Dr. Jordan Peterson Series: Overcoming Depression and Anxiety
Jordan Peterson: professor, author, influential thought leader, and philosophical phenomenon. With over 100 million views on YouTube, his videos and lectures have taken the internet by storm with followers who say he’s brought order to the chaos of their lives. In the first episode of Dr. Oz’s interview series with Dr. Peterson, they explore the roots of depression, the true meaning of life, and challenge everything you’ve always thought about suffering and success. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
It doesn't hurt to try to do good things for someone as a habit.
It doesn't hurt to try to tell the truth.
That's probably the fundamental issue.
It doesn't hurt to begin to trust someone and that's very tightly associated with the willingness to tell the truth.
You know, the truth is what produces intimacy.
Hi, I'm Dr. Oz, 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.
He often explores and ignites fiery discussions on faith, personality, self-empowerment, and identity politics.
Today, Dr. Peterson is back with me to help all of us gain a better understanding of our full potential.
Why is the need for human connection so fundamental to who we are?
Well a huge part of it is a consequence of the fact that our children are so dependent.
You know, human children have the longest dependency period of any creatures, and the connection between mother and child is obviously of primary importance as a consequence of that, but then there needs to be a scaffold around that as well in order for it even to be possible for children to survive the very dangerous early stages and then to become properly enculturated, which takes a minimum of something approximating 16 to 18 years.
And that's the price, I think, that we pay biologically for our massive cortical capacity, our intelligence.
It takes that long to program.
And so the cooperation is absolutely necessary to allow that to occur.
It seems so fundamental biologically, but you can also tell when we're not connected, because we're not really unhappy.
And in a society like today's, where people are progressively more disconnected, how do you foster genuine relationships?
You've got every temptation not to.
Well, I think one of the things you have to do first is decide that genuine relationships are necessary.
I think there was a Pew research poll done not very long ago, I think it was Pew, that showed that about 75% of Americans regarded their familial and intimate relationships as the most meaningful part of their lives.
And so you need to know that first, is that there probably isn't going to be anything more important to you over the course of your life than your family and your intimate relationships.
Making them of high quality is not optional.
It's also not optional because the connections that we have with people literally keep us sane.
The old psychoanalysts used to think about sanity as something that was a consequence of a well-structured internal psyche, something that you sort of carried around with you in your soul, let's say.
And there's some truth in that, but what's even more true is that If you're embedded in a functional social community, so you have family members, you have friends, you have a broader community, then everyone around you is constantly reminding you how to be sane.
They let you know when your jokes aren't funny.
They let you know when you're too irritable and arrogant.
And so that holds you together.
It's like a marketplace.
It's a distributed cognitive marketplace for sanity.
And people can't tolerate isolation.
It's a very rare person who can be on their own and stay together.
And it's funny to think of sanity as a distributed property, but it's definitely the case.
Why so often do we naturally tend to form pair bonds?
It's not just that we're a member of a group.
You've got your family, obviously, and they're there, but then you sort of go off on your own.
There's a whole process where you separate from your family.
But it's almost as though we're directly at...
Attracted to one other living entity to bond with.
Yeah, well, I mean pair bonding is a fairly common strategy in the animal kingdom overall, especially for child rearing.
It seems to be what you might describe as the minimal viable unit.
It seems to be biologically an elaboration of the same circuits that bond a mother to a child, which is often why people refer to their intimate partner as, you know, baby or honey or some diminutive.
So that circuit seems to have elaborated to pull in pair bonding, but it's to facilitate the long-term relationships that are necessary, I would say, fundamentally, to ensure that children are raised properly and stably across time so that society stabilizes.
If we have the biologic need and the societal need, as you outlined, why does it end up being in the form of marriage?
And if that is the best way to pair bond, how do the other options compare to it?
Well, the thing about pair bonding with someone is that even though it might be necessary, there's another element to it, and it has to do with the social distribution of sanity, is that there's lots of things wrong with you, and there's lots of things wrong with your marital partner, but hopefully if you join together, the things that are wrong can be worked out through dialogue across time, dialogue and negotiation, and conflict.
It's not an easy thing to do.
And plus the two of you are going to have to face the vicissitudes of life.
And so that mere attraction that's love, let's say, or sexual attraction, it's not sufficient to bond you together across times of extreme difficulty.
Because you'll find times in your marriage where you're not sexually attracted to one another and where you're not getting along.
And so you need the community around you to say, look, You have to think about this over the decades and not over the weeks and the months, or even sometimes the years, that it's important for you to adopt the responsibility to maintain this long-term relationship because all things considered, it's better for everyone.
It gives you the narrative of your life.
It provides you with a companion who knows who you are.
It helps you maintain your sanity because you have someone to contend to.
It provides a stable environment for the raising of children.
It's like the minimal necessary structure, social structure, that other complex social structures can be built upon, too.
But you need this society in there to say, stay together.
It's an accomplishment.
It's not just a responsibility and a necessity and a love affair.
It's also an accomplishment.
It's something you should be celebrated for.
It always seemed to me that marriage...
covenant that we have with society, the only contract that's legally binding that we sign with everybody.
We don't sign a birth certificate.
We don't sign our death certificate.
Right.
It's a choice.
Yeah, but it's a choice.
And because of that, it's wrapped into a lot of traditions and cultures.
And in a society where we don't seem to respect that covenant as much.
Yeah.
And I'll give you one example.
Living together before you're married.
Yeah.
Many people do.
Yeah.
The data seems to suggest that does not help marriage.
Maybe the opposite.
Makes it worse.
Yeah, you're much more likely to get divorced if you live together beforehand.
And I think part of the reason for that is that you don't get to try on people for size.
Because the problem with living together is the message that it sends implicitly.
People know this.
And living together is, well...
I'll check you out and see if you're okay for me, but I reserve the right to trade you in for a better partner if someone comes along.
And that doesn't work.
It's an insult to some degree.
It's also an arrogant insult because it assumes that you're the person who has the superior role in the relationship.
I mean, both people are assuming that, but it's not a good assumption.
The right assumption is that You're clueless, and your partner is clueless, and you both have a lot to learn, and you're damn lucky you've got anyone else around, and that more than that, and that to find out what that person is like, and to find out what you're like, you have to go all in, and you have to go all in early, because otherwise it's not gonna, there's gonna be something in reserve, and marriage is so difficult.
The process of conflict that puts you together as a unified pair, let's say, and then maybe as integrated people, it's so difficult that without going all in, you're just not going to manage it.
And that's why, you know, not only are people who live together more likely to get divorced, but common law couples are also much more likely to separate.
