Jordan Peterson Reveals How We Can All Unlock Our Hidden Potential
He’s been called an “accidental icon” of the modern day philosophical movement. Dr. Jordan Peterson’s work as a clinical psychology professor at the university at Toronto has gained international recognition for his profound and often controversial insights. In this interview, Dr. Peterson is back with Dr. Oz to break down his latest book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” and to help us all gain a better understanding of our full potential. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
And he ran back to his car and he got his dad out.
And they came over and they had their arms around each other.
And they were just smiling away, you know, like with a real Duchenne smile.
And he said, I've been watching your lectures.
I've really been working on putting my relationship with my father together.
And it's really worked.
And this is what makes me emotional.
It's not only that this is so good.
People require so little encouragement.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
He's been called an accidental icon of the modern-day philosophical movement.
Dr. Jordan Peterson's work as a clinical psychology professor at the University of Toronto has gained international recognition for his profound and often controversial insights.
Today, Dr. Peterson is back with me to break down his latest book, The Twelve Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos, to help all of us gain a better understanding of our full potential.
You touched earlier on this issue of the evil within us.
Yeah.
And you use stories a lot.
And some of them are stories that all of us are familiar with.
Harry Potter being a good one for this example.
Where there's a little bit of evil in Harry Potter.
Yeah.
Darkness.
Darkness.
The shadow.
Yeah.
Voldemort.
Yeah.
Right.
What is it about having or respecting that we all have evil that you find is important for us living our lives?
Yeah.
Well, I think the capacity for evil is something that is not easily distinguishable from strength.
I mean, my knowledge runs out at this level of analysis in some sense.
The world seems to be structured so that we can act for the good and we can act for evil.
And I think that's associated with self-consciousness.
I think that's illustrated in the story of Adam and Eve.
When Adam and Eve become self-conscious, the scales fall from their eyes.
They realize that they're naked.
And to realize that you're naked is to understand your vulnerability.
That's why Adam and Eve clothe themselves right away.
Oh no, I'm naked.
I can be hurt.
Okay, I can be hurt.
I have to clothe myself.
I have to protect myself in the future.
You actually become aware of that in a way that animals aren't.
Well, what does it mean that you're naked?
It means that everyone else is too.
What does it mean that you can be hurt?
It means that everyone else can be hurt too.
It means that you could hurt them.
And that's why the knowledge of good and evil goes along with the knowledge of nakedness.
That took me a long time to figure out.
It took me about 30 years to figure that out.
So why are those two things conjoined?
Oh yes.
When you understand that you're vulnerable, you understand that everyone else is vulnerable.
And then you have the option of exploiting that.
And so that's what transforms human beings to some degree from animals.
Because a predator just eats you.
But a human being...
A human being can play with you and will for all sorts of reasons.
Now, the capacity to do that though, why is the capacity to do that, let's say, useful?
Well, it's useful to be strong and not to have to use it.
That reflects something that we talked about earlier.
Because it makes you formidable.
And I think that you have to be formidable in order to move forward properly in the world.
Even to get through obstacles that aren't Just to get through obstacles.
You have to have some strength of character.
You have to have some commitment.
And some of that is there will be a cost if you interfere with me.
It'll be the minimal cost necessary.
Let's say if you've got yourself under control.
It will be the minimal cost necessary, but do not be thinking there won't be a cost.
And I don't think, I don't believe that if that's not built into your character, then you have no strength, and you certainly have no strength when you're pushed by someone who's malevolent.
A bully, if you're like that, if the bully pushes you, and your response is, There will be a cost for pushing me and you will pay it.
Then the bully will go elsewhere.
And we know that too from studies of bullies.
You know, like even childhood bullies.
They push around kids and then they find the ones that retreat and withdraw and they bully them.
So, you know, you might think, well, usually children are bullied because of some abnormality.
That's a very common idea.
It's like There's a guy named Dan Olwius, a very smart Norwegian psychologist, and he studied bullying for a long time as a precursor to fascism, by the way, so that was his interest.
He said his analysis indicated that at least three-quarters of children have some obvious abnormality that could be the focus of bullying attention.
It might even be your name.
It doesn't take much of a genius bully to come up with a good way of making fun of your name.
Or you're too tall or you're too short.
Or your brother's too tall or too short.
There's something.
It isn't the abnormality that is the cause of the bullying.
The abnormality might become the focus of the bullying, but part of the cause is the withdrawal in the face of the bullies, because the bully thinks he can get away with it.
