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Sept. 20, 2020 - Dr. Oz Podcast
05:59:06
Dr. Oz | Jordan Peterson: The Exclusive Uncut Interview | Full Episode
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He's undeniably one of the greatest intellectual phenomenons of our generation.
Dr. Jordan Peterson's work as a clinical psychology professor at the University of Toronto has catapulted him to international fame with arguments that are challenging and changing the way we all think.
He has captured the attention of millions, especially of young men, but some young women as well.
And many of you, however, have never heard of him, but you will get to know him for the first time through this interview.
Today he is here, breaking down his provocative rules for life and the prescription for success that will surprise many of you.
Thank you for joining us.
Thanks for the invitation.
So, it is...
An interesting group of insights that you offer us, and I can enter it in many ways, but let me just start with, for me, perhaps the most obvious, which is, what is it that you're saying that's resonating with so many people?
What itch are you scratching?
I think there's probably two.
We've had a long conversation in our culture about the necessity for self-esteem and happiness, and that's not what I'm talking about.
I tell my audiences and my readers very straightforwardly that life is difficult and that there's a lot of suffering in it and that you have to learn how to conduct yourself in the face of that.
The problem with the pursuit of happiness is that when life's storms come along, happiness disappears and then you're left with nothing.
And so you need to pursue something that's deeper than happiness.
And if happiness comes along, well then, hooray for you!
You don't want to despise it because it's fleeting, but it's much better to pursue things that are meaningful than things that make you happy.
It's deeper and it orients you more appropriately and it keeps you centered in your own life and makes you more useful for your family and your community.
So that's one thing.
And it's a relief to young people to know that the baseline conditions of life are difficult but that you can still prevail so it's a funny message in some sense or a strange message because on the one hand it's somewhat pessimistic now I talk about suffering and malevolence also but I also emphasize the fact that despite Despite that being the base conditions of existence, people are tough enough to prevail.
So that's one element of it.
The other element is the necessity of responsibility.
So a lot of what people find in life that provides them with a sustaining meaning is a consequence of not the pursuit of rights or the pursuit of happiness or the development of self-esteem, but the adoption of responsibility.
And the more responsibility, in some sense, the better.
Responsibility for yourself, for making sure that your life lays itself out like it should.
Responsibility for your family, responsibility for the community.
It's people who take responsibility that are the ones that you admire.
And that's the right pathway through life.
That's where meaning is to be found.
And I think that's probably the crucial issue, is that identification of a profound relationship between responsibility and meaning.
And for many of the people that I'm talking with, it seems like that's the first time that that's been articulated for them.
So speaking about responsibility and meaning and how to make sense of a world where so many people feel isolated.
I'll come back to that.
That seems so helpful.
And yet you've been a lightning rod in many ways with a lot of harsh comments, especially in the print media.
What is it that your critics are arguing?
Well, I got embroiled in some political dispute, I would say, in my home front in Canada when our government introduced some legislation that purported to be about compassion, which to my way of thinking was about compulsion with regards to speech.
And so that's tangled me up.
But I also think that people aren't necessarily that happy with a message of personal responsibility when they're really interested in the mechanics of social change.
My sense is that life is unfair.
Social structures are unfair.
The arbitrary way that illness is distributed into the population is unfair.
But despite that, the best level of analysis for rectifying that in a practical sense but also in a psychological sense is the level of the individual.
And so people who think in a collectivist manner or people who Who are playing identity politics games that insist that your group identity should be your hallmark don't like what I have to say at all.
And they have the reasons.
I'm not a fan of identity politics types.
I think it's a very, very dangerous game, particularly because it makes us tribal.
And tribal people are very dangerous.
As we degenerate into our tribal groups, the probability of violence increases as far as I'm concerned.
That's what the anthropological data would suggest as well.
So, the collectivist types don't like me very much.
Clinical psychology, it's a challenging profession.
You chose it coming out of a rural town in central Canada.
How did that advance your life journey?
What in your life has inspired you to do what you do now?
And especially to take some of the public steps now that are drawing criticism to you, which is always painful.
Well, I've always been obsessed with totalitarianism and authoritarian governments, whether they're on the right or the left.
For years, decades really, I spent almost all of my free time thinking about what happened in Nazi Germany and in Russia during the Soviet era, but also in Maoist China.
There were other places as well, trying to understand how it was that we could have got off the rails so absolutely terribly.
And I started studying that at the collectivist level, I would say, looking for political reasons or economic reasons.
But as I investigated further, those levels of analysis became increasingly...
They weren't providing the answers that I wanted.
I think partly because I was really interested in the notion that there's something to learn from what happened, say, in Nazi Germany.
But there's something to learn at an individual level.
That's my estimation.
I don't think that there were innocent masses of people led astray by a single malevolent leader.
I don't think the fundamental motivations for what happened in Nazi Germany were economic.
And I don't think they were in the Soviet Union either.
As I read more and more about the situations, I realized that the proclivity of individuals to avoid responsibility and to lie, especially about their own lives and about their own experience, were really the reasons that those systems went so far astray.
Now, there were other reasons as well, but those were very important to me because I also thought that The proper lesson in the aftermath of something like Auschwitz is how do I ensure that I live a life such that if I was offered the opportunity to do something terrible by omission or by commission that I wouldn't do it.
That I would have enough strength of character to resist.
And so the lessons there for me were psychological.
And that taught me an awful lot about, well, the role of the individual.
People like Viktor Frankl, for example, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, which is a perennial classic and a great book.
Insisted that a large part of the reason that Germany went off the rails so badly was because individual Germans were so willing to falsify their own experience.
And Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote the Gulag Archipelago, the best document on what happened in the Soviet Union, also made exactly the same argument.
So I got interested in the psychological causes of catastrophic governance, let's say.
And that taught me a lot.
It taught me about responsibility, about the responsibility of the sovereign individual.
And you know, we have an idea in our culture, it's a very powerful idea, that each of us is of intrinsic value, but that associated with that value is a responsibility.
And we have a responsibility, let's say, for our own integrity and for that of our families, but also of the state, because otherwise we wouldn't have the sovereign responsibility and right to vote.
Like our whole culture is predicated on the idea that each of us are sufficiently Significant.
So that we can entrust the destiny of the state itself to our decisions.
It's like, well, I believe that.
And I think that that's a correct idea.
Which is also why I think that systems that are based on that idea function so well like our Western systems do.
But that's a responsibility that has to be taken with dead seriousness.
Because it means that the good things that you do in your life are truly good and they matter.
They ripple outwards.
Way more than you think.
But so do the things you do that aren't good, including the acts of deception that you engage in, perhaps above all else, which would include your willingness to evade responsibility or to push it off to someone else or to play the short-term against the long-term.
Let me unwrap us a little bit, because you're touching on a bunch of things, and I think they would all benefit us.
So, first of all, let me say I appreciate that you actually put some of your thoughts down into two books, two books that I've read.
The latter is a best-selling book right now.
It's a number four-selling book in the country, 12 Rules for Life, Anecdote to Chaos.
And I am curious how you put that all together.
And let's start off with the basic, which is, what's it all about?
What's the goal of life, according to some of the more recent pieces you've been writing?
I would say that the goal in life is to conduct yourself so that life improves.
At least so that undue suffering is forestalled.
But more than that, it's to constrain malevolence and suffering to the degree that that's possible.
But then also to work for a positive improvement in things at every level.
And that's how you should orient yourself.
So I saw something you wrote, actually it's in the book in part as well, is to repeat actions that are worthy.
Yes, noble and worthy.
Noble and worthy, yes.
So you sort of figure out what you should do and then just do it, which I think that's an achievable goal.
Most people would think that's laudatory.
That takes me to the next point, which is what's the meaning of life?
I think the meaning is to be found in that.
And as you put things together and as you take responsibility for things, meaning emerges from that.
And so it emerges from that the same way it emerges from a symphony in some sense, you know, because a symphony is composed of layers of patterns and they're all working harmoniously together.
And they speak directly to people of meaning, which is why people love music so much.
I mean, every form of music does that.
And it's a model for proper being, which is the placing of all the different levels of reality into harmonious relationship with one another.
And meaning emerges out of that naturally.
And meaning is actually an instinct.
This is another thing that people don't understand, and it's a case I've been able to make because I know a fair bit about how the brain works.
The twin hemispheres of your brain interact to guide you through life, which is a truism in some sense.
You use your brain to guide you through life, but your brain does that fundamentally by instilling the proper things that you do with a sense of meaning.
And that meaning is it's not something that's just a surface.
It's not on the surface of the world in some sense.
It's the deepest instinct that you have.
It's associated with a phenomenon that Russian neuropsychologists discovered back in the 1960s called the orienting reflex.
And the orienting reflex is what orients you towards things of interest.
And that happens unconsciously.
And so if something happens around you that's of significance, often something you don't expect, say something somewhat chaotic, you'll orient towards it and that attracts your attention.
And then as you investigate what that is, that's associated with the sense of meaning.
And if you put what you're investigating into proper order, then that meaning continues to reveal itself.
So you can use meaning as a guide to proper being.
But you have to also be very careful to conduct yourself honestly if you're going to do that.
If you conduct yourself dishonestly, then you pathologize the mechanisms that orient you.
I'm thinking about in my own life how I've tried to apply some of these insights.
If I just try to be a little bit better today than I was yesterday, along the lines that you're speaking to, try to create that symphony, but be a little better at it today than yesterday.
And like everybody watching right now, not compare myself to somebody else, but rather compare myself to the future version of me.
Is that a rational way?
That's rule four, right?
It's rule four.
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
Well, it's not only...
Appropriate, but I think it's also practical.
And one of the things about what I do, including my book, is that I'm always trying to take high-level abstract truths, you know, fundamental truths, and to make them concrete and practical so that you can implement them in your day-to-day life.
Because it's the connection between those abstractions and practical action that really cements their meaning and makes them comprehensible.
And this idea of incremental improvement is a great one.
You know, if there are things about your life that are bothering you, or things about the world that are bothering you, then you want to decompose them into solvable sub-problems.
And you do this, if you have a child, this is the sort of thing that you do naturally, right?
Because you want to set your child a challenge that's sufficiently challenging to push them forward in their development.
So that makes it meaningful for the child.
That puts them in the zone of proximal development, which is where Where proper maturation takes place.
They'll find that intrinsically meaningful.
You want to make it challenging, but also with a reasonable probability of success.
And there's an art to that.
So you want to set yourself a task that's difficult, but not so difficult you can't attain it.
And then what happens is that you step up improvement across time, incrementally.
And there's also a certain element of humility to it, right?
Which is, don't bite off more than you can chew.
Don't set grandiose goals, but incremental improvement will get you a tremendous distance.
When you don't do that perfectly, and it's not easy to do, You suffer.
And I'm on this stage often said that, you know, pain is inevitable.
You're going to have pain.
How much suffering comes in that pain, you actually have a fair amount of control over.
Can't make it go away, to your point.
It's part of life.
Your thoughts around suffering that you began to touch on have been incredibly provocative for a lot of people, wildly debated.
I think in part because in our modern world we don't like to acknowledge that kind of suffering can afflict us.
We think something's wrong with us if we have that kind of suffering.
So how is it productive to focus on suffering the way you do?
Well there is something wrong with us if we're suffering and there's something wrong with the world because it's an indication that things aren't set in the order they hypothetically could be set if there's undue suffering and so that is a call to action and it's a painful call to action you know but it's a universal problem suffering is built into the structure of existence in some sense and the fact that you're suffering doesn't mean that there's something Isolated about you that's at fault, right?
Which is an important- this is why the doctrine of original sin was actually quite useful, because everyone makes mistakes and everyone falls short of the glory of God, let's say- Speaks original sin, if you don't mind.
And this is, again, all the monotheistic religions share this, but it exists in other traditions as well.
Well, it's a way of universalizing everyone's felt sense that they don't live up to their responsibility properly.
Because you're not all you could be.
And unless you understand that that's everyone's problem.
Every single person has that issue.
Then it's easy to become discouraged and crushed by that.
And the major advantage, I think, to making a case very strongly that one of the fundamental realities of life is its suffering is that it's actually a relief to people to hear that.
Because they suspect it.
Well, they know it.
But no one's forthright about it.
It's like, yeah, life is suffering.
Okay, fine.
So where does that leave us?
Well, here's where it leaves us.
It turns out that even though life is suffering, if you're sufficiently...
Courageous and forthright and honest, let's say, in your approach and you don't shy away.
What you'll find is that there's something within you that will respond to the challenge of suffering with the development of ability that will transcend the suffering.
So the pessimism is, yeah, well, life is rife with problems at every level.
But the upside is, if you turn and confront that voluntarily, that you'll find something in yourself that can develop and master that.
And so, the optimism is nested in the pessimism.
And that's extremely helpful to people, especially people who are struggling, because they think, oh my god, life is so difficult.
I don't know if I can stand this.
There must be something wrong with me.
Does anybody else feel this way?
And you can say yes.
Everyone feels that way at some time.
And it is as bad as you think, but you're more than you think you are.
You're more than you think you are.
And what I really like about this, too, is it's very much in keeping with the clinical data.
So, for example...
What you do as a clinician, as a clinical psychologist, as a psychiatrist, as any mental health professional who's well-trained, is if people are afraid of something, afraid of something that's standing in their way as an obstacle, like maybe you're trying to develop your career and you're afraid of public speaking, well, I could try to calm you down about your fear and protect you from the challenge that would be associated with public speaking.
You say, well, you never have to do that.
Or I could say, no, no, look, You have to learn to present yourself more effectively in public if you're going to develop your career.
And you're afraid of it.
So let's break down what you're afraid of into 10 steps or 20 steps until we can find a step that's small enough so that you can actually master it.
Let's assume that with three years of diligent practice, That you could become a competent public speaker, at least one that isn't terrified.
With five years you could become an expert.
And let's decide how relevant that is to your future prosperity and thriving.
And then let's assume that if you break it down properly and take it on step by step in this incremental way that we discussed, that you'll actually master every single bit of it.
And the thing that's cool about that is all the clinical evidence shows it works.
And not only that, that's actually how you learn in life.
When you bring a child to the playground and the child is apprehensive about making new friends, you say, okay, well, look, kiddo, stick around me for a minute or two and just watch what's going on.
And the child will calm down and say, okay, now go five feet away.
Just go out there a little bit and just see how it goes.
And stay out there as long as you can.
And if you need to come back for a hug, then no problem.
It's like, so then the child can go out ten feet and they come back.
You say, okay, well now, you know, maybe just go over there and watch those kids.
And the child will go out and then come back.
And so that's it.
The child's going out to where they're afraid.
Seeing that they can master it and then coming back.
So this seems so self-evident that I'm left wondering, well, did people know this 100 years ago?
This issue of taking responsibility, which I think is part of the pain that people feel.
It's not something we expect a lot.
People don't realize that it seems to help a lot in most scenarios if you sort of own it because you control your destiny.
So there's this wisdom we had and forgot.
You spoke about original sin.
These are stories that are thousands of years old, Adam and Eve, right?
These are constructs that archetypal dust are fundamental to who our species is and somehow it seems to slip from us.
Well, you know, knowledge is coded in different ways.
So, a good example, someone who's a good example acts out for you how you should be.
And a good story portrays that dramatically.
But an articulated representation tells you exactly why and explains it.
Some of this needs to be more articulated than it has been because we've become detached in some sense from our underlying examples and our stories, partly because they've been criticized so much.
But I think we're at a point where developing this more articulated knowledge is necessary.
Just so I make sure everyone's clear on this, what I'm taking away is it's a balancing act between the rights you deserve and the responsibility that you must take.
And if that balances off in society, And we do seem to focus a lot on people's rights, which is instinctive to who we are, but we often don't match it up with the responsibility that comes along with that.
Which is exactly why I think that what I'm talking about is falling on receptive ears, is because you actually cannot have a prolonged discussion of rights.
Without having an equally prolonged discussion of responsibilities for a variety of reasons.
First of all, the actual reason that you have rights is so that you can discharge your responsibilities.
It's not the other way around.
It's like you're granted rights by everyone around you or...
No, it's not granted exactly.
It's part of the purpose of your rights in some sense is so that you can be given an autonomous space That's protected, in which you can manifest what's necessary about you in the world that's a contribution to it.
So I have to leave a space for you so that you can make your contribution for yourself, so you can take care of yourself, so that you can shoulder responsibility for your family and so that you can serve the community the best way that you can.
And I don't want to set up a society that will interfere with that.
But then there's the association that we already talked about between responsibility and meaning which is absolutely crucial.
And so the responsibility element is more important than the rights element as far as I'm concerned or it certainly is at this point in time.
People know this.
They instinctively know it.
And yet the role of the victim Which is a painful role to have because something bad happened to you to be a victim.
But it's something that society struggles with.
So what about people who feel like they're a victim?
They're right.
They're victimizers too.
Everybody is a strange mixture of victim and victimizer.
Lots of terrible things happen to people that aren't justifiable in some sense.
You know, well, illness strikes people randomly.
I mean, not entirely randomly, obviously, but there's a large random element in it.
Where you're thrown into existence as a consequence of your birth.
Existentialists, especially in the 1950s, talked about that all the time.
They talked about it as thrownness, that you're sort of thrown into reality with your particular set of predispositions and weaknesses.
And then there's going to be times in your life where things twist in a manner that's unfair to you, that you're not getting your just desserts.
But that goes along with all sorts of Unequally distributed privileges as well.
And so that's the arbitrary nature of existence.
But you can't allow those sorts of things to define you because it's not that useful strategically.
When you're playing a card game, you're dealt a hand of cards.
Well, what do you do?
You play the hand the best you can.
Why?
Because all the hands are equal?
No!
Because you don't have a better strategy than playing the hand that you're dealt the best you can.
And that doesn't even mean it'll be a winning strategy.
But because people don't always win, sometimes we lose, and sometimes we lose painfully, and sometimes we lose painfully and unjustly.
That's not the point.
The point is you don't have a better strategy, and neither does anyone else.
And then it's also not so obvious how privilege and victimization are distributed.
You know, if you take someone who's doing quite well in life and you scratch underneath the surface, you generally don't have to scratch very far until you find one or more profound tragedies of the past or perhaps of the present.
No matter how well protected you are in the world, you're still subject to You're still subject to aging.
You're still subject to the dissolution of your relationships, the death of your dreams, death itself.
Vulnerability is built into the structure of existence.
Now, if you start to regard yourself as a hapless victim, or even worse, an unfairly victimized victim, well, then things go very badly sideways for you.
It's not a good strategy.
You end up resentful.
You end up angry.
You end up vengeful.
You end up hostile.
And that's just the beginning.
Things can get far more out of hand than that.
So strategically, it's a bad game.
It's better to take responsibility for the hand that you've been dealt.
You've got no better protection in life than doing that.
This is where a lot of folks in the modern West get unsettled.
Because we have been brought up to believe that we need to be compassionate to each other.
And you point out that sometimes that compassion, I don't know if it encourages weakness or it's another word for weakness.
And I'd love if you could open that up for me because it is the kind of discussion that gets folks really unsettled.
Feeling sorry for someone is not a moral virtue.
You know, morality is much more complex than mere reflexive empathy.
So I would say, when is reflexive empathy useful?
That's easy.
You're a mother.
Your child is under six months old.
Reflexive empathy is the right reaction.
And I think that that's why it's such a powerful motivating force as well.
You know, a child under six months old is always right.
If a child's in distress, always right.
You're wrong.
The child's right.
No matter why the child is distressed, it's your problem and you should do something about it.
And it's not the infant's fault.
Right.
Okay, now, we have a very lengthy dependency period as human beings, and that means that infants...
30, 40 years for some.
Well, well, yes, exactly, exactly.
And so, because of that intense dependency, that empathic circuitry has to be very, very powerful.
But it can easily be Utilized in a domain that's outside of its proper purview.
And unreflexive empathy is not a moral virtue.
And just because you feel sorry for someone, you are not a good person.
Now, that might be a sub-component of being a good person, but it's very frequently the case that complex problems require sophisticated Complex planning, thinking and analysis.
Well, which is why we invented science, for example.
Which is why we invented sophisticated social policy and all of that.
And it's certainly not the case that everything that's good in the medium to long run looks so good In the short term.
I mean, you think about when you're disciplining a child, which you have to do, because one of your responsibilities as a parent is to produce a child, help produce a child who is disciplined and who's socially acceptable to everyone else, which is your fundamental responsibility.
Whenever you discipline a child, you cause short-term distress for the benefit of the medium to the long run.
And that runs contrary to reflexive empathy.
You need more than empathy to get by in the world.
So it's unsophisticated thinking to assume that First of all, that reflexive empathy towards those who are hypothetically unfairly victimized constitutes a moral virtue.
It's not that simple and it can be very, very dangerous because you can undermine people by inappropriately feeling sorry for them.
It's not helpful.
So, as I was listening to a bunch of the different talks that you've given, I was caught off guard by a comment you made in a series on the Bible.
And this is an important issue because a lot of folks read the meek shall inherit the earth and have a belief that it means the weak will inherit the earth.
Certainly what I thought.
And you stunned me by arguing.
That the word meek didn't really mean what we thought about.
I looked at a bunch of different translations.
Yeah, and my conclusion was, well, you know, words get translated multiple times and they shift their meaning across time and so ancient texts are hard to interpret and it requires a fair bit of study.
But my interpretation was those who have swords and know how to use them but choose to keep them sheathed will inherit the earth.
And that's a very, that's a much better idea as far as I'm concerned because it means that you have a moral obligation to be strong and dangerous, both of those.
But to harness that and to use it in the service of good So it's associated with a complex set of ideas.
But that principle right there is a stark differentiator of you from much of the material that I read.
Generally it's purely about compassion.
You used the word victimhood but a lot of folks do feel it's a virtue to feel sorry for others because usually behind that is I'll do something.
Virtue is not that easy.
No.
That's the problem is that we wouldn't have to think if empathy guided us properly.
But it doesn't.
It guides us properly in some very specific conditions.
It can also make us very dangerous because, and there's good experimental literature on this, if you're very sensitive to an in-group's claims, whatever they might be, that makes you very hostile to perceived out-group members.
In-group, out-group, people within your tribe versus outside your tribe.
Well, within whatever group it is that you're identifying with at that moment.
You know, so empathy drives that in-group identification.
It's like, okay, well, what about the out-group?
Oh, those are predatory.
