In the final episode of a four part series, Dr. Peterson explains how hierarchies can be organized to encourage people to succeed. He also breaks down the fundamental differences between men and women, and why recognizing these differences can help bring us all closer together. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
I mean, a huge part of freedom is wanting unequal outcomes.
I don't want the same thing you do.
I mean, that's what makes me me.
You know, and you can say, well, that's out of the sphere of economics, but most of the time it isn't, because virtually everything has an economic value attached to it.
Freedom is the freedom to be different.
Hi, I'm Dr. 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.
Freedom and equality, two of America's core values, but are they mutually exclusive?
And if they are, which one's better?
Well, they have to be defined.
Like, if it's freedom and equality of outcome, then they're mutually exclusive.
That's for sure.
But if they're freedom and equality before the law, for example, which is a freedom predicated on the idea that each person has an intrinsic worth that even the state must bow to in some sense, must take into consideration, then They build upon each other.
They're harmonious.
You can't have one without the other.
So it depends on how they're defined.
And equality of outcome, well, that's a very bad idea for any number of reasons.
Equality of opportunity, I would say, that's much more in keeping with the classic idea of American freedom, which is that you should have the untrammeled opportunity To become what you could be.
At least you shouldn't be opposed by arbitrary and prejudicial forces because it's not in anyone's interest for that to occur.
It's not in your interest, but it's also not in the interest of the community because you have something to offer and if you're held down for arbitrary reasons and you can't manifest your competence, then it could be a tremendous loss to the entire community.
And so that's a very bad idea.
So if people are left to be free, they'll have unequal outcomes, which will be quite obvious to everyone looking from the outside.
It causes discomfort.
They'll even want them.
I mean, a huge part of freedom is wanting unequal outcomes.
I don't want the same thing you do.
I mean, that's what makes me me.
You know, and you can say, well, that's out of the sphere of economics, but most of the time it isn't because virtually everything has an economic value attached to it.
Freedom is the freedom to be different.
I mean, it's also the freedom to be the same if that's what you want.
So what is a utopia in society?
What is it deep down we desire?
What's the ideal?
Well, freedom of opportunity seems to have something to do with it.
That the state is set up to let you become what you could be, which also includes becoming the eyes and the voice of the state, right?
There's this dynamism between the state and the individual that's necessary.
And so that's part of what lurks in our notion of what constitutes the optimal good.
We want to We want to be able to confront potential and to transform it into order.
And we want to be able to confront tyrannical order and recast it into the order that's benevolent.
We want to do that for reasons of love and that would mean that we have The best in mind.
We would like things to be better.
That's a good definition of love.
I would say, let's say in the philosophical or even the religious sense.
Let's make being better.
That's the number one claim.
While you do that with responsibility and truth.
That's the way that you serve the state and the way that you recast potential into order.
And that gives your life...
The meaning that forestalls malevolence and that keeps sorrow and suffering to some degree at bay.
Dostoevsky figured this out back in the late 1800s.
He said, if you gave people everything they wanted, he was talking about materialist utopia, you get to have everything you want.
Well, he said, well, people, you know, we've got this inalienable element of insanity in some sense.
It's like original sin.
If you had everything you wanted, all of a sudden, you'd be like a petulant child and you'd just smash bits of it up just to see what new potential you could make arise so that you had something compelling to do, right?
So Dostoevsky knew that...
A utopia that was only based on material comfort would be deeply unsatisfying to people, and maybe that is because we're born adventurers.
We're not built for peace, and we're not built for comfort, not precisely.
It's nice when you need it, you know?
But we're built for adventure and we're built for conflict and that's as close to the utopia as you're going to get in the world.
So if people are able to have their adventure, some are going to succeed in some areas better than others.
How do you reward competence and yet still protect the disadvantaged?
That's the eternal discussion of politics, I would say.
It's always the problem, because you aim at solving a problem and you produce a hierarchy, and the hierarchy dispossesses, right?
It rewards, but it also dispossesses, and the dispossession can become extreme to the point where It's even running at counter purposes to the hierarchy.
So you need the discussion, because the right says, we need the hierarchies, and they're based on competence, and they're appropriate.
And the left says, yeah, but wait.
They tend towards corruption, and they dispossess.
So how do we deal with that?
Is there a way...
For a political group to solve that, or is that really gonna be fought at the individual level?
How do you avoid the bitterness, the instability that happens when these obvious inequalities are present?
That doesn't seem like it's something that can be done outside me as an individual.
I personally have to find my way.
Well, I think that you have to solve that spiritually for yourself, you know, to come to terms with the fact that you're different and that those differences are going to manifest themselves in various forms of inequality.
And that can be very bitter.
But that's part of finding your way.
But I think we've done a pretty good job in many ways of dealing with the chronic problem of hierarchical inequality with our political systems.
You know, I mean, we have, and this is particularly true of the United States, but of many reasonably developed countries, a remarkable infrastructure.
Everybody has electricity.
Everybody has central heating.
Everybody has air conditioning.
Everybody has access to as much information as there is.
We've managed to distribute scarce resources reasonably well, given this overwhelming tendency for hierarchies to form and for them to become rigid.