And it's also the case with children who are preyed upon by adult predators.
Like adult predators of children look for children who are easily cowed and who won't put up a fight.
So, for example, if you're teaching your children to be terrified of strangers, that's really not a very good strategy.
You want kids who are confident and who will make a noise if someone messes about with them.
And so that characterological strength has to be built in.
We played through the evil side of that equation.
We do a lot of shows on true crime through the lens of a doctor.
I'm interested in the forensics and what went down emotionally psychologically.
What creates evil?
What is the nature of evil?
I mean, Solzhenitsyn wrote about this, the unbelievable evil that he witnessed and lived through in Soviet Russia.
So some people see it and can react and respond and they survive.
Others wilt away.
But what caused the evil?
There are levels.
Well, some of it's like moronic evil, you might say.
It's like, well, someone has something you don't and you want it.
That's just theft, bicycle theft or something like that.
It's pure material greed.
And then I guess the level after that would be something like, well, the desire to cause harm because you're vengeful.
And that's where the idea that you're a victim starts to play a real role.
If you're a victim and things are unfair, then it's okay for you to react and to lash out and to hurt.
And so then there's the conscious desire to actually produce suffering, and then that can just expand beyond anyone's imagination until what you're trying to do is take, I think, that maximizes out when you're trying to take revenge against God for the structure of reality itself.
And I think that's the right language.
So when people...
And you see approximations of this with the high school shooters and people like that, especially the guy who shot up the elementary school.
Sandy Hook.
Yeah, you bet.
You've got to go to a pretty damn dark place before you think that the right thing to do with your life is to make people...
Fundamentally identifiable because of their innocence and lack of wrongdoing, the target of your vengeful hatred.
You've gone somewhere unbelievably dark to get there, but that's not the darkest place you can go.
It's certainly a suburb of the darkest place you can go.
You know, you can go to where Hitler went and try to cook up a strategy for destroying everything.
You know, I mean, everyone says, well, Hitler was trying to dominate the world.
It's like, well...
Maybe Hitler was trying to set up a particularly dramatic forum for suicide with Europe in flames.
That's what he did.
You mentioned totalitarian governments, Nazis in particular, several times.
One of the knocks on you is that Nazis come to your rallies.
Oh, yes.
It's such complete, utter nonsense.
It's absolutely reprehensible, all of that.
Why do they come to your rallies?
What are they looking for?
They don't.
There's no evidence for that at all.
The alt-right types don't like me at all.
There's lots of documentation of that, and the reason they don't like me is because I don't like people who play identity politics, and I don't care if they're on the left or the right.
You know, the left says, here's the victimized groups, and our society is basically an oppressor, oppressed society, and we should do everything we can to lift up the oppressed, and I don't know what we're doing with the oppressors, but I don't imagine it'll be that pleasant.
And the The identity politics types on the right say, oh yes, we should play identity politics, but we'll be white ethno-nationalists and look for white superiority or a white ethno-state.
It's like, as far as I'm concerned, none of that's even vaguely...
It's reprehensible.
It's thoroughly reprehensible on all fronts.
The reason that this all came about, there's complicated reasons, but because...
I'm not a fan of the collectivist left, let's say.
It's been in the interest of people who push that doctrine to paint me as the most radical of opponents, which of course would put me in the far-right camp.
But just because you're no fan of people who play identity politics doesn't mean you're part of the alt-right.
So that's been a strategy, I think, that's been...
What would you say put into play against me for a variety of reasons that has been somewhat successful, but not very in the final analysis?
I'll be right back with Dr. Jordan Peterson.
We've got lots more to talk about.
Maybe it's the wrong action to put you on, but if zero is ultra-liberal and 100 is the ultra-conservative alt-right, where are you on that spectrum?
You think of yourself as more conservative, more liberal.
Burl, I know that in your life you've changed.
Well, I'm a traditionalist in many senses, you know, but I'm a very creative person.
So it's very difficult temperamentally for me to place myself on the political spectrum.
It's not like I don't think that the dispossessed deserve a political voice.
You know, that's why I was interested in socialist politics when I was a kid, as And I understand perfectly well that hierarchies dispossess and that something has to be done about that.
But I also think that we mess with fundamental social structures at our great peril.
I think we've destabilized marriage very badly and that that's not been good for people, especially not good for children.
But I don't think it's been good for adult men and women either.
Mm-hmm.
