In the third episode in this series with Dr. Oz and Jordan Peterson, they discuss the growing fascination behind the true crime genre. Dr. Peterson breaks down the psyche of some of the most depraved and dangerous minds, and helps us understand the truth behind nurture version nature: do we all have the ability to be evil? He also shares his thoughts on politics and the financial world. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We're also fascinated by true crime stories because we want to identify the predator.
And so it's the same thing we do when we go to horror movies to inoculate ourselves against our fear of death or disgust.
You know, we have to expose ourselves to these realities of the world so that we're not the naive sitting ducks that we might otherwise be.
Hi, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
We'll see you next time.
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.
Since I've started covering true crime, the number one question that I get is, what goes on in the minds of killers?
I want to understand what motivates these people, and how can we harness this information to save lives?
I've invited clinical psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson to help us explore this cultural phenomenon.
Let me just start off with this broad topic of interest.
Why is everyone infatuated with true crime?
Well, I think it's partly because we're infatuated with narrative, and the fundamental narrative is good versus evil.
It's human choice in a domain characterized by good versus evil.
And so the true crime genre is a variant of that, and it concentrates on Well, both, usually, because there's an evil character and then there's the good forces attempting to bring him down.
And I think it's indicative of the fundamental structure of human experience, but it's also morally salutary in that...
To understand evil is also to understand good, at least as its opposite.
And I think that evil in some sense is more believable.
It's more immediate.
It's more visceral.
It's more undeniable.
It's more short term.
And people often have direct contact with it in one form or another.
And to be fascinated by that is to be fascinated by the moral structure of the world.
And given that you need an aim in life, that you need A moral goal, that you need a noble moral goal in order to live properly.
You have to distinguish between good and evil and the easiest way to start to do that is to start to understand what constitutes evil.
We're also fascinated by true crime stories because we want to identify the predator.
You know, I mean, human beings are prey animals as well as predators and the worst of all predators are human predators by a remarkably substantial margin.
We don't have to worry too much about being eaten by wolves, but we do have some reasonable probability of encountering malevolent people.
And so we need to understand the nature of the predatory.
And so it's the same thing we do when we go to horror movies to inoculate ourselves against our fear of death or disgust.
You know, we have to expose ourselves to these realities of the world so that we're not as naive and we're not the naive sitting ducks that we might otherwise be.
You've worked in prisons.
Briefly.
Briefly.
You've been exposed to people who do very bad things.
Yes.
What was that like?
What was it like knowing they could harm you?
Well, that wasn't the shocking part.
The shocking part for me was that they weren't that much different than me.
That's the first thing I learned when I spent some time in a maximum security prison working part-time for a psychologist back in the 1980s.
There was a very violent criminal that I met in there, a very small guy, very unassuming person, He had taken two cops out and made them dig their own graves and shot them while they were begging for their lives, making reference to their families by his own testimony.
And it was very difficult for me to reconcile this rather unassuming small person With this monster, and at the same time, two other prisoners that I met, they had taken a third down and pulverized his leg with a lead pipe because they thought he was a stool pigeon, and he might have been that, and who knows?
But I spent a lot of time meditating on that, trying to understand how it is that anyone could do that.
It seemed beyond me.
It seemed like something I could not manage, that I could not do.
And I thought about, I actually thought about doing that for weeks after that experience.
About killing somebody?
About both.
About killing someone and about the torture.
And I thought, I eventually realized that I could do it and that it would be easier than I thought.
And that was very, very shocking.
I've never forgotten that.
And so that part, that part's there in all of us, and it can come out, it's there more in some people than in others.
You know, there are people who are prone to violence.
Well, I can tell you, here's one thing that's useful to know.
If you take two-year-olds and you put them in a room, There's a small proportion of the two-year-olds, almost all male, who have a proclivity to kick, hit, bite, and steal, essentially.
They're very dominant, aggressive children.
And they're almost all male, about 5% of males.
And the vast majority of them are socialized by the time they're four.
And so it's possible to socialize even the aggressive males.