And you might say, well, what do we do next?
And I would say, well, the answer to that is we sit down the conservatives and the liberals and they have an argument about just exactly how to split the spoils property so that the competent get rewarded and the dispossessed don't get unduly punished.
And it's a dynamic, like it's, the problem is it's a dynamic problem, right?
There's no permanent solution to it.
I think part of the problem, though, is that some folks think it's an unnatural space that we're in.
And I'm going to touch on this in a couple different ways.
But if you don't think that hierarchies are acceptable, which is, I think, felt by some, it does seem like, you know, if you just want everyone to be happy, then they should all sort of be at the same level because then they'd all be happier.
It's just a simple thought.
Then you want to go back and look at the biology of hierarchies.
And you've done some work, at least brought to our attention some work on things like lobsters.
I remember when my son was a little boy, he'd watch the lobsters crawling because he was born in Maine.
He's a maniac.
People born in Maine are maniacs.
I think that's actually the word they use.
But you can have lobsters and catch them.
And trap them if you're born there.
So he became a world expert on lobsters, and he would see these lobsters following each other.
But you've told that story in a way that involves looking at things like serotonin levels, lobsters, and the fact that they form these hierarchies.
Well, almost every creature forms a hierarchy, even if they're not particularly social.
The focus on the first chapter that I wrote has been on the lobsters.
And I think it's because I wrote more about them.
Songbirds have hierarchies.
Chickens have hierarchies.
It's very difficult to come up with an animal that doesn't exist within a hierarchy.
And that's because there's competition for scarce resources.
There has to be some order placed on that because otherwise there's continual conflict.
Now, the price of the hierarchy is that some animals are much more successful reproductively than others.
So with songbirds, for example, and I'm not talking about the ones that aggregate together like crows that live socially.
I'm talking about the ones that live in a more solitary fashion.
They have a mate, of course, but they live in a more solitary fashion.
When you hear them singing in the spring, like wrens do, for example, they're staking their claim to a territory.
The male is usually doing that.
And the territory, well, the optimal territory is sheltered from the rain and the wind and the sun, and is close to a food source and far from predators.
And there's a hierarchy of shelters.
Some of them are better than others.
And so the males compete to occupy the shelters.
And so, and the females...
Check out the males for their ability to provide in that manner and then they rear their young and then if an avian flu comes along the birds die from the bottom of the hierarchy upward because the ones who have the poorer shelters are more stressed psychophysiologically and that suppresses their immune systems and so that they perish and so like in the natural world There's unbelievable competition for reproductive success and that competition emerges,
at least in part, as a consequence of hierarchies.
Now, in the chapter I wrote, I pointed out that human hierarchies aren't based on power.
They are when they're corrupt.
Like, animal hierarchies are often based on sheer physical power, you know?
Although it's not that simple.
It's not the case with chimps, and it's not the case with a variety of complex animals.
But we can leave that aside.
But human hierarchies, they're way more sophisticated than that.
Like, in most of our functional Western hierarchies, competence is the determinant of movement upward.
Now, that's corrupted often by a certain degree of prejudice and a certain degree of inaccuracy and selection, but no one thinks of Plummer's, for example, a favorite example of mine, as composing a subset of the tyrannical patriarchy, oppressive patriarchy.
If a plumber has a good business, it's because his pipes don't leak.
You don't have sewage in your house.
He treats his employees reasonably.
His prices are decent and he treats his customers honestly.
And so then he has a business and then there's a hierarchy of plumbers because some plumbers are better at that than others.
And it's like everybody's happy about that because then they have plumbing and it works.
And most of our, you know, and it's like, I talk about massage therapists the same way.
It's like, do we have an oppressive patriarchy of massage therapists?
And if we don't, if all these little unique hierarchies that we have of people who are conducting themselves in a business-like manner, if each of those lack that oppressive, patriarchal What essence?
Then, what, do you aggregate them together all of a sudden and it emerges?
I think people argue that there's a crony capitalism.
I'll use that.
That there's dishonesty that perverts the hierarchy.
So it doesn't actually function as a meritocracy.
It doesn't actually let the best person come to the top.
They're never allowed to get into the hierarchy.
They can't start timing the latter.
That happens all the time.
It happens all the time.
I mean, one of the dangers of order, so let's call it hierarchical order, is that it becomes blind, power-mad, and corrupt.
You know, and stories about that reach all the way back to ancient Egypt.
One of the primary Egyptian gods was Osiris, and he was basically the god of the hierarchy.
And he was willfully blind.
He had an evil brother, Seth.
Precursor to Satan, etymologically.
And Seth was malevolent and cut Osiris up into pieces and destroyed him and then took over the kingdom.
It's just like the Lion King story.
It's the same story.
And so our hierarchies always have the tendency to deteriorate into blind, power-seeking structures.
And it's up to the people who compose the hierarchies, who are individuals, and awake, and alert, and who can communicate, to identify when that's happening, and stop it, and to push the hierarchy back onto its proper, competent path.
And so, like the left says, the radical left says, there's nothing but power that mediates the relationships between people.
Well, that's absurd.