And I certainly, as a social scientist, one of the things you learn if you're a social scientist and you're well-educated and informed is that if you take a complex system, let's imagine you have a complex system and you have a hypothesis about how to intervene so that it will improve.
Okay, so what will you learn?
You'll learn once you...
Implement the intervention that you didn't understand the system, and that your stupid intervention did a bunch of things you didn't expect it to, many of which ran counter to your original intent.
And you will inevitably learn that.
So...
I learned that I had a whole series of very wise mentors who insisted to everyone they talked to who was interested in public policy, for example, that when they put in place a well-meaning public policy initiative, that they put aside a substantial proportion of the budget to evaluate the outcome of the initiative.
Because the probability that the initiative would produce the results desired was virtually zero.
And I believe that that's technically true.
And so that tilts me in the conservative direction because I think, well, that's sort of working, that system.
And I'm also not a utopian.
So I don't expect systems to work perfectly.
If they're not degenerating into absolute tyranny, I tend to think they're doing quite well.
Because if you look worldwide and you look at the entire course of human history...
Degeneration into abject tyranny is the norm.
And so if you see systems like our systems, say in the democratic western world, that are struggling by not too badly, it's like you should be in awe of those structures because they're so difficult to produce and so unlikely.
And then I think, well, you take a system that's working not too badly.
Think, well, I'm going to radically improve it.
It's like, no, you're not.
You're not going to radically improve it.
You might be able to improve it incrementally if you devoted a large part of your entire life to it and you were very humble about your methods and your ambition.
But if you think that some careless tweak...
Of this complex system, as a consequence of the ideological presuppositions you learned in three weeks in your social justice class at university, and that's going to produce a radical improvement?
You can't even begin to fathom the depths of your ignorance.
You mentioned marriage as an example of this.
As a social psychologist, what happened to marriage?
Well, I think a bunch of things happened.
I mean, one thing that happened might be that we live a lot longer than we did.
So, the problem of having a relationship that extends over decades is a different problem than the problem of having a relationship that extends over the period of time where you might have kids.
So, I think there's that.
I think that women have clearly become more autonomous.
And so they've been able to transcend their more limited roles.
Those roles, by the way, weren't imposed upon them by patriarchal men.
I think that's a reprehensible view of history.
Because I think men and women fundamentally served as mutually sustaining partners throughout the course of history.
Despite their continual disagreements and the difficulties of life.
Women were relegated to a more restricted role because they lacked sanitation, they lacked tampons, they lacked birth control.
And those problems have been solved in the last hundred years essentially, since about 1895. And so that's freed women to participate in a much broader sense than they were able to before.
But we don't want to underestimate the power of those technological revolutions, even though they sound rather mundane.
They're not mundane at all, especially not the birth control pill.
That's put a certain amount of stress on marriage because the traditional roles have been expanded.
And you might think, well, that's great.
It's like, yeah, it is.
It is great in that...
A broader range of people have access to the expression of a fuller range of their talents, and in principle that's good for them, and definitely it's good for the rest of society, because now we have access to the genius of women, let's say, too.
But that's made negotiating the marital role more difficult.
And then the other thing that's happened, as far as I'm concerned, is that we got a little too careless about liberalizing the divorce laws and changing the structure of marriage in general.
I don't think that that was good for people, especially not for children.
Because the evidence that children do better in intact two-parent families is overwhelming.
No credible social scientist that I know of disputes that.
And it might be because the minimal viable social structure is actually the minimal nuclear family.
Two people.
One isn't enough.
Two is barely enough.
But it's a minimum, especially...
And I think the reason for that is, this is how I look at it.
Everybody has lots of flaws and tilts towards insanity in at least one direction.
And so partly what you want to do is you want to link up with someone over the long run.
Because they might be sane where you're not and vice versa.
So if you have a partner and you put yourself together...
And this is also how marriage works symbolically, by the way.
It's the reunion of the original man before the separation into man and woman.
You put yourself together.
You have one person who's basically sane.
And so that maximizes the probability that you'll do reasonably well throughout your life course.
But it also makes the pair of you, especially if you're communicating, sufficiently sane so that you're a foundation for the raising of children who will be socially competent and acceptable.
Because if they have parents, if they have a parental unit, let's say, that's communicating and that's straightening each other out, then the child can adapt to that unit as a microcosm of broader society.
And so if the child can figure out how to get along with the parents, in the best possible sense, then they're also simultaneously figuring out how to get along with everyone else.
