmony with what you want for yourself tomorrow.
And that's going to be tangled in as well.
It's not only that you repeat across time and have to take that into account.
It's that you repeat across time in the context of your social life.
And so all of that has to be brought into the equation.
And the sacrificial motif is a huge part of that.
And that also is something that runs contrary in some sense to empathy.
Because sometimes you have to beat yourself on the back of the head with a stick to get yourself to move forward properly.
Even though you know, I should be doing this.
I should be doing this.
But I don't want to.
It's hard.
It's like...
No sympathy for that.
You have to do it because otherwise things are going to get worse.
I heard you say that you're quoting one of the Ten Commandments saying you do unto your neighbors as you have them do unto you.
The word nice is not in that commandment.
No.
Well, nice isn't enough.
And this...
Is it not enough or is it not the right thing to expect?
Because so many members of my audience beat themselves up in a way they would never hurt other people.
They say their thinking, but most thinking is self-flagellation.
Part of it is take it easy on yourself.
Be fair.
On the other hand, sometimes you tolerate stuff from other people because you teach people how to treat you.
And if you don't do that, you get it.
Well, getting that balance right is really hard.
So in rule two, I think, is treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping.
And I was really interested in that issue of people mistreating themselves.
You know, so, because we are privy to our own weaknesses and faults.
We know them better than anyone else knows them.
And so it's very easy for us to determine that we're not worthwhile because of all the ways that we don't Live up to what we should live up to.
And the painful knowledge we have of that.
And to not regard ourselves as worthwhile.
And to not treat ourselves properly.
And that's not good.
You have to treat yourself as if you're valuable.
And then that is the same attitude that you extend to other people.
Well, and it's because you are valuable.
And it's a necessity to adopt the responsibility that goes along with recognizing that.
So even if you're not happy with who you are, and even if you have your reasons...
You still deserve presumption of innocence.
You still deserve to have a good defense mounted on your own behalf.
You still need to treat yourself as if you're someone valuable and someone worthy of love, even though you have all reasons to know why you fall short.
And that's absolutely crucial.
And it is hard for people to learn that.
Hard for them to learn not to beat themselves up too much.
Why doesn't anyone ever get away with anything?
That's one of your lies.
Well, I think, imagine you have a plastic ruler, you know, and you pull it back in front of your face.
And you let go.
It's like, you think, well, this is going pretty well so far.
Snap!
Yeah, well, it's because you can't bend the structure of reality.
This is why, and this is, I think, also partly what in this message is frightening, is everything that you distort Snaps back.
And often magnified.
And everyone knows that.
And one of the things I discuss with my audience is like, well, just think about how you talk to people that you're trying to treat properly.
You don't say to them, okay, here, kid, here's the way you deal with life.
This is, you put your son on your knees and say, look, lie every chance you get.
Falsify things.
Don't take any responsibility for anything.
If you can slough it off to someone else, if you can hide things where no one will find them, that's a hell of a good strategy.
Like, no one believes that, ever.
So, we know that that doesn't work.
Now, we're tempted because now and then you think, well, I can just cut a corner here or I can get away with this and no one will find out.
It's like...
Yeah, they will.
They'll find out.
Or you'll find out.
And I saw this in my clinical practice all the time.
You know, people would be suffering for some consequence.
A lot.
And we'd untangle it.
Maybe we'd go back five years or ten years and it would be something that was left undone.
Something that was done that shouldn't have been done.
And sometimes not even on the part of the person.
Sometimes on the part of their parents or maybe even on the part of their grandparents.
These things stick around for a very long period of time.
But it's like...
If you produce a rift in the structure of reality, it's not going to go away until you rectify it.
And often it breeds more demons, that's for sure.
If that's the case, why is it so hard for us to tell the truth?
What is it biologically in us?
And what I... I'd like to push you on these biologic issues because you're a psychologist.
You actually understand how the brain works and how the fundamental order versus chaos issue is in part reflected in our brain.
So all these balancing acts our brain's pretty good at, yet truth is hard for us.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's hard to confront things now when you could hypothetically put them off.
It's discounted a bit.
You know, a child who's called onto the carpet for their actions is likely to think, well, if I lie about this, I'm not going to get punished for it now.
I can get away with it.
And they might not even really believe that, but they don't want to face the consequences of their actions right here and now.
Well, we can just put it off a little bit.
Well, it'd be nice if you could do that.
And so you're tempted to do it.
You can shunt it off into the future.
That's just future you.
You don't want to be that guy.
But it's better.
It's better to have the fight now.
It's better to confront it now if you can manage it.
Dr. Jordan Peterson, thank you very much for spending time with us.
We had so much to discuss with Dr. Peterson that I've asked him to come back for another visit.