So when people say, well, it's just a piece of paper, it's like that's an unbelievably cliched and unsophisticated response to something as complicated and necessary as socially sanctioned marriage.
Take it one step further, because I've heard you address your fear that we're becoming a polygamous society.
Most Americans repel at that thought.
We think of that as something other cultures have perhaps embraced.
It's supposed to be illegal here, but we sort of back our way into polygamy if there's no marriage.
Well, we're already a polygamous society before marriage, because people have sequential partners.
And what happens, generally speaking, is that a small number of males have a large number of female partners.
And then the vast majority of males have, like, virtually no partners.
And, you know, you can make a case for that because women should be allowed to choose whoever they want as partners.
But, like, one of the things you see happening in the colleges where females dominate, say, 70% females, you'd think, well, the males would be making out like bandits because of the sex ratio difference.
But what happens is a tiny proportion of the men attract all the women.
A huge proportion of the men are just as...
Isolated as they would be under normal circumstances.
And the men who are popular have absolutely no motivation whatsoever to form a genuine relationship with any single woman.
And so it doesn't work for the women because they don't get to have a relationship.
They get to have a series of casual affairs with high-demand men.
It doesn't work for the majority of men because they don't have any relationships at all.
And it turns the high-demand men, I think, into psychopaths.
I mean, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I don't believe that you can separate sexual intimacy from emotion.
I don't think you can separate it from the rest of life, from emotional intimacy and the necessity for considering someone in their totality as a person.
You don't get that with a series of one-night stands.
And there's no way that you can...
Reduce sex, if you have access to a lot of it, to mere casual pleasure repeatedly without denigrating what it means to be a human being, in terms of the women that you're sleeping with, but also with regards to yourself.
Like, it's not as if, if you treat someone else, some other human beings, Casually.
Repeatedly.
You're telling yourself that human beings are the sorts of creatures that can be treated casually, repeatedly.
And if you don't think that'll reflect on yourself, then you're not thinking.
It's not a good solution.
Which is why, across the world, cultures tend towards monogamy.
You know, it's partly because, on average, that does better for everyone, but particularly for children.
One tip as a practicing psychologist that you would give a patient of yours who's having trouble finding intimacy.
They think that hanging out with people is the same as being truly intimate with them.
How do you cross into true intimacy?
Well, you know, it doesn't hurt to try to do good things for someone.
You know, as a habit, it doesn't hurt to try to tell the truth.
That's probably the fundamental issue.
It doesn't hurt to begin to trust someone, and that's very tightly associated with the willingness to tell the truth.
You know, the truth is what produces intimacy.
And obviously, because how could you have an intimate relationship that's based on either the shallowness of half-truths or lies?
There can't be intimacy there.
And so, you know, the first step is to, Risk-trust.
And I say risk, I really mean that in a specific sense.
Naive people trust naively and automatically, because they think that people are basically good and they won't get hurt.
And then everyone gets burned.
And burned people get cynical, and then cynical people don't trust, and then that's a barrier to intimacy.
But you can go beyond the cynicism, and you have to do that.
And you do that by understanding that if you put your hand out in a gesture of trust, you call to the best in that person to respond properly.
And there's a big risk in that.
That's why you're supposed to be, what is it?
I'm going to get the phrase wrong.
It's something like as soft as doves, but as wise as serpents.
It's a New Testament statement, but that's what it means.
It means to risk the trust with your eyes open, knowing that you can be betrayed, but being willing to have the courage to trust regardless.
And that's the beginning of intimacy.
So, that and truth.
You know, the truth is necessary.
Well, they say the truth will set you free.
It will usually drag you through the mud to fair distance before it sets you free.
But, you know, if you start to tell someone the truth, you start to have the advantage of their viewpoint And, you know, you have a parochial viewpoint.
You're full of ignorance and biases and blind spots.
You don't know about any of them.
I mean, you may have all sorts of wonderful qualities as well, but the other person hopefully doesn't have the same biases and blind spots and so forth, although they'll have some of them.
As scary as it is, it beats the alternative, which is not having intimacy, no matter how much it hurts you.
Why do you think so many folks are afflicted with depression today?
It just seems that it touches everybody.
Well, I think depression is a very complex grab bag of diagnoses first.
And there's a lot of physiological illnesses that produce depression, a lot of autoimmune conditions that we're just starting to understand.
And so one of the things to think about if you're depressed is that there's actually something wrong with you physically.
We don't know how much of that's diet related, more than we think.
There's more and more work done on gut biome, for example, which is the bacterial substrate of your intestinal system and the role that it plays in producing the neurotransmitters that are necessary for mental health.
So I suspect that more of it has to do with diet than we think.
It's probably a subset of the same thing that's causing the obesity and diabetes epidemics.
I think the fragmenting of the family, that's a big problem.
I think that a generalized nihilism that's emerged and been amplified over the last 20 years or so is also a consequence because people need a purpose in life, they need a deeper meaning in life in order to experience positive emotion because you experience almost all of your positive emotion in relationship to a higher order goal.
And so if there's no morality underlying your, let's say, psychological structure, and you don't have an up and a down, if you don't have an up, there's nothing positive to work for, and then you're left with the suffering of life.
And that's definitely a contributor, because I've talked to many people who've told me that they're lost and directionless.
You know, and everyone knows that's a negative thing when people tell you that.
Why is lost and directionless negative?
And the answer to that is, well, you can't generate any positive emotion if you're lost and directionless.
And so, I think those are the fundamental reasons.
In your life, and you've been very open about the fact that you have suffered with depression, could you walk me through how you figured out that you actually needed to do something about what you were feeling?
Well, the first indication probably was that depression was very hard on my father.
And so I had some experience of it before I realized that it was also characterizing me.
And I could see that it took him down quite badly.
And so, you know, he went from a very, very competent person to someone who was In extreme psychological pain, and for a long time.
And that happened when I was in graduate school, and I finally got him to take antidepressants, took a lot of pressure from me and the rest of my family, my wife in particular, and it really helped.
It was remarkable how much of a difference it made.
And then I started to experience symptoms that were quite similar, and for me, there was a A lot of cognitive interference.
I had a hard time concentrating.
I'd lose my train of thought.
I tended to have a feeling of grief that was constant, that didn't really seem to be associated with any of the events in my life.
It was like free-floating.
And that's been the case with my mood irregularities throughout my entire life, as they seem virtually unrelated to actual events that are occurring in my life.
And so that's very disconcerting.
It got to the point 25 years ago where, especially in the winter, because my depression was worse in the winter, that it was difficult for me to function.
I was starting to have a hard time lecturing.
And I was also quite irritable.
Irritability is a very under-diagnosed symptom of depression.