And a lot of what you're doing in a family is micro learning, right?
It's small examples.
It stands to reason that a substantive amount of exposure to a role model is a necessary precondition for that.
I would think the most valuable thing a child has to get from two parents is their love for each other.
And I'm hearing everything else you're saying, but I've always believed that children who know they were loved, not whether they were truly loved or not, but actually knew they were loved, probably because someone told them, were the ones who did the best.
We can't make a hierarchy yet of what's absolutely vital to a child.
What you said is definitely vital.
We do know some things children have to be played with.
Yeah.
That's actually vital.
It's not optional.
They have to be touched and loved physically, no doubt about that, because otherwise they fail to thrive.
And that sense of being valued is, I think, also of crucial importance.
I mean, that sort of reflected, I think, in the discussions that I'm having with my audience, telling young people that there's really something to them.
Because I think if your parents really love you, that's how they treat you.
They treat you like you're a remarkable work in progress.
There's a divinity in you.
Yes, yes, that unfolds across time.
Raising kids and having a life, a career, a job for that matter, it's too hard for one person.
It's almost too hard for two people because even couples have a difficult time juggling their career with their commitment to child care.
I think it's just too much to ask of people.
And so I think the default was right, which is You make a permanent commitment to someone, and you're kind of all in, and it's a sacrifice too.
You make a permanent commitment to someone, and you say, well, you're imperfect, radically, and so am I, so we're two radically imperfect beings, but we're going to intertwine our destiny, and we're going to do that under the compunction of a vow.
We're going to try to make something permanent here.
Why?
Well, because it'll be better for us on average over the long run.
But most importantly, it's the minimum stable precondition for bringing children into the world.
And so we should violate that with great trepidation.
And I'm not saying that with a sense of moral superiority, by the way.
I know...
Through all sorts of experiences, personal and otherwise, how difficult and unlikely it is to maintain a relationship like that, and how the best laid plans of mice and men can go astray.
And so I understand why people get divorced, and why they feel compelled to get divorced, and perhaps why divorce is a sad necessity under some circumstances.
But I don't think it's been a net plus for Not with the...
There's too many forces that have been at work over the last 40 years fragmenting long-term monogamous relationships.
I don't think it's good.
I mean, I know the data indicates, for example, that if you live with someone before you marry them, you're more likely to be divorced rather than less.
So the idea that if you try it out for a while, you'll know that that's a good practice run.
That's not supported by the data.
And I think the reason for that is, you think about what living with someone means, if you're skeptical.
It's like, you'll do for now, for me, and I'll do for you.
But if we're leaving our options open, unless in the off chance someone better comes along.
I don't know if that provides the same security and faith that the statement, I'm with you all the way, no matter what.
If you had to choose someone on the basis of those two decisions, who would you choose?
And I don't understand how living with someone is something other than You'll do for now, but if someone else better comes along, I reserve the right to modify my choice.
The bigger societal issue for me is the marriage covenant is the only contract we sign with society.
You don't sign your birth certificate.
You don't sign your death certificate.
Your job is loyalty to the company that hires you primarily, which hopefully is also acting socially responsible.
But the marriage covenant...
Which has governed so much of human civilization and in so many different places, has a role that's even bigger than the family because it ties us together.
We'll be back with more from Dr. Jordan Peterson.
I noticed you're getting emotional talking about some parts of this discussion, in part when you talk about meaning and responsibility.
I don't know if that touches you more personally than others.
Well, I think it's a consequence actually of many of the things that I've experienced over the last, especially the last six or seven months.
So, I meet 150 people or so at each of these events, personally, and many of them have stories to tell me, and they tell me overwhelming stories, and that has a cumulative effect on you.
So, one kid, for example, he was in his early 20s, I would say, he came up to me and he said, I don't want to take up too much of your time, but...
A year and a half ago, I just got out of jail and I was homeless.
I started watching your lectures.
I said, I'm married, I have a daughter, and I just bought my first apartment.
Good work.
And I was in L.A. and I was outside the Orpheum Theatre.
It's kind of rough in downtown L.A. and I was walking down the street with my wife.
This car pulled up beside us and this kid hopped out, Latino kid, about 19 or so.
And he said, are you Dr. Peterson?
I said, yes.
He said, oh, I'm really happy to meet you.
And he shook my hand.
He said, and I've been watching your lectures and just wait a minute, wait a minute.
And I said, okay, okay.