Those are predators.
We better be hard on them.
You know, it's a mother bears compassion that gets you eaten.
So, we can't be thinking that empathy is an untrammeled virtue.
There's no evidence for that whatsoever.
The psychoanalysts knew this perfectly well as well, when we were still wise enough to attend to their more profound realizations.
And that's the motif of the devouring parent, the devouring mother is a more general trope.
And that's someone who will do absolutely everything for you all the time.
So that you never have to rely on yourself for anything.
That's not good.
No, there's rules, for example.
If you're dealing with the elderly in an old folks home, here's a rule.
Never do anything for one of your clients they can do themselves.
Why?
Because they're already struggling with the loss of their independence.
And you want to help them maintain that independence as long as possible.
And that might mean sitting by while someone struggles to do up their buttons, for example.
And this is the same if you're maybe helping your three-year-old dress themselves.
It's like, yeah, yeah, you can put on the buttons a lot faster.
Let me help you with that.
It's like, no, you struggle with that.
You master it.
And I'll keep my empathy to myself.
Thank you very much.
So that I can help you maintain your independence.
And that suffocating mother is Ursula.
That's right.
In Little Mermaid.
Yes.
So these motifs still sneak into our culture.
Sure.
Why?
You see it in Sleeping Beauty as well in the Disney movie where the evil queen plans to keep Prince Charming locked in her basement, fundamentally, chained up until he's so old he's useless.
And she's the force that stops him from making an alliance with the young woman and having his life.
I'll just keep you chained up here where you'll be safe.
It's like, no, you don't need that.
What did Freud say?
I think it was Freud.
The good mother necessarily fails.
Right?
Because as your child emerges, as your child develops, you're a perfect mother up till six months, you take care of your child's every need.
Okay, well at somewhere between six and nine months, the child starts to crawl around, starts to become a bit autonomous, starts to be able to do little things on his or her own.
You back off.
Every time the child steps forward, you step backwards.
And maybe you step backwards a little faster even, to motivate your child to step forward.
And then what you're saying is, it isn't you I care about, it's who you could be.
And see, that's another thing that I'm talking to young men and young women about.
It's like, it isn't you I care about.
It's who you could be.
You think, well, that's pretty harsh.
It's like, not when you're talking to 18-year-olds.
It's like, they have their whole life ahead of them.
Whose side should you be on?
The 18-year-old kid who's confused?
Oh, you're okay the way you are.
It's like, no, you're not.
You're not even close to okay the way you are.
You haven't even started.
You're not who you could be physically.
You're not who you could be spiritually.
You're not educated to the degree you could be.
You could really be something, man.
You've got 60 years to work on it.
Get the hell at it.
That's way better.
That's a way more positive message, even though it's got that strange harshness about it.
Because it's judgmental.
Every ideal is a judge.
You can't get away from it, right?
Or with it.
You put something up as an ideal that it stares down at you and says, you are not what you could be.
Every great piece of art does that.
And to tell young people, it's like, no, no, you're not okay the way you are.
That's why we have universities.
That's why we have training programs.
It's like you don't know enough to go out there and change the world.
You're not out there waving placards around and telling people how to behave.
Get your act together.
Learn some skills.
Educate yourself.
Learn how to speak.
Learn how to conduct yourself.
Learn how to stand up.
Make yourself a force in the world.
There's way more to you than you think.
You appreciate why that message would resonate with some, but scare the heck out of others.
It should scare the heck out of everybody.
You know, that's what they say.
Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.
There's real truth in that.
See, I think, and this is what scared me.
I learned from studying Auschwitz and the terrible things that I studied for many, many years, that I was responsible for them.
And I believe that.
Yes, because it comes down to individual integrity.
All of these things.
If the state is corrupting around you, that's on you.
It's your responsibility.
You think, well, how can I take on that responsibility?
It's like, be more than you are.
So, how could you not be afraid of that?
Well, of course you'd want to shy away from that.
But the alternative is far worse.
It's far worse to let things degenerate.
Like you have a chance, you have the opportunity to contend with the structure of reality and to set things right.
You can do that if you take it on voluntarily.
And that's a terrible burden to confront suffering and malevolence, especially given the degree of malevolence.
It's a terrible thing to confront.
The alternative is worse.
Let things slide.
You just see where you end up there.
At least you have a fighting chance if you're a contender.
Right?
You're in the ring.
And you can do it.
That's the thing.
That's what makes me so fundamentally optimistic about people.
Is that the problems that confront us are most infinite in their catastrophic consequence.
But there's something within us that's even greater than that.
And so that's...
That's the fundamental reality.
You don't get to that either unless you start with what's so terrible.
Say, life is rife with suffering and injustice.
And we make it worse with our malevolence.
It's terrible.
Okay, well, that's horrible.
Who can withstand that?
It's like, yeah, well, if you look inside that, you see that something beckons.
And what beckons is the possibility of what you could become if you confront that.
And that's what we need to know.
And that's, I think, integrity tied up with our most...
Fundamental religious convictions.
We know that people have an indomitable divine spirit.
Well, how do you call that forth?
Well, by challenging it.
It's not going to come out without that.
You're not going to be who you could be without pushing yourself to your limit.
Because why would you be?
It's not like it's easy.
You have to be compelled in some sense.
You have to be challenged.
And that's why you do your children no favors by overprotecting them.
Quite the contrary.
Why does that message make you so emotional?
And what were you like at age 18?
You're in Saskatchewan, I believe.
Alberta at that time, yeah.
Well, I was thinking about the sorts of things that we're talking about now.
I've been thinking about them ever since I can remember.
But, you know, I've got better at thinking about them across time.
But I was...
I had a lot of the problems, I suppose, that the typical 18-year-old would have.
I drank a lot.
I come from this little town in northern Alberta.
Heavy drinking.
I started drinking when I was 14, so I was quite a partier.
I was confused existentially, I would say.
I wasn't sure what the proper direction in life was.
I was very much I'm obsessed with the problem of the Cold War.
That's never really gone away because that seemed to me to be just a kind of insanity that I didn't know how to fathom.
And, you know, it was all of that.
And I was obsessed with reading and obsessed with learning.
And so that was what all drove me in this direction.
And then as I started to develop these ideas, like I had to let go of things, you know, one of the Ideas that I've been promoting to people is that you have to let the dead wood burn off and you do that by You do that as a consequence of necessity in the pursuit of responsibility when I started writing seriously, I had to stop drinking Because I couldn't think properly so that was it.
It was either like you're gonna do one of these or the other You're either going to continue wasting your time.
I was having a fine time.
I was in graduate school and I had a very social...
I was very, very social.
And a lot of that involved drinking and that sort of thing.
Couldn't do both.
Especially when I was editing.
I couldn't get my thoughts down pristinely enough, precisely enough.
Plus, the emotional magnitude of the things that I was dealing with were more overwhelming if I was, well, in the aftermath of a party.
So I decided when I was like 25 or so to just stop.
I've been caught off guard by how politicized you've become.
As I read of your youth, I know that you had your run-ins with religion, which a lot of people do.
You actually got politically active, but on the left, not the right.
Help me understand what went down.
Well, in the little town I grew up in, the member of parliament, the provincial parliament, equivalent to American state, was a democratic socialist.
He was the only one in the entire province.
Everyone else was conservative, which would be sort of moderate Republican, I would say.
And, you know, there's something to be said for Political voice for the working class and for the dispossessed.
And it certainly is the case that hierarchical structures, the hierarchical structures that compose our society, do produce dispossession.
They stack people up at the bottom.
And so people at the bottom need to have a political voice.
And so I was very attracted to that end of the political spectrum.
But as I came to investigate some of the problems I've been discussing more deeply, I started to understand that mere economic Rectification was insufficient.
That that wasn't the level of analysis that was appropriate for my inquiry, anyways.
Translated, redistribution of income doesn't work.
Well, think about it this way.
The guaranteed basic income idea.
It's like, well, that's predicated on the idea that man lives by bread alone.
Well, that isn't how it works.
And I've certainly seen that in my clinical practice.
I've had clients, especially addicts, if you gave them money, they would die.
And the reason for that, like one guy that I remember in particular, I liked him quite a bit.
He had a bad cocaine problem.
And as long as he was flat broke, he wasn't dead.
But as soon as his, he was on disability, as soon as his disability check came in, he was face down in a ditch three days later.
So, Well, and you think, well, maybe that's a consequence of his overwhelming poverty, etc.
You could come up with some social reason for that path that he took.
But it wasn't, by any stretch of the imagination, that simple.
It's like, people need purpose more than money, even.
I mean, obviously, we don't want people starving.
And actually, we're doing a pretty good job of solving that problem worldwide.
You know, the UN projects that there won't be anyone in absolute poverty by the year 2030, which is really quite the bloody miracle, that's for sure.
So we're doing a pretty good job of getting rid of abject privation.
But then, it isn't the provision of material well-being with ease that allows people to live properly, even though a certain amount of material Wealth is a necessary precondition.
It's purpose.
That's a much more difficult problem to solve.
It's like we need something to grapple with.
We need a meaning to justify our lives.
And some of that is to be found in, well, the struggle against privation and malevolence.
The mere offering of material sustenance to people isn't going to solve the problem.
Dostoevsky knew this 150 years ago.
He said if he gave people everything they wanted, So all they had to do was eat cakes and busy themselves with the continuation of the species.
The first thing they do is smash it all to hell so that something interesting could happen.
So that's our fatal flaw and salvation, both of that, that wanting to contend rather than to sit back and have everything taken care of.
So how do we get...
An 18-year-old to understand what Dostoevsky wrote 150 years ago.
How do you get a 38 or a 58-year-old, which is my age, to understand how to take responsibility?
No, we have discussions like this.
You know, and you make the case to people as well.
So I've been touring around.
My wife and I have gone to 60 cities now since January of this year.
And I've been speaking to audiences that average 2,500 people.
And I deliver a lecture that's very much like this conversation.
It's like, lay out the structure of life, the fact that it's rife with suffering and malevolence, that we erect hierarchies in an attempt to deal with that, to deal with those problems, because they're too alike, that the hierarchies dispossess people, and so we have to take care of the dispossessed as well, and to draw out the relationship between meaning and responsibility.
And the audiences are...
Wrapped as a consequence of that.
And I'm always listening to my audiences.
When are they silent?
Because you know, when everyone in an audience is silent, then everyone's in the same place.
That's a meaningful place.
They're all lined up.
And they line up on this axis of responsibility and meaning.
So there's a hole in our culture where this information hasn't been provided.
But it was there at times in our history, which has been the thing that I struggle with, which is the issue of sacrifice.
It's so paradoxical, right?
Why would me giving of myself to you make me feel better?
It does seem, like most of the time, if I have money, I give you some of my money, I have less money.
But you're arguing that if I understand true sacrifice and I sacrifice myself for something that has meaning...
Well, part of it is, you know, human beings discovered time.
That's one of the things that makes us very peculiar creatures.
To be aware of our own mortality is a consequence of the discovery of time, right?
We can see how we extend out into the future.
And so that makes us very strange creatures as selfish creatures.
Because you actually can't be narrowly selfish and survive.
And here's the reason.
You have to take care of yourself now.
So let's say, well, then you can pursue impulsive pleasure, perhaps at the expense of other people.
And why not?
Well, here's one reason why not.
There isn't just you now.
There's you tomorrow, there's you next week, there's you next month, the next year, and ten years from now.
And so if you conduct yourself in a manner in the present that interferes with your future selves, then that's a downhill trip for you.
And so taking care of yourself in the future and taking care of other people actually turns out to be exactly the same thing.
Because you're actually a community of people that's distributed across time.
And so if you act in your own best interest, Then you're going to sacrifice some of the present for the future.
And that was one of the great discoveries of mankind, right?
Which is something that I also concentrate on in Twelve Rules because I'm really interested in the issue of sacrifice.
Why would you give up something now Why would you ever give up something now voluntarily?
And the answer is sometimes if you give up something now, and often something you love, something you're very in love with even, perhaps not for the best reasons, then you can make a bargain with the future.
And that bargain with the future isn't any different than the bargain you make with other people.
That narrow selfishness is blindness to time and context.
And there's nothing about it that's good.
And I do think the musical example is a really good one.
Like in a musical piece, every note has to fit with every other note across the entire span of the piece.
Well, that's what your life needs to be like.
How you act with me right now has to be in harmony with what you want for yourself tomorrow.
And that's going to be tangled in as well.
It's not only that you repeat across time and have to take that into account.
It's that you repeat across time in the context of your social life.
And so all of that has to be brought into the equation.
And the sacrificial motif is a huge part of that.
And that also is something that runs contrary in some sense to empathy.
Because sometimes you have to, you know, you have to beat yourself on the back of the head with a stick to get yourself to move forward properly.
Even though you know, I should be doing this.
I should be doing this.
Well, I don't want to.
It's hard.
It's like no sympathy for that.
You have to do it because otherwise things are going to get worse.
I heard you say that you're quoting one of the Ten Commandments saying you do unto your neighbors as you have them do unto you.
And the word nice is not in that commandment.
No.
No.
Well, nice isn't enough.
You know, and this...
Is it not enough or is it not the right thing to expect?
Because so many members of my audience beat themselves up in a way they would never hurt other people.
And they say their thinking, but most thinking is self-flagellation.
Part of it is take it easy on yourself.
Be fair.
On the other hand, sometimes you tolerate stuff from other people because you teach people how to treat you.
And if you don't do that, you get it.
Well, getting that balance right is really hard.
So in rule two, I think, is treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping.
I was really interested in that issue of people mistreating themselves.
Because we are privy to our own weaknesses and faults.
We know them better than anyone else knows them.
And so it's very easy for us to determine that we're not worthwhile because of all the ways that we don't live up to what we should live up to and the painful knowledge we have of that.
And to not regard ourselves as worthwhile, and to not treat ourselves properly.
And that's not good.
You have to treat yourself as if you're valuable.
And then that is the same attitude that you extend to other people.
Well, and it's because you are valuable.
And it's a necessity to adopt the responsibility that goes along with recognizing that.
So even if you're not happy with who you are, and even if you have your reasons, You still deserve presumption of innocence.
You still deserve to have a good defense mounted on your own behalf.
You still need to treat yourself as if you're someone valuable and someone worthy of love, even though you have all the reasons to know why you fall short.
And that's absolutely crucial.
And it is hard for people to learn that.
Hard for them to learn not to beat themselves up too much.
Why doesn't anyone ever get away with anything?
That's one of your lines.
Well, I think, imagine you have a plastic ruler, you know, and you pull it back in front of your face, and you let go.
It's like, you think, well, this is going pretty well so far.
Snap!
Yeah, well, it's because you can't bend the structure of reality.
This is why, and this is, I think, also partly what in this message is frightening, is everything that you distort Snaps back.
And often magnified.
And everyone knows that.
And one of the things I discuss with my audience is like, well, just think about how you talk to people that you're trying to treat properly.
You don't say to them, okay, here, kid, here's the way you deal with life.
This is, you put your son on your knees and say, look, lie every chance you get.
Falsify things.
Don't take any responsibility for anything.
If you can slough it off to someone else, if you can hide things where no one will find them, that's a hell of a good strategy.
Like, no one believes that, ever.
So, we know that that doesn't work.
Now, we're tempted because now and then you think, well, I can just cut a corner here or I can get away with this and no one will find out.
It's like...
Yeah, they will.
They'll find out.
Or you'll find out.
And I saw this in my clinical practice all the time.
You know, people would be suffering for some consequence.
A lot.
And we'd untangle it.
Maybe we'd go back five years or ten years and it would be something that was left undone.
Something that was done that shouldn't have been done.
And sometimes not even on the part of the person, you know.
Sometimes on the part of their parents or maybe even on the part of their grandparents.
Like these things stick around for a very long period of time.
But it's like...
If you produce a rift in the structure of reality, it's not going to go away until you rectify it.
And often it breeds more demons, that's for sure.
If that's the case, why is it so hard for us to tell the truth?
What is it biologically in us?
I'd like to push you on these biologic issues because you're a psychologist.
You actually understand how the brain works and how, in fact, the fundamental order versus chaos issue is in part reflected in our brain.
So all these balancing acts our brain's pretty good at, yet truth is hard for us.
Well, you know, it's hard to confront things now when you could hypothetically put them off.
It's discounted a bit.
You know, a child who's called onto the carpet for their actions is likely to think, well, if I lie about this, I'm not going to get punished for it now.
I can get away with it.
And they might not even really believe that, but they don't want to face the consequences of their actions right here and now.
Well, we can just put it off a little bit.
Well, it'd be nice if you could do that.
And so you're tempted to do it.
You can shunt it off into the future.
That's just future you.
You don't want to be that guy.
But it's better.
It's better to have the fight now.
It's better to confront it now if you can manage it.
You touched earlier on this issue of the evil within us.
And you use stories a lot, and some of them are stories that all of us are familiar with, Harry Potter being a good one for this example, where there's a little bit of evil in Harry Potter.
Yeah, darkness.
Darkness, the shadow by Voldemort in the story.
What is it about respecting that we all have evil that you find is important for us living our lives?
Well, I think the capacity for evil is something that is not easily distinguishable from strength.
My knowledge runs out at this level of analysis in some sense.
The world seems to be structured so that we can act for the good and we can act for evil.
And I think that's associated with self-consciousness.
I think that's illustrated in the story of Adam and Eve.
When Adam and Eve become self-conscious, the scales fall from their eyes.
They realize that they're naked.
And to realize that you're naked is to understand your vulnerability.
That's why Adam and Eve clothe themselves right away.
Oh no, I'm naked.
I can be hurt.
Okay, I can be hurt.
I have to clothe myself.
I have to protect myself in the future.
You actually become aware of that in a way that animals aren't.
Well, what does it mean that you're naked?
It means that everyone else is too.
What does it mean that you can be hurt?
It means that everyone else can be hurt too.
It means that you could hurt them.
And that's why the knowledge of good and evil goes along with the knowledge of nakedness.
That took me a long time to figure out.
It took me about 30 years to figure that out.
So why are those two things conjoined?
Oh, yes.
When you understand that you're vulnerable, you understand that everyone else is vulnerable.
And then you have the option of exploiting that.
And so that's what transforms human beings to some degree from animals.
Because a predator just eats you.
But a human being...
A human being can play with you and will for all sorts of reasons.
Now...
The capacity to do that, though, why is the capacity to do that, let's say, useful?
Well, it's useful to be strong and not to have to use it.
That reflects something that we talked about earlier.
Because it makes you formidable.
And I think that you have to be formidable in order to move forward properly in the world.
Even to get through obstacles that aren't...
Just to get through obstacles.
You have to have some strength of character.
You have to have some commitment.
And some of that is...
There will be a cost if you interfere with me.
It'll be the minimal cost necessary, let's say if you've got yourself under control.
It will be the minimal cost necessary, but do not be thinking there won't be a cost.
And I don't think, I don't believe that if that's not built into your character, then you have no strength, and you certainly have no strength when you're pushed by someone who's malevolent.
A bully, if you're like that, if the bully pushes you, and your response is, There will be a cost for pushing me, and you will pay it.
Then the bully will go elsewhere.
And we know that too from studies of bullies, you know, like even childhood bullies.
They push around kids, and then they find the ones that retreat and withdraw, and they bully them.
So, you know, you might think, well, usually children are bullied because of some abnormality.
That's a very common idea.
It's like, There's a guy named Dan Olwius, a very smart Norwegian psychologist, and he studied bullying for a long time as a precursor to fascism, by the way, so that was his interest.
He said, his analysis indicated that at least three-quarters of children have some obvious abnormality that could be the focus of bullying attention.
It might even be your name.
It doesn't take much of a genius bully to come up with a good way of making fun of your name, or you're too tall, or you're too short, or, you know, or your brother's too tall or too short, There's something.
It isn't the abnormality that is the cause of the bullying.
The abnormality might become the focus of the bullying, but part of the cause is the withdrawal in the face of the bullies, because the bully thinks he can get away with it.
And it's also the case with children who are preyed upon by adult predators.
Like, adult predators of children look for children who are easily cowed and who won't put up a fight.
So, for example, if you're teaching your children to be terrified of strangers, that's really not a very good strategy.
You want kids who are confident and who will make a noise if someone messes about with them and who are...
And so that characterological strength has to be built in.
Let me play to the evil side of that equation.
We do a lot of shows on true crime through the lens of a doctor.
I'm interested in the forensics and what went down emotionally and psychologically.
What creates evil?
What is the nature of evil?
I mean, Solzhenitsyn wrote about this after unbelievable evil that he witnessed and lived through in Soviet Russia.
So some people see it and can react and respond and they survive.
Others wilt away.
But what caused the evil?
There are levels.
Well, some of it's like moronic evil, you might say.
It's like, well, someone has something you don't and you want it.
That's just theft, bicycle theft or something like that.
It's pure material greed.
And then I guess the level after that would be something like, well, the desire to cause harm because you're vengeful.
And that's where the idea that you're a victim starts to play a real role.
If you're a victim and things are unfair, then it's okay for you to react and to lash out and to hurt.
And so then there's the conscious desire to actually produce suffering and then that can just expand.
Beyond anyone's imagination.
Until what you're trying to do is take, I think, like the...
That maximizes out when you're trying to take revenge against God for the structure of reality itself.
And I think that's the right language.
So when people...
And you see approximations of this with the high school shooters and people like that, especially the guy who shot up the elementary school.
Sandy Hook.
Yeah, you bet.
You've got to go to a pretty damn dark place before you think that the right thing to do with your life is to make people...
Fundamentally identifiable because of their innocence and lack of wrongdoing, the target of your vengeful hatred.
You've gone somewhere unbelievably dark to get there, but that's not the darkest place you can go.
It's certainly a suburb of the darkest place you can go.
You know, you can go to where Hitler went and try to cook up a strategy for destroying everything.
You know, I mean, everyone says, well, Hitler was trying to dominate the world.
It's like, Well, maybe Hitler was trying to set up a particularly dramatic forum for suicide with Europe in flames.
That's what he did.
You know, you've mentioned totalitarian governments, Nazis in particular, several times.
One of the knocks on you is that Nazis come to your rallies.
Oh, yes.
It's such complete, utter nonsense.
It's absolutely reprehensible, all of that.
Why do they come to your rallies?
What are they looking for?
There's no evidence for that at all.
The alt-right types don't like me at all.