And the thing about the irritability that's associated with depression is that it's often directed down dominance hierarchies.
So doctors don't see it, but family members do.
And so if you have someone in your family who's irritable, far more irritable than you think they should be, and who takes things much more to heart than they should, and have a hard time recovering from that, you know, they make mountains into molehills, for example, and they overreact to negative things that you do, there's a reasonable probability that some of that's associated with depression.
And, like I said, depression isn't one thing, it's many things, and some of it's psychological, and some of it's physiological.
You've shared with me in private moments that there are some people who are depressed for good reasons because their life is horrible.
Yes, they have terrible lives.
And there are some people who have what seems to be good lives and who are still depressed.
And as a psychologist, as you look at medical treatments, you mentioned you give your father antidepressants.
If you give someone whose life is worthy of change and maybe their depression is to catalyze them to change it, an antidepressant, it doesn't seem to have the same effect as if you give it to someone who has a true chemical abnormality.
Well, people are often worried that if they take an antidepressant, that first of all, they're taking the easy way out, and second, they won't be motivated to change their life.
But I don't believe that to be the case.
I mean, if you're really depressed, and there's a difference between being depressed and sad.
My daughter, for example, suffered from depression, and she said, I asked her one day, well, how would you describe it?
And she had this little dog that she really liked, you know, that was a real friend of hers, and she said...
Well, it's pretty much like waking up every morning and remembering that your dog just died.
And she was young when she said that, and I thought, well, that was interesting.
And then, three years ago, her dog died.
And, you know, it was a pretty bad day when we put the dog down.
And she said afterwards...
Depression is way worse than when your dog dies.
So there's this feeling of, I would say, constant...
I think the best analog is grief and loss.
It's something approximating the same emotion that you'd feel if your whole family was wiped out in a car accident.
And it's there all the time.
But to treat that pain, that darkness...
If it's something you can change in your life, you've already to change that.
If you can't change something in your life where there's nothing to change that should make a difference, look at the chemical issues.
In your life, you began to tie or connect the dots, I'll say, with your diet and depression.
Yeah, it was first of all chemical because antidepressants really helped me.
It was such a relief when I first took them.
How long did it take for you to feel relief?
About five days.
It just flattened me.
Like, for the first five days, I was just on the couch.
But I realized...
And it was...
You know, that's the sort of thing that can frighten people because it seems like a side effect.
But what I realized was that it was probably the first time that I had...
Relaxed physically for maybe 15 years.
And so, you know, it just...
And it's in a serotonergic effect because part of what the serotonin system does is actually relax you.
And so I was relaxing and it was...
Once I realized that was happening, it was such a relief.
It was a massive change.
And the thing too, you know, if you're depressed...
And even if things are not good in your life and you need to change them, you're not going to change them if you're dead.
And if you're seriously depressed and considering suicide, which means you have elaborated fantasies of how you might kill yourself, then you're not going to improve if you're dead.
And so you take the antidepressant and hopefully what happens is that it puts you up into a...
Energy state that's high enough so that you can start working on your problems and they're relatively harmless drugs you know like relatively and Relatively means harmless compared to the depression let's say and so with any luck and with good counseling you can take an antidepressant and it'll stabilize your mood somewhat you can stabilize your sleeping and your eating which often helps and then if Part of the reason for your depression is that your life is out of order,
then you can start taking steps one by one to address the problems that are actually causing you the misery and the grief and, you know, over a multi-year period, maybe stabilize yourself and put yourself back together.
So you take the pills and then you change your diet.
We've spent a fair amount of time together.
You eat exclusively steak.
Yeah, that's very extreme.
And I certainly wouldn't recommend that for everyone.
But in your case, you believe that's a profoundly important additional path.
Well, I think that the depression in our family has a very powerful autoimmune component, and so it seems very associated with diet.
My daughter had a very extensive series of autoimmune problems and was probably on the road to an early grave, I would say, maybe by the time she was 30. She's 27 now, and she's doing just fine.
All of her symptoms, some of which manifested themselves as depression and some of which of arthritis, seemed to recede when she radically decreased her diet.
We had a clue about that early on because if you read the literature on rheumatoid arthritis, for example, arthritis in general, you find that if people fast, Their symptoms disappear.
But as soon as they start eating again, they come back.
And so I read that literature and I thought, well, God, people can't be having an autoimmune response to everything.
There must be some other factor associated with food that I didn't understand.
But it turned out for her, and it seems to be the case for me, that virtually anything other than beef Triggers whatever this response process is with your current beef diet.
Yeah, and that's again beef morning lunch dinner Nothing else.
Nothing else just salt.
You don't have just salt the beef.
No Can you get off your antidepressants?
I am off the antidepressants.
They didn't seem to work the same way once I changed my diet.
I still, I wouldn't say that my mood is 100% regulated.
I'm more anxious now than I was depressed.
So that's changed.
It's actually a different form of negative emotion because there's two forms.
There's a form of negative emotion that causes withdrawal.
And there's a form that causes irritability.
And before I would say I was, and that's more classically associated with depression, I would say I was more on the side of the irritability, volatility end of the spectrum, and now it's more on the withdrawal end.
I often feel sort of frozen by anxiety.
Especially in the morning, and I have had a hard time getting that under control.
However, I also have a hard time separating that from the events of my life, because my life has become extraordinarily complicated, and I actually have had things to be anxious about.
So, you know, it's not that easy to determine what's still physiological and what's psychological.
I can tell you that the effect of the Restricted diet has been very salutary in a variety of ways.
I've had an inflammatory condition in my right eye that seems to have disappeared completely, peripheral uveitis.
I don't have gastric reflex disorder anymore.
I don't have psoriasis.
I had numbness in my legs that's gone away.
I had chronic gum disease, which is fundamentally incurable.
Technically, and it's gone according to my dentist.
So all of that inflammatory condition is gone.
I'm a lot physically stronger.
I can wake up in the morning.
I do wake up in the morning spontaneously, which has never happened to me in my entire life.
I'm physically, I may have mentioned this, but I'm physically stronger and I can definitely concentrate better.
I'd noticed as I was getting older that my ability to read complex material was starting to deteriorate and that I would skip words and that's gone.
And I lost 50 pounds in seven months, which was absolutely staggering.
50 pounds?
50 pounds, yeah.
And my appetite declined by about 75%.
And so that's a lot of good things, surprisingly good.
Like, I look much better, well, to the degree that I look better, you know, than anything.
I look better than I did five years ago.
There's lots more when we come back.
Given the amount of suffering that we all witness in the world, continually inundated by new reasons to feel badly and to suffer, how do you maintain a positive continually inundated by new reasons to feel badly and to suffer, how do Well, you need a noble goal to aim for, fundamentally.