And then he ran back to his car and he got his dad out.
And they came over and they had...
He had his arm.
They had their arms around each other.
And they're just smiling away, you know, like with a real Duchenne smile, a real smile.
And he said, I've been watching your lectures.
I've really been working on putting my relationship with my father together.
And it's really worked.
And so I thought, well, that's a lovely thing to have happen when you're walking through...
Rough neighborhood is that some kid jumps out of his car and comes rushing over and tells you How much better his life is because he's been working hard on the basis of your recommendation to fix his relationship with his father.
And people are telling me stories like this all the time.
And the thing that's sad about it, I think, and this is what makes me emotional, is not only that this is so good and good at a level that transcends politics, absolutely, but that People require so little encouragement.
You know, there's so many people I see in my lectures, and I have a very diverse range of people who come to my lectures.
They're starving for encouragement, and they don't need much.
I said, I had this kid talk to me at a barbecue I was at this weekend, and he's working with delinquent kids, 13 and 14 years old.
And he said, they were pulled out of other delinquent camps and brought to his camp, which was for the worst delinquents.
And he started talking to them about my lectures.
And so they'd been watching him.
And now they have a little fan club that's based around my lectures.
And they're doing things like talking to each other about making their beds and cleaning up their rooms.
It's like, it's unbelievable how little genuine encouragement many people need and how they had none.
No one ever said to them and meant it.
It's not okay for you to be a weak loser.
It's not okay.
And the reason it's not okay is because you could be way more than that.
And it's a crime, an ethical crime, for you to allow all that necessary potential to go to waste.
It hurts you.
It hurts your family.
It hurts the world.
Really, really, it does.
And people think, oh, okay, okay.
I get it.
And they do get it, because they know at some level.
The other thing people tell me, you know, they say, well, I've been paying attention to your lectures, developing a vision for my life, trying to tell the truth, trying to adopt more responsibility, and things are way better.
But the other story is, you've been able to help me put into words things I always knew to be true, but didn't know how to say.
Which is a good role for an intellectual to play.
And so, well, so those are, that's why this all makes me emotional.
It's so, it's so good.
You know, and so much of this has been covered as if it's political.
It's not political what I'm doing.
It's not political.
It's something that politics is nested inside.
Politics is nested inside the healthy sovereignty of the individual.
I'm working to buttress and sustain the healthy sovereignty of the individual.
The great idea of the West.
Is it worth it?
Is the pain that you must feel with some of the biting criticism that you witness here about yourself, is it worth it?
Oh, absolutely.
And, you know, I'm not so naive as to think you can get the good without the bad.
You know, I've had discussions with my publicists, say, and the people who are working on my book, and sometimes the discussions are such that Well, maybe a little less controversy would be a good thing.
It's like...
It's hard to say what's a good thing.
You know, and what's happened to me over the past two years, fortunately, is that every time I've been attacked, the net outcome has been in my favor.
Even though it's very painful in the immediate...
Well, when it's happening with the mobs of students, for example, or with a particularly reprehensible press piece, some of which, some of the press pieces, people who were very close to me told me they thought they sunk me.
And I mean, I watch people respond to these things, and very frequently now if someone's mobbed, In social media.
They apologize.
They're done with one episode.
And this has probably happened to me a hundred times in the last two years.
So it's very stressful.
But I'm kind of detached from it because we'll see how it plays out.
And you can't do difficult things without them being difficult.
And so I'm not...
I don't feel that it's been...
What do we say?
How to say it exactly?
I'm perfectly satisfied with the way things are going.
Especially with these lectures, because they're so positive.
So how do you want to be remembered years from now when the world looks back on what we're witnessing right now?
What should people say about Jordan Peterson?
That he wanted the best for people.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Not the worst.
And the reason I want the best, I think, is because I know a fair bit about what the worst is like.
And I definitely don't want that.
And that's a conscious decision, to turn away from that.
It's like, enough hell.
That's the lesson of the 20th century.
And so, it means that we take responsibility for that.
We put the world together and we start with ourselves.
We do that by adopting responsibility, not by fixing someone else.
And not even by fixing social structures.
They're not that easy to fix.
It's like, start with yourself.
You're a fixer-upper, man.
You got work to do.
Get at it.
Then maybe you'll develop enough wisdom so that you'll be good for someone other than you.
And then you can expand that outward.
So, I would like the best for people.
I think when people look back on you, they'll also see that you began to tie together seemingly disparate parts of who we are as a species.
