He’s one of the most influential thought-leaders of our generation. Dr. Jordan Peterson’s work has been catapulted into an international dialogue that’s challenging and changing the way we think. In this interview, Dr. Peterson is breaking down his rules for life, success, meaning, and his philosophy on maintaining a happy and healthy relationship. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The hierarchy tends towards ossification and corruption, and it dispossesses people at the bottom.
Well, and those are both true.
And that's part of that opponent processing.
The hierarchies tend towards corruption.
They need to be taken care of.
It's like, yes.
How much should we take care of them versus how much should we sustain the hierarchy?
And the answer is, we don't know, and it changes.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Thank you.
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 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos, to help all of us gain a better understanding of our full potential.
So one thing that you've raised to my consciousness is whether we would even have a civilization.
If we were unable to believe in things bigger than us.
So I'm of Turkish origin.
And I went back to Turkey this summer.
In part because I was visiting the Syrian refugees.
But within an hour drive of this refugee camp was the oldest civilization known to mankind.
It's called Göbekli Tepe.
The literal translation is Potbelly Hill.
It's 12,000 years old.
Three times older than the pyramids.
Four times older than Stonehenge.
And they had big sculptures.
And the reason I was stunned by it is I was always taught in school.
I don't know what you learned.
But you're in a farming community.
You probably had some discussion of how farming came about.
But I learned farming happened.
And then because of that, we had free time.
We sent off a couple people to be religious leaders.
They went off and wrote all the religious tomes.
And that's how civilization evolved.
But Göbekli Tepe didn't have...
A agricultural community.
It was a hunter-gatherer community.
Which meant that hunter-gatherers were able to build temples to their gods.
And because they could believe in things bigger than themselves, they began to think they can control the world around themselves.
So, follow this, it's important.
Agriculture came because of a belief in deities, not the opposite.
Completely fits everything that I had ever loved.
Well, if you're a hunter, the question is, what should you hunt?
See, and we're built on a hunting platform, human beings, because we can throw an aim.
So then the question is, once your brain starts to develop, is, okay, what's the ultimate aim?
Right?
And you might think, well, it's to hunt.
It's like, no, it's to provision.
Okay, so how do you provision?
By aiming at transcendent things.
Because then everyone cooperates and everyone shares.
We all work together.
We get rid of hunger as such.
Instead of aiming at a particular animal.
We aim at something higher.
And it works.
And so that's encapsulated in our narratives.
And then the aim issue is really fundamental to that.
Like...
What's at the center?
What's the point that we're aiming at?
And that's the ultimate point.
It's the highest possible aim.
It's even in our language.
And everything we do has to do with aim.
It shows you how deeply the idea of hunting is in us.
We're carnivorous chimpanzees, fundamentally.
You use the word sin.
That's right.
Sin is to miss your target.
Miss your target, yeah.
It's an archery term, hamartia.
It means to miss the mark.
Yeah, that's a really useful thing to know.
It's like, well, what's a sin?
Well, it's when you miss your target.
How do you miss your target?
How about you don't aim?
How about you don't know how to aim?
How about you refuse to aim?
How about you have no aim?
And no one can live under those conditions.
We need a name.
It orients us.
It gives us direction.
It gives our life meaning.
Like, literally.
It does that neurologically.
So that begs the question.
Without culture, you know, 70,000 years ago, we believe, humans started the diaspora from northern Africa.
At least 12,000 years ago, you have Gebeketepe.
Abraham, by the way, was born there.
Not surprisingly, a lot of Christ's disciples were in that area.
I mean, you start to begin to realize that there's lots of layers of culture that got us to where we got.
And if I'm hearing you correctly, you're saying there's a collective unconscious that senses thousands of years of human evolution, and that culture cannot be discarded.
You throw that culture, that faith away, those traditions, even if you're not quite sure why they exist.
You toss them away and you discard them, there will be consequences.
Okay, so the first thing is that some of the best scientists that I knew, like Jaak Panksepp, who was a great neuroscientist who studied emotion.
I think he was probably one of the five greatest scientists of emotion.
He was really interested in archetypal ideas.
The people who study the emotional and motivational systems in the brain are the ones that are most convinced about the reality of archetypal issues.
So for example, people who understand how our brains work, who look at the emotion and motivational system, so the deep layers, not the cortical tissue.
The reptilian parts, the old parts.
They're convinced that these archetypes are vital to us.
Yeah, well, not all of them, but many of them.
Explain what an archetype is.
An archetype, say, well, it's a behavioral pattern.