I mean, you need positive emotion in your life, and most of your positive emotion is generated as a consequence of pursuing worthwhile goals.
And the more worthwhile the goal, the more positive emotion is generated as you observe yourself moving successfully towards it.
So you need to live inside a hierarchy of value, and you need to have something at the top.
And the higher the top is, so to speak, so the nobler your goal, then the more meaning is infused into every action you take in that direction, even if the actions, the day-to-day actions themselves, are trivial.
You know, if you're laying bricks, well, you can be irritated because it's one brick after another.
But if you're laying bricks and you're building a cathedral, then you can think, well, I'm not laying bricks, I'm building a cathedral.
And that's a good parable or metaphor because the question is when you're doing your day-to-day Your normal day-to-day activities.
Like, what are you building?
You're building better you, I hope.
You're building a more solid family.
You're building a more well-regulated community.
You're trying to do all that in a way that's beneficial and sustainable in the broadest possible context.
And you're working to make the world a better place.
You have to think that through very carefully.
And you think, well, That's not necessary in some sense, or maybe it's too much of a demand, but life puts the ultimate demand on you.
It's an all-in game.
It's a mortal game, and there's lots of suffering associated with it, and you need something that's as powerful on the positive end, more powerful on the positive end, to allow you to deal with the vicissitudes of life.
And that's the destiny of humans, to participate in that process of improvement of the world.
For most of our history, there were times when we seem to have struggled to find that higher service.
And we resorted to using chemical ways of stimulating us.
Fasting was a way of doing it.
Now we can use LSD, psilocybin, magic mushroom.
There's a whole research project around ketamine.
I'm curious as a psychologist how you see those coming to the aid of some of us.
Maybe it's a cheat, maybe it's a hack, maybe there's no shortcuts, but I'd like to understand where some of these These influences can take people who are really struggling?
That's a good question.
I mean, there might not be shortcuts, but there might be glimpses.
I mean, what we don't know about psychedelics fills many, many volumes.
We don't know how long people have been using them.
I mean, there's even speculation that the reason that psilocybin mushrooms produce psilocybin is because human beings have distributed psilocybin mushrooms all over the planet because of the effects of the psilocybin, right?
And so God only knows how long this has been going on.
The psychedelics often induce mystical experiences.
It's very common.
And if they induce mystical experiences, then they seem to have curative properties.
So, for example, at Johns Hopkins, if you take psilocybin mushrooms, this is a study that was done there, and you have a mystical experience, and you smoke, There's an 85% chance that you'll stop smoking, which is head and shoulders above any other chemical intervention.
But you need the mystical experience.
Now, it's obvious that human beings have the capacity for religious experience, and it isn't obvious why.
It can clearly be elicited chemically and through these other mechanisms that you described.
And it may be that it's necessary for us now and then to move into something that approximates a mystical realm to keep us grounded In our day-to-day lives.
We do that naturally anyways because we surround ourselves with art and we surround ourselves with literature and we surround ourselves with music in particular, which can evoke a quasi-mystical state and which seems to be...
I mean, many, many people derive a tremendous amount of meaning in their life from listening to music.
And so, I don't know that the psychedelics are...
They're probably the source of most of our fundamental religious thoughts.
That's my suspicion.
The part that fascinates me is, I look at, for example, AA. I'll go to Anonymous.
The founder...
Apparently.
It was really curative as alcoholism with the mystical experience with the help of a magic mushroom.
So the thought that a glimpse of what really is out there might change everything and now allow you to appreciate what you're really working for.
Now it's not just about laying the bricks in the mundane elements of the world, which can drive anybody batty and causes terrible suffering, but appreciating that there is a cathedral you could never see before.
I get that.
Just to be clear to everybody, we're not talking about rave concerts and dropping LSD. We're talking about very clinical settings, safe settings, with people to guide you to your point.
If you don't have the mystical experience, then there's no benefit.
It could be a bad experience.
Well, we might even be talking about rave concerts and so on.
You know, I think the probability that you'll have a bad experience is exaggerated under those conditions, but I think that people gravitate towards that sort of collective mystical experience because there's actually some physiological and psychological requirement for it.
We don't know how to handle it in our culture, right?
Because these substances have been newly introduced only since the 1950s, and they blew our culture apart in some sense in the 1960s because they're so unbelievably powerful.
But there is accruing evidence as scientists get brave again that, you know, the use of psychedelics, which mostly have the same chemical structure, have salutary effects.
I mean, again, the same research team at Johns Hopkins indicated that if you give people who have terminal cancer psilocybin and they have a mystical experience, that it radically decreases their fear of death and helps them become more Accepting of what's happening to them and their eventual death.
And you know, that's not trivial.
It's not a form of treatment that we're used to thinking about in the West.
But there's something to be said for being able to come to terms with the fact of your mortal illness and your impending mortality.
Speaking of psychedelic experiences, Hieronymus Bosch's masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights, depicts a paradise in an iconic moment.
And some say there's a damning message to the piece that represents sadness.
Let's go up and look at it.
And depression.
You have lectured on this.
What do you see?
And just to point out to everybody, this central panel, they seem like they're happy.
They're frolicking.
But look more carefully.
It's more of an orgy.
And does it deliver what it's supposed to?
Well, what you see mostly on the right here, this is an image of hell, essentially.
And hell is a place of, well, let's call it eternal suffering.
And there's a metaphysical idea of hell, which is the afterlife version, you know, that if you don't behave properly while you're here on the earthly plane, that you're destined for eternal suffering.
But there's a psychological idea.
Interpretation that's also useful, which is that you can get into situations where things go from bad to worse.
It's often associated, I would say, with the accumulation of lies in your life, you know, because you tell one lie and that that generates the need for five more lies and it expands outward in a negative spiral.
You lose faith and you lose hope and you end up I think about this as like a corner of the underworld where not only are you nihilistic and hopeless because things have got out of control.
Sometimes that can be bad luck, but sometimes it can be your own moral failings.
And that can take you into a place that's exceedingly dark and, you know, past...
Nihilism, despair and hopelessness comes anger at the structure of the world that's making you suffer.
And past anger comes vengefulness.
And then that vengefulness can be manifested against yourself.
You see people cut themselves, for example, and hurt themselves in various ways or commit suicide.
They can take it out on their family or they can turn to destructive political ideologies and start to plot You know, reprehensible social interactions like the Unabomber, for example, or the mass killers who have a political motivation.
That interaction of negative consequences, let's say, as a consequence of losing hope, can bring you down underneath the structure of the world where things are unhappy.
And then there's a particular corner there in that underworld that's hell.