The reasonable left says, Power can corrupt hierarchies, and often does, and we should be awake to that and do what we can so that the meritocracy prevails, so that competence is rewarded properly, so that the dispossessed aren't set to zero, so we lose their talents, and so that there is actual possibility for movement upward.
You know, and the right says, don't mess around too much because the hierarchies aren't doing too bad a job the way they already are.
And then there's constant Chatter.
And there has to be, because sometimes the world tilts too much towards order, and sometimes it tilts too much towards chaos.
It's like you're riding on the back of a serpent, you know, it's moving.
You don't know where you are.
And the only way you can tell is by talking with a bunch of people, especially ones that don't agree with you.
And then maybe, because you're blind, you're blinded by your own biases.
It's like, well, where are we?
Is there too much chaos or is there too much order?
Well, we don't know.
Well, we better talk honestly, carefully.
That's the political discussion.
Figure out where we are.
See if we need to tap a bit to the right or we need to tap a bit to the left so that, you know, we can keep these forces in balance.
I've seen data that the majority of today's youth think socialism offers a viable alternative to this continually shifting back and forth hierarchical power structure.
But what would you say to someone who's thinking, guys, let's just get off that train and let's build another structure that works better?
Well, it depends to some...
I would say be very careful about getting off a train that's actually moving and hoping that you can build another one from scratch.
And I would say also that blowing up a train is seldom a good way of producing a new train, right?
Mess with complex structures at your peril.
And remember with humility and gratitude just exactly how much you have.
That's good advice for people in the West because our culture works pretty damn well.
You know, it's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but there isn't anything else you can compare it to anywhere else in the world or anywhere during any time in history where things were basically better for people.
Socialism?
Well, that has to do with the distribution of wealth, right?
And there are various tacks that can be taken in that direction that are whose utility is the subject of continual political debate.
There is some evidence that the Scandinavian countries function quite nicely.
They have some problems and they also have a tremendous amount of wealth and they're fundamentally market economies which are all things that have to be remembered.
They have flatter income distribution in the United States and there seems sometimes to be some advantage to that.
I don't think they're as competitive in the long run as the Americans are with their steeper hierarchies, but they have lower crime rates and so forth that are probably a consequence of flattening out the hierarchy.
The thing is that what you're trying to do is you've got two errors.
You're never going to get rid of both of them.
One error is going to be the hierarchy is too steep, and the other error is that it's going to be too flat.
And the argument about exactly how steep or flat the hierarchy should be at any given point is what people need to be discussing constantly, because it shifts and moves.
And I think that's the essence of political discussion about borders, but we won't talk about borders.
We'll get to borders later.
Well, borders define hierarchy, so that's part of the way of looking at that.
There's lots more when we come back.
Why do we have such deeply conflicting core values even when we come from the same families, the same communities?
I've never understood how we can be so different.
Theoretically, the nurture element should influence it, I always thought, completely.
And it doesn't.
I mean, the nurture element of it seems to influence it far less than we thought.
The genetic data pertaining to nurture shows that the shared environment that people inhabit actually has very little effect on their long-term life outcome.
So that would be the fact that you grew up in the same family.
Now that might be partly because if you're in a good family The relationship you have with your parents is so unique and individual that it doesn't really generalize to the relationship that your siblings had with your parents.
You know, and so partly what you might be doing in a good family is actually maximizing the genetic differences between your children because you're allowing them to manifest themselves the way they are and encouraging that, you know, with some exceptions.
Why are we so different?
Well, we're different because we We're composed of biological subsystems that have a substantial amount of variability in their operation.
And there are reasons for that.
The reasons are that some configurations of these biological systems are better suited for some environments, and some configurations are better suited for some other environments.
And when you're born, you don't know which environment you're going to be thrown into.
So, you know, God rolls the dice, and there you get your temperament.
And so the biological system seemed to aggregate into five core differences.
There's extroversion.
Extroverted people are assertive and enthusiastic.
They like groups.
They like parties.
They are energized by people, whereas introverts are better on their own.
And there's people who are high or low in neuroticism.
That's the negative emotion dimension.
Extroversion is a positive emotion dimension.
And people who are higher in neuroticism are more sensitive to uncertainty and anxiety and emotional pain.
And you might say, well, why is that useful?
And the answer to that, I think, is twofold.
Is that, first of all, maybe you're going to be born in dangerous times and you should be alert for predators.
And there's another reason, too.
Women tend to have higher scores in negative emotion than men.
And I think there's three reasons for that.
I think they become sexually vulnerable at puberty, and that's when the temperamental differences kick in.
They're smaller physically, so the world is actually more dangerous.
But most importantly, I think, that women's nervous systems are not optimized for women.
I think they're optimized for...
Woman-infant dyads.
Because you have to be very threat-responsive and sensitive to negative emotion if you're going to take proper care of an infant.
So I think women pay the price of increased susceptibility to depression and anxiety for their heightened sensitivity to the distress of infants.
And so, well, that's how it is.
And, you know, you might say, well, those differences in negative emotion are sociocultural, but that's wrong, because if you look at the egalitarian societies of Scandinavia, for example, in Northern Europe, the differences between men and women in these traits is actually larger than it is in the rest of the world.