That's what it would be most fundamentally, a behavioral proclivity.
And then the secondary archetype would be the reflection of that in a story.
So let's say one of our behavioral proclivities is to react in a certain way to a predator.
So how do we react to a predator?
Two ways.
Terror.
Freezing.
To be turned to stone when you look at the Medusa.
That's the response of a prey animal to a predator.
That's archetypal.
It's wired into us.
It happens way before you think.
Way faster than you can think.
But then that's secondarily reflected in a story, and that story becomes abstracted.
So the ground of the archetype would be the biology.
And then the secondary manifestation would be the manifestation of that biology in action.
And the archetypes are the most important things, I gather, because if they weren't important, we wouldn't be hardwired to react to them.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
But some of these archetypes aren't running away from it.
They're also respecting your parents.
Yes.
Well, you better respect your parents or you die.
I mean, you're dependent on your parents for 18 years.
It's like, yeah, there's filial respect built in.
Now, it's pliable because sometimes you have parents and if you respect them, you die.
So there has to be some plasticity there.
Mm-hmm.
But as a fundamental rule of thumb, it's there as a pattern.
And I guess an archetype would also be something like the proclivity to learn language.
No one really understands that, but it's obviously built into us.
Even children who are quite impaired intellectually, with the general exception of really severely autistic kids, learn to speak.
It's built into our biology in a way that we really don't understand.
fear of snakes is built into our biology for a long time psychologists thought it was just no we just learned fear and then psychologists thought no we learned to be afraid of some things more easily than others so you could condition fear to pictures of spiders faster than you could condition fear to pictures of pistols for example but then it went farther than that it's like no no you're not just conditionable you're actually innately afraid of snakes and But I don't think it's snakes.
I think it's toothed reptilian predators, which is a broader category than snakes.
And that's the dragon, fundamentally, because the dragon looks like an amalgam of predatory cats, predatory birds, and predatory snakes.
And maybe fire as well, which would have been an ancestral friend and enemy, right?
Because fire is an ancestral friend and enemy.
There's evidence, I think it was Richard Wrangham wrote a very good book on fire a while back, a very good anthropo-primatologist.
He figured we'd been using fire for two million years, something like that.
And that we traded intestinal tract for brain.
Once we learned to cook, and that was a secondary consequence of hunting, let's say, or at least associated with hunting, because our diet became so much more nutritious and calorie-rich, especially eating meat and fat, that we could afford to shrink our digestive system and trade it in for brain.
Chimps spend about eight hours a day chewing, because mostly what they eat is leaves.
It's like, go out and try to eat leaves.
It's like, all you're going to do is chew, because they have no nutrition.
So anyways, we're built on a hunting platform.
We throw an aim.
Even our perceptions are very aimed at something.
And the metaphysical question, you see how the biology transforms itself into the abstraction.
It's like, well, you have to have an aim because you're a hunter.
It's like, well, what's the ultimate aim?
That's the religious question.
What should you hunt above all else?
What should you devote your life to pursuing?
So why are these stories the best way for us to articulate these negotiated rules that we all have with each other?
Because the principles are so complex that we weren't able to articulate them and understand them.
So one of the things Nietzsche pointed out was, you know, you tend to think that morality emerges in thought and then is imposed on behavior.
We think up the rules and then we apply them.
It's like, no!
We evolve the rules.
Then we observe them in behavior.
Then we tell stories about them.
And then out of the stories, we can abstract general principles, and then maybe we can get to the point of an articulated morality.
But it's bottom-up.
Now, there's top-down effects, because as you articulate, you start to change your behavior.
But a lot of this is moved up from the bottom.
One of the things I lecture about in my public appearances is the emergence of proto-morality in animals.
So here's a great example.
This is from Yak Panksepp, the scientist that I mentioned earlier.
He wrote a book called Affective Neuroscience, which is a great book.
He said, here's what he did.
Rats like to rough and tumble play.
So if you take a juvenile rat, especially the males, they'll work to enter an arena where they can wrestle with another rat.
And they really like it.
It's play, behavior.
It's not aggression.
It's distinguishable from aggression.
Okay, so you put your two rats together.
One's 10% bigger than the other.
The 10% big rat just flattens the little rat.
Pins them, just like kids.
Okay, but then you see, you don't play with someone once.
You play with them multiple times in life.
So the game isn't one bout.
The game is repeated bouts.
Okay, so now you pair the rats together.
So the next time you pair them together, the little rat has to ask the big rat to play.
That's the rule.