There's lots of documentation of that, and the reason they don't like me is because I don't like people who play identity politics, and I don't care if they're on the left or the right.
You know, the left says, here's the victimized groups, and our society is basically an oppressor-oppressed society, and we should do everything we can to lift up the oppressed, and I don't know what we're doing with the oppressors, but I don't imagine it'll be that pleasant.
And the The identity politics types on the right say, oh yes, we should play identity politics, but we'll be white ethno-nationalists and look for white superiority or white ethno-state.
It's like, as far as I'm concerned, none of those, none of that's even vaguely, it's reprehensible.
It's thoroughly reprehensible on all fronts.
The reason that this all came about, there's complicated reasons, but because I'm not a fan of the collectivist left, let's say, It's been in the interest of people who push that doctrine to paint me as the most radical of opponents, which of course would put me in the far-right camp.
But just because you're no fan of people who play identity politics doesn't mean you're part of the alt-right.
So that's been a strategy, I think, that's been...
What would you say?
Put into play against me for a variety of reasons that has been somewhat successful, but not very in the final analysis.
Maybe it's the wrong axis to put you on, but if zero is ultra-liberal and 100 is the ultra-conservative alt-right, where are you on that spectrum?
You think of yourself as more conservative, more liberal.
I know that in your life you've changed.
Well, I'm a traditionalist in many senses, you know, but I'm a very creative person, so it's very difficult temperamentally for me to place myself on the political spectrum.
It's not like I don't think that the dispossessed deserve a political voice.
You know, that's why I was interested in socialist politics when I was a kid.
And I understand perfectly well that hierarchies dispossess and that something has to be done about that.
But I also think that we mess with fundamental social structures at our great peril.
I think we've destabilized marriage very badly and that that's not been good for people.
It's especially not good for children.
But I don't think it's been good for adult men and women either.
And I certainly, as a social scientist, one of the things you learn if you're a social scientist and you're well educated and informed is that if you take a complex system let's imagine you have a complex system and you have a hypothesis about how to intervene so that it will improve okay so what will you learn?
you'll learn once you implement the intervention that you didn't understand the system and that your stupid intervention did a bunch of things you didn't expect it to many of which ran counter to your original intent and you will inevitably learn that so I learned that I had a whole series of very wise mentors who insisted to everyone they talked to who was interested in public policy,
for example, that when they put in place a well-meaning public policy initiative that they put aside a substantial proportion of the budget to evaluate the outcome of the initiative.
Because the probability that the initiative would produce the results desired was virtually zero.
And I believe that that's technically true.
And so that tilts me in the conservative direction because I think, well, that's sort of working, that system.
And I'm also not a utopian.
So I don't expect systems to work perfectly.
If they're not degenerating into absolute tyranny, I tend to think they're doing quite well.
Because if you look worldwide and you look at the entire course of human history, degeneration into abject tyranny is the norm.
And so if you see systems like our systems, say in the democratic western world, that are Struggling by not too badly.
It's like you should be in awe of those structures because they're so difficult to produce and so unlikely.
And then I think, well, you take a system that's working not too badly.
Think, well, I'm going to radically improve it.
It's like, no, you're not.
You're not going to radically improve it.
You might be able to improve it incrementally if you devoted a large part of your entire life to it and you were very humble about your methods and your ambition.
But if you think that some careless tweak of this complex system as a consequence of the ideological presuppositions you learned in three weeks in your social justice class at university and that's going to produce a radical improvement, you can't even begin to fathom the depths of your ignorance.
You mentioned marriage as an example of this.
As a social psychologist, what happened to marriage?
Well, I think a bunch of things happened.
I mean, one thing that happened might be that we live a lot longer than we did.
So the problem of having a relationship that extends over decades is a different problem than having the problem of having a relationship that extends over the period of time where you might have kids.
So I think there's that.
I think that women have clearly become more autonomous.
And so they've been able to transcend their more limited roles.
Those roles, by the way, weren't imposed upon them by patriarchal men.
I think that's a reprehensible view of history, because I think men and women fundamentally served as mutually sustaining partners throughout the course of history, despite their continual disagreements and the difficulties of life.
Women were relegated to a more restricted role because they lacked sanitation they lacked tampons they lacked birth control and those problems have been solved in the last hundred years essentially since about 1895 and so that's freed women to participate in a much broader sense than they were able to before But we don't want to underestimate the power of those technological revolutions,
even though they sound rather mundane.
They're not mundane at all, especially not the birth control pill.
That's put a certain amount of stress on marriage because the traditional roles have been expanded.
And you might think, well, that's great.
It's like, yeah, it is.
It is great in that A broader range of people have access to the expression of a fuller range of their talents, and in principle that's good for them, and definitely it's good for the rest of society, because now we have access to the genius of women, let's say, too.
But that's made negotiating the marital role more difficult.
And then the other thing that's happened, as far as I'm concerned, is that we got a little too careless about liberalizing the divorce laws and changing the structure of marriage in general.
I don't think that that was good for people, especially not for children.
Because the evidence that children do better and intact to parent families is overwhelming.
No credible social scientist that I know of disputes that.
And it might be because the minimal viable social structure is actually The minimal nuclear family.
Two people.
One isn't enough.
Two is barely enough.
But it's a minimum.
Especially...
And I think the reason for that is...
This is how I look at it.
Everybody has lots of flaws.
And tilts towards insanity in at least one direction.
And so, partly what you want to do is you want to link up with someone over the long run.
Because their...
They might be sane where you're not and vice versa.
So if you have a partner and you put yourself together, and this is also how marriage works symbolically, by the way.
It's the reunion of the original man before the separation into man and woman.
You put yourself together.
You have one person who's basically sane.
And so that maximizes the probability that you'll do reasonably well throughout your life course.
But it also makes the pair of you, especially if you're communicating, sufficiently sane so that you're a foundation for the raising of children who will be Socially competent and acceptable.
Because if they have parents, if they have a parental unit, let's say, that's communicating and that's straightening each other out, then the child can adapt to that unit as a microcosm of broader society.
And so if the child can figure out how to get along with the parents, in the best possible sense, then they're also simultaneously figuring out how to get along with everyone else.
So, and I think if you go below that Pairing, things fragment in a way that can't be easily rectified.
I know you're getting emotional talking about some parts of Of this discussion, in part when you talk about meaning and responsibility.
I don't know if that touches you more personally than others?
Well, I think it's a consequence actually of many of the things that I've experienced over the last, especially the last six or seven months.
So, I meet 150 people or so at each of these events personally and many of them have stories to tell me and they tell me overwhelming stories.
And that has a cumulative effect on you.
So one kid, for example, he was in his early 20s, I would say.
He came up to me and he said, I don't want to take up too much of your time, but a year and a half ago, I just got out of jail and I was homeless.
I started watching your lectures.
He said, I'm married, I have a daughter, and I just bought my first apartment.
Good work!
And I was in LA, and I was outside the Orpheum Theatre, and it's kind of rough in downtown LA, and I was walking down the street with my wife, and this car pulled up beside us, and this kid hopped out, Latino kid, about 19 or so, and he said, are you Dr. Peterson?
I said, yes.
He said, oh, I'm really happy to meet you.
And he shook my hand, he said, and I've been watching your lectures, and just wait a minute, wait a minute.
And I said, okay, okay.
Okay, and then he ran back to his car and he got his dad out.
And they came over and...
They had...
He had his arm...
They had their arms around each other.
And they were just smiling away, you know, like with a real Duchenne smile, a real smile.
And he said, I've been watching your lectures, and I've really been working on putting my relationship with my father together, and it's really worked.
And so I thought, well, that's a lovely thing to have happen when you're walking through Rough neighborhood is that some kid jumps out of his car and comes rushing over and tells you How much better his life is because he's been working hard on the basis of your recommendation to fix his relationship with his father.
And people are telling me stories like this all the time.
And the thing that's sad about it, I think, and this is what makes me emotional, is not only that this is so good and good at a level that transcends politics, absolutely, but that People require so little encouragement.
You know, there's so many people I see in my lectures and I have a very diverse range of people who come to my lectures.
They're starving for encouragement and they don't need much.
I said, I had this kid talk to me at a barbecue I was at this weekend and he's working with delinquent kids.
13 and 14 years old and he said they were pulled out of other delinquent camps and brought to his camp which was for the worst delinquents and he started talking to them about my lectures and so they've been watching him and now they have a little fan club that's based around my lectures and they're doing things like talking to each other about making their beds and cleaning up their rooms.
It's like it's it's unbelievable how Little, genuine encouragement many people need and how they had none.
No one ever said to them and meant it.
It's not okay for you to be a weak loser.
It's not okay.
And the reason it's not okay is because you could be way more than that.
And it's a crime.
An ethical crime.
For you to allow all that necessary potential to go to waste.
It hurts you.
It hurts your family.
It hurts the world.
Really, really, it does.
And people think, oh, okay.
I get it.
And they do get it because they know at some level.
The other thing people tell me, you know, they say, well, I've been paying attention to your lectures.
Developing a vision for my life, trying to tell the truth, trying to adopt more responsibility, and things are way better.
But the other story is, you've been able to help me put into words things I always knew to be true, but didn't know how to say.
Which is a good role for an intellectual to play.
And so, well, so that's why this all makes me emotional.
It's so good.
You know, and so much of this has been covered as if it's political.
It's not political what I'm doing.
It's not political.
It's something that politics is nested inside.
Politics is nested inside the healthy sovereignty of the individual.
I'm working to buttress and sustain the healthy sovereignty of the individual.
The great idea of the West.
Is it worth it?
Is the pain that you must feel with some of the biting criticism that you witness, hear about yourself, Is it worth it?
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And, you know, I'm not so naive as to think you can get the good without the bad.
You know, I've had discussions with my publicists, say, and the people who are working on my book, and sometimes the discussions are such that, well, maybe a little less controversy would be a good thing.
It's like...
It's hard to say what's a good thing.
And what's happened to me over the past two years, fortunately, is that every time I've been attacked, the net outcome has been in my favour.
Even though it's very painful in the immediate Well, when it's happening with the mobs of students, for example, or with a particularly reprehensible press piece, some of which, some of the press pieces, people who were very close to me told me they thought they sunk me.
And I mean, I watch people respond to these things, and very frequently now, if someone's mobbed, In social media.
They apologize.
They're done with one episode.
You know, and this has probably happened to me a hundred times in the last two years.
So it's very stressful.
But I'm kind of detached from it because we'll see how it plays out.
You know, and you can't do difficult things without them being difficult.
And so I'm not...
I don't feel that it's been...
What would we say?
How to say it exactly?
I'm perfectly satisfied with the way things are going.
Especially with these lectures because they're so positive.
So how do you want to be remembered years from now when the world looks back on what we're witnessing right now?
What should people say about Jordan Peterson?
That he wanted the best for people.
Thank you.
Not the worst.
And the reason I want the best, I think, is because I know a fair bit about what the worst is like.
And I definitely don't want that.
And that's a conscious decision, to turn away from that.
It's like, enough hell.
That's the lesson of the 20th century.
And so, it means that we take responsibility for that.
We put the world together and we start with ourselves.
We do that by adopting responsibility.
Not by fixing someone else.
And not even by fixing social structures.
They're not that easy to fix.
It's like start with yourself.
You're a fixer-upper, man.
You got work to do.
Get at it.
Then maybe you'll develop enough wisdom so that you'll be good for someone other than you.
And then you can expand that outward.
So, I would like the best for people.
I think when people look back on you, they'll also see that you began to tie together seemingly disparate parts of who we are as a species.
And I'd like to get into that, because it's deep stuff, but you articulate it in a way that I think people will understand.
Let's start with the soul.
This idea that we have something that for most people is this amorphous part of us.
But you argued that it was in our parents' That it's out through all of us.
It's a much bigger concept than I had heard.
Yeah, well I think, see, this is how I think reality lays itself out.
I think we all know this.
You're not driven by your past like clock.
You're not deterministic.
You are to some degree, because you're a limited creature.
You've got rules that you run by and all of that.
You know, you're not omniscient.
But you're not driven by the past.
What you do instead is confront the potential of the future.
That's what's in front of you.
So it's a domain with multiple pathways and that's what's always in front of you.
You could go there, you could go there, you could go there.
There's an array of choices that confront you.
You confront that as soon as you wake up and become conscious in the morning.
And then there's all this potential that's there in front of you.
And you use your ethical choice to determine which of those possibilities will become actual.
And it's through that mechanism that you participate in the creation of reality.
And that's the making of you in the image of God.
Because that's what God did at the beginning of time, according to our old stories.
Spoke and transformed potential into the being that was good.
And that was dependent on using truthful speech.
So that's what you do if you act properly.
You confront potential and you translate it into reality.
And it's your soul that does that.
Your soul makes that translation.
But the soul for you is bigger than just in me, right?
It's a part of...
almost like our collective unconsciousness touches all of us.
Our soul seems to be bigger than just what's inside of us.
It's connected.
It's also the thing that's the same between us in some sense, right?
I mean, it's a funny thing because...
You're a singular being possessed of this creative consciousness, but so am I. So it's a strange kind of singularity because we share it.
And it's the thing that unites us in some sense as sovereign individuals.
So how does faith play a role in all this?
And faith again is, I gather that if you act Appropriately, you'll have a better life.
Good stuff will happen to you.
Is that what faith is?
I think you make a decision about what your fundamental attitude towards being is going to be.
I think that's faith.
It's like, well, are things bad or good?
There's a lot of evidence they're bad.
There's a lot of evidence they're good.
Where are you going to come down on that?
Should you work to make things better?
Should you work further annihilation?
These are decisions that you make, and I think they're fundamentally based on something like faith.
Your decision to confront the unknown and the things that frighten you.
It's like, well, do you have faith in your potential?
Do you have faith in what you could call forward out of you?
Because you need that in order to move forward with confidence.
You want to instill faith.
I mean, we know this.
If you're trying to raise a child, you want to instill faith in them.
Now, you might not say, well, I'm instilling faith in God.
It's like, well...
It's not so easy to decide when you're doing that.
But to instill in your child the faith in the ability of their own potential to unfold in a positive direction, well, that's faith.
That's what you want for someone who's confident.
Like, yes, in absence of evidence, in the absence of certain evidence, I believe that my commitment to this path of action will bear fruit.
So let's take this discussion and I think make it practical.
So one of the biggest battles that I sense in America, North America through the West, is that between religion and science.
In many ways this is a fracture that you quote Nietzsche is speaking to when he said God was dead.
Not as a good thing.
No, not as a good thing.
And led to the totalitarian ideology of much of the last century.
But let's just take it right to today to North America in particular.
And our brains hardwired to look at this information differently.
Religion made it possible to have inquisitive minds that led to science.
Religion also placed in all of us this belief that there's some divinity in us, special in all of us.
And you very thoughtfully speak about how science talks about what is.
How can people watch us right now or see us or hear us?
The technology is remarkable, but science is not designed to talk about what it means.
It's what should be.
What should be.
Yes, there has to be something beyond that.
I believe that the description that I just gave you of human consciousness is actually scientifically accurate.
I think that we do confront potential and that we do cast it into reality.
I think if you understand how the brain works from its ability to first grapple with what's unknown in physical representation and then to represent it in image and then to represent it in word, I think that What you see is the process of potential coming into reality.
So I don't think that there's anything that's not commensurate with the scientific viewpoint there.
I also think that If we act as if we're each divine centers of consciousness of that sort, then we treat ourselves properly.
Think, well, you've got some intrinsic value.
You treat other people properly because I'm duty-bound to treat you as if you have some intrinsic value.
We build social structures on that predicate.
They work.
So the idea that the individual is sovereign in some divine sense, if you act that out politically, it's like, hey, your society functions, and people don't starve, and things aren't an absolute abject tyranny, and your rulers have something to bow to, that principle of intrinsic sovereignty.
Now the question is how that might be related to some metaphysical reality.
Because that's the question of God and the way I don't know exactly how to answer that except that I've seen this relationship say between the opening statements in Genesis which describe God as this being that uses communicative intent to call forth being out of possibility and that that's That's the essence of God as portrayed in Genesis, and that's built into us as an image.
I think, okay, well, that's what our whole society is predicated on, and that works, so it seems to me that there's something true about that.
I don't know what the fundamental relationship is between consciousness and the soul and the metaphysics of being, but I'm certainly unwilling to assume that this is all meaningless and random.
I don't believe that.
I don't think that's a good theory.
I don't think it works at all when you act it out.
So there's something wrong with it.
And I don't think there's any evidence that it's true.
So, people say, well, do you believe in God?
And I think a bunch of things when I'm asked that question.
It's like, why are you asking?
What do you mean God?
What do you mean believe?
It's like, then those are reasonable objections for a question that complex.
But I think a better answer is, I act as if God exists.
You say, well, does that mean you believe?
It's like, well...
What you believe is most appropriately expressed in your action.
So, and I think, what's the saying?
By their fruits you will know them.
That's an action-oriented idea.
It's like...
So that's enough belief to stake my existence on.
That doesn't mean I'm certain of it.
How could you be certain of it?
It's not within the human...
It's not within the realm of human capacity to be certain about such a thing.
And so you have to stake something on it.
It's like I act as if it's true.
That's as good as I can manage.
And I don't think there's a more appropriate answer than that.
It's like it's up to you to take it from there in some sense.
I think part of the reason That you've become so popular is because you take religion and you allow us to see the fundamental grammar that is offered by different religions without people having to first make the very important step of deciding whether they believe or not.
I know for a lot of people listening there, that's going to be a bit of a struggle, but it is one of the more rewarding aspects of reading or listening to you.
And I do think that a lot of people will come to either a conclusion you just offered, which is I can live my life that way and the fruits of my action will be bestowed on my family and my life.
And many will just decide to believe, period, because it makes sense, because there's so much wisdom in these writings, no matter what religion it is.
And I've talked to folks in every discipline about how they feel about what you're saying, and most find a way into it.
But the...
The reality that there is wisdom out there beyond what a scientist like me can offer.
Like you, I look at the brain, I see the left hemisphere is pretty good at some types of processing, the right hemisphere is different, and one is better about things of order, and one is better about things of chaos, making sense of what just happened, paying attention to things that are unexpected.
The other one is pretty good at just automating my life.
And I start to see that much of my behavior is hardwired.
More than I would have normally anticipated or expected.
And I suspect that when you read some of the This wisdom.
I've stopped thinking about people who wrote these beautiful old treatises as, you know, like many scientists think about them, as, you know, simpletons who didn't really understand how the stars and the planets worked and this is their best effort at it.
They were trying to answer a very different question.
Yes, yes.
They're not superstitious scientific theories.
They're something different.
Well, and the thing about belief, I think you put your finger on it, is, well, do you follow the story?
That's a fundamental religious question.
You know, when people go to see a movie like Pinocchio, which is a movie I've taken apart online in some detail, it's like they suspend disbelief.
No one thinks that a wooden puppet has become alive.
No one questions why the wooden puppet should rescue his father from the chaos of the whale.
It all just makes sense.
It's like, well, yeah, but why does it make sense exactly?
And isn't it interesting to notice that it makes sense?
These stories have a pattern, and the pattern has a function.
And that's a religious function.
You say, well, I don't know whether I believe.
It's like, well...
You follow the story.
The Harry Potter books are a good example of that because they have a deeply, deeply religious substructure.
And that's why they were so insanely popular.
You know, they have to speak.
For a book to become that popular, it has to speak to something that's in everyone.
Because otherwise, why would they become that popular?
You know, in the second volume, Harry confronts the basilisk, the thing that turns you to stone that lurks underneath the magic castle.
It's like, well, that's life.
That's Jaws.
It's the same story.
It's like we have a structure.
It's kind of magical.
We live inside it.
It's a hierarchy.
But underneath, there's chaos.
And terror.
And that can come up at any time and paralyze you with its gaze, right?
Turn you to stone because it's so awful.
And every building is like that.
And so what do you have to do is you have to go down into the depths and confront that thing voluntarily.
And then you'll find what's of great value in that pursuit and be reborn.
It's like, well, that's the Harry Potter story.
That's the second volume.
It's like, well, everyone knows that story.
Do you believe it?
Do you act it out?
That's the question.
Do you act it out?
It's the right pattern.
I think, and maybe, you know, maybe it's not even the right pattern.
Maybe the human race is a hopeless race, and there's no destination for us.
But for better or worse, that's our pattern.
Our pattern is, the snakes are after us.
Well, we can cower in our dens, or we can go out and we can find the source of the snakes, and we can contend with it.
And that's what we decided to do.
And God only knows how long ago.
Millions of years.
We decided we weren't going to cower in our dens.
We were going to go out and root out the snakes.
It's like St. Patrick or St. George.
And then we found, well, there was the snakes that will eat you.
And then there were the snakes that were in other people's hearts.
And then there were the snakes that were in your hearts.
And all those had to be contended with and rooted out.
And that's part of the even deeper mythology.
There's an association in Christianity between the snake in the Garden of Eden and Satan.
It's like, where did that come from?
What kind of crazy idea is that?
Well, I just laid out the idea.
It's like there's always a snake.
What's the worst possible snake?
Well, it isn't an actual snake.
It's a metaphorical snake.
It's the snake that's in the heart of your enemy when he comes to burn down your city.
Well, what if you get rid of your enemies?
Well, the snake's still there.
Well, then it's in your heart.
So what's the ultimate battle?
The ultimate battle is with the snake in your heart.
It's like, yes.
True.
True.
Metaphorically.
But more than that, metaphysically, as true as anything can be, that statement is as true as anything can be.
We live in a society where the dividing line between good and evil is between my tribe and someone else's tribe.
Right.
Yes.
Maybe it's inside each and every one of our hearts.
Yes.
Well, that's Solzhenitsyn's comment, right?
That's his conclusion from the analysis of the Gulag Archipelago.
It's like, constrain the evil within.
That's your primary moral obligation.
That's why I don't like identity politics.
It's like, it's not my tribe and your tribe.
Don't be thinking that.
That's a mistake.
It's more sophisticated than that.
You have to understand it as a spiritual battle.
Not as an economic battle.
Not as a physical battle.
You have to conceptualize it as a spiritual battle.
That abstracts it.
That puts it up into the level of abstraction where it's properly dealt with.
Because otherwise it degenerates into tribal violence.
So to take that abstract and reduce it to practice, religions are able to provide a grammar.
Science has provided a grammar for some as well.
But religion provides the basic building blocks for a lot of folks.