But there's a small proportion of them who don't become socialized.
And then they become alienated from their peer group.
Because no one can be friends with them.
And they become habitual criminals.
And after four, it looks like there's very little that can be done to...
Put them back together.
Because so much of what happens to you after 4 is dependent on peer socialization.
And if you're isolated from your peers, then you don't get socialized.
So just to be clear on this, because I was curious how much of being a killer is genetic and how much of it is the nurture.
If, let's just say, 1 in 20 males at age 2 is prone to becoming a bad apple, and most of them get better by 4, that makes me feel nurture is important.
Yes, definitely.
No doubt about it.
But the fact that only 1 in 20 had the predisposition to begin with means there's a genetic element as well.
Yes, definitely.
Well, you know, I mean, men are definitely more aggressive than women, which is why so many more men are in prison.
The personality traits that go along with that are, in all likelihood, high levels of emotional stability, so low neuroticism, very little fear.
Low levels of agreeableness.
So those are people who are harsh and brusque, but who also tend to tell hard truths and to be able to make hard decisions.
So there's real advantages to that, but then also low conscientiousness.
That's a bad thing.
Triad of traits for criminal behavior, but most of the boys who show violent traits when they're two, and two-year-olds, by the way, are the most violent of human beings.
If you group kids together by age, the two-year-olds engage in by far the largest number of violent interactions.
But it's a small minority, but most of that can be brought under control.
Is that why we seem to see, amongst these serial killers, people who are often in respected positions of society, police officers, politicians, that some of those traits seem to overlap?
Well, the serial killers, the problem with assessing those sorts of people is that they're so statistically rare that it's hard to draw any Firm conclusions from it.
I mean, I've thought about, it's a very tough one.
They get hooked on it.
They get hooked on the desire for the novelty of more and more outrageous acts.
That's part of it.
And they're often, that would be the true serial killer type.
And there's often a really powerful sexual component that goes along with that.
So something's gone wrong with their psychosexual development at a very early age, and they become sadistic.
And there's a sexual pleasure in that.
And, you know, sex often involves domination and submission.
It's part of the sexual game.
And so they represent an extraordinarily extreme variant of that.
The mass murderer types, they're usually more...
Generally, vengeful and angry about the structure of the world.
You know, and those are often the quiet people that you hear about that never caused any trouble, who are actually harboring immense amounts of resentment about the structure of the world, like Cain, and who are brooding In their basements or in their lonely existences for months, fantasizing.
And this is that invitation of evil into your life, right?
They start to become vengeful.
They desire destruction.
They start to fantasize about that.
And then they start to live in that fantasy.
And that fantasy grows and grows and grows and grows.
And they entice it and invite it along until it dominates them completely.
And then they have a plan.
And then they execute the plan.
And then it's mayhem everywhere.
And what they're aiming at is the mayhem.
No doubt about it.
Amongst the serial killers, when we look at their stories, their version of what happened, they seem to have often had big-time problems with their mother, not with their father.
Why do you think that might be?
Well, it's definitely the case that One of the best...
Children are more likely to grow up healthy and well-functioning if they have two parents.
So there's that.
I don't know what it is about the balance between fatherhood and motherhood that increases the probability of that healthy outcome.
It might just be in part division of labour, right?
It's very difficult to raise children and I think it's probably too much for one person to work full-time and raise children full-time.
I think it's just too much.
It may be that fathers play some particular role in the socialization of males, in particular, decreasing their proclivity for aggression.
I mean, you even see this in species as divergent from human beings as elephants, like if an elephant group, tribe, let's say, is disrupted and the old males are taken out, then the young males get hyper-violent.
And so we don't know exactly what role Functional males play in the proper socialization of juvenile males, but it's not trivial.
And you can see, you can understand that to some degree, because by the time you're, say you're a 13-year-old kid, you're a boy, and you're kind of tough, and let's say you're like six feet tall and you weigh 150 pounds already, or 170 pounds, like, you're kind of a man.
Not quite, but kind of.
And certainly your friends are going to be on your case to the degree that you're not.