Then if you pair them repeatedly, if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win 30% of the time, 30 or 40% of the time, it's some substantial amount of the time, the little rat won't play with them anymore.
And so Panksept is right.
That's for sure.
That's a major discovery.
Because it's the emergence of fair play.
It's at the mammalian level.
It's like if the big rat plays unfair because the little rat doesn't get a chance, then the little rat won't play.
So then you think, well, here's the morality.
And this is what you say to your kids when you say, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose.
It matters how you play the game.
You don't know what the hell you mean.
It's like, well, what do you mean by that?
It doesn't matter to win.
Of course it matters to win.
Okay, but let's define winning.
There's the game.
You can win the game.
Okay, but the game isn't isolated because there's a whole bunch of games because it's a tournament.
But then it's a tournament of tournaments because it's many games.
Your whole life.
Your whole life, that's right, is a sequence of games.
So what do you tell your kid?
Play so that you will be invited to play.
Because the winner is the person who's invited to play the most games.
And so then, so what does that mean?
It means, well, try to win because you're no fun if you don't try to win.
Sharpen your skills because you're no fun if you don't try.
Help your damn teammates.
Because it's a team effort, and you want to push them up as you put yourself up.
Distribute the spoils.
Don't hog all the glory, right?
If you're ahead when you're playing soccer, pass the damn ball, right?
Act, act in this admirable sportsman-like manner.
Well, what's that?
It's prototypical morality.
So then you think, well, he's a good sport.
He does this well.
Well, he's a good sport over here, too.
Here's another person who's a good sport, and it's something different.
And here's another person.
And then we get a picture of what the good sport looks like, and that's the good citizen.
And we start telling stories about that.
But it's not like we understand, right?
We can't understand.
We have to build the story up from the behavior.
And so if you look at these old stories, there's behavioral wisdom encoded in the stories.
Here's an idea.
Moses leads his people through the desert.
Right?
And they're all fractious.
They got out of a tyranny, but now they're in a damn desert.
It's like out of the tyranny, out of the frying pan, into the fire, right?
So that's what happens.
You go from a tyranny into a desert, not to the promised land, which is why people will stay in a tyranny.
It's like, why do you stay in that tyranny?
Well, we'd rather be here than in the desert, because that's the next place.
It's okay.
Well, now you're in the desert.
So what do you do?
Fragment and fight over what's important.
So that's what Moses faces.
It's like all these Israelites, they're fighting like mad.
So they come to him.
It's outlined in the story.
So he adjudicates their disputes.
And he spends like 10,000 hours listening to all the Israelites whine about everybody and the desert and complain about God.
And so this is driving Moses crazy.
He's trying to figure out, well, how should these people live?
And he's actually adjudicating the cases.
Well, then all of a sudden he goes up on a mountain and poof, the rules appear.
It's like, those are the rules by which you live.
They're discoveries.
It's like, oh, this is how you have to conduct yourself behaviorally in order for everyone to prosper.
It's bottom up.
If he wouldn't have gone out of the tyranny into the desert and done all that adjudication, the rules wouldn't have been revealed.
Or you could say, let's say you're watching a wolf pack or a troop of chimps.
They have structure, behavioral structure, so that would be acting out the archetype.
You're the anthropologist or the ethologist and you're watching the primatologist.
Think, well it's as if the chimps are following these rules.
Well, that's us.
That's us.
We're watching ourselves over thousands of years.
It's like, okay, what are we up to?
Well, here's an interesting story about how things go badly.
It's like, yeah, you're extracting out the essence of the behaviors.
And you turn them into a story, and the story's compelling because you want to imitate it.
Right?
Just like a child acting out his father or a child acting out her mother.
You want to imitate it.
So that you get the drama down, you imitate the pattern, but then you can start to think, okay, well there are principles that can be articulated that underlie these patterns.
Oh, that's natural ethics!
And this is a wonderful thing because it means that the natural ethic, in some sense, isn't just a rational construct.
It's not just a floating abstraction.
It's like the articulated ethic matches the image.
It matches the story.
And the story matches the behavior.
And the behavior matches the biology.
And the biology reflects the structure of being.
That's the musical layering of all these layers, one on top of another.
I'll be right back with Dr. Jordan Peterson.
We've got lots more to talk about.
So if we get that it's not just random chance, not just a bunch of rules, but it's actually tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands but it's actually tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands of years of us seeing stuff, observing stuff, and our biology What's going on today?
Why do we live in a society, I think the biggest epidemic is isolation and loneliness.
Yeah.