What do you say about the argument that God is dead?
Look out for what will replace him.
That's the thing.
This is why I'm such an admirer of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, both of them in particular.
Because Nietzsche famously announced in the late 1800s that God was dead.
But it was also, that wasn't the announcement.
The announcement was, God is dead and we have killed him and we'll never find enough water to wash away the blood.
And he thought everything would fall because that foundation piece had been torn away.
And I believe that.
So I'm trying to find out, well what is that foundation piece?
See, now Carl Jung, the great psychoanalyst, was a student of Nietzsche.
Nietzsche thought that human beings would have to create their own values in the aftermath of the death of God.
And there's a utopian idea associated with that, that Dostoevsky, he wouldn't, that wasn't an idea that he would allow.
He didn't believe that human beings could do that.
Jung, following Freud, discovered that, let's say, that you can't create your own values.
Because you are a certain sort of being.
You have a nature.
And the best you can do is go down into the depths and rediscover the values.
And that's the same as the revivification of God.
It's the same thing.
It's the rescuing of the Father from the belly of the beast.
It's the same thing that Pinocchio does.
And it's an eternal return to the depths and reclamation of the relationship with the divine spirit, let's say.
And that's religious or metaphysical language, but I mean it most concretely in the sense we already discussed.
It's like, well, that's your ability to contend with potential and turn it into reality.
It's your fundamental responsibility.
It's actually what you do as a living, self-conscious being.
And we elevate that to the highest value.
Say, that's divine.
It's like, yes, that's divine.
Well, how is that related to the transcendent divine?
I don't know.
But it seems related to it.
I also think that that's a perfectly reasonable claim.
There's all sorts of experiences that people have under all sorts of different conditions that seem to indicate some relationship between their isolated consciousness and being as such.
It's outside of our grasp for some reason, but that doesn't mean it's not there.
It doesn't mean that people haven't reported on it.
So one thing that you've raised to my consciousness is whether we would even have a civilization if we were unable to believe in things bigger than us.
So, I'm of Turkish origin, and I went back to Turkey this summer, in part because I was visiting the Syrian refugees, but Within an hour drive of this refugee camp was the oldest civilization known to mankind.
It's called Göbekli Tepe.
The literal translation is Potbelly Hill.
It's 12,000 years old.
Three times older than the pyramids, four times older than Stonehenge.
And they had big sculptures.
And the reason I was stunned by it is I was always taught in school.
I don't know what you learned, but you're in a farming community.
You probably had some discussion of how farming came about.
But I learned farming happened.
And then because of that, we had free time.
We sent off a couple of people to be religious leaders.
They went off and wrote all the religious tomes.
And that's how civilization evolved.
But Göbekli Tepe didn't have A agricultural community.
It was a hunter-gatherer community.
Which meant that hunter-gatherers were able to build temples to their gods.
And because they could believe in things bigger than themselves, they began to think they can control the world around themselves.
So, follow this, it's important.
Agriculture came because of a belief in deities, not the opposite.
Completely fits everything that I had ever wanted.
Well, if you're a hunter, the question is, what should you hunt?
See, and we're built on a hunting platform, human beings, because we can throw an aim.
So then the question is, once your brain starts to develop, is, okay, what's the ultimate aim?
Right?
And you might think, well, it's to hunt.
It's like, no, it's to provision.
Okay, so how do you provision?
By aiming at transcendent things.
Because then everyone cooperates and everyone shares.
We all work together.
And we get rid of hunger as such, instead of aiming at a particular animal.
We aim at something higher.
And it works.
And so that's encapsulated in our narratives.
And then the aim issue is really fundamental to that.
What's at the center?
What's the point that we're aiming at?
And that's the ultimate point.
It's the highest possible aim.
It's even in our language.
And everything we do has to do with aim.
It shows you how deeply the idea of hunting is in us.
We're carnivorous chimpanzees, fundamentally.
You use the word sin.
That's right.
Sin is to miss your target.
Miss your target, yeah.
It's an archery term, hamartya.
It means to miss the mark.
Yeah, that's a really useful thing to know.
It's like, well, what's a sin?
Well, it's when you miss your target.
Well, how do you miss your target?
How about you don't aim?
How about you don't know how to aim?
How about you refuse to aim?
How about you have no aim?
And no one can live under those conditions.
We need a name.
It orients us.
It gives us direction.
It gives our life meaning.
Like, literally.
It does that neurologically.
So that begs the question.
Without culture, you know, 70,000 years ago, we believe, humans started a diaspora from northern Africa.
At least 12,000 years ago, you have Gebeketepe.
Abraham, by the way, was born there.
Not surprisingly, a lot of Christ's disciples were in that area.
I mean, you start to begin to realize that there's lots of layers of culture that got us to where we got.
And if I'm hearing you correctly, you're saying there's a collective unconscious that senses thousands of years of human evolution, and that culture cannot be discarded.
You throw that culture, that faith away, those traditions, even if you're not quite sure why they exist, you toss them away and you discard them, there will be consequences.
Okay, so the first thing is that some of the best scientists that I knew, like Jaak Panksepp, who was a great neuroscientist who studied emotion.
I think he was probably one of the five greatest scientists of emotion.
He was really interested in archetypal ideas.
The people who study the emotional and motivational systems in the brain are the ones that are most convinced about the reality of archetypal issues.
So for example...
So the people who understand how our brains work...
Emotionally and motivated, who look at the emotion and motivational system.
So the deep layers, not the cortical tissue.
The reptilian parts, the old parts.
Yeah, that's right.
They're convinced that these archetypes are vital to us.
Yeah, well not all of them, but many of them.
Explain what an archetype is.
An archetype say, well it's a behavioral pattern.
That's what it would be most fundamentally.
A behavioral proclivity.
And then the secondary archetype would be the reflection of that in a story.
So let's say one of our behavioral proclivities is to react in a certain way to a predator.
So how do we react to a predator?
Two ways.
Terror.
Freezing.
To be turned to stone when you look at the Medusa.
That's the response of a prey animal to a predator.
That's archetypal.
It's wired into us.
It happens way before you think.
Way faster than you can think.
But then that's secondarily reflected in a story, and that story becomes abstracted.
So the ground of the archetype would be the biology.
And then the secondary manifestation would be the manifestation of that biology in action.
And the archetypes are the most important things, I gather, because if they weren't important, we wouldn't be hardwired to react to them.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
Some of these archetypes aren't running away from it.
They're also respecting your parents.
Yes.
Well, you better respect your parents or you die.
I mean, you're dependent on your parents for 18 years.
It's like, yeah, there's filial respect built in.
Now, it's pliable because sometimes you have parents and if you respect them, you die.
So there has to be some plasticity there.
But as a fundamental rule of thumb, it's there as a pattern.
And I guess an archetype would also be something like...
The proclivity to learn language.
No one really understands that but it's obviously built into us.
Even children who are quite impaired intellectually with the general exception of really severely autistic kids learn to speak.
It's built into our biology in a way that we really don't understand.
Fear of snakes.
It's built into our biology.
For a long time, psychologists thought it was just, no, we just learned fear.
And then psychologists thought, no, we learned to be afraid of some things more easily than others.
So you could condition fear to pictures of spiders faster than you could condition fear to pictures of pistols, for example.
But then it went farther than that.
It's like, no, no, you're not just conditionable.
You're actually innately afraid of snakes.
But I don't think it's snakes.
I think it's toothed reptilian predators, which is a broader category than snakes.
So, and that's the dragon, fundamentally, because the dragon looks like an amalgam of predatory cats, predatory birds, and predatory snakes.
And maybe fire as well, which would have been an ancestral friend and enemy, right?
Because fire is an ancestral friend and enemy.
There's evidence, I think it was Richard Wrangham wrote a very good book on fire a while back, a very good anthropo- or primatologist.
He figured we'd been using fire for two million years, something like that.
And that we traded, um, we traded intestinal tract for brain.
Once we learned to cook, and that was a secondary consequence of hunting, let's say, or at least associated with hunting, because our diet became so much more nutritious and calorie-rich, especially eating meat and fat, that we could afford to shrink our digestive system and trade it in for brain.
Chimps spend about eight hours a day chewing, because mostly what they eat is leaves.
It's like, go out and try to eat leaves.
It's like, all you're going to do is chew, because they have no nutrition.
So anyways, we're built on a hunting platform.
We throw an aim.
Even our perceptions are very aimed at something.
And the metaphysical question, you see how the biology transforms itself into the abstraction.
It's like, well, you have to have an aim because you're a hunter.
It's like, well, what's the ultimate aim?
That's the religious question.
What should you hunt above all else?
What should you devote your life to pursuing?
So why are these stories the best way for us to articulate these negotiated rules that we all have with each other?
Because the principles are so complex that we weren't able to articulate them and understand them.
So one of the things Nietzsche pointed out was, you know, you tend to think that morality emerges in thought and then is imposed on behavior.
We think up the rules and then we apply them.
It's like, no!
We evolve the rules.
Then we observe them in behavior.
Then we tell stories about them.
And then out of the stories we can abstract general principles.
And then maybe we can get to the point of an articulated morality.
But it's bottom-up.
Now, there's top-down effects because as you articulate you start to change your behavior.
But a lot of this is moved up from the bottom.
One of the things I lecture about in my public appearances is the emergence of proto-morality in animals.
So here's a great example.
This is from Jak Panksepp, the scientist that I mentioned earlier.
He wrote a book called Affective Neuroscience, which is a great book.
He said, here's what he did.
Rats like to rough and tumble play.
So if you take a juvenile rat, especially the males, they'll work to enter an arena where they can wrestle with another rat.
And they really like it.
It's play behavior.
It's not aggression.
It's distinguishable from aggression.
Okay, so you put your two rats together.
One's 10% bigger than the other.
The 10% big rat just flattens the little rat.
Sure.
Pins them, just like kids.
Yeah.
Okay.
But then you see, you don't play with someone once.
You play with them multiple times in life.
So the game isn't one bout.
The game is repeated bouts.
Okay, so now you pair the rats together.
So the next time you pair them together, the little rat has to ask the big rat to play.
That's the rule.
Then if you pair them repeatedly, if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win 30% of the time, 30 or 40% of the time, it's some substantial amount of the time, the little rat won't play with them anymore.
And so Panksept is right.
That's for sure.
That's a major discovery.
Because it's the emergence of fair play.
At the mammalian level.
It's like if the big rat plays unfair because the little rat doesn't get a chance, then the little rat won't play.
So then you think, well, here's the morality.
And this is what you say to your kids when you say, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it matters how you play the game.
You don't know what the hell you mean.
It's like, well, what do you mean by that?
It doesn't matter to win?
Of course it matters to win.
Okay, but let's define winning.
There's the game.
You can win the game.
Okay, but the game isn't isolated because there's a whole bunch of games because it's a tournament.
But then it's a tournament of tournaments because it's many games.
Your whole life.
Your whole life, that's right, is a sequence of games.
So what do you tell your kid?
Play so that you will be invited to play.
Because the winner is the person who's invited to play the most games.
And so what does that mean?
It means, well, try to win because you're no fun if you don't try to win.
Sharpen your skills because you're no fun if you don't try.
Help your damn teammates.
Because it's a team effort.
And you want to push them up as you put yourself up.
Distribute the spoils.
Don't hog all the glory.
Right?
If you're ahead when you're playing soccer, pass the damn ball.
Right?
Act, act in this admirable sportsman-like manner.
Well, what's that?
It's prototypical morality.
So then you think, well, he's a good sport.
He does this well.
Well, he's a good sport over here, too.
Here's another person who's a good sport, and it's something different.
And here's another person.
And then we get a picture of what the good sport looks like, and that's the good citizen.
And we start telling stories about that.
But it's not like we understand, right?
We can't understand.
We have to build the story up from the behavior.
And so if you look at these old stories, there's behavioral wisdom encoded in the stories.
Here's an idea.
Moses leads his people through the desert.
And they're all fractious.
They got out of a tyranny, but now they're in a damn desert.
It's like out of the tyranny, out of the frying pan, into the fire, right?
So that's what happens.
You go from a tyranny into a desert, not to the promised land, which is why people will stay in a tyranny.
It's like, why do you stay in that tyranny?
Well, we'd rather be here than in the desert, because that's the next place.
It's okay.
Well, now you're in the desert.
So what do you do?
Fragment and fight over what's important.
So that's what Moses faces.
It's like all these Israelites, they're fighting like mad.
So they come to him.
It's outlined in the story.
So he adjudicates their disputes and he spends like 10,000 hours listening to all the Israelites whine about everybody and the desert and complain about God.
And so this is driving Moses crazy.
He's trying to figure out, well, how should these people live?
And he's actually adjudicating the cases.
Well, then all of a sudden he goes up on a mountain and poof, the rules appear.
It's like, those are the rules by which you live.
They're discoveries.
It's like, oh, this is how you have to conduct yourself behaviorally in order for everyone to prosper.
It's bottom up.
If he wouldn't have gone out of the tyranny into the desert and done all that adjudication, the rules wouldn't have been revealed.
Or you could say, let's say you're watching a wolf pack or a troop of chimps.
They have structure, behavioral structure, so that would be acting out the archetype.
You're the anthropologist or the ethologist and you're watching, or the primatologist.
You think, well, it's as if the chimps are following these rules.
Well, that's us.
That's us.
We're watching ourselves over thousands of years.
It's like, okay, what are we up to?
Well, here's an interesting story about how things go badly.
It's like, yeah, you're extracting out the essence of the behaviors and you turn them into a story and the story is compelling because you want to imitate it, right?
Just like a child acting out his father or a child acting out her mother.
You want to imitate it so that you get the drama down, you imitate the pattern, but then you can start to think, okay, well, there are principles that can be articulated that underlie these patterns.
Oh, that's natural ethics.
And this is a wonderful thing because it means that the natural ethic, in some sense, isn't just a rational construct.
It's not just a floating abstraction.
It's like the articulated ethic matches the image.
It matches the story.
And the story matches the behavior.
And the behavior matches the biology.
And the biology reflects the structure of being.
That's the musical layering of all these layers, one on top of another.
So if we get that it's not just random chance, not just a bunch of rules, but it's actually tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands of years of us seeing stuff, observing stuff, and our biology matches it.
What's going on today?
Why do we live in a society?
I think the biggest epidemic is isolation and loneliness.
But it's manifested a lot of disagreeable behavior.
I've heard you use the word complexity management as opposed to mental illness.
A lot of people think I'm depressed, I'm borderline, I'm personality, I've got this issue, I've got that issue.
But it's actually, if I understand you correctly, something that's much more common, something much more ubiquitous, something much more understandable, that we have a complexity management problem.
Yeah, well, the doctrine of turning to face that which confronts you is a complexity management solution.
It's like, what do you do when horrible things are chasing you?
Turn around.
Chase them back.
That's your best bet.
And then I think that is an unbelievably ancient human decision.
Also, that's the classic story of the dragon fight.
The hero goes out to confront the dragon and rescues the virgin from her clutches.
Well, what does that mean?
It means that the standard human pattern of Sexual attraction is for the person who decides to confront the predator in its lair to be reproductively successful.
That's what that story means.
It's like, well, that's worked for us.
That's our fundamental story.
And who knows how old that is?
It's as old as predator primates.
That's how old it is.
Maybe it's older than that.
So that's at least...
Several million years old.
But it goes back, like Lynn Isbell, who's an anthropologist at UCLA, She makes the case that the reason that human beings have acute vision is because we were preyed upon by predatory snakes over a 60 million year period.
So we have unbelievably acute vision.
And we're particularly good at seeing the kind of camouflage patterns that snakes have on their skin in the lower half of our visual system.
It's like snakes gave people vision.
That's Lynn Isbell's theory.
And the way she established that was she went around the world and she looked at the acuity of primate vision and correlated it with the prevalence of predatory serpents.
So the more snakes, the better our vision.
Exactly.
And that's such a cool principle, too, because there's a metaphysical principle there, too, which is why does reality have an adversarial nature?
Why would God set something on you, say?
An enemy.
An adversary makes you stronger.
Well, isn't that cruel?
It's like, not if the person who sets the adversary on you believes that you could win.
Now, maybe that's an insufficient explanation, but there's something about it that's You know, you can think about this biologically, too.
I was reading The Master and His Emissary, which is quite an interesting book about hemispheric function, and the author pointed out that if you want to make a very small movement with your right hand, the best way to do that is to put your left hand up, and then to push against your right hand and push.
Opponent processing.
Precision in action is a consequence of opponent processing.
You have opponent processing between the right and left hemispheres.
To make things function, you need this opposition between powerful forces.
And I think that's built into the opposition between chaos and order.
That's hemispherically represented.
But also something like the opposition between good and evil.
Maybe you get a higher good when there's opposition between good and evil.
I mean, obviously, these are ideas that are at the...
Absolute extent of my cognitive ability to try to think them through, but maybe the good you get when good and evil are both possibilities is a higher good than the good you get with just good.
That tug-of-war, which you actually argue artists do brilliantly, right?
They stand on the border between order and chaos, they look in the chaos, they see patterns, and then they tell the people on the other side, hey, I just noticed a couple things over there.
Right?
So, if that's where we need to be, then in modern society, why is it that we can't get those two groups talking to each other?
People who are primarily left-brain, you know, organized order folks, and the folks on the right side are more chaos folks.
What gives?
Good question.
Well, that's something I've really been struggling with in my lectures.
I try to make a case for left, the left, and the right wing.
Okay, so the right wing, the right wing, There's a variety of things that distinguish them, but we'll talk about one in particular.
You have to accomplish useful things in the world just to survive, okay?
And if you're going to do that in a social space, you do that by constructing a hierarchy.
And if you construct a hierarchy, it's going to be of a certain steepness because the people at the top are going to be more successful than the people at the bottom.
There's also hierarchies of productivity, so the people at the top are more productive than the people at the bottom.
And those overlap to some degree.
So, you have to do useful things to survive.
If you're going to do useful things in the social system, you have to build a hierarchy.
Okay, so, hierarchies are necessary and valuable.
That's what the right says.
The left says, yeah, wait a minute though, the hierarchy tends towards ossification and corruption, and it dispossesses people at the bottom.
California fires.
Sorry, go ahead.
No problem.
Well, and those are both true.
And that's part of that opponent processing.
You need the hierarchy.
Social animals organize themselves hierarchically.
Hierarchies are way older than capitalism, way older than the West.
They're older than trees.
They're unbelievably ancient.
There's no getting rid of the hierarchy.
But hierarchies tend towards corruption and dispossession.
And there's a tie, by the way, with the lobster.
Yes, exactly.
Someone gave me this.
Yeah, exactly.
350 million years of hierarchies.
Now, that doesn't mean we should organize our societies on the lines of the lobsters.
That's not the point.
The point is that you can't attribute the existence of hierarchy to the West or to capitalism.
So that's a foolish critique.
That's the basic Marxist critique.
It's at least part of it.
Okay, so the left wing says, wait a second now, the hierarchies tend towards corruption and they dispossess people and they need to be taken care of.
It's like, yes.
How much should we take care of them versus how much should we sustain the hierarchy?
And the answer is, we don't know and it changes.
So that's why you need political dialogue.
Okay, so what's the fundamental necessity for political dialogue?
Freedom of speech.
So freedom of speech is the mechanism that keeps the opponent process balanced.
And so you don't mess with freedom of speech, which is why I opposed the legislation that I opposed in Canada, which started all this political...
The transgender legislation.
Just for two seconds on this.
So there was a law that said you must refer to transgender people the way they want you to, right?
Picking the pronoun they use.
Yes, that was part of the legislation, background part of the legislation.
Do you have any problems with transgender people being identified by what pronoun they use in private settings in your practice or in your classrooms?
My proclivity when people ask me to address them in a certain way is that if I believe that they're being straightforward in their communication then I tend to exceed to the demand like a reasonable person does.
So that wasn't the issue.
The issue was the compulsion of speech and also the government's insistence that it was alright to build a social constructionist view of gender into the law, which is now the case in, well, it's the case in New York.
It's also the case in Canada.
And that's not appropriate because gender is not socially constructed in its entirety.
It has a biological basis.
So you don't build that into the law.
But anyways, it was the compelled speech issue that really got me.
It's like, no, you don't have sovereign control over my speech.
Never in the history of English common law has the legislative branch produced legislation that compelled voluntary speech.
There has been restrictions on hate speech.
There's more of those in Canada than there are in the US. And I don't agree with them either.
I think that's a mistake, but that's a separate issue.
Compulsion in speech, your Supreme Court deemed that invalid in 1942. No compulsion of speech in the private sphere, no matter what the reason.
And I think that's the correct principle.
And what's the issue with hate speech?
Well, hate speech exists, clearly.
The question is, it's the fundamental issue.
Who defines hate?
And that's like the Achilles tendon, the Achilles heel of the law.
It's like the answer is those people who you least want to define it.
So what you want is you want to have people say their hateful things out in the open where you can keep an eye on them and where they can invalidate their own viewpoint, which is generally what happens.
Invalidate their viewpoint.
Yes.
If they say something hateful, racist for example, the society says, you guys, you're missing the boat, you're completely off target with this.
Yeah, right.
You get reprimanded, spanked, you get back in line.
Right, exactly, exactly that.
That's how it's supposed to work.
Yeah, well that's a good way of putting it because what it also means is that the people who espouse those opinions for whatever reason get appropriately subjected to social correction.
That's good.
You want them to be subjected to social correction.
So what happens if the government passes a law saying you can't say those words?
Then where do they go?
Underground.
And psychologically and socially.
And that's not good.
Because then you don't know what's going on.
Like this thing that happened with Alex Jones is a good example of that.
It's like, leave Alex Jones alone.
Why?
Because you want to see what he's up to.
Not because you like him, but you want to see what he's up to.
Yeah, absolutely.
You want to see what people are up to.
You know, because sometimes extremists are correct.
Almost never.
They're almost always dangerous beyond belief.
But like one time in a thousand, things have changed so radically that someone who appears extreme is correct.
Well, you've got to be able to know when that's the case.
You've got to keep an eye on it.
You know, and it's not clear to me at all that most of the followers of Alex Jones necessarily agree with him.
Maybe they're mildly entertained by his antics.
Whatever it might be, but it was a mistake to go after him.
You've got to keep an eye on him.
Plus, you shouldn't persecute people who are paranoid.
That was Kissinger's big statement to Nixon, about Nixon.