And it's pretty much time to step away from your mother, even though you may not be wise enough to do so.
You're not going to listen to what she has to say anymore.
And part of your way of displaying your masculine independence is to push against authority.
And if the authority doesn't push back, well, then you win, especially if you're aggressive and dominant.
And you know, the way that aggressive and dominant people are put in their place, so to speak, civilized, is by meeting someone who's more dominant than they are.
And that would, at least in principle, be someone male who has the authority and the power to Stop them.
It's the important role of the mother in serial murderers lives that's always caught me.
They seem to detest them, have very bizarre relationships with their mother.
Many have killed or threatened their mother.
It's out of proportion to what I would have expected.
And the FBI profilers use that as one of the risk criteria, one of the ways of identifying the symptom of a serial killer.
Yeah, well, you know, like I said, it's pretty rare behavior, so it's hard to draw conclusions.
There's a documentary for people who might be interested in this sort of thing called Crumb, which I would highly recommend.
Watch it.
On your recommendation.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you could see the disturbed relationship with the mother there, and a lot of it in that particular situation was that she was hyperprotective, right?
She wanted her boys to remain in an infantile state and that meant that she had to do everything she possibly could to cripple their proclivity for autonomous existence.
By failing to reward it, failing to encourage it, or punishing it every time it manifested itself.
And you can do, I've seen families do this, you can do a very effective job.
I've worked with families where the basic rule was that if the child, who was often like 35 or 40 by the time I was involved, If the child did anything that was positive, your job was to undermine it in every possible way.
And then if they did something that was negative and helpless, then you did everything you possibly could to foster that and reward it.
And the rule was something like, well, here's the deal.
You stay useless and infantile, and I won't labor you with responsibility, but you'll never leave.
Right, and that's not a good deal.
And the psychoanalysts used to talk about the necessary failure of the mother.
So, the good mother fails.
Why?
Well, if you have an infant up to six months, say, your job is to do whatever that infant wants, because it's always right.
It has misery, it has needs, it has wants, and your job is to figure out how to fix that.
But as the child starts to mature, you have to start to pull back, and you have to allow the child to start to regulate its own behavior to the degree that that's possible.
But that separates you from the child.
From the infant.
And if that's all you've got, like if that's your whole life, you've staked that on that infantile dependency, maybe that's the only love you've ever had, then to see that burgeoning majority is going to be nothing but a threat.
Even my daughter, she used to call my son baby when he was starting to walk.
And we told her at one point that he was no longer a baby.
She had this very complex dream where he fell into a hole and turned into a skeleton, and then he came out in a different form.
And she told me this dream when I was typing, so it was an amazing dream.
And what I realized was that she was resistant to the idea that he was no longer a baby, because she really liked this baby.
We'd encouraged her to take care of it.
And so now he was...
Well, what was he?
He wasn't this baby anymore.
She loved the baby.
He was a new thing.
She wasn't very happy about that.
She didn't know how to cope with it.
Well, you know, we helped her figure out, you know, that there were some advantages to his maturation and that she could play with him and so forth.
But it's really easy to...
Especially if you're hyper-compassionate, and let's say not very conscientious, and you don't have your children's long-term best interests in mind, it's very easy to want to infantilize them, because then they need you.
And that maternal love, that all-encompassing maternal love, can stay as the center of your Universe!
But Jesus, that's pretty ugly by the time your son is 40 and still living in his basement bedroom and you know, plotting revenge against you and the rest of the world.
So once someone has already gone down the road of doing evil acts, mass murdering, serial murdering, can they be rehabilitated?
Well, I would say from a practical perspective, you know, once you've committed a crime of a certain violence, especially multiple times, the probability that you can be rehabilitated by some psychological treatment is extraordinarily low.
I mean, first of all, the resources aren't there.
Second, Well, you didn't just do it once.
You did it like three times.
It wasn't a drunken rage.
You know, it wasn't situationally determined.
You've gone way beyond the pale of normative behavior, and it's hard enough to treat people psychologically who've just deviated to some small degree.