And hell is where you're motivated by nothing but the desire to make everything that's already bad suffer for the crime of its being.
And we don't take that sort of thing seriously anymore as well.
But it's the only way that you can understand the motivation of people who do truly terrible things.
He's doing his best to represent that with all these demonic forms and these half disembodied figures and these strange hallucinogenic-like representations.
It's a very terrifying painting and Bosch is an incredible artist.
There was a number of artists.
Grunewald was another one who was working approximately the same period who were working on these sorts of ideas and part of it is the attempt to lay out a moral universe, you know, and think, well, is the universe moral?
Well, it depends on what you mean by the universe, but the lived experience that we have is clearly moral because we all can identify Things that we should not do.
And our conscience does that for us.
It tortures us with the things that we've done or not done, that we should have done or not done.
Is that what this represents?
These are the things you probably shouldn't be doing?
Well, it's a movement.
It's a midway point here.
This is the far negative end.
So, I suppose, to some degree, there's carelessness represented here, like an impulsive and pleasure-seeking carelessness.
And, you know, there's something to be said for pleasure-seeking, and there's something to be said for pleasure, but the problem is it's very short term.
It doesn't take the longer span into consideration, and it doesn't provide you with that depth of meaning that we already pointed out is necessary to set against the suffering of life.
You really do.
What you have to do, and this is partly what this here is an attempt to have you meditate upon.
Like, there are terrible places you can go.
And people end up there, and sometimes they end up there for very long periods of time, enough to ruin their entire lives and their families' lives, and then to also have very negative social consequences.
Life has enough suffering and malevolence embedded in it to seriously corrupt you.
And the only antidote to that is to have that nobility of purpose that we already described.
And given the depths of suffering and malevolence that clearly exist, that nobility of purpose has to be, like it has to be, You have to have lifted your eyes above the horizon and look to something that's greatly in the distance.
The old cathedrals are a good example of that, again, I would say, because when people started building them, they knew they wouldn't be finished for 350 years.
And yeah, it's very difficult for modern people to even imagine.
But they were participating in a drama that was something like the renovation of the world, that being your moral responsibility, the renovation of the world.
Laying the bricks, you realize you're bringing a cathedral.
You go past, this is the decisions you make, some of them bad, the small lies lead this way.
But if you elevate, you head here.
Well, that's the theory.
That's right.
If there's a down, and there's clearly a down, I mean, everyone knows that.
Everyone with any sense understands not only that there's suffering and malevolence in the world, but that But that you can get pulled into that, and that can make you hopeless and nihilistic, and then that can make you bitter and cruel.
Everyone knows that.
It takes very little self-reflection to understand that.
And the alternative is to...
And it's a courageous alternative, given the fact that the suffering is real.
It's a courageous alternative to, first of all, agree to try to improve the world, given its relatively sorry and pain-filled state.
You know, you can take the Position and some philosophers do that would be better if nothing existed at all because the suffering is too overwhelming to justify the existence the alternative is well no instead you're tasked with this moral obligation which is to Remediate suffering to the degree that you can to resist the temptation of malevolence and to fight it where it appears and to Bring the world into something approximating harmony.
And maybe you start with yourself, and maybe you start with your family, because at least there's a certain amount of humility in that.
But it's not optional.
That's the thing.
These great masterpieces, especially of medieval and the Renaissance times, they're trying to indicate in a way that's pre-verbal, in some sense.
I've represented an image that this isn't optional.
There's no way out of this problem.
Is that if you ignore the nobility of your aim, you're stuck with the suffering and the malevolence.
And that will take you down.
And it may take you places that no one with a clear head would ever want to go.
And, well, that's this part of the trip ditch.
You don't want to be there.
More questions after the break.
Happiness, you talk a lot about it.
Should it be our life goal?
And if not, what should we be seeking?
Well, it shouldn't be our life goal.
Because there are times in your life when you're not going to be happy.
And then what are you going to do?
Your goal is demolished.
And there are going to be plenty of times in your life when you're not happy.
There might be years.
And so it's a shallow boat in a very rough ocean.
And it's based upon a misconception.
Happiness is something that descends upon you.
Everyone knows that.
You know, it comes upon you suddenly.
And then you should be grateful for it because There's plenty of suffering, and if you happen to be happy, well, wonderful.
Enjoy it.
Be grateful for it.
And maybe try to meditate on the reasons that it manifested itself, right?
Because it can come as a mystery, you know?
You don't necessarily know when you're going to be happy.
Something surprising happens.
Delights you and you can analyze that you can think well.
I'm doing something right.
I'm in the right place right now.
I've done something right Maybe I can hang on to that.
Maybe I can learn from that What you should be pursuing instead is well.
There's two things is You should be pursuing Who you could be.
That'd be the first thing.
Because you're not who you could be.
And you know it.
You have guilt and shame and regret.
And you berate yourself for your lack of discipline and your procrastination and all your bad habits.
You know perfectly well that you're not who you could be.
And God only knows who you could be.
And so that's what you should be striving for.
Striving for and associated with that you should be attempting to formulate some conception of the highest good that you can Conceive of that you can articulate because why not aim for that?
It's like your life is short and and it's troublesome and perhaps you need to do something worthwhile with it and if so then you should do the most worthwhile thing and you should Figure out what that is for you and part of that's definitely going to be to develop your character as much as possible to dispense with those parts of you that are unworthy and then maybe if you're fortunate and you do that carefully then Happiness will
descend upon you from time to time.
And that's the best you've got.
And then also perhaps during sorrowful times, or worse, evil times, the fact that you've strengthened your character and that you're aiming at the highest that you can conceptualize, that'll give you the moral fortitude to endure without becoming corrupted during those times.
And to be someone who can be Relied upon in a crisis.
There's an aim.
You know, one of the things I've told my audiences, young guys take to this a lot.
I said, you should be the strongest person at your father's funeral, right?
Well, that's something to aim for.
It's a transition, a generational transition.
And it means that, well, all the people...
around you are suffering because of their loss they have someone to turn to who can illustrate by their behavior that the force of character is sufficient to move you beyond the catastrophe and you need that and that's a great thing to that's a great thing to Hypothesize as your aim.
And happiness just evaporates as irrelevant in light of that sort of conceptualization.
So when you are the strongest person at your father's funeral, and I just buried my father.
Yeah.
So it strikes home when you say that.
Should there be joy around that realization?
Not happiness.
Happiness is like the fizzly bubbles in a carbonated beverage.
Flighty, flighty, they tickle your tongue, but they go away.
Is there a deeper joy?
Because so many...
Well, there's at least the sense that you've taken something that could be very much like hell and made it far better than it could have been.