Even paranoid people have enemies.
Right, right, right.
Now you can confirm their bias.
Right, that's exactly right.
Yes, that's not a good idea.
Why is every person watching us right now, and there are quite a few, Suffering from anxiety, depression, addiction, all three together even.
How is it possible we're not all there in that quandary?
Oh well, first of all, many people are at different periods in their life.
It's a rare person who doesn't have a severe bout of anxiety at some point in their life, often because things collapse around them.
They encounter some real catastrophe.
Even with depression, if you look at the epidemiological studies, most people who eventually suffered depression had their first episode precipitated by something truly awful.
So, you know, we move in and out of states of terrible negative emotion throughout our life.
Why don't we stay there?
What makes us better?
Almost subconsciously, we have a resilience...
Yeah, well, some of it's the grace of God and blind luck.
You know, some people are just healthier than other people, and that makes a big difference.
So, you know, you don't want to be too morally self-righteous about the absence of anxiety in your life.
It could easily be due to your characterological strengths and your willingness to confront things voluntarily and all that, but health plays a big role.
Health and good fortune, you know, I mean, you meet people now and then who are In their 40s and they've never suffered a serious loss from death, for example.
Do you think part of the reason that people find their path is because they know the story they're in?
Oh, definitely.
They don't know what story they're in.
Or they're in someone else's stories, a bit player, as you've articulated.
Yeah, well, we've produced some things, some exercises online to help people get their stories straight.
There's one exercise called Future Authoring.
Speak about that.
I did that, actually.
Yeah, well, you know, the idea was that it's based on exactly the questions you asked, which is, well, what's the story of your life?
Is it a comedy or a tragedy?
Comedy is something with a happy ending, fundamentally.
And a tragedy is, well, it starts bad and gets worse.
And is it a tragedy that someone else is imposing on you or some bit of you that you don't understand?
What's the story of your life?
Part of that is, well, what do you want?
What are you aiming at?
That's the reverse of sin, right?
You're aiming at something.
Well, the Future Authoring Program helps you determine what it is that would be good for you to aim at.
What do you hope for?
What do you hope for?
So the exercise basically assumes that you treat yourself as if you're someone that you're taking care of.
So that's the presupposition.
You're valuable, despite your flaws.
It would be okay for you, and maybe alright for the universe as a whole, if your life wasn't any more wretched than it has to be.
So we could set it up for that.
So now, if you were looking three to five years down into the future, And you could have what you needed within the bounds of reason.
What would it be?
What do you want?
What do you want from your family?
What do you want from your friends?
How are you going to educate yourself?
What are you going to do for your career?
How are you going to take care of your mental and physical health?
How are you going to resist temptation?
What are you going to do with your time outside of work that's productive and meaningful?
You get to have it.
It's like knock and the door will open.
Okay, you've got to knock first, and then you've got to pick the door.
And like, I really like this because it is...
You cannot catch something you're not pursuing.
So now, if you're pursuing it, that doesn't mean you'll catch it.
But generally, you'll catch something interesting along the way.
You know, that's the thing that's so cool about this.
Let's say you set out a vision.
You start pursuing it.
You don't get what you were after.
But you learn a lot as you move towards that destination.
And as you learn, your vision is going to change.
And you may end up with something that's better than what you were aiming at to begin with.
But that won't happen unless you initiate the journey.
That's partly something I learned from the Abrahamic stories.
With the story of Abraham in particular, because God calls Abraham to an adventure when he's like 85. It's like, get out of your father's tent, for God's sake.
Get out there in the world, right?
Really, that's how the story is set up.
Leave your family in your tent.
It's time to get out in the world.
Well, what does he confront?
Famine is the first thing.
Tyranny and the potential loss of his wife.
It's like Abraham must have been going...
It's like, the tent's looking pretty good.
But it's this call to adventure.
Okay, so you put together a vision.
That's your call to adventure.
Get out there in the world and contend with it.
Well, you might not get what you want, but you might find what you need.
But it won't happen without the pursuit.
And that's part of faith.
Right?
Faith is, I'm going out in the world to seek my fortune.
And if I do that properly, then the fates will cooperate with me.
How do the archetypal stories that we, in our subconscious, have?
These archetypal questions are the ones that everyone really is trying to ask, even if we can't put words to it, right?
How do they help us maintain our sanity?
And do you think that's part of what we're struggling with right now, that we've lost touch with ancient wisdom?
Again, part of our collective unconscious that should be there, should be part of us, that we've distanced ourselves from, either from technology or modern culture, whatever.
Well, look, we have the capacity for abstraction, right?
And so to abstract means you can think without acting, because otherwise it's useless.
It's not abstraction then.
So you can peel reality away and represent it abstractly, and then you can start manipulating it.
And you can criticize what you're representing.
And we're doing an awful lot of that.
A lot of that's subsidized, I would say, this intense criticism of our own structure.
It's like, fair enough, you know?
But you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, especially if it's the divine child that you're throwing out, which is what it is.
It's like, criticism, this is where the left goes too far, when it's criticizing.
It's like, well, you can criticize the hierarchy.
You can criticize the current instantiation of the hierarchy.
It isn't obvious that you can criticize the idea of hierarchy itself.
You're pushing a little too far then.
You can describe the tyrannical nature, the partial tyrannical nature of the current societal structure.
You can't say all hierarchies are patriarchal tyrannies.
That's too far.
You have to use some judgment.
And so the proclivity for...
And the thing is, what are you trying to do when you criticize?
Well, if you're smart, like when I get my students to read Freud, it's like...
Or Nietzsche.
Well, these guys had...
A, they were bound by their time and place.
And so they had presumptions that we no longer share.
And B, they said things that were regrettable.
Nietzsche said a variety of things about women that were regrettable.
Partly, I think, because he didn't have that much success on the romantic front.
Partly because he was very ill.
Partly because he was isolated.
Like, he had his reasons.
But it's not that helpful.
Maybe you read Nietzsche, it's like you get rid of 10% of it.
But you keep the rest!
You read Freud, it's the same thing.
You read these people who were flawed humans and you think, well, let's separate the wheat from the chaff.
We're not going to put it all in a pile and burn it.
It's like, oh, Freud made a mistake.
Burn him!
That's what we're doing with people on social media.
It's like, no!
Discriminate.
There's a horrible word for people.
Don't discriminate.
It's like, yeah, discriminate, man.
Like your life depended on it.
You read these old thinkers and you think, well, no, no.
Yes, that goes in the keep pile.
That goes in the keep pile.
We're not doing that with our culture.
And it's partly because we don't have any gratitude, as far as I can tell.
And this is another thing I talk to my audiences about.
Here's the story.
Here's how to survive in Indonesia.
Okay, so you live on a mountain, but it's a volcano.
All right, so you get to climb up the volcano at night.
It has to be at night because it's too hot otherwise.
And so you have to climb up this volcano and it's a mountain.
Then you have to go inside the volcano down to near where the volcano is active because it's active so it's belching out sulfuric clouds at you all the time and if you encounter a bad one then you just die so when you have a mask around your face that's just a wet rag and you go down to the volcano and you pick up a 40 pound clump of sulfur and then you carry it up out of the volcano at night because otherwise it's too hot and then you carry it down the mountain and you get a couple of dollars so that you can do it again Yeah.
That's not your life.
But someone has that life.
And you don't have that life because look around you, man.
This is a remarkable place that we've built.
It's absolutely unbelievable.
And most of the time it works.
And you should be on your knees in gratitude for it.
Even though you can also say, well, look.
We don't have full equality of opportunity.
We're not making the use of, full use of the talents that everybody's bringing to the table.
The system tilts towards tyranny from time to time, and we have to keep an eye on it.
It's like, yeah, but you're not hauling 40-pound sulfur boulders out of volcanoes at night.
That's something, you know?
So a little gratitude would temper the criticism.
You made the point that part of the reason people get bitter is because they don't think they can be as good as they should be able to be.
And a lot of it comes back to self-esteem.
How do we build self-esteem at any age?
Because I see that slip away in a lot of people.
And without that, they don't have the confidence to act on some of the things you're speaking to.
Okay, so self-esteem is a tricky concept because the best predictor of self-esteem is trait neuroticism.
So the higher you are in trait neuroticism...
Please explain that for everybody.
There are five cardinal personality traits.
Extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness.
I have a test that people can take, understand myself, that allows them to assess those five traits broken down into two additional aspects.
I took mine, by the way.
My results were scary.
Well, the test is designed so that everybody's results get to be scary.
It's scary to find out who you are.
So, but how...
Trait neuroticism is a measure of the proclivity for negative emotion.
Anxiety and emotional pain, essentially.
And the higher you are in that, the lower you score on tests of self-esteem.
So self-esteem is not a very good measurement because basically it's a misnamed Reverse neuroticism.
So it's not easy to deal with that proclivity for anxiety.
But there's a separate question, which is more like, how do you encourage people?
So it's not a matter of bolstering their self-esteem.
Actually, it's really important to get these things right, because if you don't get the conceptions right, then the implementations fail.
So it's about reducing neuroticism?
Well, if you could.
I don't think you can, really.
What you can do is make people more courageous.
That's different.
So even if you're treating people who are phobic, like agoraphobic, it isn't obvious that you make them less phobic.
What is obvious is that you make them more courageous.
So if you're treating someone who's agoraphobic, and they won't go on an elevator, so they're afraid of an elevator, and you slowly expose them to the elevator, negotiating that, and they get to the point where they can get on the elevator, they don't really, they're not really less afraid of death than they were.
They're more confident of their ability to prevail in the face of adversity.
And you can teach that.
And you do that by challenge.
You do that through challenge.
So if you want to build someone's self-esteem, let's say, but I would say encourage them, then set them a set of optimal challenges and allow them to watch themselves succeed at those challenges, and that will build it right into their bones.
All right, so let's go back to this lobster story since you're wearing the lobster tie, all right?
So 250 million years ago, you had a hierarchy.
There's hierarchies in Most everything, it seems.
Some lobsters win the hierarchy.
They get to have all the female lobsters, I guess.
What do you do with the lobsters at the bottom of the hierarchy?
Now, today you say we've got to talk about them.
Can't ignore them.
But it's not easy just to engineer society to automatically manifest a better life.
Although I think a lot of people say we can do better than we are for a lot of people.
They don't get a chance.
What is the beta lobster?
How do they get courageous?
Well, I think we have done a lot of things successfully in our society.
So the first is that it's not a monolithic hierarchy by any stretch of the imagination.
As we've made society more complex, the number of sub-hierarchies has multiplied tremendously.
And so, let's say each of us comes to the table with a different set of weaknesses and strengths, it's highly probable that you'll be able to find a sub-hierarchy where your particular pattern of weaknesses and strengths actually constitutes the crucial element.
So if you're high in agreeableness, for example, well, healthcare is a good field for you.
And if you're really conscientious, then you can be a manager.
And if you're open, then you can be entrepreneurial or creative.
So play in a different hierarchy.
Find a hierarchy that matches your temperament.
That's a really good rule.
And then we could say, well, let's diversify the hierarchies.
And we are doing that at a very rapid rate.
God, there's an endless number of diverse hierarchies online, for example.
So, a sophisticated society produces a subset of hierarchy that's matched for as many people as possible.
Okay, but then there's additional complications and some of them we don't know how to deal with.
So, for example...
One of the things that predicts the ability to succeed in hierarchies across hierarchies seems to be associated with intelligence.
So all things considered across most hierarchies, it's better to be intelligent.
So then the question is, well, what do you do with people who are of less cognitive power?
And that's an increasingly complex problem.
And I don't think we have a straightforward solution to that because one of the dangers is that as our society becomes more technological and more cognitively complex, The effect of intelligence actually grows, and that's what the literature...
So what do you do with members of our society who cannot compete?
Because we have an obligation.
That was one of the basic insights I gained from reading and listening to you was that we all have that spark of divinity.
That you can't leave.
When Nietzsche said God is dead, because science had prospered But it only happened because religion first respected our specialness.
Each of us.
And only after that could we begin to transcend it.
Okay, well this is...
The way I look at this is that...
Let's say that you're blessed with success.
Like you've been blessed with success.
Okay, so you have a lot of resources at your disposal.
Okay, now you can feel guilty about that and perhaps to some degree that you should.
That's between you and your conscience.
But let's say that you've generated your resources in a fair game and that a lot of people have benefited along with you.
So you've played a straight game.
Now you have all these resources.
Okay, so what should you do with the resources?
Well...
Impulsive pleasure.
It's like, well, a little of that goes a long ways, and it's liable to take you down in a very, very short period of time.
There's many shows on that, so...
Right, okay, so how about not that?
Doesn't work.
Right.
It's not a good medium to long-term solution.
Okay, how about...
Your ethical responsibility grows in proportion to the resources that you have at your control.
And the right thing to do is that as you become more competent, authoritative and able is to expand the range in which you're operating to do more good.
It's like you got a problem, you see something in the world that's bothering you, you think, well, that's a problem.
It's bothering me.
Because that's an interesting thing.
Not everyone bothers everything.
Some things bother each of us.
That's your problem.
Whatever bothers you.
It's like, that's like a little marker.
I don't know why it emerges.
That's your problem.
You should go out there and do something about that.
Okay, so you have some excess resources.
It's like, great, get at it.
And this is one of the things I like about someone like Bill Gates, for example.
It's like, what's he doing?
Well, how about combating malaria?
Okay, you got $60 billion, you want to wipe out malaria?
That's...
It might be a good thing that you have $60 billion if one of the consequences is that you're going to wipe out malaria, or at least you're going to try.
And he's after the five major diseases, right?
And actually, from what I've been able to read, is like making some headway.
It's like, great!
So what is winning, losing, what is success?
How does that all fit into this hierarchy game?
It's musical.
Musical.
Multiple layers.
You bet.
It's like, you know, maybe it's a Strauss Waltz, eh?
It's beautiful and you're dancing with someone you love and the orchestra is being conducted and everyone's dancing around you and everything is stacked up harmoniously.
It's like you're winning at every level simultaneously.
That's where the maximal meaning is.
It's like there isn't anything better than that.
Why would you pursue anything else?
You want to win at every level.
And that means that not only do you win, but the fact of your winning is related, integrally, to the fact of everyone else's winning.
That's a perfect game.
It's like, not only are you winning, so is everyone that's playing with you.
It's like, great.
And that is, and I do believe, I believe we're wired for that to be a meaningful experience.
God, look at us!
You go to a sports game.
And you see a remarkable display of athletic prowess and sportsmanship at the same time.
Everybody spontaneously gets up and applauds.
Before they think, it's like, yes, you got it.
I see that picture, but I also see pictures, often on the set, of men and women coming in, not getting each other.
And a lot of times it's...
It's hard to understand what the guy's up to.
I think we're all, as humans, like Maseratis.
As a surgeon, I see the inner workings of this.
When one little spark plugs off, everyone can hear it.
Sometimes you can't hear it over the noise, but it's there.
When a woman is not happy, for example, with what she needs out of life, most divorces these days in middle-aged couples are initiated by the women.
That's a consequence of higher trait neuroticism in all likelihood.
Explain.
Well, women are higher in trait neuroticism than men.
And I think it's because they have to take care of infants.
I don't think adult women's nervous systems are attuned to the needs of women.
I think they're attuned to the needs of woman and infant.
That's different.
Mother and infant.
Mother and young infant, too.
And so there's more sensitivity to threat than might be good for a woman's mental health across the span of her individual life.
But it's the price she pays for being hypervigilant for her infants.
And it's driving the sorts of things that...
We know that one of the predictors of divorce, for example, is high-trade neuroticism in at least one of the partners.
Because they're more unhappy.
So how does an unhappy woman...
Express that in a successful way to get the guided change.
Because he doesn't have trait neuroticism, right?
He's not all worried about being a father of a young child.
He's hardwired for aiming at the target.
Yeah.
Well, it might be worth having a discussion about what target to aim at.
Again, that's why we developed the Future Authoring Program.
It's like, okay, what are you both up to?
What are you aiming at?
We need to establish that.
And you say, well, I'm not aiming at anything.
It's like, yes, you are.
If you don't know what you're aiming for, that just means you don't know what you're aiming for.
You can't live without an aim.
It also might mean that you're aiming at 25 things at the same time, so you're polytheistic in some sense, and 10 of those aims are working at cross-purposes to the other 10. So you're a house divided amongst itself.
I think a lot of times women...
Are big players in their family story.
And they figure it out.
And that's not fulfilling.
You want to be the main character, protagonist of your story.
Well that's also perhaps associated with higher trade agreeableness.
It's another big five trait.
So if you're agreeable, you tend to defer to others and you're compassionate.
Now, deferring to others isn't necessarily a virtue.
We tend to think of compassion as a virtue, but we already discussed that.
It's like, well, one of the things that you do if you're a clinician, like clinicians basically do two things.
They help people deal with anxiety and negative emotion.
That's a big part of it.
And the other is they do assertiveness training.
And that's usually for people who are too high in agreeableness.
It's like, okay, what do you want?
I've had clients who are so agreeable they couldn't say what they wanted.
It's like, what do you want?
I don't know.
They've been so other-centered that they don't know what it is that they're crying out for.
And that's often a very lengthy process of discovery.
But then you have to find out what you want.
Then you have to figure out how to fight for it.
Because you don't just get what you want.
It's like...
That isn't how things work.
Since you're talking about fighting for what you want, this came up in your Channel 4 interview in the UK about the fundamental differences between women and men.
And a hot topic that we've talked about on this show is the fact that women aren't paid in a way that it seems equitable to the men in a similar job.
And you made arguments that there are fundamental differences between men and women where women need to play some of the role.
And assertiveness is...
Yeah, well agreeable people get paid less for the same job than disagreeable people.
Because they don't ask?
Sure.
Look, if you do your job very competently, you might expect that your boss should notice that and probably he or she should.
But the problem with doing things well is that it's invisible.
What's visible is mistakes.
So then you just work really hard and you're invisible.
It's like, well, you're invisible.
That's not helpful.
And like, did you ask?
And maybe asking isn't good enough.
Like, I've counseled lots of people who've tripled their salaries in two or three years.
Like, it's work, man.
It's work.
It's a strategy.
It's a war to do that.
But you can do it.
I mean, the first thing you do is, well, the first thing we do is, well, are you actually doing a good job?
Let's say yes.
Okay, fine.
Are you documenting it?
Generally, no.
If you're documenting, are you communicating the documentation?
Well, no.
Okay, is your CV up to date and prepared?
Are you ready to move laterally?
Are you looking for other positions?
Are you looking for other opportunities within the workplace?
How often do you talk to your boss about what you're doing?
What are your salary goals?
Well, I want a 15% raise.
Did you ask?
No.
Well, sorry, man, you're not going to get it if you don't ask, unless you're assuming that your boss is omniscient and benevolent, which is highly improbable, especially if you're doing a good job and you can be ignored.
You know, and then it's not only a matter of asking, it's a matter of negotiating.
Because if I want something from you and it's somewhat of a zero-sum game, and often the distributable pile of money is somewhat of a zero-sum game, it's like...
Here's six reasons why you should pay me 15% more.
And here's two things that aren't good that will happen if you don't.
So and then usually you're not even negotiating with your boss, you're negotiating with your boss's boss.
So what you're trying to do is to give your boss a story so that he can or she can go to the next person up and say, well, we have to give this person 15% more because if we don't, first they're doing a good job, but here's the documentation which they so helpfully supplied me for, and here's the negative costly thing that will happen if we don't.
It's like, oh yeah, give them their money.
Because it's cheaper than hiring someone else.
It's like you have to think strategically and you have to be disagreeable.
And the disagreeable part is you have to negotiate on your own behalf.
What's the fundamental difference between men and women?
Well, the temperamental traits are women are higher in trait neuroticism, so they feel more negative emotion, anxiety and emotional pain primarily.
And they're higher in agreeableness, which is compassion and politeness.
Right.
And that's about half a standard deviation, which isn't a lot.
So men and women are more the same than they are different by a substantial margin.
But at the extremes, those differences really make a difference.
So, for example, women's higher trait neuroticism, negative emotionality, is reflected in the fact that cross-cultury, they're more likely to be diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorders.
Whereas men's disagreeableness is reflected in the fact that they're more likely to be arrested and imprisoned.
So it's 10 to 1 male convicts to female.
You think that's a matter of socialization?
You think this court system is stacked against men?
Are we going to have an equity program for men and women in prison?
Or are we going to accept the fact that men tend to be more violent than women?
Which is also, by the way, women commit, women attempt suicide more often than men.
That's a reflection of their higher levels of anxiety and depression.
But men commit suicide more often because they use lethal means.
Yes, and that's a reflection of their lower levels of agreeableness and their proclivity towards physical aggression.
And you think, well, that's all sociologically constructed.
No.
The data are in.
So, you rank order countries by how egalitarian their social policies are.
And you put the Scandinavian countries at the top because they have the most egalitarian social policies.
If we know what egalitarian means, you know, if it's not the Scandinavians, then we don't know what egalitarian means because that's what they've been trying to do.
Then you look at personality differences across those countries.
If it's sociological, Then the smallest personality differences are in Scandinavia, because they've been obliterated by the egalitarian policies.
That's exactly the opposite of what happened.
The biggest personality differences in the world are between Scandinavian men and women.
Why?
Because when you take out the sociological variability, you maximize the biological variability.
Right.
It's exactly the opposite of what virtually everyone predicted.
No one saw that coming.
But that's what happened.
And it's not like a few little studies done by some right-wing professors of psychology in some little podunk institution.
First of all, there are no right-wing professors of psychology.
So no one's been happy about this.
Second, these are studies with thousands of people.
Like, they're among the most credible psychological studies that have ever been done.
And it's not only personality.
It's interest.
This is the big one.
The biggest difference between men and women in the Scandinavian countries isn't trait neuroticism or agreeableness.
Those are personality dimensions.
The biggest difference is in interest.
And women tilt towards people and men tilt towards things.
It also turns out that if you're in a thing-oriented job, you tend to make more money because they're scalable.
You know, it's like how many people can you take care of?
So a thing is you're building machines, cars.
Gadgets.
Gadgets.
Yeah.
Tools.
And people, you're helping people, hospitals, psychology.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And that tends to be more one-on-one.
It's hard to scale healthcare.
And you don't make a lot of money in most enterprises that aren't scalable.
So taking a step back from this, should we be following our bliss?