I mean, classic penological theory now is something like this, is that while men are pretty aggressive between 15 and 26, So it peaks up when testosterone kicks in, and then it declines, and it declines quite rapidly after 26. That's usually when men start to take on full responsibility in life.
If you have a repeated violent criminal, you just keep them in jail until they're older than 26, and the probability that they'll re-offend starts to decline dramatically, and a lot of that seems to be maturation, and a fair bit of it seems to be a consequence of biological transformation.
But that has nothing to do with psychological treatment.
And, you know, you also have to assume that the violent and, let's say, psychopathic criminal that you're going to treat wants treatment, genuinely, and also that you are wilier than they are.
And I wouldn't make that assumption.
There's reasonable evidence that group therapy for psychopaths makes them worse.
Well, it trains them in a whole new set of techniques that they can use to manipulate people.
Oh, my goodness.
You know, and if you're going to treat someone who's a violent criminal, especially if they're psychopathic, well, first of all, you know, beware, but don't be thinking that you've got the upper hand.
You're a fool if you think you've got the upper...
You know, in a true crime movie, it's always the naive do-gooder who gets taken down by the evil predator.
Well, it's no wonder, because the evil predator has every advantage.
So the naive person thinks they're naive.
They have no defense against malevolence.
And like, they may not even believe it exists.
Oh, you were just misunderstood.
It's like, yeah, maybe you started out misunderstood, but you took a dark pathway.
And if you encounter someone like that, The evidence on post-traumatic stress disorder is quite clear with regard to that, is that people who develop post-traumatic stress disorder almost always develop it because they've encountered someone malevolent.
It might be themselves.
They might have observed themselves doing something they can't believe they did, and they can't recover from it.
But it's often that they've encountered someone who wishes to do them harm for the sake of the harm, right?
And to meet someone like that, and then to get a glimpse into what they're like.
That's no joke, especially if you're a naive person.
And then there's more pragmatic considerations too that people don't often think about.
A tremendous amount of violent crime is fueled by alcohol.
Like 50% of it.
50% of the people who are murdered are drunk.
50% of the people who do the murdering are drunk.
It's the major contributor to familial violence.
And so alcohol is the one drug we know of.
The one drug that makes people violent.
And that's also very much worthy of consideration because it's an appropriate situational diagnosis.
There's lots more when we come back.
I asked a question to everybody because I'm seeing more and more reports that folks get super offended if their children are dating someone from a different political affiliation, It's elevated in terms of its importance in our society, way beyond what I would have envisioned as a child or a young person.
What are the risks of this transformation?
Well, if you imagine that there is a religious function, psychologically and sociologically speaking, it's going to have to find its expression somewhere.
And, you know, we've always hoped that the church and the state would be separated, but if the church starts to deteriorate, which seems to be the case, arguably, then that function is going to be folded somewhere, and it'll contaminate the function of politics.
And, like, I certainly don't think that the arguments that are going on on campus For example, with regards to free speech, are political.
I think they're religious.
So they have to do with fundamental arguments about the nature of man.
They're underneath the constitutional axioms of the United States.
I felt when my own country introduced compelled speech legislation that they had jumped the political border and entered into metaphysical terrain that wasn't appropriate because they were requiring that Their citizens utter words of a certain form, a certain ideological form.
So yes, I think politics has taken on a religious element, and that's not good.
That needs to be separated.
Having said that, I'm not exactly sure what to do about it.
I mean, partly what I'm trying to do with my lectures is to...
We'll re-establish the conceptual relationship between the political and the philosophical and the theological to get those elements separated out again so that people understand the distinction between them.
And I'm hoping that that will serve as an antidote to ideological possession.
Walk me through those three levels.
Well, the theological level is a narrative level, as far as I'm concerned.
It's a level of story.
People tell stories and learn from stories and enjoy stories tremendously.
They'll pay to go watch them.
I mean, they're a primary form of communication.
They seem to be something like abstracted mimesis or imitation.
You know, you imitate someone that you admire.