And there's also the fact that, you know, if you deal with If you've matured enough, let's say, to deal with the catastrophe of loss and death, then you can also be the rallying point for the remnants of your family and pull them together at a moment of crisis.
And that's a payoff.
To some degree for the loss.
And I mean, I've seen this in families who've dealt with death properly.
The remainder of the family pulls together, you know, they become more integrated.
And it's not complete compensation for their loss, but it's not nothing.
And it certainly beats the alternative where everyone fractionates because everyone's too weak to cope with the catastrophe and everything dissolves.
How do you actually become the strongest person at your father's funeral?
What are the steps?
And is it always about being mission driven?
Well, the mission is the improvement of your character, the constant improvement of your character.
And I think a lot of that's done in dialogue with your conscience.
It's like your conscience is always telling you.
Socrates said this thousands of years ago.
Your conscience is always telling you what you shouldn't be doing.
And one of the things Socrates said was what discriminated him from the run-of-the-mill person, and why perhaps we still know of him so many thousands of years later, was that when his conscience told him not to do something, he didn't do it.
He stopped saying the things that he shouldn't have been saying, and he stopped doing the things he shouldn't have been doing.
And that's a start, you know.
That's a discipline, I would say.
That's the ability to follow a certain kind of intrinsic discipline.
And maybe that's merely the cessation of evil.
That's not exactly the same as the pursuit of positive good.
Let's say you haven't got there yet, but that's a start.
You clear away the obstacles from your vision by ceasing to engage in those activities you know to be wrong.
And then the world starts to lay itself out in more pristine form.
And then maybe you can start to apprehend what would be positively good instead of merely not wrong.
I mean, not wrong is a good start.
That's right.
The biblical corpus is structured in that way to some degree, at least from a Christian reading.
The first rule is follow the damn rules, right?
Get yourself together.
Here's some rules, ten of them, a hundred of them.
Follow them.
You discipline yourself, right?
You make yourself a reasonably Morally respectable individual and so now you're not blinded as much by your own proclivity for Uselessness and malevolence and then you can integrate all that you can integrate all those rules and and that's the beginning of the development of character and then you can Then you can embody the union of the rules.
It's something like that.
And that's that ultimate nobility and character.
In the Christian corpus, Christ is represented, let's think about this psychologically, as the perfect individual.
Just think about that as a psychological representation.
And that's the person who's taken a disciplinary structure and integrated it into a personality that acts that out properly in the world.
And it's not merely rule-bound either because You have to follow the rules, but you also have to be part of the process that generates new rules when it's necessary.
And so you take that onto yourself, too, as an additional responsibility.
And that makes you more than a blind avatar of authority and stops you from being rigid.
And, you know, if you look at a medieval cathedral, one of the things you'll see, for example, is a representation of the sky, the dome of the sky.
And maybe you'll see a representation of Christ on the peak of the dome.
And think about that as a representation of the ideal individual.
Speaking only psychologically.
It's like there's something of cosmic importance about that.
That's what you're aiming at, is that perfection of yourself.
And that'll keep you busy for your entire life.
And it'll do no harm, right?
It'll make you better.
It'll make your family better.
It'll make your community better.
And it'll give you...
And it's psychologically meaningful.
So there's all that.
It helps you withstand suffering and disperse malevolence.
But it's also extraordinarily practical because if you become a better person, then you start to be good for things, you know?
You can fix problems.
You can handle a funeral.
You can handle a difficult situation, you know?
And so it's not only that It's psychologically meaningful to pursue the highest of goals and the development of your character, but it's also the best possible thing that you can do practically here and now in the material world to make it less terrible than it might otherwise be.
Are your personal goals always going to be aligned with the needs of society, the needs of humanity?
Well, that's a trick.
Optimally, the answer is yes.
And you can think about it like a musical score.
You know how there's levels in a musical score.
Each instrument is doing its own thing.
Each section is doing its own thing.
But it's all united into a single vision.
And that's the right...
This is another reason why critics of the hierarchical structure are wrong.
Because the proper way to set up a hierarchy is so that...
Your interests are aligned with those of your family.
That's hard.
That requires a lot of negotiation.
And then you and your family have your interests aligned with those of your local community, right?
So that all of those Levels are reinforcing each other and then those are united at the higher level on a higher political structure and and that that's an Equilibrated state to use a phrase from the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget It's a game that everyone wants to play and it's working for everyone at the same time And so it isn't based on oppression or dominance from the top down and so I think that if if you Formulate your character properly.
And you put yourself together, you start also to realize that you're not...
Look, if you get married to someone, the idea is that you become one.
And so it isn't just your interest anymore.
Or maybe it's that your interest isn't your interest without it also being someone else's interest.
It's insufficiently formulated.
And you need that conflict with that other person to tap you into proper shape.
So what you're aiming at is you And the development of your character, but more than that.
And then you do the same when you introduce children into that.
You expand out that characterological capacity.
And then you can continue to expand that.
And so optimally, yes, what serves you should be serving at every level.
And I believe that part of the reason that music has such an overwhelming effect on people is because that's what it says.
It says, look, everything can work in a multi-level harmony.
And then people listen to music and, like, it produces...
Music produces a religious-like experience in everyone, right?
It transfixes them with the sense of intrinsic meaning.
It's really miraculous that it does that.
And the question is, why?
And I've puzzled over this for years.
And it seems to me that the reason is, is that...
In a musical piece, everything has its proper place at every level.
And so that speaks of, well, it speaks of heaven.
That's the right way to put it, which is why music is so often used in churches.
But it means that everyone's interests are being taken into account.
You know, and obviously it's a utopian ideal, and it's something that has to be constantly worked on.
See, people often have accused me of an individualistic bias in my moral reasoning, you know, that, well, you should get yourself together.
It's like Ayn Rand.
It's like, no, it's not it!
You get yourself together, So that you can get your family together, so you can get your community together, so that you can get the world together.
All of that at the same time.
There's nothing selfish about that except the responsibility which is on you to start that and to bear that and to lift that and to act it out.
So it has nothing to do with chasing your Short-term, impulsive, pleasure-seeking goals.
Which is the real epiphany for me, because you'll know that you're doing the right thing for your personal growth when it's the same thing that society needs from you.
When your needs align with what society needs you to do for it, then you're doing the right thing probably for yourself.
Well, that's how it seems.
I mean, it seems then you've found your niche, right?
It's where you and what you have to offer Fit.
And, you know, I think of people as beasts of burden in some sense.
Like, we're built for a burden.
And we're not happy without that burden.
And we want to find the one that suits us.
And that's difficult.
It's part of the adventure of life to seek out the burden that suits you.
But when you have that, then yes, then hopefully you're operating in harmony with the requirements of those around you.