So what seems to happen is that as you remove the sociocultural constraints from men and women, the genetic differences Maximize.
And so that's a very complicated problem and no one's come to terms with that.
And just to be clear, the benefit of people having such diametrically opposing views within a society, besides making us angry at each other, is?
Well, you know, who knows who's right and who's wrong?
It's like, let's say you have an employee who isn't turning out very well.
And you have an agreeable manager, because that's another dimension associated with compassion and politeness.
You have a disagreeable manager.
And the disagreeable manager says...
We've got to get rid of this person.
They're pulling everyone's performance down.
We're not going to meet our targets this term because of it.
We've given them, let's say, several chances.
And it's not an appropriate business decision to continue.
And the agreeable person says, You're failing to take the context into consideration.
The person is dealing with a parent who has Alzheimer's and a spouse who's got an alcohol problem and they're doing their best to continue working and if we fire them then we're going to send a message to all of our other employees that we're not caring.
It's like, well, who's right?
Well, you don't know who's right.
You need that diversity of opinion, you know, because either of those stories could be correct, and sometimes one of them is correct, and sometimes the other is correct.
And so...
Part of the diversity is, and it's part of the way that human beings are able to fit into so many niches, is that the answer to the problems that are posed by many situations are far from obvious, and that a diversity of opinion is actually necessary to address them properly.
We live in a world where you'll hear one of those stories and not the other.
You'll only hear the story about the missed target or the guy's Alzheimer's mom.
You won't hear both stories.
And as we begin to make decisions based on only hearing one part of the story, we get more and more angry at the folks who don't agree with us.
So what does, for example, the Trump election and other similar elections that we've seen around the world teach us about what's going on?
Well, I would say what the Trump election taught us primarily was that it was dangerous for the Democrats to abandon the working class in favor of identity politics.
And this has to do with identity politics is essentially predicated on the idea that your fundamental nature is determined by Some obvious group characteristic.
Your sex, your ethnicity, your race, your gender.
That's another one that's been added.
And that you're fundamentally an avatar of that group.
That wasn't a position, because of its radical anti-individualism, I would say, that wasn't a position that was popular among Americans.
And so Trump squeaked by, at least in part because of that.
That and the fact that I think that the classic Democrats, the working class types, felt abandoned by the Democrat Move towards identity politics as opposed to their general work for the working class.
And with that decision, now we have other issues that are coming to the forefront.
Maybe they were there all along, but things like immigration, this issue of borders, which has been much more divisive than I thought because we've had challenges to our immigration policy for a long time.
Most of us don't see the other side of this equation.
Explain why borders themselves are so important to our societies, not just the United States, but around the world.
Countries are making decisions that seemingly fly in the face of what's in their best interest as an individual to vote for a government that will support that borders issue.
Well, how big a territory do you think you can manage?
That's a big part of it.
That's the Tower of Babel problem.
You know, you can easily make an organization so large that it can no longer govern itself.
It starts to fractionate from within.
And that's a major permanent problem.
I think it's the problem that the European Economic Community is suffering from.
It's very hard as your organization scales.
It's very difficult to have it not fragment and fracture within.
It's very difficult to not have its lower strata alienated from its top strata.
So there's a gigantism problem with the idea of border...
A border-free world, let's say.
It's like, one world, one government?
What exactly does that mean?
That's a steep hierarchy with very few people in charge.
Very difficult to organize that so that, I mean, the UN hasn't been able to manage it in 40 years of trying.
And so, Part of the advantage of a border is that you can take this relatively secluded space and organize it half reasonably so the people who exist within it can exist in a certain amount of harmony.
Now the price you pay for that is that you exclude people.
That's the price you pay for borders.
It's the price you pay for hierarchies.
And you can argue about the cost of exclusion.
And you should argue about it.
But the solution shouldn't be, well, we don't need borders.
It's like, it's not thought through.
You have walls in your bedroom.
You have walls in your house.
You know, sometimes you have walls in your community, or at least you have demarcations, right?
And so everyone already understands that we have to exist within spaces that are somewhat protected and defined.
Why is it metaphorically so important?
I mean, when these kinds of topics become major dividers in our politics, it's often more than the issue itself.
Yeah.
So what are they seeing that we're missing?
I mean, there's, again, quite a few people have been elected only on the issue of immigration.
Yeah, well the thing is there's two ways of looking at the foreigner.
One is as a source of contamination.
That would be physiological contamination and also moral or philosophical contamination.
So the physiological contamination would be Bearers of illness.
So there's a great study.
There's a couple of great studies published a few years ago showing...
This was amazing studies, man, showing that the higher the rate of transmissible disease in the state or country studied, the more likely the culture was to be authoritarian at that level of analysis.
And that held within countries, between the provinces in the countries and across countries.
And the correlation wasn't small.
And so...
And it's been historically the case that when isolated human populations mix, there is always the problem of the transmission of illness.
It happened with the Black Plague, right?
It happened with the decimation of the Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere.
We figure we might have lost 95% of them as a consequence of the contact with Europeans.