Then you tell a story about someone that you admire and you imitate the story.
It's a form of abstraction.
How to live your life.
How to live your life, that's right.
Or how not to.
Either way.
So that's the theological...
Yeah, and there's metaphysical presumptions built into that.
It's something like the world of experience is a moral world of good and evil and you're an actor in that.
And that you're a conscious actor and that you have some role to play in the interplay between those forces.
And that's axiomatic in some sense.
It isn't amenable to the sort of proof that we accept scientifically.
But it doesn't matter because it's at the bottom of our society.
It's a foundation stone that we stand on.
Now, on top of that, you have philosophy.
Philosophy is the attempt, at least in part, to subject that to critical analysis and to make it more articulate.
It's like the difference between Dostoevsky, the novelist, and Nietzsche, the philosopher.
They talked about very similar themes, but Dostoevsky encapsulated those themes in active characters, and Nietzsche made it explicit.
And so that's what the philosophers do.
And then on top of that is the political.
It emerges, but it rests on those other two foundations.
And when those lines get blurred, or when the political starts to become either philosophical or theological worse, then there's trouble brewing.
There's revolutionary trouble brewing.
If the political is nested inside the philosophical and people accept a certain philosophical viewpoint, and that's nested inside the theological and people accept a certain theological viewpoint, you get revolutions happening when those underlying structures are moved.
So we end up expecting too much from our politics, I gather.
And part of what I see you trying to do is to pull back some of the power that we have ceded to politics.
And recognize that things like our narrative are up to us.
You made the point often that you're in a story.
You better know what story it is.
Because if you're in someone else's story, you're a minor character in your own life.
Right.
Or maybe you're acting out a tragedy.
Or worse.
Or worse.
Or a trip to hell.
And people act those out pretty effectively, and they can get pretty deep.
And so it's not good.
So someone's sitting at home right now, and they're just so upset, so angry about the political system, whatever side of the aisle they're on.
Yeah.
Is that a person who should probably be rethinking their narrative and their philosophy because maybe he's blurring into their politics?
Well, I think that that's a question worth asking.
I mean, certainly one of the things that I've often recommended to my clinical clients who are depressed was to stop watching the news because it wasn't helpful to them.
First of all, most of it isn't news.
If it's only important today, it's not news, right?
It doesn't matter.
So maybe it has to still be important in a month to be news or something.
I don't exactly know, but I did, and I took my own advice for a long time, although I haven't for quite a while now for a variety of reasons.
I would also say that there's something grandiose about the political discussion.
Because it's always about high-order abstractions and about large-scale institutions and about the actions of other people, you know?
And I believe that, well, that's dangerous because of its grandiosity, but also, in some sense, it deprives, in some sense, it's predicated on a misapprehension about where power actually lies.
There is political power, but there's individual power, and I believe that it's far more potent Your best bet if you're interested in making things better is to put your life together.
Individually.
And there's some humility in that because you have to recognize what's wrong with you and what small steps that you have to take in order to fix it.
But there's some real revelation of self-worth in that to understand that the small domain that's been offered to you that's under your control, the potential that manifests itself to you and in you, is in some sense of incalculable worth and also inexhaustible.
We need to pull away from our belief in politics and return to the notion that moral action on the part of individuals is the lever that moves the world.
And that the political only functions when individuals are actually doing that properly.
We've always known that to some degree.
I mean, the point of a liberal education, let's say, Classically speaking, was to produce an informed citizen, right?
Not a consumer, not a happiness pursuer, none of that, but an informed citizen.
Someone who could take their place as the eyes and the mouth of the state, and who could bear that responsibility.
And part of that was to live a noble and moral life, and a recognition that the integrity of the state itself depended on that.
And I believe that's the case.
You know, It's another thing that's been so interesting to discuss with my lecture audiences.
They say, look at what you believe, the way you act.
Like, you get to vote.
What does that mean?
It means your society has decided that, for better or worse, despite all your manifest flaws, that the destiny of the state, there's something about you that's of sufficient import to allow you to determine, at least in part, the destiny of the state.