But it's manifested in a lot of disagreeable behavior.
I've heard you use the word complexity management as opposed to mental illness.
Because a lot of people think I'm depressed, I'm borderline, I'm personality, I've got this issue, I've got that issue.
But it's actually, if I understand you correctly, something that's much more common, something much more ubiquitous, something much more understandable that we have a complexity management problem.
Yeah, well, the doctrine of turning to face that which confronts you is a complexity management solution.
It's like, what do you do when horrible things are chasing you?
Turn around, chase them back.
That's your best bet.
And then I think that is an unbelievably ancient human decision.
Also, that's the classic story of the dragon fight.
The hero goes out to confront the dragon and rescues the virgin from her clutches.
Well, what does that mean?
It means that...
The standard human pattern of sexual attraction is for the person who decides to confront the predatory in its lair to be reproductively successful.
That's what that story means.
It's like, well, that's worked for us.
That's our fundamental story.
And who knows how old that is?
It's as old as predator primates.
That's how old it is.
Maybe it's older than that.
So that's At least several million years old.
But it goes back.
Like Lynn Isbell, who's an anthropologist at UCLA... She makes the case that the reason that human beings have acute vision is because we were preyed upon by predatory snakes over a 60 million year period.
So we have unbelievably acute vision.
And we're particularly good at seeing the kind of camouflage patterns that snakes have on their skin in the lower half of our visual system.
It's like snakes gave people vision.
That's Lynn Isbell's theory.
And the way she established that was she went around the world and she looked at the acuity of primate vision and correlated it with the prevalence of predatory serpents.
So the more snakes, the better our vision.
Exactly.
And that's such a cool principle, too, because there's a metaphysical principle there, too, which is, you know, why does reality have an adversarial nature?
Why would God set something on you, say?
An enemy.
An adversary makes you stronger.
Well, isn't that cruel?
It's like, not if the person who sets the adversary on you believes that you could win.
Now, maybe that's an insufficient explanation, but there's something about it that's You know, you can think about this biologically, too.
I was reading The Master and His Emissary, which is quite an interesting book about hemispheric function, and the author pointed out that if you want to make a very small movement with your right hand, the best way to do that is to put your left hand up, and then to push against your right hand and push.
Opponent processing.
Precision in action is a consequence of opponent processing.
You have opponent processing between right and left hemispheres.
To make things function, you need this opposition between powerful forces.
And I think that's built into the opposition between chaos and order.
order that's hemispherically represented, but also something like the opposition between good and evil.
Maybe you get a higher good when there's opposition between good and evil.
I mean, obviously, these are ideas that are at the absolute extent of my cognitive ability to try to think them through.
But maybe the good you get when good and evil are both possibilities is a higher good than the good you get with just good.
That tug of war.
Which you actually argue artists do brilliantly, right?
They stand on the border between order and chaos, they look in the chaos, they see patterns, and then they tell the people on the other side, hey, I just noticed a couple things over there, right?
So if that's where we need to be, then in modern society, why is it that we can't get those two groups talking to each other?
People who are primarily left-brain, you know, organized order folks, and the folks on the right side are more chaos folks, right?
Good question.
Well, that's something I've really been struggling with in my lectures.
I try to make a case for the left and the right wing.
Okay, so the right wing, there's a variety of things that distinguish them, but we'll talk about one in particular.
You have to accomplish useful things in the world just to survive.
And if you're going to do that in a social space, you do that by constructing a hierarchy.
And if you construct a hierarchy, it's going to be of a certain steepness because the people at the top are going to be more successful than the people at the bottom.
There's also hierarchies of productivity, so the people at the top are more productive than the people at the bottom.
And those overlap to some degree.
So, you have to do useful things to survive.
If you're going to do useful things in the social system, you have to build a hierarchy.
Okay, so, hierarchies are necessary and valuable.
That's what the right says.
The left says, yeah, wait a minute though, the hierarchy tends towards ossification and corruption, and it dispossesses people at the bottom.
Well, and those are both true, and that's part of that opponent processing.
You need the hierarchy.
Social animals organize themselves hierarchically.
Hierarchies are way older than capitalism, way older than the West.
They're older than trees.
They're unbelievably ancient.
There's no getting rid of the hierarchy.
But hierarchies tend towards corruption and dispossession.
And those are tied, by the way, with the lobster.
Yes, exactly.
Someone gave me this.
Yeah, exactly.
350 million years of hierarchies.
Now, that doesn't mean we should organize our societies on the lines of the lobsters.
That's not the point.