So there's danger in encountering the foreigner.
And so the conservative types who are more disgust-sensitive and more orderly, more wall-focused, they think, look, let's err on the side of caution.
Things are pretty good here.
Minimal contact with the stranger, it's a safer route.
And the liberals say, yeah, yeah, that's all well and good, but look, without some new ideas, we're going to get all stagnant here and tyrannical, and we're going to fall behind, and so we better open the borders so that we can have a free flow of ideas so that everybody can become richer and smarter.
And they're also right, but the problem is they're both right.
They're both right.
There's the viral problem, so to speak, and that can be physiological as well as ideological and intellectual.
Ideas can contaminate you.
Oh, of course, of course.
Ideas sweep.
Well, look what happened to the Soviet Union when the Marxist ideas came sweeping through, or Maoist China, for that matter.
I mean, ideas have a viral quality, and they're not trivial.
And so the border, the tall border people think, hey, caution.
And the permeable border, people think, yeah, well your caution is just going to cause stagnation.
And the issue is, again, it's the same problem.
They're both right.
It's a problem with temperaments in general, is that it depends on the circumstance, and so you have to have an argument.
Is this a time to open the borders or to shut them?
Essentially, you want both.
You actually want both those groups fighting over it, because the truth's not going to be at either end of that extreme.
That's right, because the truth is going to continue to vary.
So what has allowed political leaders who've been able to offer one extreme to succeed?
Well, I think part of what happened in the Trump election was that The level of general distrust in American society rose substantially because of political polarization.
And I think that was part of what drove the desire for the wall, is that as distrust rises and uncertainty rises, the requirement for Predictable order necessarily increases.
I get it.
That's why you mentioned the viruses.
Countries with lots of infections in them, whether it's ideological or true viral, they tend to get more conservative in terms of their wall management.
Yes, and they get authoritarian.
And the correlation is not trivial.
In these papers, the correlation, and that's the indicator of the strength of the relationship between the two variables, it was up to 0.6.
It was the determining factor.
Well, I mean, why would that be?
Well, let's say that some of the diseases are transmissible through sexual contact.
So what do you do about that?
Well, obviously what you do about that is you clamp down on sexual freedom.
That's going to be part of the authoritarian ethos.
And sometimes that is what you do because there are viral forces afoot and it's time to batten down the hatches and to isolate yourself.
But other times, well, it's time to open up because there's new things to learn.
And so it is part of the eternal debate between the liberal types and the conservative types.
And you can never say...
That's why the utopia in American politics is the politics.
It's not the liberals winning and it's not the conservatives winning.
Because the conservatives will win for a while and then they'll be wrong.
And then the liberals will take over, and they'll be alright for a while, and then they'll be wrong.
It's the dynamic, and it's the dynamic that's mediated by the free speech of sovereign individuals that keeps the interplay between the opposition centering us on the best approximation of reality we can manage.
It's a dynamic process.
It's also partly the problem with the idea of political utopia, because you think, well now the problem's solved.
It's like, No, the damn problem's never solved because the ground keeps shifting underneath your feet.
So the solution is to dance.
The solution is to surf, right?
And you maintain your stability that way.
But it's not because it's permanent.
More questions after the break.
Jordan Peterson sparked controversy by arguing the differences between men and women.
We're real.
Why do you feel it's so important for us to recognize that?
It's an intimidating area you wandered into.
I didn't really spark controversy.
It was the people who disagreed with me that sparked controversy.
Because I happened to be right about that.
So, and it was never controversial.
I mean, psychologists have known for decades that men and women differ on a variety of dimensions, including temperamentally.
Now, they're more the same than they are different.
So the curves overlap more than they diverge.
But a lot of selection for various employment opportunities, for example, happen at the extremes of distribution.
So even if the overlap between the populations is substantial, If the men and women are offset to some degree along some dimension, that can make a walloping difference.
To be specific, men tend to be less empathetic, women tend to be more empathetic.
Like 15 to 1, 10 to 1. And it's because men are more disagreeable than women.
And it's not a huge difference if you take a woman out of a population randomly and a man, and you said, well, who's less agreeable?
And you bet on the man, you'd be right 60% of the time.
So it's not like 90% of the time, it's 60%.
Except at the extremes.
Yeah, but that's the problem.
But then if you go out to, like, you take the one in 100 persons who's most disagreeable, They're all men, and those are the ones that are in prison.
So, because it's the best predictor of imprisonment.
It's not a great predictor, by the way, but it's the best personality predictor.
So, even though the differences in the middle aren't great, the extremes are often where this election takes place.
And this makes a difference.
Like, look, The biggest differences in occupational choice in the world are in Scandinavia.
So what's happened?
The Scandinavians have pursued a policy of equality of opportunity, radical equality of opportunity, for decades.
And you could argue that they've done that quite successfully, like most of the West.
The proportion of men and women in the workforce is approximately equal.
It's a massive shift towards egalitarianism that's occurred in the last 50 years, say, 40 years.
So a huge part of equalization has emerged as a consequence of equality of opportunity doctrines.
But one of the things that happens is that as you remove the sociocultural restrictions on men and women, the biological differences maximize.