And the The thing to me is that everything else pales in comparison to that.
That's why it says in the New Testament that you should stack up riches in heaven.
It's like there isn't anything better than that.
You're functioning well.
Your family's functioning well.
You're contributing to your community.
What you're doing is worthwhile.
You're not tormented by your conscience.
You're aiming at something that...
The sacrifices that you have to make are that clearly justify the sacrifices you have to make.
Maybe even the sacrifice of your life because you're in this Like, this is a mortal game.
You're in this with your whole life.
And you'd think that what that would mean, at least in part, is that you need to find a game to play that's of sufficient grandeur and nobility so that perhaps even the fact that mortality is built into this structure now becomes justifiable.
I mean, it's a hell of an ambition.
But...
But it doesn't seem to me to be something that's impossible.
I think you can live your life enough so that it justifies itself despite its limitation.
That's the real question.
Can you do that?
And I believe that you can, and I believe that what that means is that the human spirit fundamentally triumphs over death.
And so that's...
That's optimism, you know, in the midst of the sorrow and the malevolence.
We have the capacity...
We have the capacity...
Sorry.
Don't be sorry.
We have the capacity to transcend that.
And there isn't anything more optimistic than that.
And there's nothing...
There's nothing in it that isn't good.
Right?
It's good for you.
It's good for the people you love.
It's good for the broader society.
It's like it's good.
And that'll take you through your times of travail.
There isn't anything else that will.
And then maybe on your deathbed you can think I justified my The privilege, the terrible privilege of my existence.
And maybe that's good enough.
It's possible that that's good enough.
You certainly don't have anything better to do than that, as far as I can tell.
How do you modify your expectations or forgo the selfishness that is disappointment at its very core?
How does that happen?
I mean, it is a lot of self-pity sometimes when you're disappointed.
Yeah.
Around you probably don't feel the same pain you have, but it is a motivating force as well to be disappointed and feel pain from it.
Yeah, it depends on the magnitude of the disappointment, you know, because different beliefs we have stabilize us at different levels of resolution in some sense.
Some things are vitally important to us and stabilize our lives in vital ways and some things are more trivial.
So if you're disappointed in something trivial, well, that's not as consequential, obviously, as when the bottom falls out of your life.
How do you deal with it?
Well, hopefully, what you do is you learn from it.
You suffer first, I would say.
And you have to assume that that's going to happen.
And the suffering is the part of you that's disappointed.
In some sense, dying.
You put a lot of effort into that thing that's now gone, and there's grieving that takes place, but there's also physiological transformation because that system is no longer functional, and that's a small death.
You have to learn to accept those small deaths and hopefully the rebirths that follow as part of what moves you forward in life.
And then I would say, You look to yourself first and you think carefully.
Think through the causal pathways.
What errors, what missteps did you make?
What did you have mapped improperly that increased the probability that you were going to encounter that disappointment?
And you don't want to do that with too heavy a hand, right?
You don't want to start by assuming that you're guilty of the most major of sins, you know?
You start with the assumption of a relatively small error.
But you have to investigate until you find out where you walked off the path.
Because the purpose of memory, especially memory about disappointments, Is to analyze your error so you don't repeat it in the future.
And so that's how you deal with disappointment.
You have a model to help people understand the paths of coping with unmet expectations.
I'm just going to start again.
You're lifting the burden of the planet above you, and that's your goal, and that's the unbearable present.
Yes, well, this is the map that we all inhabit.
What is Well, I call it the unbearable present, and the reason for that is that, well, you're trying to change the present because it's not good enough, so obviously it's unbearable.
It's part of what you're trying to transform, and you want to transform it into what you're aiming at.
You know, and as you go along, You put into practice the sequence of behaviors that you think are appropriate, and then either what you want to have happen happens, predicted outcome, or what you didn't want to have happen happens.
And if it's predicted, then what that means is that your map is correct, right?
And so is your strategy.
And so that produces positive emotion.
It's actually the genesis of positive emotion.
Promise and hope.
Yeah, but it's a really important thing to know because one of the things that it implies is that unless you have a direction that's an important direction, you don't feel any positive emotion.
So you need a name.
Now the downside is if there's an unpredicted outcome, well, that's threatening and it makes you anxious.
And if it's a really threatening outcome that indicates that your pathway to the ideal future, you posit it, is blocked completely, well then there's going to be a collapse into chaos.
And that's, that's the disappointment that we were talking about.
But part of you dies.
And that's, you know, the flames just burns away.
Despair there.
Despair there.
You know, that's the underworld.
That's the mythological underworld.
Hell is part of that.
And the reason for that is that if you're disappointed enough, you can visit the worst suburb of the underworld.
And that's where you get bitter and vicious and resentful and angry and, you know, willing to destroy.
It's a very dangerous place to be.
You need to know that you can go there.
Well, the thing is, is you can learn from your immersion in chaos.
If you run into a disappointment, if you hit an obstacle, what it means, an unpredicted outcome, what it means is that there's something wrong with your representation of the present, or there's something wrong with your representation of the future.
You don't know what it is, right?
And it might be...
There's two points.
Yeah, that's what I'm sure.
Your map's wrong.
It's either you didn't know where you were, or your destination was specified improperly, or something about the journey.
So the unpredicted outcome, the advantage to that, which is also why it's very useful to be attentive to your errors, is that If you are attentive to your errors, then you can update your representation of the present and your representation of the future, even though that might require a pathway through chaos, and then the next map you produce will be more accurate.
So to go to chaos, if you don't get stuck in the worst neighborhood, you reintegrate.
Yes, that's right.
Yeah, now maybe you're a new person.
You say to people, you know, you've gone through this disappointment.
Maybe it's the collapse of a love affair.
And you say, geez, you know, that was really bitter and horrible.
But I'm a new person.
I'm actually better for it.
I have a better understanding of myself.
I have a better understanding of other people.
I know more about what a real relationship would be like.
And so you've put yourself back together.
But that's only because you passed through fire.
And maybe you dispensed with some of the parts of you that weren't so necessary.
So just so I'm clear, in life, you have the unbearable present, you're aiming high, big aspirations, you make it or you don't, you don't, you go to chaos, which is okay, because the point is to come back out of that, to reintegrate, to ascend, to repeat this process over and over and over again.
Yes, and what you hope is that the map that you're producing after you pass through chaos is a much more accurate representation of the moral world, and the moral world being The world in which you act, so that you understand yourself better, you know where you're situated better, but your aim is also higher and truer.
And hopefully, like, it's a process like this, as well as one that goes up and down, you know?
You're searching for the optimal pathway forward, and there's going to be deviations during that search.