The point is that you can't attribute the existence of hierarchy to the West or to capitalism.
So that's a foolish critique.
That's the basic Marxist critique, at least part of it.
Okay, so the left wing says, wait a second now, the hierarchies tend towards corruption, and they dispossess people, and they need to be taken care of.
It's like, yes.
How much should we take care of them, versus how much should we sustain the hierarchy?
And the answer is, we don't know, and it changes.
So that's why you need political dialogue.
Okay, so what's the fundamental necessity for political dialogue?
Freedom of speech.
So freedom of speech is the mechanism that keeps the opponent process balanced.
And so you don't mess with freedom of speech, which is why I opposed the legislation that I opposed in Canada, which started all this political...
Transgender legislation.
Just for two seconds on this.
So there was a law that said you must refer to transgender people the way they want you to, right?
Picking the pronoun they use.
Yes, that was part of the legislation, background part of the legislation.
Do you have any problems with transgender people being identified by what pronoun they use in private settings in your practice or in your classrooms?
My proclivity when people ask me to address them in a certain way is that if I believe that they're being straightforward in their communication, then I tend to accede to the demand, like a reasonable person does.
So that wasn't the issue.
The issue was the compulsion of speech and also the government's insistence that it was alright to build a social constructionist view of gender into the law, which is now the case in New York.
It's also the case in Canada.
And that's not appropriate because gender is not socially constructed in its entirety.
It has a biological basis.
So you don't build that into the law.
But anyways, it was the compelled speech issue that really got me.
It's like, no, you don't have sovereign control over my speech.
Never in the history of English common law has the legislative branch produced legislation that compelled voluntary speech.
There has been restrictions on hate speech.
There's more of those in Canada than there are in the U.S. And I don't agree with them either.
I think that's a mistake, but that's a separate issue.
Compulsion in speech, your Supreme Court deemed that invalid in 1942. No compulsion of speech in the private sphere, no matter what the reason.
And I think that's the correct principle.
And what's the issue with hate speech?
Well, hate speech exists, clearly.
The question is, it's the fundamental issue.
Who defines hate?
And that's like the Achilles tendon, the Achilles heel of the law.
It's like, the answer is, those people who you least want to define it.
So what you want is you want to have people say their hateful things out in the open, where you can keep an eye on them, and where they can invalidate their own viewpoint, which is generally what happens.
Invalidate their viewpoints.
Yes.
When they say something hateful, racist, for example, the society says, you guys, you're missing the boat.
You're completely off target with this.
Right.
You get reprimanded.
Spanked.
You get back in line.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly that.
That's how it's supposed to work.
Well, that's a good way of putting it, because what it also means is that the people who espouse those opinions, for whatever reason, get appropriately subjected to social correction.
Right.
That's good.
You want them to be subjected to social correction.
So what happens if the government passes a law saying you can't say those words?
Then where do they go?
Underground.
And psychologically and socially.
And that's not good.
Because then you don't know what's going on.
Like this thing that happened with Alex Jones is a good example of that.
It's like, leave Alex Jones alone.
Why?
Because you want to see what he's up to.
Not because you like him, but you want to see what he's up to.
Yeah, absolutely.
You want to see what people are up to.
You know, because sometimes extremists are correct.
Almost never.
They're almost always dangerous beyond belief.
But like one time in a thousand, things have changed so radically that someone who appears extreme is correct.
Well, you've got to be able to know when that's the case.
You've got to keep an eye on it.
You know, and it's not clear to me at all that most of the followers of Alex Jones necessarily agree with him.
Maybe they're mildly entertained by his antics.
Whatever it might be, but it was a mistake to go after him.
You've got to keep an eye on him.
Plus, you shouldn't persecute people who are paranoid.
That was Kissinger's big statement to Nixon, about Nixon.
Even paranoid people have enemies.
Right, right, right.
Now you can confirm their bias.
Right, that's exactly right.
Yes, that's not a good idea.
Why is every person watching us right now, and there are quite a few, suffering from anxiety, depression, addiction, all three together even?
How is it possible we're not all there in that quandary?
Oh, well, first of all, many people are at different periods in their life, right?
It's a rare person who doesn't have a severe bout of anxiety at some point in their life, often because things collapse around them, you know, like they encounter some real catastrophe.
Even with depression, if you look at the epidemiological studies, most people who eventually suffered depression had their first episode precipitated by something truly awful, right?
So, you know, we move in and out of states of terrible negative emotion throughout our life.
Why don't we stay there?
What makes us better?