And so this is why, apparently, there are a comparative shortage of female engineers in Scandinavia and a comparative shortage of male nurses.
Even in Scandinavia?
Oh yes!
More in Scandinavia!
More!
The difference is, like, the more egalitarian in this society, the less likely women are to enroll in STEM fields.
Period.
And that's not, you know, people have accused me of pseudoscience, which I find very annoying for a variety of reasons, mostly because the studies that have demonstrated this are large-scale studies, international studies, with thousands or hundreds of thousands of participants, conducted by primarily left-leaning psychologists, Who did not expect this outcome, and were not happy about it.
You know, so how do you know your science is trustworthy?
Well, how about when you don't like the result?
And then you replicate it, and there it is again.
And then you still don't like it, so you replicate it again.
And then it comes up again.
And then some other teams who don't want it to be true study it and replicate it, and it happens to be the case.
And so, well, and then it opens up a host of questions.
It's like, You lay open equality of opportunity for men and women.
It means they make different choices.
And those choices have economic consequences, for example, because the STEM fields pay more than the non-STEM fields, partly because they're scalable.
It's like, well, then what do you do?
Do you not want to offer individual men and women the choice of occupation because it produces these inequalities of outcome?
So then, and if not, because you want the outcomes to be equal, then what are you going to do?
Are you going to start to Like, really put the clamps down on socialization?
You're really going to start to socialize little boys like little girls and vice versa?
You're going to punish little girls for their doll preference?
You're going to punish little boys for their wheeled thing preference?
Which, by the way, you can also elicit and hire primates?
So, I mean, how totalitarian are you going to get about the fact that you want the outcomes to be equal if you've already opened up the equality of opportunity space?
It's like men and women are different in all sorts of ways, and temperamentally, the biggest difference that's been identified is actually an interest.
So, Men are more interested in things, by and large, and women are more interested in people, by and large.
And that makes a huge difference in occupational choice, and that makes quite a large difference in pay, in the pay gap.
And, you know, the pay gap also isn't really between men and women.
It's between men, women, and mothers.
Because women pay a big price for motherhood, an economic price, and we could certainly have a perfectly reasonable discussion about whether or not that's equitable and fair.
The problem is we don't know what to do about it.
Because if you're in a profession and you take yourself out of your profession for five years to take care of your children, then you're not going to be on the top of your profession anymore.
And no one knows what to do about that.
Maybe you pay women to stay home with their children.
Or maybe you subsidize daycare.
We don't know.
It's complicated to raise children.
It's a big problem.
And there's an economic price to be paid for it.
But these differences are real.
And they're bigger in the egalitarian societies.
And the Scandinavians, they have to reckon with this.
I talked about this a lot when I went to Scandinavia.
You guys are pursuing two opposite...
Goals.
And they're working at counterposition to one another.
You're maximizing equality of opportunity.
You're increasing inequality of outcome.
They're causally linked.
What are you going to do about it?
Oh, it isn't happening.
It's like, no, that's the wrong answer.
It's happening.
Even the London Times said that these studies showing these effects are among the most well-replicated and well-established findings in all of the social sciences.
And that's true.
So, understanding the economic issues, there are also the emotional issues between men and women.
What should women be telling men about their desires, their needs?
We're in a Me Too movement, and I'm cognizant of the fact we're two guys on stage here, so this is not an area that either of us should profess to know from a personal level, but there's probably information that men need from women to be able to process what their desires are now.
Well, that's a deep and troublesome question.
One of the things that's really remarkable, as far as I'm concerned, is that I would say, roughly speaking, that it was the left that was at the forefront of the sexual revolution in the 1960s.
And that shot of that was, we've got good birth control.
Maybe it's a free-for-all.
And, you know, maybe it could have been.
But there were some negative consequences of that.
AIDS, let's say, being one of them.
There was a deterioration of the family structure that was arguably associated with that.
There were costs to be paid.
And then there was more subtle costs, which is that it turned out you probably couldn't just detach sex from the rest of life and treat it as something that was merely fun.
Because it's an intimate act, and it involves emotion, and it implies commitment, and it can't be pulled out of the person as an independent entity.
And so the sexual taboos are coming back.
And what's so interesting about that is they're mostly coming back on the radical left, which is exactly where the sexual revolution came from to begin with.
And it's because...
I think it's because you cannot regulate sex properly outside of the context of long-term, stable, monogamous relationships.
It's as simple as that.
You try to move outside of that, and you're in trouble.
And we're in trouble.
You know, we don't know the rules governing sexual interactions between men and women.
You know, one rule that sort of applies is probably if you're married, you can have sex and that's generally okay.
But even there, you know, the consent rules have got more complex.
It is not obvious, for example, in California.
It seems obvious to me now that in California, That if you have sex with your wife or she has sex with you and either of you are intoxicated, that's rape.
Because you have to give consent and you can't give consent unless you're intoxicated.
If you're intoxicated, yeah.
Yes, if you're intoxicated.
So that seems a bit on the not sustainable side of reality.
So with that in mind, there's a bunch of very biblical interpretations, religious ones, around the role of the man and the woman.