And it's an axiom of the entire political system that that characterizes you.
It's like, well, that speaks volumes about the fundamental worth of the individual.
So I'm trying to establish, reestablish, I suppose, the idea of the primacy of the individual as the central moral actor and the central locus of responsibility.
If we don't do that, does democracy become mob rule?
Well, I think we already see that, you know.
Of course it becomes mob rule, because what's the alternative to individual responsibility?
There's the dissolution of responsibility to the mob.
That's it.
People stop saying what they know to be true.
A small minority can take power under conditions like that.
I mean, there was an interesting article in the New York Times just a week ago, looking at Twitter Democrats versus Democrats.
And the Twitter Democrats who dominate Twitter from the Democrat perspective are all the radical progressives.
The moderates hardly say anything.
It's like things can get warped very badly by small minorities of people when individuals aren't awake to the possibility of that occurring.
More questions after the break.
My friend, legendary hedge fund founder Ray Dalio wrote an excellent article helping us all understand our nation's, in fact, the world's financial challenges under a capitalistic in fact, the world's financial challenges under a capitalistic society.
Now, the research that he quoted was startling.
I'll give you just a little bit of it.
The income gap is about as high as it has ever been and the wealth gap is the largest since the late 1930s When a lot of bad things happen around the world including the Second World War and the Great Depression The wealth the top 1% of the population to give you a specific number is more than the bottom 90% of the population Combined.
That's how big a difference there is.
Prime age workers, folks at their prime, and the bottom 60% of the population in terms of income, have had no real income growth since 1980. In the same 40 years, incomes for the top 10% of earners have doubled.
And those of the top 1% have tripled.
In the face of these scary statistics, many argue for seismic shifts to our current economic system.
These disparities, unfortunately, can cause violence.
So, Dr. Peterson, as a psychologist who spent a lot of time on this, let's start off with where humans historically have been with this issue of growing financial inequalities, because it has happened for all known history.
Well, the first thing we should do is to be very clear that this isn't something that you can lay at the feet of capitalism, right?
This is something that you can lay at the feet of hierarchical structures.
And hierarchical structures are, as far as I'm concerned, inevitable.
That doesn't mean they're all good.
Imagine that there's a complex problem that needs to be solved.
I think we can all agree that there are complex problems that need to be solved.
And then imagine that we have to solve them cooperatively and competitively.
So we organize ourselves into groups.
And then if we're aimed at solving the problem, what we try to do is organize ourselves into a hierarchy so the people who are most competent at solving the problem Rise to the top of the hierarchy.
And then maybe we set up reward structures so that we incentivize them to the degree that's possible to extract out the maximum value from their competence.
Now The problem with that is that hierarchies once set up, even if they're set up to solve problems, can become corrupt.
And they can be dominated by people who are only after power and who will exploit the resources of the hierarchy.
And we have to be always awake to that.
That's the ever-present danger of tyranny at every level of bureaucratic organization.
And that can happen within a capitalist system, just like every other system.
But the inequality problem is much deeper.
Because when you structure a hierarchy, you get winners and you get losers, and that can get really steep.
So the winners take all and the losers have nothing.
Now, a complex society has a variety of ways of dealing with that.
It sets up multiple hierarchies, for example, so that if you fail in one, you might be able to succeed in another.
It tries to make the hierarchies open so that if you are competent, you have the possibility of rising.
And that's one of the things that can take the edge off the inequality.
Like one of the reasons that Americans have been able to deal with inequality quite appropriately throughout their entire history is that those at the bottom believe that with sufficient sacrifice, They had some probability, even if it was a multi-generational probability, of moving up the ladder.
And it's the loss of that, it's the loss of hope that I think is even more important than the rising inequality.
Now, with regards to seismic shifts, it's like, well, that to me, it's like, okay, fair enough, but seismic shifts are dangerous.
And what makes you think that you know what seismic shifts are going to repair inequality?
Because inequality is very, very difficult to deal with.
This is one of the things that annoys me about the Marxists.