Almost subconsciously we have a resilience.
Yeah, well, some of it's the grace of God and blind luck.
You know, some people are just healthier than other people and that makes a big difference.
So, you know, you don't want to be too morally self-righteous about the absence of anxiety in your life.
It could easily be due to your characterological strengths and your willingness to confront things voluntarily and all that.
But health plays a big role.
Health and good fortune.
You know, I mean, you meet people now and then who are in their 40s and they've never suffered a serious loss from death, for example.
We'll be back with more from Dr. Jordan Peterson.
Do you think part of the reason that people find their path is because they know the story they're in?
Oh, definitely.
They don't know what story they're in.
Or they're in someone else's story as a bit player, as you've articulated.
Yeah, well, we've produced some things, some exercises online to help people get their story straight.
There's one exercise called Future Authoring.
Speak about that.
I did that, actually.
Yeah, well, you know, the idea was that it's based on exactly the questions you asked, which is, well, what's the story of your life?
Is it a comedy or a tragedy?
Comedy is something with a happy ending, fundamentally.
And a tragedy is, well, it starts bad and gets worse.
You know, and is it a tragedy that someone else is imposing on you or some bit of you that you don't understand?
What's the story of your life?
Part of that is, well, what do you want?
What are you aiming at?
That's the reverse of sin, right?
You're aiming at something.
Well, the Future Authoring Program helps you determine what it is that would be good for you to aim at.
What do you hope for?
What do you hope for?
So the exercise basically assumes that you treat yourself as if you're someone that you're taking care of.
So that's the presupposition.
You're valuable, despite your flaws.
It would be okay for you, and maybe alright for the universe as a whole, if your life wasn't any more wretched than it has to be.
So we can set it up for that.
So now, if you were looking three to five years down into the future...
And you could have what you needed within the bounds of reason.
What would it be?
What do you want?
What do you want from your family?
What do you want from your friends?
How are you going to educate yourself?
What are you going to do for your career?
How are you going to take care of your mental and physical health?
How are you going to resist temptation?
What are you going to do with your time outside of work that's productive and meaningful?
You get to have it.
It's like knock and the door will open.
Okay, you've got to knock first.
And then you've got to pick the door.
And like, I really like this because it is...
You cannot catch something you're not pursuing.
So now, if you're pursuing it, that doesn't mean you'll catch it.
But generally, you'll catch something interesting along the way.
You know, that's the thing that's so cool about this.
Let's say you set out a vision, you start pursuing it, you don't get what you're after.
But you learn a lot as you move towards that destination.
And as you learn, your vision is going to change.
And you may end up with something that's better than what you were aiming at to begin with.
But that won't happen unless you initiate the journey.
That's partly something I learned from the Abrahamic stories.
With the story of Abraham in particular, because God calls Abraham to an adventure when he's like 85. It's like, get out of your father's tent for God's sake.
Get out there in the world, right?
Really, that's how the story is set up.
Leave your family in your tent.
It's time to get out in the world.
Well, what does he confront?
Famine is the first thing.
Tyranny and the potential loss of his wife.
It's like Abraham must have been going...
It's like, the tent's looking pretty good.
But it's this call to adventure.
Okay, so you put together a vision.
That's your call to adventure.
Get out there in the world and contend with it.
Well, you might not get what you want, but you might find what you need.
But it won't happen without the pursuit.
And that's part of faith.
Right?
Faith is, I'm going out in the world to seek my fortune.
And if I do that properly, then the fates will cooperate with me.
How do the archetypal stories that we, in our subconscious, have?
The archetypal questions are the ones that everyone really is trying to ask.
Even if we can't put words to it, right?
How do they help us maintain our sanity?
And do you think that's part of what we're struggling with right now?
That we've lost touch with ancient wisdom.
Again, part of our collective unconscious.
That should be there, should be part of us, that we've distanced ourselves from, either from technology or modern culture, whatever.
Well, look, we have the capacity for abstraction, right?
And so to abstract means you can think without acting, because otherwise it's useless.
It's not abstraction then.
So you can peel reality away and represent it abstractly, and then you can start manipulating it.
And you can criticize what you're representing.
And we're doing an awful lot of that.
A lot of that's subsidized, I would say, this intense criticism of our own structure.
It's like, fair enough, you know?
But you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, especially if it's the divine child that you're throwing out, which is what it is.
It's like, criticism, this is where the left goes too far, when it's criticizing.
It's like, well, you can criticize the hierarchy.
You can criticize the current instantiation of the hierarchy.