Perhaps the most famous, of course, Adam and Eve.
And come on over here.
This is a painting by Martin Allen.
It's called Waiting for Eve.
And before I let you give me your first impressions of this, you know, you've got, you know, that's probably Adam down there waiting.
The apples have all shriveled up while he's waiting for Eve to come into his life.
But it reminded me of this great poem by Mark Twain, which folks, if you want to take a little time and look through, it's called, it's called Eve's Diary, it's Adam's and Eve's Diary, and the final line has always resonated with me, and Adam said it.
He said, wheresoever she was, there was Eden.
Yeah, well, if I look at this painting, I think, first of all, well, the tree is often a symbol of the psyche, and this tree is not in good shape.
It's gray and dying.
It's kind of serpentine in its appearance, and all the apples are fading, and this person down here is featureless and not paying attention and downcast and, well, obviously not thriving.
Is the same color, for example, as the tree?
Waiting.
Well, you could read it a variety of ways, is that what he needs is right in front of him if he would only look.
That's one interpretation.
Another is that this is absolutely vital to color and life and happiness.
And he hasn't discovered it for one reason or another.
Eve hasn't come along to point it out to him.
That would be part of it.
And I think that's right.
I mean, I read a Pew Research study, I think it was Pew Research, a couple of weeks ago, asking people what was important in their life, you know.
And this is relevant because we tell women, young women, we tell young women all sorts of lies.
Especially when they're around 19 or 20. And one of the lies is that career is going to be the most important part of their life.
And that's a lie because career isn't the most important part of most people's lives.
So 76% of Americans, if I remember the stat correctly, regard their intimate and family relationships as the most meaningful part of their life.
And I believe that's correct across the lifespan.
You know, it's your intimate partner, your family, your children in particular.
And I think that's especially true as you get older.
And yet, the narrative is, career is all.
Even though the patriarchy is oppressive.
It's just so contradictory.
Men and women There isn't that much to life in some sense, you know?
You need to do something productive that you can exchange with other people.
So that's your job or your career.
That's your obligation.
You need an intimate partner.
You need a family, right?
That's life.
And if you miss out on any of those, one of those three things, then there's a hole in your life, and you might be able to fill it.
Like, you might be able to have such a stellar career that the fact that you're alone is justifiable.
But that's rare, man.
I've seen that with very, very few people.
The gentleman in the painting, he's lost because he hasn't found his partner.
He hasn't found someone to intertwine his life with.
He hasn't found his counterbalance as well, because The other thing, I wrote about this a fair bit in my 12 Rules for Life book, in the chapter called, Don't Let Your Children Do Anything That Makes You Dislike Them.
You know, you're not very well put together, let's say, like the typical person, and neither is your provisional romantic partner.
But with any luck, the two of you are biased and ignorant and blind in different ways.
And so, you put yourself together and you bind yourself together and you decide that you're going to become one superordinate entity that's better than both of you.
And then you exchange your viewpoints in conflict and in negotiation and you improve each of you.
And hopefully what that does is turn the two of you into one person, one being, sane enough to raise decent children.
It's something like that.
And you need that.
To complete you.
There's an old idea, you know, that Eve was taken out of Adam and that that meant that the original human being was hermaphroditic, right?
And that what happens when man and woman are united is the original being created by God is reconstituted.
And there's a nice symbolism that goes along with that because it It's predicated on the idea that that intense bond that characterizes monogamy is necessary for mutual spiritual and psychological development.
And I think that's right.
I think it's the right long-term solution.
It's the right solution for children, clearly, because children do much better in intact two-parent families.
Much better.
But it's also right because Well, it's one of the things that keeps you sane.
It's one of the things that gives your life depth.
It's one of the things that you can aspire to, right?
Because people think, well, you find who you love and then you live happily ever after.
It's like, no, if you've been married for 40 years, man, that's an accomplishment.
It's like you've battled through some hard times, right?
You've stuck together through thick and thin.
It's an aspiration to maintain a monogamous relationship.
You say, well, I'm not happy.
It's like, oh God.
It's like, no kidding, you're not happy.
It's like, life's not for happiness.
That's not how it works.
And you're there to maintain that relationship.
It's a challenge for you.
It's a wrestling match.
And then the community is there to kind of cheer you on.
Say, look, we know this is difficult.
That's why you get married in a church with a bunch of people around you.
Say, I'm going to take this foolish leap.
And everybody says, they clap at you.
And they know it's going to be hard.
But they're there to support you because they know that just the love that's there isn't enough.
You need everything behind you.
You need the society behind you.
You need traditional morals behind you.
You need the political system and the economic system behind you.
And then you produce the right structure, which is a monogamous structure, a long-term monogamous structure.
And then sexuality is properly regulated.
And I think that everything outside of that is a delusional adolescent dream.
That's what it looks like to me. - We field a lot of questions from young people and many are struggling, trying to figure out how to focus on a better tomorrow.
What advice would you give them?
Well, I think the first advice might be to assume that you could have a better tomorrow and that you could have something to do with that.
And the second bit of advice I would give is take stock.
No.