That's the message that we've been putting out there a lot.
There's a comment, and I've heard it from others as well, that we're better off following our blisters than our bliss.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Is that an important part of your message?
That the promise of bliss is a false promise?
Yeah, it's not the right term, and you've got to get your terms right.
Precision and speech, right?
Speech matters, because that's how you turn potential into reality, right?
Meaning.
If you pursue what's meaningful, then sometimes you'll encounter bliss.
Perhaps as often as it's possible to.
Which I would say isn't that often.
Those are sort of peak experiences.
Meaning.
And I do believe that meaning is a fundamental instinct.
In fact, I think it's the most fundamental instinct.
It's what you've got.
Meaning is real.
It might be the most real thing.
I pick on that theme because it's an example of how people aren't getting you, amongst the critics.
And another example, because, you know, people say, well, follow my bliss, I want to be happy, I want to be light, I want to be, you know, it's like the bubbly, sparkling water in my tongue.
How about you want to be good?
That'd be way better.
Pursue what makes you good, as opposed to evil.
Bliss?
Sorry, no.
And what about the issue of political correctness, much of which I think came about because a lot of my generation grew up when reprehensible things could easily be stated about women in the workplace, about folks of different gender, color.
You know, that was...
Vietnam War.
The Vietnamese War.
Yes, which really tore the country apart.
I think a lot of my generation has PTSD just watching the news at age five and wondering why everyone thought everyone was lying.
And it still has impacted us.
But there are groups that have...
A sensitivity to how they are portrayed.
And political correctness allows you to be polite, if nothing else.
Good, at a higher level.
And yet, you've criticized political correctness.
I gather because you think it chases...
It's a wrong narrative.
It's a group-oriented narrative.
It's like...
So people have social groups, obviously, and they're individuals.
And the question is, group first, individual second, or individual first, group second?
And the answer is, individual first, group second, or else...
And the politically correct types who play identity politics say, no, your fundamental characteristic is your group.
Now, there's all sorts of problems with that.
It's like, well, the first problem, and this is the intersectional people within the politically correct campus have already realized this.
Well, which group?
Oh, it turns out that people belong to, like, five groups.
Okay, so do you make all of their groups the number one thing?
Well, that doesn't work because there's an infinite number of groups.
So that just can't work.
Actually, you see, what the West discovered was that You have to fractionate the groups to get justice.
Where do you stop fractionating them?
That's right.
That's exactly right.
I get that there are emotional hemophiliacs out there where there's a lot of sensitivity that you may not be able to control as a speaker.
You're not going to please everybody.
I get it.
But for me, a lot of the speech that we would call politically correct is polite speech.
I'm giving you a break because I don't want to be mean to you.
No problem.
No problem with polite speech.
It depends on how it's enforced and who's enforcing it.
That's the thing.
It's like, you want to be polite?
No problem.
First of all, you should reserve the right to be impolite when necessary.
Because otherwise you're...
You've been deprived of your defenses.
And that's not good.
So...
It's not, for example, it's not like I don't believe there's hate speech.
There is.
The question is how should it be regulated?
It's not like I don't believe that there's prejudice.
There is.
That's not the issue.
The issue is how do you conceptualize the world?
And the identity politics types, they have a fundamental tribal conception.
They try to make group identity the fundamental issue.
They assume that the best narrative is oppressor versus oppressed and they play up the victim issue and I don't think that's good for anyone.
I think all it does is divide society and return us to a fractionated tribal existence.
It's the wrong...
the whole story is wrong.
That's the problem with political correctness.
It's like you put the group first.
No!
No.
Wrong.
The thing that we got right in the West is that we put the individual first.
And I'm not willing to see that eroded.
It's a mistake.
And it's not because of rights.
It's because of responsibility.
So, the way out of the The oppressive structure of history is through maximal adoption of individual responsibility.
It's the best way forward.
The best that we are along to the next generation.
There's a line that you've offered that really caught me off guard.
There are many, but this one was particularly provocative.
You said, don't give your children a reason for you to hate them.
Right, right.
That's rule five, right?
Don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
Yeah, well, that's another...
Most of the book, 12 Rules for Life, is about responsibility and meaning.
I would say those are the two.
Responsibility, meaning, and truth.
That's probably the interplay of the principles.
Well, the question is, what are you doing if you're a parent?
And the answer is, preparing your child to be maximally socially welcome.
That's your job.
And it's the job of the two of you.
Because the two of you together make one reasonable person.
Okay, so now you're a reasonable person because you've kind of ironed out your idiocies with each other, right?
Through that opponent process, that contentious relationship, that wrestling that's part of a real relationship.
You're both smarter and wiser than you would have been otherwise.
And that's part of the reason for the vow, eh?
It's like, I'm not leaving you.
Oh my God, you mean we're stuck with each other?
Yes.
For how long?
Six decades.
Oh, so this stupid problem we have isn't going to go away for six decades?
It's like, well, we...
Right.
No kidding.
We better do something about it.
So there's going to be contention there.
So let's say we fix each other up, so we're kind of 80% functional as a unit.
Okay, now we have a child.
A child has this 80% functional unit.
And to the degree that the child can establish a relationship with that unit, that will generalize to other people.
So you want your child to be a good play partner for other children because by the time he or she is four, their primary source of socialization will be other children.
So if they're not prepared to take their place in the world of children, they fall farther and farther behind.
That's very well documented.
Okay?
And you want them to respect adults.
Why?
Well, firstly, because they're going to become an adult.
So they should obviously respect adults because they're going to spend two-thirds, three-quarters of their life as an adult.
So that better be worthwhile.
So better be respectable.
Otherwise you devalue their future and that's pretty counterproductive and mean.
And then the second thing is if they respect adults and can listen to them, then adults who kind of naturally like children are more likely to teach them things and give them opportunities.
And so that's a good deal.
And so if your child is doing something that makes you dislike them, assuming you're in a relationship and you've ironed out most of your idiocy, then other people will also dislike that.
And so if you allow or encourage your child to continue in such behavior, you turn them into someone who's miserable and socially isolated.
Now, if you don't want them to leave home ever, That's probably a good strategy.
If you cripple them badly enough, they won't be able to drag themselves out of your door.
But if you love your child and you want them to thrive, then you do everything you can to have the world open up its arms to them.
And that's a huge part of that is discipline, careful, Minimal force discipline.
Fewest number of rules.
Few rules.
Few rules.
Minimal enforcement.
That's right.
Just the least you have to do.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
Minimal rules, because it gets too complicated otherwise, enforced with minimal necessary force.
Those are excellent principles.
See, part of what got me on that statement is the possibility that if you are unsuccessful, you will hate your children.
And we see times when parents are ruining their children.
And vice versa.
And vice versa.
Yeah.
Because they've fallen out of love with them.
Yes.
I see this at the end of life quite a bit when your father's dying and all the strange children are coming back into the picture and you see horrible fights.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Well, I can tell you a quick story.
So when my mother-in-law died, she had prefrontal dementia and it started quite young.
So she died when I believe she was just in her early 70s.
And so it was a kind of a brutal death.
And her husband really He went above and beyond the call of duty with her.
I mean, he just made my jaw drop, man.
Because as she deteriorated, he stepped in and allowed her to preserve her autonomy, too.
Like, he wasn't over caring.
He was really attentive.
And when someone offered help, he would take it.
He wasn't so proud, you know, in the arrogant way.
He would take help.
And he kept her at home until he was getting old, too.
He couldn't get her off the chair anymore.
And so then she went into the old-age home where she eventually died.
And her whole family gathered around her deathbed.
We were there for about the last week.
And, you know, that's pretty rough.
She was dying of hunger and thirst, really, but the disease.
And one of her daughters, a palliative care nurse, was making sure that her mouth was wet and taking care of her.
And they all pulled together.
They all pulled together.
It was really something to watch.
And so, and then she died.
And so what happened?
Well, that was awful, but it wasn't hell.
Hell would have been her dying and everyone around fighting and everyone walking away embittered and full of enmity as a consequence of her life and death.
But what happened instead was that all her kids had a newfound respect for their father which has prevailed over the intervening 10 years and all the siblings got tighter and so they lost their mother which was no trivial thing but because they handled it so well They gained something.
I'm not going to say in some naive way that it was equivalent to the loss or that they came out better.
You know, you don't have to make that case.
They certainly didn't come out worse.
And so these end-of-life scenes, the ones you're describing, it's like those things, bad can get so horrible if it's contaminated by enmity and deceit and misbehavior.
That's the difference between tragedy and hell.
Since I'm a doctor, let me ask you one medical question.
I know that your diet has become an issue of interest.
You're obviously real thin.
People could take the Jordan Peterson diet, probably, and maybe they'll look like you.
But I know that some medical issues forced you to be careful about your diet.
Yes.
So what specifically do you eat, do you not eat, and how has it benefited you?
Well, it's mostly been of benefit to my daughter, who had a very complex autoimmune disease with about 30 extremely severe symptoms.
And she learned over about a three-year period of experimentation what she could eat, which was virtually nothing, and what she couldn't eat, which was virtually everything.
All she eats is beef and water.
Beef and water.
That's it.
And she's been eating only that for a year.
And she never cheats.
Because cheating has very severe consequences for her.
And so her mother has some of the autoimmune symptoms and I have some of them and so it looks like she got all of them.
And so when this worked for her and we watched very carefully over a number of years while she was doing this and like the improvement in her is I just can't believe it every time I see it.
I literally can't believe it.
It doesn't compute and I can't believe that it was diet either you know because that went against many many things that I believed but I decided to try her more restricted diet and first of all it was just meat and greens and then I stopped eating greens too about five months ago and her mother has been doing the same thing for about eight months and the consequences have been they're hard to believe I don't even really like to talk about them because I'm not a dietary expert and it sounds so completely insane but But
I lost 52 pounds in seven months.
52 pounds?
Yeah.
And I wasn't overweight.
Well, I was.
But not by modern standards.
No.
And, you know, a year before that, I had cut all the sugar out of my diet.
But I was still eating carbohydrates of all sorts.
And I lost like three pounds.
Nothing.
And then I tried this diet.
It was like the first...
Here's what happened.
This is what happened.
In the first week I tried this diet.
This was just meat and greens essentially.
I quit snoring.
That was way before any weight loss.
It's just like it just off.
And I was snoring a lot.
It was disrupting my wife's sleep.
So I thought, oh, that's really interesting.
I quit snoring.
Isn't that weird?
Then I lost seven pounds the first month.
I thought, hmm, that's quite a lot.
Then I stopped having to have a nap in the afternoon because I was napping a lot.
Then my gastric reflux disorder went away.
Then I lost another seven pounds.
Then the psoriasis that I had on my foot and my scalp, that started to go away.
So and then over the course of seven months, I stopped taking antidepressants because I didn't need them anymore.
My mood isn't perfectly regulated, but it's pretty damn good.
And I lost 50 pounds in total.
And I wake up in the morning and I've never woken up well in the morning in my entire life.
So I don't know what to make of that.
And I wouldn't recommend it.
This is not something you do lightly.
Obviously, there were issues that were going on in your gut, but it does make me curious as a physician.
As you point out, you learn from the extremes as well.
Well, here's a hypothesis.
You can make of it what you will.
This is a hypothesis I've formulated over the last year.
And like I said, this came as an absolute shock to me, and it still is a shock.
And I wouldn't recommend it because it's hell on your social life.
And it really makes traveling difficult.
So it's not to be done lightly.
And there are other consequences too.
But here's a hypothesis.
Let's say you have a patient who has multiple complex medical symptoms of unspecified etiology.
Okay, so what might you do?
How about if you reduce their complexity?
How about if you regard every single thing they eat as a variable?
Because maybe it is.
So then you take them down...
Well, people use elimination diets, but that's...
You got it down to one thing, basically.
One thing.
And what's weird is it appears that you can live on that one thing.
So the people say, well, you can't live on an all-meat diet.
It's like...
That's not so obvious.
It defies the conventional wisdom.
Yeah.
Well, here's the other thing that's worth thinking about.
Maybe.
There are a lot of people who are overweight.
There are way more people who are overweight than there should be, and we don't know why.
Look, I've read some literature that suggests that maybe it's a secondary consequence of emulsifiers disrupting our gut lining.
There's lots of theories.
To your point, if you simplify the variables, you only have one.
Well, the other issue is, what's the harm?
So you eat nothing but beef for two months.
Who cares?
If it doesn't work, quit doing it.
But maybe, like if you see symptom reduction, and I've heard stories, and these are, what do they say?
The plural of anecdote is not data.
It's like, yeah, but the plural of anecdote might be hypothesis.
I really appreciate all the information you shared.
I've taxed you.
There's lots more to discuss, but it's wisdom that's worth thinking about.
I agree with everything you're saying, but I think a lot of folks will be stimulated to think further on things that matter.
Well, thanks very much for the invitation.
It was a pleasure to be here and to have the opportunity to talk with you.
Jordan Peterson.
Be sure to subscribe to my channel so you don't miss anything.
And remember to check back often to see what's new.
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?
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'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 extraversion.
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.
You know, 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 a price, 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, and 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 for 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, and 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.
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, 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 figured 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 circumstances, 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 is not going to be either end of that extreme.
That's right.
Because the truth is going to continue to vary.
So what has allowed political leaders who have 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, 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.
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.
We'll keep dancing.
Dr. Peterson, thank you.
If you become a better person, then you start to be good for things, you know?
know you can fix problems happiness you talk a lot about it's Should it be our life goal?
And if not, what should we be seeking?
Well, it shouldn't be our life goal.
Because there are times in your life when you're not going to be happy.
And then, what are you going to do?
Your goal is demolished.
And there are going to be plenty of times in your life when you're not happy.
There might be years.
And so, it's a shallow boat in a very rough ocean.
And it's based upon a misconceptualization.
Happiness is something that descends upon you.
Everyone knows that.
It comes upon you suddenly.
And then you should be grateful for it because There's plenty of suffering, and if you happen to be happy, well, wonderful.
Enjoy it.
Be grateful for it.
And maybe try to meditate on the reasons that it manifested itself, right?
Because it can come as a mystery, you know?
You don't necessarily know when you're going to be happy.
Something surprising happens, and Delights you.
And you can analyze that.
You can think, well, I'm doing something right.
I'm in the right place right now.
I've done something right.
Maybe I can hang on to that.
Maybe I can learn from that.
What you should be pursuing instead is, well, there's two things.
You should be pursuing who you could be.
That'd be the first thing.
Because you're not who you could be.
And you know it.
You have guilt and shame and regret.
And you berate yourself for your lack of discipline and your procrastination and all your bad habits.
You know perfectly well that you're not who you could be.
And God only knows who you could be.
And so that's what you should be striving for.
Striving for.
And associated with that, you should be attempting to formulate some conception of the highest good that you can conceive of, that you can articulate.
Because why not aim for that?
It's like your life is short and it's troublesome.
And perhaps you need to do something worthwhile with it.
And if so, then you should do the most worthwhile thing.
And you should Figure out what that is for you and part of that's definitely going to be to develop your character as much as possible to dispense with those parts of you that are unworthy and then maybe if you're fortunate and you do that carefully then Happiness will descend upon you from time to time and that's the best you've got and then also perhaps during sorrowful times or worse evil times the
fact that you've strengthened your character and that you're aiming at the highest that you can conceptualize that'll give you the moral fortitude to endure without becoming corrupted during those times and to be someone who can be Relied upon in a crisis.
There's an aim.
You know, one of the things I've told my audiences, young guys take to this a lot.
I said, you should be the strongest person at your father's funeral.
Right?
Well, that's something to aim for.
It's a transition, a generational transition.
And it means that, well, all the people...
around you are suffering because of their loss they have someone to turn to who can illustrate by their behavior that the force of character is sufficient to move you beyond the catastrophe and you need that and that's a great thing to that's a great thing to Hypothesize as your aim.
And happiness just evaporates as irrelevant in light of that sort of conceptualization.
So when you are the strongest person at your father's funeral, and I just buried my father this month, so it strikes home that when you say that, Should there be joy around that realization?
Not happiness.
Happiness is like the fizzly bubbles in a carbonated beverage.
Flighty, flighty, they tickle your tongue, but they go away.
Is there a deeper joy?
Because so many...
Well, there's at least the sense that you've taken something that could be very much like hell and made it far better than it could have been.
And there's also the fact that, you know, if you deal with, if you've matured enough, let's say, to deal with the catastrophe of loss and death, that you can also be the rallying point for the remnants of your family and pull them together at a moment of crisis.
And that's a payoff.
To some degree for the loss.
And I mean, I've seen this in families who've dealt with death properly.
The remainder of the family pulls together.
You know, they become more integrated.
And it's not complete compensation for their loss, but it's not nothing.
And it certainly beats the alternative where everyone fractionates because everyone's too weak to cope with the catastrophe and everything dissolves.
So how do you actually become the strongest person at your father's funeral?
What are the steps?
And is it always about being mission-driven?
Well, the mission is the improvement of your character.
The constant improvement of your character.
And I think a lot of that's done in dialogue with your conscience.
It's like your conscience is always telling you.
Socrates said this thousands of years ago.
Your conscience is always telling you what you shouldn't be doing.
And one of the things Socrates said was what discriminated him from the run-of-the-mill person, and why perhaps we still know of him so many thousands of years later, was that when his conscience told him not to do something, he didn't do it.
He stopped saying the things that he shouldn't have been saying, and he stopped doing the things he shouldn't have been doing.
And that's a start, you know?
That's a discipline, I would say.
That's the ability to follow a certain kind of intrinsic discipline.
And maybe that's merely the cessation of evil.
That's not exactly the same as the pursuit of positive good.
Let's say you haven't got there yet, but that's a start.
You clear away the obstacles from your vision by ceasing to engage in those activities you know to be wrong.
And then the world starts to lay itself out in more pristine form.
And then maybe you can start to apprehend what would be positively good instead of merely not wrong.
I mean, not wrong is a good start.
The biblical corpus is structured in that way to some degree, at least from a Christian reading.
The first rule is, follow the damn rules.
Get yourself together.
Here's some rules.
Ten of them.
A hundred of them.
Follow them.
You discipline yourself.
You make yourself a reasonably Morally respectable individual and so now you're not blinded as much by your own proclivity for uselessness and malevolence and then you can integrate all that you can integrate all those rules and and that's the beginning of the development of character and then you can Then you can embody the union of the rules.
It's something like that.
And that's that ultimate nobility and character.
In the Christian corpus, Christ is represented, let's think about this psychologically, as the perfect individual.
Just think about that as a psychological representation.
And that's the person who's taken a disciplinary structure and integrated it into a personality that acts that out properly in the world.
And it's not merely rule-bound either because You have to follow the rules, but you also have to be part of the process that generates new rules when it's necessary.
And so you take that onto yourself, too, as an additional responsibility.
And that makes you more than a blind avatar of authority and stops you from being rigid.
And, you know, if you look at a medieval cathedral, one of the things you'll see, for example, is a representation of the sky, the dome of the sky, and maybe you'll see a representation of Christ on the peak of the dome.
And think about that as a representation of the ideal individual.
Speaking only psychologically.
It's like there's something of cosmic importance about that.
That's what you're aiming at, is that perfection of yourself.
And that'll keep you busy for your entire life.
And it'll do no harm, right?
It'll make you better.
It'll make your family better.
It'll make your community better.
And it'll give you...
And it's psychologically meaningful.
So there's all that.
It helps you withstand suffering and disperse malevolence.
But it's also extraordinarily practical because if you become a better person, then you start to be good for things, you know?
You can fix problems.
You can handle a funeral.
You can handle a difficult situation, you know?
And so it's not only that it's psychologically meaningful to pursue the highest of goals and the development of your character, but it's also the best possible thing that you can do practically here and now in the material world to make it less terrible than it might otherwise be.
Are your personal goals always going to be aligned with the needs of society, the needs of humanity?
Well, that's a trick.
Optimally, the answer is yes.
And you can think about it like a musical score.
There's levels in a musical score.
Each instrument is doing its own thing.
Each section is doing its own thing.
But it's all united into a single vision.
And that's the right This is another reason why critics of the hierarchical structure are wrong, because the proper way to set up a hierarchy is so that your interests are aligned with those of your family.
That's hard.
That requires a lot of negotiation.
And then you and your family have your interests aligned with those of your local community, right?
So that all of those Levels are reinforcing each other, and then those are united at the higher level, at the higher political structure.
And that's an equilibrated state, to use a phrase from the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget.
It's a game that everyone wants to play, and it's working for everyone at the same time.
And so it isn't based on oppression or dominance from the top down.
And so I think that if you Formulate your character properly.
And you put yourself together.
You start also to realize that you're not...
Look, if you get married to someone, the idea is that you become one.
Right?
And so it isn't just your interest anymore.
Or maybe it's that your interest isn't your interest without it also being someone else's interest.
Right?
It's insufficiently formulated.
And you need that conflict with that other person to tap you into proper shape.
So what you're aiming at is you And the development of your character, but more than that.
And then you do the same when you introduce children into that.
You expand out that characterological capacity.
And then you can continue to expand that.
And so optimally, yes, what serves you should be serving at every level.
And I believe that part of the reason that music has such an overwhelming effect on people is because that's what it says.
It says, look, everything can work in a multi-level harmony.
And then people listen to music and, like, it produces, music produces a religious-like experience in everyone, right?
It transfixes them with the sense of intrinsic meaning.
It's really miraculous that it does that.
And the question is, why?
And I've puzzled over this for years.
And it seems to me that the reason is, is that In a musical piece, everything has its proper place at every level.
And so that speaks of, well, it speaks of heaven.
That's the right way to put it, which is why music is so often used in churches.
But it means that everyone's interests are being taken into account.
You know, and obviously it's a utopian ideal.
And it's something that has to be constantly worked on.
See, people often have accused me of an individualistic bias in my moral reasoning, you know, that, well, you should get yourself together.
It's like Ayn Rand.
It's like, no, it's not it!
You get yourself together, So that you can get your family together, so you can get your community together, so that you can get the world together.
All of that at the same time.
There's nothing selfish about that except the responsibility which is on you to start that and to bear that and to lift that and to act it out.
So it has nothing to do with chasing your Short-term, impulsive, pleasure-seeking goals.
Which is the real epiphany for me, because you'll know that you're doing the right thing for your personal growth when it's the same thing the society needs from you.