It isn't obvious that you can criticize the idea of hierarchy itself.
You're pushing a little too far then.
You can describe the tyrannical nature, the partial tyrannical nature of the current societal structure.
You can't say all hierarchies are patriarchal tyrannies.
That's too far.
You have to use some judgment.
And so the proclivity for...
And the thing is, what are you trying to do when you criticize?
Well, if you're smart, like when I get my students to read Freud, it's like...
Or Nietzsche.
Well, these guys had, A, they were bound by their time and place.
And so they had presumptions that we no longer share.
And B, they said things that were regrettable.
Nietzsche said a variety of things about women that were regrettable.
Partly, I think, because he didn't have that much success on the romantic front.
Partly because he was very ill.
Partly because he was isolated.
Like, he had his reasons.
But it's not that helpful.
Maybe you read Nietzsche, it's like you get rid of 10% of it.
But you keep the rest.
You read Freud, it's the same thing.
You read these people who were flawed humans and you think, well, let's separate the wheat from the chaff.
We don't want to put it all in a pile and burn it.
It's like, oh, Freud made a mistake.
Burn him!
That's what we're doing with people on social media.
It's like, no!
Discriminate.
There's a horrible word for people.
Don't discriminate.
It's like, yeah, discriminate, man.
Like your life depended on it.
You read these old thinkers and you think, well, no, no.
Yes, that goes in the keep pile.
That goes in the keep pile.
We're not doing that with our culture.
And it's partly because we don't have any gratitude as far as I can tell.
And this is another thing I talk to my audiences about.
Here's the story.
Here's how to survive in Indonesia.
Okay, so you live on a mountain, but it's a volcano.
All right, so you get to climb up the volcano at night.
It has to be at night because it's too hot otherwise.
And so you have to climb up this volcano, and it's a mountain.
Then you have to go inside the volcano, down to near where the volcano is active, because it's active.
So it's belching out sulfuric clouds at you all the time.
And if you encounter a bad one, then you just die.
So when you have a mask around your face that's just a wet rag, and you go down to the volcano, and you pick up a 40-pound clump of sulfur, and then you carry it up out of the volcano at night, because otherwise it's too hot, and then you carry it down the mountain, and you get a couple of dollars so that you can do it again.
Yeah, that's not your life.
But someone has that life.
And you don't have that life because look around you, man.
This is a remarkable place that we've built.
It's absolutely unbelievable.
And most of the time it works.
And you should be on your knees in gratitude for it.
Even though you can also say, well look...
We don't have full equality of opportunity.
We're not making the full use of the talents that everybody's bringing to the table.
The system tilts towards tyranny from time to time, and we have to keep an eye on it.
It's like, yeah, but you're not hauling 40-pound sulfur boulders out of volcanoes at night.
That's something, you know?
So a little gratitude would temper the criticism.
You made the point that part of the reason people get bitter is because they don't think they can be as good as they should be able to be.
And a lot of it comes back to self-esteem.
How do we build self-esteem at any age?
Because I see that slip away in a lot of people.
And without that, they don't have the confidence to act in some of the things you're speaking to.
Okay, so self-esteem is a tricky concept because the best predictor of self-esteem is trait neuroticism.
So the higher you are in trait neuroticism...
Please explain that for everybody.
There are five cardinal personality traits.
Extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness.
I have a test that people can take, understand myself, that allows them to assess those five traits broken down into two additional aspects.
I took mine, by the way.
My results were scary.
Well, the test is designed so that everybody's results get to be scary.
It's scary to find out who you are.
But how...
Trait neuroticism is a measure of the proclivity for negative emotion.
Anxiety and emotional pain, essentially.
And the higher you are in that, the lower you score on tests of self-esteem.
So self-esteem is not a very good measurement because basically it's a misnamed test.
Reverse neuroticism.
So it's not easy to deal with that proclivity for anxiety.
But there's a separate question, which is more like, how do you encourage people?
So it's not a matter of bolstering their self-esteem.
It's really important to get these things right, because if you don't get the conceptions right, then the implementations fail.
So it's about reducing neuroticism?
Well, if you could.
I don't think you can, really.
What you can do is make people more courageous.
That's different.
So even if you're treating people who are phobic, like agoraphobic, it isn't obvious that you make them less phobic.
What is obvious is that you make them more courageous.
So if you're treating someone who's agoraphobic, and they won't go on an elevator, so they're afraid of an elevator, and you slowly expose them to the elevator, negotiating that, and they get to the point where they can get on the elevator, they don't really, they're not really less afraid of death than they were.