Take a look at yourself.
Figure out where your weaknesses are.
Figure out where you're procrastinating, where you're not living up to your responsibilities.
Consult your conscience and see if you can straighten yourself out piece by piece.
You know, you think you could have a better tomorrow, you could grow up, you could be a functional adult, you could be a contributing member of society, as old-fashioned as that sounds.
But it's a noble goal, especially when you're the eyes and the mouth of the state.
So, Have some optimism because you're courageous.
Have some trust in people because you're courageous.
Assume that tomorrow could be better than today.
And then pay attention to your conscience and put yourself together.
Where does playing a truth fit into this?
Because converting chaos into something beautiful, an essence that we all love, and that brings us ultimately the joy many seek, is only going to come if we tell the truth, which is hard to do when you're 15 years old and people around you don't like that.
Well, it's really hard when you're 15 because your primary goal when you're 15 is to fit in.
And it's a necessary goal because you have to learn to fit into society.
You have to learn society's rules before you can break them, for example.
But you don't want to fit in to the point where you violate your own sense of integrity.
And you can tell that again because your conscience will plague you.
You know, you'll feel that you haven't been true to yourself, for example.
And the color will go out of things.
And then you have to ask yourself.
It's like, well, is the game I'm playing my game?
Or is it someone else's?
And you can ask yourself more specific questions.
You know, it's like...
What sort of person would I like to be in three months?
What do I want from my friends?
Like, what sort of people should I be associating with?
How am I going to deal if I was dealing intelligently with temptations that beset me?
Pornography use, for example, or drug or alcohol use.
It's like, well, if I was treating myself properly, like a reasonable person who was caring for myself, what exactly would be my stance on such things?
You know, and I think, well, total abstinence seems to me to be an unreasonable goal, and it's not even obvious that it's healthy, because most adolescents need to experiment to mature properly.
But you might want to have, like, a bit of a conscious goal in mind.
You know, like, there's nothing so great about being an alcoholic at 24. So, some meditation on character development, which is something our schools seem to do a very poor job of, I would say.
Part of having a goal in life is to be able to see it.
It's a fine line between a vision and hallucination.
You have a self-authoring program, which is a fairly thoughtful way of getting people to write down exactly what it's going to look like a couple years from now.
A short version of that tool, these teens may be able to do it themselves.
Well, you know, we ask people, it's at selfauthoring.com, we ask people, well, if you could have the friends you wanted, what would that look like?
If you could have the career that you wanted, what would that be?
If you could use your time outside of work productively and meaningfully, what would that look like?
How should you take care of yourself mentally and physically?
How do you deal with temptations in the way that I just described?
How do you educate yourself properly?
So those are warm-up questions.
And then we ask people to write for 15 minutes about what their future could look like at some point down the road.
It's three to five years for older people, but it can be shorter for younger people.
You get what you want.
You can have what you want and need if you were taking care of yourself.
What would that look like if you could have it?
Well, now you have a vision, right?
Then we have them write a counter vision.
It's like, okay, you've got some bad habits.
Let's say they take you out in five years.
What sort of hell does that look like?
And how could you circumvent that?
And then they have something to avoid.
And then we ask them to write a bit of a plan to put their vision into practice.
It's like, okay, you've got a sense of what life would be like if it was worth living.
How are you going to keep yourself on track?
How are you going to implement it?
And so we've done that.
We work with college students, mostly, and especially with the males, it seems to work extraordinarily well.
But the overall effect is that it decreases dropout rates from university by about 25%.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
In trade school, even more.
It's a 50% decrease in dropout among males, especially ones who weren't doing that well in high school.
So in order to do the things you're speaking to, we need a little mental resilience.
Yeah.
It's something that at HealthCorps we focused a lot on.
And you can get mental resilience by playing sports and failing or being in the theater.
Failing and not whining.
And not whining.
Yeah.
Failing nobly.
Failing nobly.
Right.
Define that.
Explain that.
Well, sometimes you win, and then you win graciously, and sometimes you lose, and then you lose nobly.
It's like it wasn't your turn to win, and perhaps you didn't deserve to win, and maybe there's something for you to learn.
And mostly what there is for you to learn is how to fail nobly.
That's a victory, man.
It's like with games.
You've got to think about games.
You're playing a game and the goal is to win.
But you're not playing a game.
You're playing a series of games.
And a series of games isn't the same as a game.
And so you don't want to win the game.
You want to win the series of games.
Okay, so how do you win the series of games?
Well, you do that by being a good player.
By being a good sport.
There's an ethic in that.
It's like...
It doesn't matter whether you win or lose.
It matters how you play the game.
But what in the world does that mean?
Because you're supposed to try to win.
Well, yeah, but you're winning the series of games.
And so you want to be the person that invites you to play.
You want to be the person that's always invited to play.
To play the most games possible.
And so that means you have to be noble in victory.
You have to be humble in victory and you have to be noble in defeat.
That's a start.
You have to be a team player so that you build your team and don't take all the glory for yourself.
And people see that iterated across time.
That's an excellent thing to know from an ethical perspective is that you're trying to win the set of all possible games and you do that by being a good sport.