Is that they blame inequality on capitalism.
And inequality has its terrible consequences.
It puts people at zero, where it's hard for them to get moving.
And it can destabilize societies if it becomes steep enough.
But the idea that that's something that's unique to capitalism, there's no evidence for that whatsoever.
There's less inequality Statistically speaking, in the European countries, you know, I'm including North America and Australia in that, than there is in the non-European countries.
Inequality is very difficult to get rid of.
And we don't know how to do it.
That's the other thing.
Let's talk through this a little bit.
You've offered some ideas that I think we can all benefit from.
In the 1930s, when we had similar numbers as we're talking about now, we did some things.
We started to believe in political philosophies.
We followed leaders like Hitler and Mussolini, Toto and others that took us in places that we didn't want to go.
And then there were subsequent horror stories of tens of millions of humans killed because we followed these ideologies.
What did we do wrong back then?
What do we not want to repeat now?
And by forgetting what happened back then, what mistakes can we make?
And I don't want to let capitalism off the hook yet, because capitalism is very, very good at creating value.
It's not part of the essence of capitalism to distribute it fairly.
No.
Although it does distribute it, I would say, in its defense is that it, like, all systems we know of produce hierarchies of inequality, but very few also produce wealth.
And capitalism at least produces wealth.
And a fair bit of that goes to the poorest people.
So, for example, between the year 2000 and the year 2012, The number of people in the world in abject poverty fell by 50%.
And by UN current projections, there won't be anybody living underneath the abject poverty mark by the year 2030. So despite the fact that inequality is growing in the way that we just described, absolute wealth is growing as well.
And a fair bit of that is lifting up the poorest people in the world to...
To the point where they might be able to start to actually get away from zero and to have a life.
And that's a big deal.
Even in socialistic settings, philosophies, you still have a hierarchical issue, right?
So what makes those so alluring to some folks?
What's the promise that people see there?
Well, no one likes the...
The negative consequences of hierarchical structures, especially when they start to become corrupted by power seeking.
You know, if you walk down the street, if you're a well-off person, you walk down the streets of Manhattan and you see a ruined, alcoholic, homeless person on the street, it's not like you're dancing in delight because you're in your position and he's in his.
It's painful.
You know, and you think, well, wouldn't it be lovely if our system could be set up so that that kind of suffering could be alleviated by adjustments to the social structure?
And that's associated with compassion, which is a fundamental trait.
And it's an egalitarian trait.
And it characterizes, for example, it's one of the predictors of political correct belief, is compassion.
And the idea that, well, we should equalize things so that everybody has a fair shake and maybe even a fair outcome.
Well, how did humans historically deal with this?
I mean, for...
These hierarchical structures do become unstable after a while, whether it's because of capitalism or socialism or communism.
Whatever the cause of it is, any group of humans working together has it.
So what's to solve?
What role, for example, has faith placed in widening that hierarchy so more people have flexibility?
Well, what we hope is that we solve it through negotiation.
And that's another issue that's relevant to free speech.
It's not like the billionaires.
It's not like the American billionaires are sitting at home with their mattress stuffed with money first.
Their money is out there in the world doing all sorts of things.
And there's many of them who are banding together for all sorts of philanthropic purposes.
And I would say that one of the things that has to be built into capitalism is this notion of a higher moral purpose.
It's like, well, it isn't how much money you have.
It's what you decide to do with it.
And that money opens up the possibility of solving, possibly, of addressing at least very, very complex problems.
Problems for everyone.
And so the money can be used wisely.
I would say that what you have if you're rich is not so much a responsibility to flatten the economic distribution as it is to use your money in the most appropriate possible way to alleviate the problems that disturb your conscience about the structure of the world.
You have to do that carefully.
So let's say, along with the Wealth comes an attendant responsibility.
You know, we criticize the wealthy because we think, at least in part, of their excessive lifestyle, let's say, their excessive reliance on luxury and decadence, yeah.
And, you know, that characterizes a certain proportion of rich people, but also a certain proportion of middle class and poor people.