And I'd like to get into that, because it's deep stuff, but you articulate it in a way that I think people will understand.
Let's start with the soul.
This idea that we have something that, for most people, is this amorphous part of us.
But you argued that it was in our parents' That it's out through all of us.
It's a much bigger concept than I had heard.
Yeah, well I think, see, this is how I think reality lays itself out.
I think we all know this.
You're not driven by your past like clock.
You're not deterministic.
You are to some degree, because you're a limited creature.
You've got rules that you run by and all of that.
You know, you're not omniscient.
But you're not driven by the past.
What you do instead is confront the potential of the future.
That's what's in front of you.
So it's a domain with multiple pathways, and that's what's always in front of you.
You could go there, you could go there, you could go there.
There's an array of choices that confront you.
You confront that as soon as you wake up and become conscious in the morning.
And then there's all this potential that's there in front of you.
And you use your ethical choice to determine which of those possibilities will become actual.
And it's through that mechanism that you participate in the creation of reality.
And that's the making of you in the image of God.
Because that's what God did at the beginning of time, according to our old stories.
Spoke and transformed potential into the being that was good.
And that was dependent on using truthful speech.
So that's what you do if you act properly.
You confront potential and you translate it into reality.
And it's your soul that does that.
Your soul makes that translation.
But the soul for you is bigger than just in me, right?
It's a part of...
Almost like our collective unconsciousness touches all of us.
Our soul seems to be bigger than just what's inside of us.
It's connected.
It's also the thing that's the same between us in some sense, right?
I mean, it's a funny thing because...
You're a singular being possessed of this creative consciousness, but so am I. So it's a strange kind of singularity because we share it.
And it's the thing that unites us in some sense as sovereign individuals.
So how does faith play a role in all this?
And faith, again, is...
I gather that if you act...
Appropriately, you'll have a better life.
Good stuff will happen to you.
Is that what faith is?
I think you make a decision about what your fundamental attitude towards being is going to be.
I think that's faith.
It's like, well, are things bad or good?
There's a lot of evidence they're bad.
There's a lot of evidence they're good.
Where are you going to come down on that?
Should you work to make things better?
Should you work further annihilation?
These are decisions that you make, and I think they're fundamentally based on something like faith.
But your decision to confront the unknown and the things that frighten you is like, well, do you have faith in your potential?
Do you have faith in what you could call forward out of you?
Because you need that in order to move forward with confidence.
You want to instill faith.
I mean, we know this.
If you're trying to raise a child, you want to instill faith in them.
Now, you might not say, well, I'm instilling faith in God.
It's like, well...
It's not so easy to decide when you're doing that.
But to instill in your child the faith in the ability of their own potential to unfold in a positive direction, well, that's faith.
That's what you want for someone who's confident.
Like, yes, in absence of evidence, in the absence of certain evidence, I believe that my commitment to this path of action will bear fruit.
So let's take this discussion and, I think, make it practical.
So one of the biggest battles...
That I sense in America, North America through the West, is that between religion and science.
In many ways, this is the fracture that you quote Nietzsche is speaking to when he said God was dead.
Not as a good thing.
No, not as a good thing.
And led to the totalitarian ideology of much of the last century.
But let's just take it right to today to North America in particular.
And our brains hardwired to look at this information differently.
Religion made it possible to have inquisitive minds that led to science.
Religion also placed in all of us this belief that there's some divinity in us, special in all of us.
And you very thoughtfully speak about how science talks about what is.
How can people watch us right now or see us or hear us?
The technology is remarkable.
But science is not designed to talk about what it means.
It's what should be.
What should be.
Yes, there has to be something beyond that.
I believe that the description that I just gave you of human consciousness is actually scientifically accurate.
I think that we do confront potential.
And that we do cast it into reality.
I think if you understand how the brain works from its ability to first grapple with what's unknown in physical representation and then to represent it in image and then to represent it in word, I think that what you see is the process of potential coming into reality.
So I don't think that there's anything that's not commensurate with the scientific viewpoint there.
I also think that if we act as if we're each divine centers of consciousness of that sort, then we treat ourselves properly.
Think, well, you've got some intrinsic value.
You treat other people properly because I'm duty bound to treat you as if you have some intrinsic value.
We build social structures on that predicate.
They work.
So the idea that the individual is sovereign in some divine sense, if you act that out politically, it's like, hey, your society functions and people don't starve and things aren't an absolute abject tyranny.