When your needs align with what society needs you to do for it, then you're doing the right thing probably for yourself.
Well, that's how it seems.
I mean, it seems then like you found your niche, right?
It's where you and what you have to offer Fit.
And, you know, I think of people as beasts of burden in some sense.
Like, we're built for a burden.
And we're not happy without that burden.
And we want to find the one that suits us.
And that's difficult.
It's part of the adventure of life to seek out the burden that suits you.
But when you have that, then yes, then hopefully you're operating in harmony with the requirements of those around you.
The thing to me is that everything else pales in comparison to that.
That's why it says in the New Testament that you should stack up riches in heaven.
It's like there isn't anything better than that.
You're functioning well.
Your family's functioning well.
You're contributing to your community.
What you're doing is worthwhile.
You're not tormented by your conscience.
You're aiming at something that...
The sacrifices that you have to make that clearly justify the sacrifices you have to make.
Maybe even the sacrifice of your life because you're in this Like, this is a mortal game.
You're in this with your whole life.
And you'd think that what that would mean, at least in part, is that you need to find a game to play that's of sufficient grandeur and nobility so that perhaps even the fact that mortality is built into this structure now becomes justifiable.
I mean, it's a hell of a...
it's a hell of an ambition.
But...
But it doesn't seem to me to be something that's impossible.
I think you can live your life enough so that it justifies itself despite its limitation.
That's the real question.
Can you do that?
And I believe that you can, and I believe that what that means is that the human spirit fundamentally triumphs over death.
And so that's...
That's optimism, you know, in the midst of the...
the sorrow and the malevolence.
We have the capacity...
We have the capacity...
Sorry.
I'll be sorry.
We have the capacity to transcend that.
And there isn't anything more optimistic than that.
And there's nothing...
There's nothing in it that isn't good.
Right?
It's good for you.
It's good for the people you love.
It's good for the broader society.
It's like it's good.
And that'll take you through your times of travail.
There isn't anything else that will.
And then maybe on your deathbed you can think...
I justified my...
The privilege, the terrible privilege of my existence.
And maybe that's good enough.
It's possible that that's good enough.
You certainly don't have anything better to do than that, as far as I can tell.
We all got to find our burden.
Dr. Peterson, I appreciate your passion for this.
It sinks through and it's music as you poetically describe the things we all struggle with day in and day out.
You put words to emotions most of us can't even touch.
Thank you for being with us.
People can't tolerate isolation.
You know, it's a very rare person who can be on their own and stay together.
Why is the need for human connection so fundamental to who we are?
Well, a huge part of it is a consequence of the fact that our children are so dependent.
Human children have the longest dependency period of any creatures.
The connection between mother and child is obviously of primary importance as a consequence of that, but then there needs to be a scaffold around that as well in order for it even to be possible for children to survive the very dangerous early stages and then to become properly enculturated, which takes a minimum of something approximating 16 to 18 years.
And that's the price, I think, that we pay biologically for our massive cortical capacity, our intelligence.
It takes that long to program.
And so the cooperation is absolutely necessary to allow that to occur.
It seems so fundamental biologically, but you can also tell when we're not connected, because we get really unhappy.
And in a society like today's, where people are progressively more disconnected, how do you foster genuine relationships?
You've got every temptation not to.
Well, I think one of the things you have to do first is decide that genuine relationships are necessary.
I think there was a Pew Research poll done not very long ago, I think it was Pew, that showed that about 75% of Americans regarded their familial and intimate relationships as the most meaningful part of their lives.
And so you need to know that first, is that There probably isn't going to be anything more important to you over the course of your life than your family and your intimate relationships.
And so making them of high quality is, it's not optional.
It's also not optional because psychoanalysts used to think about sanity as something that was a consequence of a well-structured internal psyche.
Something that you sort of carried around with you in your soul, let's say.
And there's some truth in that.
But what's even more true is that If you're embedded in a functional social community, so you have family members, you have friends, you have a broader community, then everyone around you is constantly reminding you how to be sane.
No, they let you know when your jokes aren't funny.
They let you know when you're too irritable and arrogant.
And so that holds you together.
It's like a marketplace.
It's a distributed cognitive marketplace for sanity.
And people can't tolerate isolation.
It's a very rare person who can be on their own and stay together.
And it's funny to think of sanity as a distributed property, but it's definitely the case.
Why so often do we naturally tend to form pair bonds?
It's not just that we're a member of a group.
You've got your family, obviously, and they're there, but then you also go off on your own.
There's a whole process where you separate from your family.
But it's almost as though we're directly attracted to one other living entity to bond with.
Yeah, well, I mean, pair bonding is a fairly common strategy in the animal kingdom overall, especially for child rearing.
It seems to be what you might describe as the minimal viable unit.
It seems to be biologically an elaboration of the same circuits that bond a mother to a child, which is often why people refer to their intimate partner as, you know, baby or honey or some diminutive.
So that circuit seems to have elaborated to pull in pair bonding, but it's to facilitate the long-term relationships that are necessary, I would say fundamentally, to ensure that children are raised properly and stably across time so that society stabilizes.
If we have the biologic need and the societal need as you outlined, Why does it end up being in the form of marriage?
And if that is the best way to pair bond, how do the other options compare to it?
Well, the thing about pair bonding with someone is that even though it might be necessary, there's another element to it, and it has to do with the social distribution of sanity, is that there's lots of things wrong with you, and there's lots of things wrong with your marital partner, but hopefully if you join together, the things that are wrong can be worked out through dialogue across time, dialogue and negotiation, and conflict.
It's not an easy thing to do.
And plus, the two of you are going to have to face the vicissitudes of life.
And so that mere attraction that's love, let's say, or sexual attraction, it's not sufficient to bond you together across times of extreme difficulty.
Because you'll find times in your marriage where you're not sexually attracted to one another and where you're not getting along.
And so you need the community around you to say, look, You have to think about this over the decades and not over the weeks and the months or even sometimes the years that it's important for you to adopt the responsibility to maintain this long-term relationship because all things considered it's better for everyone it it it gives you the narrative of your life it provides you with a companion who knows who you are It helps you maintain your sanity because you have someone to contend to.
It provides a stable environment for the raising of children.
It's like the minimal necessary structure, social structure, that other complex social structures can be built upon too.
But you need this society in there to say, stay together.
It's an accomplishment.
It's not just a responsibility and a necessity and a love affair.
It's also an accomplishment.
It's something you should be celebrated for.
It always seemed to me that marriage offered the only covenant that we have with society, the only contract that's legally binding that we sign with everybody.
We don't sign a birth certificate, we don't sign our death certificate.
Right, it's a choice.
It's a choice and because of that it's wrapped into a lot of traditions and cultures and in a society where we don't seem to respect That covenant is much.
And I'll give you one example.
Living together before you're married, which many people do.
The data seems to suggest that does not help marriage.
Maybe it's the opposite.
Makes it worse.
Yeah, you're much more likely to get divorced if you live together beforehand.
And I think part of the reason for that is that you don't get to try on people for size.
Because the problem with living together is the message that it sends implicitly.
People know this.
And living together is, well, I'll check you out and see if you're okay for me, but I reserve the right to trade you in for a better partner if someone comes along.
And that doesn't work.
It's an insult to some degree.
It's also an arrogant insult because it assumes that you're the person who has the superior role in the relationship.
I mean, both people are assuming that, but it's not a good assumption.
The right assumption is that You're clueless, and your partner is clueless, and you both have a lot to learn, and you're damn lucky you've got anyone else around, and that more than that, and that to find out what that person is like, and to find out what you're like, you have to go all in, and you have to go all in early, because otherwise it's not going to...
There's going to be something in reserve, and marriage is so difficult.
The process of conflict that puts you together as a unified pair, let's say, and then maybe as integrated people, it's so difficult that without going all in, you're just not going to manage it.
And that's why not only are people who live together more likely to get divorced, but common-law couples are also much more likely to separate.
So when people say, well, it's just a piece of paper, it's like that's an unbelievably cliched and unsophisticated response to something as complicated and necessary as marriage, socially sanctioned marriage.
Take it one step further, because I've heard you address your fear that we're becoming a polygamist society.
Most Americans repel at that thought.
We think of that as something other cultures have perhaps embraced.
It's supposed to be illegal here, but we sort of back our way into polygamy if there's no marriage.
Well, we're already a polygamous society before marriage because people have sequential partners.
And what happens, generally speaking, is that a small number of males have a large number of female partners.
And then the vast majority of males have, like, virtually no partners.
And, you know, you can make a case for that because women should be allowed to choose whoever they want as partners.
But, like, one of the things you see happening in the colleges where females dominate, say, 70% females, you'd think, well, the males would be making out like bandits because of the sex ratio difference.
But what happens is a tiny proportion of the men attract all the women.
A huge proportion of the men are just as isolated as they would be under normal circumstances.
The men who are popular have absolutely no motivation whatsoever to form a genuine relationship with any single woman.
And so it doesn't work for the women because they don't get to have a relationship.
They get to have a series of casual affairs with high-demand men.
It doesn't work for the majority of men because they don't have any relationships at all.
And it turns the high-demand men, I think, into psychopaths.
I mean, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I don't believe that you can separate sexual intimacy from emotional...
I don't think you can separate it from the rest of life, from emotional intimacy and the necessity for considering someone in their totality as a person.
You don't get that with a series of one-night stands.
And there's no way that you can Reduce sex, if you have access to a lot of it, to mere casual pleasure repeatedly without denigrating what it means to be a human being, in terms of the women that you're sleeping with, but also with regards to yourself.
Like, it's not as if...
If you treat someone else, some other human beings, Casually.
Repeatedly.
You're telling yourself that human beings are the sorts of creatures that can be treated casually, repeatedly.
And if you don't think that'll reflect on yourself, then you're not thinking.
It's not a good solution.
Which is why, across the world, cultures tend towards monogamy.
You know, it's partly because, on average, that does better for everyone, but particularly for children.
One tip as a practicing psychologist that you would give a patient of yours who's having trouble finding intimacy.
They think that hanging out with people is the same as being truly intimate with them.
Why do you cross into true intimacy?
Well, you know, it doesn't hurt to try to do good things for someone, you know, as a habit.
It doesn't hurt to try to tell the truth.
That's probably the fundamental issue.
It doesn't hurt to begin to trust someone, and that's very tightly associated with the willingness to tell the truth.
You know, the truth is what produces intimacy.
And obviously, because how could you have an intimate relationship that's based on either the shallowness of half-truths or lies?
There can't be intimacy there.
And so, you know, the first step is to Risk trust.
And I say risk, I really mean that in a specific sense.
Naive people trust naively and automatically because they think that people are basically good and they won't get hurt.
And then everyone gets burned.
And burned people get cynical and then cynical people don't trust and then that's a barrier to intimacy.
But you can go beyond the cynicism, and you have to do that.
And you do that by understanding that if you put your hand out in a gesture of trust, you call to the best in that person to respond properly.
And there's a big risk in that.
That's why you're supposed to be, what is it?
I'm going to get the phrase wrong.
It's something like, as soft as doves, but as wise as serpents.
It's a New Testament statement, but that's what it means.
It means to risk the trust with your eyes open, knowing that you can be betrayed, but being willing to have the courage to trust regardless.
And that's the beginning of intimacy.
So, that and truth.
You know, the truth is necessary.
Well, they say the truth will set you free.
It will usually drag you through the mud to a fair distance before it sets you free.
But, you know, if you start to tell someone the truth, you start to have the advantage of their viewpoint.
And, you know, you have a parochial viewpoint.
You're full of ignorance and biases and blind spots.
You don't know about any of them.
I mean, you may have all sorts of wonderful qualities as well, but the other person, hopefully, doesn't have the same biases and blind spots and so forth, although they'll have some of them.
As scary as it is, it beats the alternative, which is not having an intimacy, no matter how much it hurts you.
Yes, yes.
Dr. Peterson, thank you very much.
No problem.
My pleasure.
Be sure to subscribe to my channel so you don't miss anything.
and remember to check back often to see what's new.
The best person to compare yourself to is you yesterday and not someone else today.
We're all living in a world of continual comparison to others, at least a fluctuating emotions of smug superiority or desperate insecurity and And the big question is how do we stop measuring our self-worth by someone else's standards, especially when social media is the main way, especially a lot of young people define themselves?
Well, I think there's two things.
The first thing is you should figure out who to compare yourself to.
And I think the best person to compare yourself to is you yesterday and not someone else today.
And the reason for that is you don't know anything about these people that you're comparing yourself to usually.
One of the things I've noticed is that it doesn't take much discussion with someone, no matter how successful they are.
You scratch below the surface and you find that their life consists of trouble and suffering in proportions that you could hardly imagine.
Almost everyone is dealing with some serious problem, personal problem or problem in their family.
Relative status.
I mean, I suppose it's better to be rich and miserable than poor and miserable.
But, you know, the misery is universal.
And so what you're comparing yourself to, if you're envious, it's an illusion.
And it's not a helpful illusion.
It's not a fair race to be racing against someone else, but it's a fair race to be racing against yourself.
You could be slightly better than you are.
And that will actually, the thing about that that's so cool, and I think the psychological literature really indicates this, is that slow incremental improvement from your initial baseline can take you places that you couldn't possibly imagine, and envy is only an impediment to that.
And then it's an illusory impediment too, because those other people, they don't have it as good as you think they do.
You've talked frequently about how stories, the oral tradition, the Bible, can remind us of deep, fundamental insights of who we are.
I'm going to put an image up of Cain and Abel.
It's a story you've talked about quite frequently.
What does this story teach us about envy and victimhood?
Well, what happens, you see, Cain and Abel are actually the first two human beings They're the first two human beings, real human beings, because Adam and Eve are created by God, and so in some sense, well, they're not like us, but Cain and Abel are born, and they're two sons, and they enter a state of mortal enmity, you know, and the reason for that is that Abel makes sacrifices to God, and Cain makes sacrifices to God, and Abel's sacrifices produce success, and Cain's produce failure.
Now, you know, the sacrifices are very concrete.
They're making burnt offerings, and that seems very anachronistic, old-fashioned, and incomprehensible to modern people.
But the idea was that you could offer something of value, you could let go of something of value, In the present.
And you could offer that up.
The smoke would rise to God so he could detect the quality of your offering.
And if the quality of what you were sacrificing in the present was high enough, then the future would work out for you.
And this is an unbelievably brilliant insight because human beings are the only creatures that have really figured out consciously that you can let go of something that you need and want now And forego gratification, and you will actually improve your future.
So it's a huge deal.
Now, it's a huge deal that this was discovered.
You know, it's the discovery of the future.
And so it's a massively important story.
Oh my goodness, you're right.
It's the discovery of time.
It's the discovery of time.
Yes, and it's the discovery that you can actually Act in the present so that you can bargain with the future.
And it actually works.
So it's a real miracle.
And then what happens is that Cain's offerings aren't accepted, and Abel's are, and this makes Cain very angry.
And no wonder, because if you're working hard, And it isn't working, you know, people aren't happy with you and you're not making progress through your life, then you get bitter.
And that's what happens to Cain.
And so then he goes and has a conversation with God.
And he says, like, what's up with this world you created?
I'm working myself to death here, you know, and nothing's working for me.
And my brother Abel, well, everything's coming easy to him.
Everyone loves him.
What's happening?
And God says something like this.
He says...
Sin has made its entry into your dwelling place, into your home.
And sin means to miss the target.
But it's in this metaphor, it's presented as a living thing.
When you fire an arrow and you miss your bullseye, that's a sin.
That's a sin.
It's a sin to miss the target.
So you can do that by not aiming or not having the skill.
Anyways, God tells Cain, and it's a terrible thing to tell him, he says, sin is waiting at your doorstep, and you've invited it in to your life, evil, and you've entered into a creative union with it.
And it's that creative union with this evil that you've invited in that's compromising your sacrifices, and that's the cause of all your suffering.
And Cain is devastated by this because he's already not happy that, you know, Abel is doing extraordinarily well and all his work is going for naught, and now he goes and complains to God about the structure of the world, and God says, you look to yourself.
Your sacrifices are not what they should be, and you've made terrible mistakes that you're not taking...
responsibility for.
And Cain, he can't tolerate that.
The story says his countenance falls.
He becomes absolutely enraged at the structure of existence.
It's not only that he's suffering.
But he now realizes that the suffering is self-induced.
And he can't tolerate that.
And he's so angry at being and at God that he decides he'll kill Abel.
And it's a terrible thing because Abel is also his ideal.
So he kills his own ideal, right?
And then he tells God that his suffering is more than he can bear and God marks him and sends him on his way.
Where is he running to?
Well, that's the question.
I mean, Cain's descendants Degenerate generation after generation.
He's running away from his terrible crime to hell.
There's no other way of putting it, and I'm not speaking metaphysically.
One of Cain's descendants is Tubal Cain, and Tubal Cain is the first person who makes, in tradition, he's the first person who makes weapons of war.
And Cain's sons are even more dangerous than Cain.
And so there's this idea in this old story that it's this envious rage coupled with this inability to make appropriate sacrifices that produces misery.
And then that misery can desire to manifest itself in the world in the exaggeration of suffering and malevolence.
And that leads to social collapse.
So if we've made a bargain, In our lives and acknowledge that there's time and we can negotiate the future based on sacrifices we make today, then we have tremendous control over the world around us.
Cain could have stopped sinning, stopped missing the target, stopped constructing a world with evil.
Yeah, he could have learned from Abel.
He could have made the right sacrifices.
Instead he killed him.
Instead he killed him.
And there's this ambivalence in the story.
It appears as though Cain's sacrifices are second-rate.
You can never tell because there's some...
You know, look, sometimes people work really hard and things don't work out for them.
There's an arbitrariness about life, you know.
And that is left ambivalent in the story.
Although there is this strong undercurrent suggesting that Cain is playing fast and loose with The Divine.
Well, let's say he's playing fast and loose with the future.
Well, that's not going to work.
Everyone knows.
It's like, if you want the future to work out properly, the sacrifices that you make now have to be real.
And people understand that.
I ask my students, most of whom are children of first-generation immigrants at the University of Toronto, and so pretty dedicated to their task, say, well, what sacrifices did your parents make so that you could go to university?
You know, and I mean, they moved countries.
They left everyone behind.
I mean, This idea of sacrifice, which is concretized in the story of Cain and Abel, is something that every modern person understands.
But it's useful to understand it in an articulated way.
It's so strange that you can bargain with the future, and that it works.
It says, well, I'll forego this gratification now.
I'll take the harder route now, and the future will open itself up positively.
And that actually works.
And if you don't do that bargain, you made the point that it always comes back to get you.
Yeah, and everyone knows that.
Everyone knows that.
Every undergraduate who procrastinates is guilty about it.
They're torturing themselves, atheistic or not.
There's no escape from this.
You know, they wake up the night before, or maybe it's the night before their final, and they put everything off.
They're sweating.
They feel weak and useless.
How do you cultivate acting better today for a more successful tomorrow?
That is a challenge for a good sliver of the population.
Yeah, well, I would say humility is the key to that.
It's like, look, if you have a child and you love that child and you want the child to develop, you set them a task that exceeds their current domain of competence.
But you set them a task that they have a reasonable probability of succeeding at.
Right?
Not complete, because then it's too easy.
It has to be a challenge.
And so you look at the child and you say, well, here's your ability level.
Here's one more step you could take, right?
Well, then you have to do the same to yourself.
You have to take stock of yourself.
That's a meditational exercise.
It's like, who am I? Where are my flaws?
And they're not going to be something you want to face.
And then you think, well, what small thing could someone as flawed as me do that I would do that would improve me?
And then it's humiliating because you think, oh my god, really?
I have to do something that small, that's all I'm capable of?
It's like, yeah, that's your lot, man.
And you better be humble enough to accept it.
And then you make that small improvement, but then what you find is that small improvements, those things accumulate, those things compound, and you can start moving ahead very, very rapidly with the succession of small improvements.
There's a metaphysical element to this, but it's also the basis of behavior therapy, which is the widest used, widest employed brand of clinical psychology now in the world.
Behavior therapy.
It's like, well, let's figure out what your problem is.
Let's figure out what your goal is.
Let's break down your problem until we have a small enough piece that you can address it successfully.
Let's see if you can address it successfully in the next week.
You can go out and try.
And if you can't, we'll cut it down a little bit more.
And let's assume that incremental improvement is going to move you up.
And it does.
But it does require that humility.
And it's not a matter of comparing yourself to other people.
It's not helpful.
It's like, what are you doing wrong?
And you can ask yourself that, right?
And the problem with asking yourself that is you get an answer.
And it's not an answer you want.
It's like, oh my God, really?
That's what I'm doing wrong?
How could I be so foolish and blind that that would be my mistake?
And how can I be so little and useless that this is all I can do to improve it?
That's to get down on your knees in some sense before the ideal that you're attempting to manifest, you know, and to show where you are in relationship to that.
But the The upside of that is that it's an unbelievably powerful process.
You can put yourself together to a staggering degree merely by ceasing doing those things you know you shouldn't do.
Don't be keen.
Dr. Pearson, thank you very much.
My pleasure.
We've been asking the question, are you sabotaging your marriage without knowing it?
Dr. Jordan Peterson is back, along with Stacey and Tracy, who have been having communication issues, significant ones.
Dr. Peterson has been workshopping with them, and he says the next step is not only for Stacey and Tracy, but for all of us.
Number one rule that everyone needs to do right now, no matter what, if they are sabotaging their relationships, is...
Strive to maintain the romance in your relationship.
The romance.
Yes, well, and strive, you know, which is a funny way of thinking about it because people tend to think that romantic interludes will be spontaneous.
It's like, well, you don't think that when you're dating.
You plan a date.
You take someone somewhere nice.
You set up the romantic situation.
You think, well, I don't need to do that when I'm married.
It's like, yeah, not if you want the romance to disappear.
Then you don't have any for the rest of your life.
It's a very bad idea, so you have to think carefully about how often you would like to interact with your partner romantically.
And you have to make it part of your life, a routine, and something that's even somewhat predictable.
The spontaneity will come if you get practiced and excellent.
And maybe it's a little stilted and wooden to begin with because you're planning it, but you'll get over that, man.
It might take a year, but if you're married for 50 years, who cares if it takes a year?
But in perspective.
Stacey and Tracy, how do you feel about that?
I've heard you talk about your friendship, but the romantic absence is clearly impacting both of you.