It's not a sin that's unique to the rich.
What's required of the rich in a society that's functioning appropriately, morally, is that they use their money wisely.
That's the responsibility that goes along with having access to that power.
Why is it not happening now?
The numbers that I just quoted to you reveal the opposite is happening.
It's seemingly, anyway, more of the fruits of capitalism's A benefit are accruing to the wealthiest Americans.
And so people who don't have that money are getting appropriately, understandably angry.
Well, afraid, too.
Afraid.
And stress is a rich man's word for fear.
Well, there is some good news on the horizon.
I mean, unemployment rates have been falling quite nicely, and there is some evidence that wages are increasing.
Independent of what's naturally happening.
If people who have a lot can make a lot more and more easily than people who don't have a lot, what is the structural solution?
What does the next generation of advance look like in capitalism?
I don't know.
I don't know.
The hierarchical problem, this is why the Marxists bother me, part of it.
The problem of hierarchical inequality is unbelievably deep.
I mean, people are really different.
And people range unbelievably widely in their talents.
And the consequence of that is in a social environment that you get incredible disparity no matter where you look.
You ask a leading question then.
Historically, faith, or at least the values that came from faith, and the faith doesn't have to be a particular religion, just a belief of something bigger than you, had some kind of a governor effect, a limiting effect on the extravagant Playback that capitalism could actually take, extremes that we could go.
If you don't have that cultural, almost at this point, morality, then you begin to slip.
That might be reversing that, might be one of the ways we start to deal with the excesses of capitalism.
Well, one of the things you pointed out is that if the hierarchical differentiation gets too steep, then things start to destabilize.
And so fear, at least, fear of the negative consequences can be one impetus towards change.
But I would say this is actually, in some sense, this is a problem that's a political problem.
It's natural for hierarchies to produce dispossession and And in unequal distribution of assets, whatever they happen to be.
In any creative domain, this happens to be the case.
And so we have a constant problem of what to do with those who are dispossessed.
And I would say that the dialogue between the left and the right is a continual attempt to solve that problem.
Because the right says, look, we need these hierarchies, and here's why they're functional and why they're efficient, and we need to reward the people who are able and willing.
And competent, and conscientious.
And the left says, yeah, but don't forget, these structures ossify, they become blind, and they start to serve the interests of power.
And then they leave people who have something to contribute on the bottom, and that's to no one's benefit.
And both those positions are correct, and sometimes one is more correct than the other, depending on the historical point that we're in.
You need a constant dialogue between the reasonable right and the reasonable left so that you can figure out how to maintain the hierarchies so that they continue to perform their necessary functions, and at the same time distribute the resources in a way that enable people who are at the bottom to have, let's say, to have optimal equality of opportunity.
And everyone wants that because you also want to be able to benefit from the talent pool that's isolated at the bottom of the hierarchy at zero and can't rise up because all of those additional people could be adding useful use of various sorts to the world.
But I think it's a political issue and I think the dialogue between the right and the left, that's really what it focuses on two things.
It focuses on that inequality and it focuses on borders.
It isn't obvious how to rectify inequality.
And to say that it's, well, it's due to capitalism and its flaws, it's like, well, yes, but it's a way, it's a way deeper problem than that.
And we've tried solutions.
We've tried to radically egalitarianize societies.
You know, the Soviets tried that, and the Maoists tried that, and it was just an absolute bloody disaster.
And there's a certain amount of inequality that everyone is going to have to live with, because we all come into the world with different talents and abilities.
And we actually want that.
So it's an unbelievably tricky question.
But again, I would say, from my perspective, the best way to address that is to put your own house in order.
That means morally, means financially, to use your money wisely, not to use it to chase impulsive and Reprehensible pleasures.
It's also something that does your reputation no good and destabilizes society because it makes the rich look like parasites.
And some are.
Some people are parasitical, but many aren't.
And we don't want to put a situation in place where people have their faith in the entire economic system destabilized because then they will look for those radical solutions and that's I don't see any evidence that radical solutions produce anything but a lot of unnecessary misery.