And your rulers have something to bow to.
that principle of intrinsic sovereignty.
Now the question is how that might be related to some metaphysical reality.
Because that's the question of God.
And I don't know exactly how to answer that, except that I've seen this relationship, say, between the opening statements in Genesis, which describe God as this being that uses communicative intent to call forth being out of possibility, and that that's...
That's the essence of God as portrayed in Genesis, and that's built into us as an image.
I think, okay, well, that's what our whole society is predicated on, and that works, so it seems to me that there's something true about that.
I don't know what the fundamental relationship is between consciousness and the soul and the metaphysics of being, but I'm certainly unwilling to assume that this is all meaningless and random.
I don't believe that.
I don't think that's a good theory.
I don't think it works at all when you act it out.
So there's something wrong with it.
And I don't think there's any evidence that it's true.
So, people say, well, do you believe in God?
And I think a bunch of things when I'm asked that question.
It's like, why are you asking?
What do you mean God?
What do you mean believe?
It's like, then those are reasonable objections for a question that complex.
But I think a better answer is, I act as if God exists.
You say, well, does that mean you believe?
It's like, well...
What you believe is most appropriately expressed in your action.
So, and I think, what's the saying?
By their fruits you will know them.
That's an action-oriented idea.
It's like...
So that's enough belief to stake my existence on.
That doesn't mean I'm certain of it.
How could you be certain of it?
It's not within the human...
It's not within the realm of human capacity to be certain about such a thing.
And so you have to stake something on it.
It's like, I act as if it's true.
That's as good as I can manage.
And I don't think there's a more appropriate answer than that.
It's like, it's up to you to take it from there in some sense.
I think part of the reason...
That you've become so popular is because you take religion and you allow us to see the fundamental grammar that is offered by different religions without people having to first make the very important step of deciding whether they believe or not.
I know for a lot of people listening there, that's going to be a bit of a struggle, but it is one of the more rewarding aspects of reading or listening to you.
And I do think that a lot of people will come to either a conclusion you just offered, which is I can live my life that way and the fruits of my action will be bestowed on my family and my life.
And many will just decide to believe, period, because it makes sense because there's so much wisdom in these writings, no matter what religion it is.
And I've talked to folks in every discipline about how they feel about what you're saying, and most find a way into it.
But the reality that there is wisdom out there beyond what a scientist thinks, Like me, I look at the brain.
I see the left hemisphere is pretty good at some types of processing.
The right hemisphere is different.
One is better about things of order, and one's better about things of chaos.
I'm making sense of what just happened, paying attention to things that are unexpected.
The other one's pretty good at just automating my life.
I start to see that much of my behavior is hardwired, more than I would have normally anticipated or expected.
I suspect that when you read some of the This wisdom, I've stopped thinking about people who wrote these beautiful old treatises, like many scientists think about them, as simpletons who didn't really understand how the stars and the planets worked, and this is their best effort at it.
They were trying to answer a very different question.
Yes, yes, they're not superstitious scientific theories.
They're something different.
Well, and the thing about belief, I think you put your finger on it, is, well, do you follow the story?
That's a fundamental religious question.
You know, when people go to see a movie like Pinocchio, which is a movie I've taken apart online in some detail, it's like they suspend disbelief.
No one thinks that a wooden puppet has become alive.
No one questions why the wooden puppet should rescue his father from the chaos of the whale.
It all just makes sense.
It's like, well, yeah, but why does it make sense exactly?
And isn't it interesting to notice that it makes sense?
And these stories have a pattern, and the pattern has a function.
And that's a religious function.
You say, well, I don't know whether I believe.
It's like, well...
You follow the story.
The Harry Potter books are a good example of that because they have a deeply, deeply religious substructure.
And that's why they were so insanely popular.
You know, they have to speak for a book to become that popular.
It has to speak to something that's in everyone.
Because otherwise, why would they become that popular?
In the second volume, Harry confronts the basilisk, the thing that turns you to stone that lurks underneath the magic castle.
It's like, well, that's life.
That's Jaws.
It's the same story.
It's like we have a structure.
It's kind of magical.
We live inside it.
It's a hierarchy.
But underneath, there's chaos.
And terror.
And that can come up at any time and paralyze you with its gaze, right?
Turn you to stone because it's so awful.
And every building is like that.
And so what you have to do is you have to go down into the depths and confront that thing voluntarily.
And then you'll find what's of great value in that pursuit.