And then you have to ask yourself, like, who are you?
You know, first of all, you're your...
You're a plan, and it gets blown into pieces, and then you're chaos, and then, you know, that's a catastrophe, and then you're your new plan.
Well, you're not, because it's going to fall apart too.
Eventually.
Yes.
In some domain.
So what you want to know is that you're the thing that does this movement.
Right?
You're the thing that's constantly transforming its map of the world and moving forward.
And that makes you also the thing that can transcend the whole process in some sense because you can function in the underworld.
You can.
Well, yeah, you need to know that's a place that people go and that you can function there.
There are things to learn there.
It's part of life.
It's scary.
It's the unknown, but you can still go and come out.
Well, and it's also the case that it doesn't hurt at all, and this is with regards to developing resilience, is that While you're moving from point A to point B, you might be looking for unpredicted outcomes, you know?
Because it's kind of...
That's curiosity.
It's like, well, is there something here I didn't expect?
You can spend a fair bit of time in voluntary exploration of what you don't know.
And that actually really works because it means that you're able to make smaller self-improvements often.
Without that catastrophe of disappointment.
And so, you want to have a plan, but you want to kind of hold it in your hands loosely, and you think, well, I've got a plan, but, you know, what do I know?
I don't really know where I am, and I don't really know where I'm going, but I need a plan, because I've got to move forward.
But as I move forward, I'm going to keep an eye out for what I don't know.
I'm going to keep an eye on what other people might tell me.
That might disturb me even, but that I don't know.
And that does build resilience, you know?
That's the acceptance of voluntary challenge.
And that strengthens you.
And it allows you to make incremental improvements to your map so that, you know, the chaos journey is, you know, not quite as deep and maybe not as catastrophic.
That's part of the adventure of life you've been speaking of.
The maps of meaning takes us through adventures.
And you wouldn't voluntarily normally want to go to chaos and...
And the unknown.
But without going there, you're not truly living the adventures of life.
But you can see, too, that people have this immense proclivity to do this.
I mean, think of all the crazy experiments that teenagers in particular do with themselves.
You know, they're putting themselves at risk all the time.
And people go to horror movies.
And they put themselves in extreme situations.
And that's partly because they are testing and they're pushing.
And they're trying to learn.
So if this is your path...
To find a meaning in life.
How do you live the virtuous life?
How do you define what's a vice and what's a virtue if relativism seems to become a dominant way that we judge those today?
Well, I think you do that in discussion with yourself and in discussion with others.
You know, I mean, for weirdly enough, you know, I've asked my psychology class this many years in a row.
I said, do you have a little voice in your head or a feeling that tells you when you're going to, that you're likely to do something wrong?
You're about to do something wrong and you shouldn't.
That'd be one part of the voice.
Or that you have done something wrong.
Everybody puts up their hand.
Like the faculty of conscience is...
Not everybody says it's a voice.
Sometimes it's a feeling.
It doesn't matter.
People have this faculty that was identified thousands of years ago that orients you in some sense morally.
Well, you could start to have a dialogue with that, with your conscience.
It's like...
Well, this feels wrong to me.
Okay, feels wrong to me.
Why exactly?
Is it wrong?
Is the feeling that it's wrong, wrong?
It's like, if it is wrong, what does it imply?
If it is wrong, well, what would right be?
Well, if it's wrong...
Does it mean I shouldn't do it?
If it's right, what sort of risk do I have to take?
That's a dialogue.
In the movie Pinocchio, Pinocchio's trying to not be a wooden-headed boy anymore, right?
A marionette who's being played by the strings that he doesn't understand.
And he has a conscience.
And his conscience isn't that bright.
It's a cricket that was like a tramp, you know?
And so the two of them have to adventure.
And as they adventure and communicate, each of them gets Wiser.
Until at the end they're wise enough so that Pinocchio becomes an actual autonomous being.
Well, that's part of the process of learning to distinguish vice from virtue.
It's like, you have a conscience.
Have a dialogue with it.
It's not omniscient.
It needs to mature like you do.
It can be rough on you.
It can be like a harsh Freudian superego that's too punitive, for example.
Or maybe it lets you off the hook too often.
It needs to mature as well.
But it's a separate part of you.
It's like...
You could think about it as the demand of society within, if you were thinking about it biologically, because people want you to act a certain way, and you are prone to be socialized, right?
Otherwise, well, you're a criminal, and you're outside of society entirely.
So you have to have guilt, and you have to have shame, and self-disgust, and all those things.
That's all part of conscience.
And you need to...
You need to integrate that in and live in accordance with it and develop it.
So the stoic movement now that's become so popular seems to be about allowing all this chaos to happen around you, the ascent, the descent, missing the targets, disappointment, without much of a response.
Healthy, problematic, really beneficial.
Your thoughts to psychology?
Well, there's something to be said for endurance.
You know, I mean...
It's better to face a challenge voluntarily.
That's a primary psychological truth.
It's better not to let a challenge faced that you failed at stop you.
Especially if it's crucial to your plan, right?
Because, well, otherwise then you won't be able to manifest the plan.
Maybe you could change the plan.
That might be an okay way around it, if it's not a rationalization.
But, you know, let's say that you're pursuing a career that requires you to speak publicly, and you get up and you speak publicly, and it doesn't go very well.
Like, it's 30th percentile talk or something.
It's like, now you're terrified.
You were to begin with.
It's like, well, I'm so afraid.
I can't do this again.
It's like, no, that's no good.
It's like next time it's 35 percentile, right?
Prepare a little bit more.
You take some courses.
You get the obstacle out of your way.
And you build that part of your character that enables you to manifest that part of you that's going to let that dream manifest itself.
Otherwise you don't develop.
And so that's...
There's a stoic element to that.
It's like don't...
What is it?
It's a western.
Get back on the damn horse.
You know, if you want to ride the horse somewhere, you get back on when you're thrown off.
Because otherwise you lose faith in yourself.
Right?
The horse loses faith in you.
That's not a good thing.
It's not going to listen to you anymore.
But you lose faith in yourself too.
And so, you face the challenges, you assess your failures, you develop your skills, you confront the obstacles that are in your way forthrightly, and you progress.
That's the hope.
That's your best hope.
It might not happen.
I'm not a Pollyanna optimist.
People are hurt often in life arbitrarily.
Their dreams are destroyed by things that have nothing to do with them.
They develop an illness.
They're involved in a fatal accident.
We can be taken out.
We're not omniscient.
But your best pathway forward is that.
It's the voluntary confrontation with those things that you don't understand.
That potential that surrounds you while you're trying to continually rebuild and And improve the moral representation of the world, the map of the world that you carry with you.