They're more confident of their ability to prevail in the face of adversity.
And you can teach that.
And you do that by challenge.
You do that through challenge.
So if you want to build someone's self-esteem, let's say, but I would say encourage them, then set them a set of optimal challenges and allow them to watch themselves succeed at those challenges and that will build it right into their bones.
Alright, so let's go back to this lobster story since you're wearing the lobster tie.
So, 250 million years ago you had a hierarchy because there's hierarchies in Most everything, it seems.
Some lobsters win the hierarchy.
They get to have all the female lobsters, I guess.
What do you do with the lobsters at the bottom of the hierarchy?
Now, today you say we've got to talk about them.
Can't ignore them.
But it's not easy just to engineer society to automatically manifest a better life.
Although I think a lot of people say we can do better than we are for a lot of people.
They don't get a chance.
But what is the beta lobster...
How do they get courageous?
Well, I think we do a lot of...
I think we have done a lot of things successfully in our society.
So the first is that it's not a monolithic hierarchy by any stretch of the imagination.
As we've made society more complex, the number of sub-hierarchies have multiplied tremendously.
And so...
Let's say each of us comes to the table with a different set of weaknesses and strengths.
It's highly probable that you'll be able to find a sub-hierarchy where your particular pattern of weaknesses and strengths actually constitutes the crucial element.
So if you're high in agreeableness, for example, well, healthcare is a good field for you.
And if you're really conscientious, then you can be a manager.
And if you're open, then you can be entrepreneurial or creative.
So play in a different hierarchy.
Find the hierarchy that matches your temperament.
That's a really good rule.
And then we could say, well, let's diversify the hierarchies.
And we are doing that at a very rapid rate.
My God, there's an endless number of diverse hierarchies online, for example.
So, a sophisticated society produces a subset of hierarchy that's matched for as many people as possible.
Okay, but then there's additional complications, and some of them we don't know how to deal with.
So, for example, one of the things that predicts the ability to succeed in hierarchies across hierarchies seems to be associated with intelligence.
So all things considered across most hierarchies, it's better to be intelligent.
So then the question is, well, what do you do with people who are of less cognitive power?
And that's an increasingly complex problem.
So, and I don't think we have a straightforward solution to that, because one of the dangers is that as our society becomes more technological and more cognitively complex, the effect of intelligence actually grows.
So what do you do with members of our society who cannot compete?
Because we have an obligation.
That was one of the basic principles.
One of the basic insights I gained from reading and listening to you was that we all have that spark of divinity.
That you can't leave.
When Nietzsche said God is dead because science had prospered But it only happened because religion first respected our specialness.
Each of us.
And only after that could we begin to transcend it.
Okay, well this is...
The way I look at this is that...
Let's say that you're blessed with success.
Like you've been blessed with success.
Okay, so you have a lot of resources at your disposal.
Okay, now you can feel guilty about that, and perhaps to some degree that you should.
That's between you and your conscience.
But let's say that you've generated your resources in a fair game, and that a lot of people have benefited along with you.
So you've played a straight game.
Now you have all these resources.
Okay, so what should you do with the resources?
Well...
Impulsive pleasure.
It's like, well, a little of that goes a long ways, and it's liable to take you down in a very, very short period of time.
There's many shows on that, so...
Right, okay, so how about not that?
It doesn't work.
Right, it's not a good medium to long-term solution.
Okay, how about...
Your ethical responsibility grows in proportion to the resources that you have at your control.
And the right thing to do is that as you become more competent, authoritative, and able, is to expand the range in which you're operating to do more good.
It's like you got a problem, you see something in the world that's bothering you, think, well, that's a problem.
It's bothering me.
Because that's an interesting thing.
Not everyone bothers everything.
Some things bother each of us.
That's your problem.
Whatever bothers you, it's like, that's like a little marker.
I don't know why it emerges.
That's your problem.
You should go out there and do something about that.
Okay, so you have some excess resources.
It's like, great, get at it.
And this is one of the things I like about someone like Bill Gates, for example.
It's like, what's he doing?
Well, how about combating malaria?
Okay, you got $60 billion, you want to wipe out malaria?
It might be a good thing that you have $60 billion if one of the consequences is that you're going to wipe out malaria, or at least you're going to try.
And he's after the five major diseases, right?
And actually, from what I've been able to read, is like making some headway.
It's like, great!
We had so much to discuss with Dr. Jordan Peterson that I've asked him to come back for another visit.
There's so much more to discuss, and I'm going to get right into it.