And be reborn!
It's like, well, that's the Harry Potter story.
That's the second volume.
It's like, well, everyone knows that story.
Do you believe it?
Well...
Do you act it out?
That's the question.
Do you act it out?
It's the right pattern.
I think, and maybe, you know, maybe it's not even the right pattern.
Maybe the human race is a hopeless race, and there's no destination for us.
But for better or worse, that's our pattern.
Our pattern is, the snakes are after us.
Well, we can cower in our dens, or we can go out and we can find the source of the snakes, and we can contend with it.
And that's what we decided to do.
And God only knows how long ago, millions of years, we decided we weren't going to cower in our dens.
We were going to go out and root out the snakes.
It's like St. Patrick or St. George.
And then we found, well, there was the snakes that will eat you.
And then there were the snakes that were in other people's hearts.
And then there were the snakes that were in your hearts.
And all those had to be contended with and rooted out.
And that's part of the even deeper mythology.
There's an association in Christianity between the snake in the Garden of Eden and Satan.
It's like, where did that come from?
What kind of crazy idea is that?
Well, I just laid out the idea.
It's like, there's always a snake.
What's the worst possible snake?
Well, it isn't an actual snake.
It's a metaphorical snake.
It's the snake that's in the heart of your enemy when he comes to burn down your city.
Well, what if you get rid of your enemies?
Well, the snake's still there.
Well, then it's in your heart.
So what's the ultimate battle?
The ultimate battle is with the snake in your heart.
It's like, yes.
True.
True.
Metaphorically.
True.
But more than that, metaphysically, as true as anything can be, that statement is as true as anything can be.
We live in a society where the dividing line between good and evil is between my tribe and someone else's tribe.
Right.
Yes.
Maybe it's inside each and every one of our hearts.
Yes.
Well, that's Solzhenitsyn's comment, right?
That's his conclusion from the analysis of the Gulag Archipelago.
It's like, constrain the evil within...
That's your primary moral obligation.
That's why I don't like identity politics.
It's not my tribe and your tribe.
Don't be thinking that.
That's a mistake.
It's more sophisticated than that.
You have to understand it as a spiritual battle.
Not as an economic battle.
Not as a physical battle.
You have to conceptualize it as a spiritual battle.
That abstracts it.
That puts it up into the level of abstraction where it's properly dealt with.
Because otherwise it degenerates into tribal violence.
So to take that abstract and reduce it to practice, religions are able to provide a grammar.
Science has provided a grammar for some as well.
But religion provides the basic building blocks for a lot of folks.
What do you say about the argument that God is dead?
Look out for what will replace him.
That's the thing.
This is why I'm such an admirer of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, both of them in particular.
Because Nietzsche famously announced in the late 1800s that God was dead.
But it was also, that wasn't the announcement.
The announcement was, God is dead and we have killed him and we'll never find enough water to wash away the blood.
And he thought everything would fall because that foundation piece had been torn away.
And I believe that.
So I'm trying to find out, well, what is that foundation piece?
See, now Carl Jung, the great psychoanalyst, was a student of Nietzsche.
Nietzsche thought that human beings would have to create their own values in the aftermath of the death of God.
And there's a utopian idea associated with that, that Dostoevsky, that wasn't an idea that he would allow.
He didn't believe that human beings could do that.
Jung, following Freud, discovered that, let's say, that you can't create your own values.
Because you are a certain sort of being.
You have a nature.
And the best you can do is go down into the depths and rediscover the values.
And that's the same as the revivification of God.
It's the same thing.
It's the rescuing of the Father from the belly of the beast.
It's the same thing that Pinocchio does.
And it's an eternal return to the depths and reclamation of the relationship with the divine spirit, let's say.
And that's religious or metaphysical language, but I mean it most concretely in the sense we already discussed.
It's like, well, that's your ability to contend with potential and turn it into reality.
It's your fundamental responsibility.
It's actually what you do as a living, self-conscious being.
And we elevate that to the highest value.
Say, that's divine.
It's like, yes, that's divine.
How is that related to the transcendent divine?
I don't know.
But it seems related to it.
I also think that that's a perfectly reasonable claim.
There's all sorts of experiences that people have under all sorts of different conditions that seem to indicate some relationship between their isolated consciousness and being as such.
It's outside of our grasp for some reason, but that doesn't mean it's not there.
It doesn't mean that people haven't reported on 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 them to come back for another visit.