I think that, like Dr. Peterson said, if we start planning dates, you know, I think it'll all just come back, but we've got to actually put forth the time to do it.
Will you do a little exercise that Dr. Peterson told me about?
Give up those little boards, Dr. Peterson.
Pass that along.
Yeah, well, this might be useful with regards to reconciliation.
So what I'd like you to do is to just think for a moment and then write down something about the other person that you really like.
Okay.
Because there are obviously things that you like and that brought you together to begin with.
So let's try that.
Okay.
It's like a little gift, I suppose.
All right.
All right.
Don't look at mine.
Just while you're writing, if 80% of marriage is the logistics of marriage, raising the kids, paying the bills, making sure that people get to work on time, and 20% is the romantic part, why does that part disappear earlier?
Well, because once Once you start to confront...
The problem with having a serious relationship with someone is that life is serious.
And so you have to understand that romance is a very difficult thing to kindle.
And you have to put space aside for it.
And even if it doesn't seem like the most pressing issue at the moment, you have to remember that you're in this for the long run.
And so you want to...
Develop habits of romance that will take you through the decades, and it'll decrease the probability that you want to stray, too.
It's very important to do this.
Let's take a look at who wants to go first?
Doesn't matter.
Ladies first.
Okay, go ahead.
I wrote these.
Oh, you gave four.
Well, those were my top four.
You only had to give one.
You came up with four.
That's pretty good.
That's a good sign, Tracy.
Thank you.
Funny, sweet, devoted, and eyes.
Well, that's good.
So you've got some physical attraction there, so that's the last one.
Funny, well, good, because you can use some humor in life.
Sweet, well, that's warmth, right?
Devoted, that means you can trust them.
That's also a really big deal.
So those are nice traits, I would say.
Tracy, match that.
Wrote a little smaller, but...
Eyes.
Well, there we go.
You do both have beautiful eyes, by the way.
Laugh.
Laugh.
Okay, so that's something interesting because you obviously share this ability to delight in life and to be humorous and usually that's associated with the trait extroversion, but that's a great thing because life is difficult and if you can laugh about it sometimes, well then you can transcend that difficulty and that's a huge thing.
So that's a big positive force that you both agree on.
Obviously you both need to have some fun together.
You might think, well, we don't have time for fun when things are so serious.
It's like, no, you probably want to have more time for fun because things are so serious.
That's what it looks like to me.
Beauty?
Great.
Well, that's another element of physical attractiveness.
Another real strength of your relationship is that you both do actually find each other physically attractive.
So you have that spark.
You have a friendship.
You have a spark.
That's a good thing.
You share things in common.
You like each other.
It's like, well, you're estranged.
Okay, well, so you have to work to get rid of the estrangement.
Strength.
Well, that's also good.
So it was also remarkably easy for both of you, by the way, to generate four positive attributes about each other.
And I didn't see any sign of anger or resentment when you were doing that.
So I think you're estranged, but that...
That there's something at the bottom of your relationship that's stopping you from signing those papers that's actually quite intact at a fundamental level.
Tracy, before you walk off the stage today, what do you want to tell your wife?
That I love you.
I miss you as my best friend.
I want to do whatever it's gonna take to keep this.
I just want my friend back.
I love you.
You can hear more in Dr. Peterson's book, 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos, and he's also on my podcast.
A whole series of programs I think you'll find very illuminating.
WE'LL BE RIGHT BACK.
BE SURE TO SUBSCRIBE TO MY CHANNEL SO YOU DON'T MISS ANYTHING.
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AT THE BOTTOM YOU HAVE TRIBALISM.
RIGHT ABOVE THAT YOU HAVE RELIGION.
And then right above that you have politics and economics.
many of our political discussions have become religious or tribal.
I'll talk a little bit about tribe.
What is the difference between solidarity, loyalty on one side and defining oneself in the group that sometimes you're at odds with and sometimes you're part of?
So help us explain how human hierarchies forced us into tribes.
Well I think it's probably that it's probably our better angels in some sense that do it.
You know, everyone agrees that perhaps that your primary loyalty should be to your family and that logically extends to your extended kin group like evolutionarily speaking and you know then maybe that elaborates up into your tribe.
Your tribe is set up to cooperate and compete towards necessary ends and to provide you with a context of friendship and a structure of meaning in your life.
And that's absolutely necessary.
And it can't be of infinite Because you lose the personal relationship that's necessary to keep it functional.
I think one of the things that's happening, for example, with the European Economic Community and its fragmentation is that the size of it is too much.
So the distance between the people at the bottom and the people at the top is so great that the people at the bottom don't feel any personal They don't feel any connection with their leaders.
So there's like an optimal tribal size.
And it's a testament to people's ability to cooperate that we produce tribal groups.
And we do it at the drop of a hat.
We do it when we organize sports teams.
And you see how powerful that tribal motivation is.
Well, in the case of people's allegiance, say, to a sports team, it's a very natural part of human existence.
And a lot of it is admirable.
The problem is that there are many tribal groups and that puts us in conflict because, on the one hand, the other tribal groups pose a threat to our way of being in a variety of ways, like a genuine threat.
The threat of disease, for example, which has been a terrible threat throughout our evolutionary history, but also the threat of radically new ideas or the threat of physical conflict.
By the same token, all these other tribes, well, you know, they create interesting things.
They have new ideas.
They have ways of being in the world that might be really helpful if we could incorporate them.
And so we have this terrible tension between our in-group loyalty and our out-group curiosity.
And it's one of those opponent process issues where there's positive and negative things pushing in both directions, and getting the balance right is extraordinarily difficult.
So much of human history has been one long narrative of enslavement, fighting between tribes.
I remember you said once that if you met someone that was not like you, historically, one of you would die, right?
That's right.
So how do we begin to strive, how do we reprogram ourselves to accept a different outcome, where we actually get bigger and bigger tribes, that we actually feel like we're seeking the same, not different?
Well, I think the United States is a really good example of that, is that You need an overarching narrative.
And so a narrative is a story about how you should conduct yourself and your life, right?
It's a story about who you are and where you are and where you're going and why and how you're going to get there with other people.
So you need that universal narrative.
That's acceptable to people and then within that you can place tribal groups but they have to subsume their tribal loyalty to that fundamental larger narrative.
And so there's a melting pot element.
You can keep those elements of your tribal affiliation that aren't in contradiction with the underlying So why is that dissolved now?
We seem not to have that melting pot mindset anymore.
Well, I think you still have it to a fair degree.
You know, we don't want to get too pessimistic about it.
The U.S. is pretty peaceful, ethnically speaking, despite what people think and say.
It's much more peaceful ethnically than it was, say, in the 1960s.
And I think that's the same with most Western countries, although not all of them.
So there's no reason for despair.
But, you know, the problem is that part of the narrative that united the United States and all its people was predicated on the idea of self-evident truths.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
And those truths themselves are embedded in an underlying narrative structure that we don't really understand.
That would be the Judeo-Christian narrative structure, which is thousands of years old and has its roots tens of thousands of years before that.
And it consists of a series of stories about what constitutes a human being.
So for example, one of the most fundamental elements of the Judeo-Christian narrative is that human beings, men and women alike, which is a staggering statement for something that was written so long, are made in the image of God.
And so there's a notion that each individual has sovereign value.
And that's something you can't prove that, right?
It's an axiomatic statement.
It's something you have to accept on faith.
And then allied with that, because the question is, well, if you're made in the image of God, what does that exactly mean?
In the narrative that lays that out, what God does when you are first introduced to him is he's the creator of order from chaos.
And he does that with truth.
He creates the order that is good, because that's repeated consistently, what I've created is good.
He creates the order that is good from chaos, from possibility.
And that's what human beings do.
And so that's why each human being is of intrinsic value, because we have that role to play in the world.
And that's part of this massive underlying narrative that composes the self-evident part of the political structure that unites all of us.
When we start to lose The beliefs that enable those fundamental propositions to be self-evident, then the whole thing starts to shake and move.
And that's not good.
That was Nietzsche's warning from back in the philosopher Nietzsche's warning with the idea that God was dead.
Or Dostoevsky's warning that if there's no God, then anything is permitted.
You're serious warnings.
And that, you know, the collapse of that underlying structure can make us hopeless and nihilistic, and that can lead to very dark places.
Yeah, Nietzsche wasn't bragging that God was dead.
He was lamenting.
Oh, yes, he was terrified.
Like Nietzsche believed that the consequence of that was that we would have to create our own values, that we'd sort of have to become like gods ourselves.
But the problem with that is that we can't create our own values.
We don't have the capacity for that.
I mean, try.
Wake up at 3 in the morning when your conscience is bothering you.
about something you've done and tell yourself that no, it's okay.
You're going to make your own value and that reprehensible action that you undertook is now fine.
You see how far you get with that rationalization?
It's like you'll find that you're working against an intrinsic moral intuition that has you in its grip.
And that moral intuition is a guideline to the underlying moral structure of the world.
Now, I don't know what that means metaphysically.
I don't know if that means that the world really is a narrative of the fight between good and evil, but as far as human beings are concerned and their psychological makeup, it certainly is.
And so we can't create our own values.
The best we can do is to go back to the values that we've already had and rediscover them.
So why is it that so many people seem to hate others who have different political perspectives on what's going on.
Oh, well, it's not surprising.
I mean, there's all sorts of reasons to be ethnocentric, you know?
Other people are genuinely dangerous.
Other ideas are genuinely dangerous.
You know, I mean, look at what happened to the Native Americans when the Europeans came to the New World.
I mean, they brought with them all these diseases, like dozens of diseases, measles, smallpox, mumps, chickenpox.
They lost 95% of their population.
In like a hundred years.
I understand the risks of different tribes.
I always thought the deep fundamental frustrations with each other would arise because of those higher stories we're telling.
What we're aiming for in our lives.
What gives us higher purpose, right?
I never thought politics would do that.
Politics is more tactical.
How are we going to tax each other to take care of some of the issues so we can all live in harmony and seek that higher goal?
So fighting within religious disciplines, I sort of get that.
Not good, but I understand it.
It seems that religion has taken a back seat and politics seems to have absorbed some of that anger.
So imagine that the hierarchy of human conflict is something like this.
At the bottom you have tribalism.
Right above that you have religion.
And then right above that you have politics and economics flowing out of that.
And what's happened is that many of our political discussions have become religious or tribal.
And so they're becoming more serious.
So we're not talking, we're not in the domain of politics.
We're down beneath that.
We're into the domain of what's self-evident.
So for example, there's a free speech Controversy on campus.
Who should talk and who shouldn't?
That's what people think the free speech controversy is about.
But that's not what it's about.
Because the radicals on campus who are opposed to free speech do not believe that free speech exists.
They're underneath the political domain.
Because in the United States, if you're acting politically, you can argue about who should speak and who shouldn't.
But you can't argue about whether or not people should be allowed to speak and that would be useful.
But the argument on the campuses is, well look, you're not a sovereign individual.
That's all nonsense.
You're a member of a group.
You're just a mouthpiece for your group.
You don't have anything individual to add.
It's not possible for groups to communicate to one another in any reasonable manner or to negotiate.
And the entire political landscape is nothing but a nightmare of competing power claims between groups of different identity.
The whole idea of free speech is something just invented by the dominant power group to oppress the Minority power groups.
So it isn't about who should speak.
It's about whether free speech exists.
That's not political.
That's theological.
It's certainly philosophical, but I also think it's theological, because it violates the claim that each person Is individually sovereign and is a source of valid information.
So, like, if you and I are going to have a discussion, I have to presume that you have the capacity to face the world and to change it, for better or for worse.
And I have to listen to how you lay out your propositions.
I have to believe that there's something there to you that isn't just your social construction, that isn't just your political identity or your group identity.
Well, if I've...
Dispensed with all that belief, there's no possibility for us to communicate, especially across racial or ethnic or sexual barriers.
One idea that I've been playing with to help address this is to remind people that a lot of our differences are genetic.
So, if these genetic differences also influence whether we're Republicans or Democrats or we're pro-life or pro-choice, then it would make people perhaps more forgiving.
Maybe.
How realistic is that?
Are we really genetically that different?
And take disgust as a good domain.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean...
Far more of what you think politically is determined by your temperament than you think.
Your genetics?
Yes, yes, by biological factors.
And so it's useful to know that because that helps you understand that the person that you're talking to isn't just arbitrarily different.
They're actually different when you think, well, that's a bad sort of difference.
It's like, well, no, it's a sort of difference that might be useful in a particular set of circumstances.
So I can give you an example.
Liberal types are higher in creativity, which is a temperamental trait that's heavily influenced by genetics, and they're lower in conscientiousness, which is also heavily influenced by biological factors.
And so the disadvantage to that is that they tend to be disorderly and chaotic.
But the advantage is they tend to be creative and entrepreneurial.
So all the entrepreneurial types are liberals, or almost all of them.
And you can see that by what's happening, say, in places like Silicon Valley.
Well, that's fine, man.
You need the entrepreneurial and creative types to generate new ideas.
And you need to generate new ideas because the old ideas Decay and age.
Like, it'd be lovely if we could just fix things and then that was a permanent solution.
But it doesn't work that way.
But what the liberals don't understand is that, well, they're all fine.
They're fine in terms of creating their new entrepreneurial ventures.
But they need conservatives to run them.
They need the conscientious types who are not as...
Prone to think laterally, to take the algorithmic processes that they've now invented, right, because they have a structure, and to implement them carefully.
And so there's this dynamic between the liberal and the conservative in a free market society that drives the entire economy.
And so you might be annoyed at your crazy liberal colleague who's, you know, taking risks all the time and is coming up with, you know, ten crazy ideas an hour.
But without him, you'll stagnate.
And he might be just as irritated as hell at you because you're so damn narrow-minded you can't get out of your little, you know, your one-dimensional trap and things have to be done exactly the same way or you're going to be upset.
But you two need each other.
And then what you need free speech for In particular, is to negotiate between those different temperamental types to come up with a solution that's, well hopefully, that's optimally functional, that would be the first thing, but also that you can both live with.
And the great hope of societies that are predicated on the idea that The capacity to speak freely is an expression of our divine essence, let's say, speaking in this deeper sense, is that we can, in fact, negotiate our way to peace.
And I think that that's I think that successful human societies do exactly that.
And that is the cure for the mediation between different tribal groups.
It's like, well, what's your perspective?
God, I have to listen to you.
Oh my God, that's so terrible.
Because it's going to undermine what I believe.
I'm going to have to question things that I think of as sacred even.
I have to listen to you as if you know something.
And you have to do the same for me.
A terrible process.
You know that if you're married to someone.
You know it's very brutal to have a genuine conversation.
But there is a possibility that what will come out of the chaos that that produces is a new kind of order and that that new kind of order will be superior to the previous order.
And I would say that is the history of humankind because over the centuries our tribes have united into larger and larger and more and more peaceful aggregations and the net consequence of that seems to be a much, much less male homicide.
That's the first thing.
And, I mean, we do have outbreaks of terrible wars from time to time, but all things considered, it looks like an upward climb as a consequence of I would say as a consequence of careful negotiation.
So it's worth investing the time to listen to people you don't even like, because they'll add to your life.
Well, they'll also tell you things that no one else will tell you about yourself.
Maybe you don't want to know those things, but your friends won't tell you that.
Your enemies might.
And then you'll learn something that you might need to know.
You know, and it might save your life to learn that.
So it's bitter and terrible, but maybe not as bitter and terrible as the outcome.
Dr. Peterson, thank you very much.
Be sure to subscribe to my channel so you don't miss anything.
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To understand evil is also to understand good, at least as its opposite.
And I think that evil in some sense is more believable.
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 broader 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, right?
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 them 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 it's part of...
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 did 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, a very unassuming person who had taken two cops out and made them dig their own graves and shot them while they were begging for their lives and 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.
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 four is dependent on peer socialization.
And if you're isolated from your peers, then you don't get socialized.
Well, just to be clear on this, because I was always curious how much of being a killer is genetic and how much of it is the nurture.
If, let's just say, one in 20 males at age two is prone to becoming a bad apple, and most of them get better by four, 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 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, like, 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've thought about...
It's a very tough one.
They get hooked on the desire for the novelty of more and more outrageous acts.
That's part of it.
And 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 often have 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 labor, 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 If a 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.
I would, the best, there's a documentary for people who might be interested in this sort of thing called Crumb, which I would highly recommend.
Watched 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 hyper protective, right?
So, 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.
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 while 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.
Like 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 till 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.
So, 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.
So, and that's also very much worthy of consideration because it's an appropriate situational diagnosis.
Good warnings.
Dr. Peterson, thank you very much.
We'll be right back.
Be sure to subscribe to my channel so you don't miss anything.
And remember to check back often to see what's new.
If you become a better person, then you start to be good for things, you know?
You know, you can fix problems. - Happiness, you talk a lot about it.
Should it be our life goal?
And if not, what should we be seeking?
Well, it shouldn't be our life goal.
Because there are times in your life when you're not going to be happy.
And then what are you going to do?
Your goal is demolished.
And there are going to be plenty of times in your life when you're not happy.
There might be years.
And so it's a shallow boat in a very rough ocean.
And it's based upon a misconception.
Happiness is something that descends upon you.
Everyone knows that.
It comes upon you suddenly.
And then you should be grateful for it because There's plenty of suffering, and if you happen to be happy, well, wonderful.
Enjoy it.
Be grateful for it.
And maybe try to meditate on the reasons that it manifested itself, right?
Because it can come as a mystery, you know?
You don't necessarily know when you're going to be happy.
Something surprising happens, and Delights you.
And you can analyze that.
You can think, well, I'm doing something right.
I'm in the right place right now.
I've done something right.
Maybe I can hang on to that.
Maybe I can learn from that.
What you should be pursuing instead is, well, there's two things.
You should be pursuing who you could be.
That'd be the first thing.
Because you're not who you could be.
And you know it.
You have guilt and shame and regret.
And you berate yourself for your lack of discipline and your procrastination and all your bad habits.
You know perfectly well that you're not who you could be.
And God only knows who you could be.
And so that's what you should be striving for.
Striving for.
And associated with that, you should be attempting to formulate some conception of the highest good that you can conceive of, that you can articulate.
Because why not aim for that?
It's like your life is short and it's troublesome.
And perhaps you need to do something worthwhile with it.
And if so, then you should do the most worthwhile thing.
And you should Figure out what that is for you and part of that's definitely going to be to develop your character as much as possible to dispense with those parts of you that are unworthy and then maybe if you're fortunate and you do that carefully then happiness will descend upon you from time to time and that's the best you've got and then also perhaps during sorrowful times Or worse, evil times.
The fact that you've strengthened your character and that you're aiming at the highest that you can conceptualize, that'll give you the moral fortitude to endure without becoming corrupted during those times.
And to be someone who can be relied upon in a crisis.
There's an aim.
You know, one of the things I've told my audiences, young guys take to this a lot.
I said, You should be the strongest person at your father's funeral.
Right?
Well, that's something to aim for.
It's a transition, a generational transition.
And it means that, well, all the people around you are suffering because of their loss.
They have someone to turn to.
Yeah.
Who can illustrate by their behavior that the force of character is sufficient to move you beyond the catastrophe.
And you need that.
And that's a great thing to hypothesize as your aim.
And happiness just evaporates as Irrelevant in light of that sort of conceptualization.
So when you are the strongest person at your father's funeral, and I just buried my father last month, so it strikes home when you say that, Should there be joy around that realization?
Not happiness.
Happiness is like the fizzly bubbles in a carbonated beverage.
Flighty, flighty, they tickle your tongue, but they go away.
Is there a deeper joy?
Because so many...
Well, there's at least the sense that you've taken something that could be very much like hell and made it far better than it could have been.
And there's also the fact that, you know, if you deal with, if you've matured enough, let's say, to deal with the catastrophe of loss and death, that you can also be the rallying point for the remnants of your family and pull them together at a moment of crisis.
And that's a payoff.
To some degree for the loss.
And I mean, I've seen this in families who've dealt with death properly.
The remainder of the family pulls together.
You know, they become more integrated.
And it's not complete compensation for their loss, but it's not nothing.
And it certainly beats the alternative where everyone fractionates because everyone's too weak to cope with the catastrophe and everything dissolves.
So how do you actually become the strongest person at your father's funeral?
What are the steps?
And is it always about being mission-driven?
Well, the mission is the improvement of your character.
The constant improvement of your character.
And I think a lot of that's done in dialogue with your conscience.
It's like your conscience is always telling you.
Socrates said this thousands of years ago.
Your conscience is always telling you what you shouldn't be doing.
And one of the things Socrates said was what discriminated him from the run-of-the-mill person, and why perhaps we still know of him so many thousands of years later, was that when his conscience told him not to do something, he didn't do it.
He stopped saying the things that he shouldn't have been saying, and he stopped doing the things he shouldn't have been doing.
And that's a start, you know?
That's a discipline, I would say.
That's the ability to follow a certain kind of intrinsic discipline.
And maybe that's merely the cessation of evil.
That's not exactly the same as the pursuit of positive good.
Let's say you haven't got there yet, but that's a start.
You clear away the obstacles from your vision by ceasing to engage in those activities you know to be wrong.
And then the world starts to lay itself out in more pristine form.
And then maybe you can start to apprehend what would be positively good instead of merely not wrong.
I mean, not wrong is a good start.
The biblical corpus is structured in that way to some degree, at least from a Christian reading.
The first rule is follow the damn rules.
Get yourself together.
Here's some rules.
Ten of them.
A hundred of them.
Follow them.
You discipline yourself.
You make yourself a reasonably Morally respectable individual and so now you're not blinded as much by your own proclivity for uselessness and malevolence and then you can integrate all that you can integrate all those rules and and that's the beginning of the development of character and then you can Then you can embody the union of the rules.
It's something like that.
And that's that ultimate nobility and character.
In the Christian corpus, Christ is represented, let's think about this psychologically, as the perfect individual.
Just think about that as a psychological representation.
And that's the person who's taken a disciplinary structure and integrated it into a personality that acts that out properly in the world.
And it's not merely rule-bound either, because You have to follow the rules, but you also have to be part of the process that generates new rules when it's necessary.
And so you take that onto yourself, too, as an additional responsibility.
And that makes you more than a blind avatar of authority and stops you from being rigid.
And, you know, if you look at a medieval cathedral, one of the things you'll see, for example, is a representation of the sky, the dome of the sky, and maybe you'll see a representation of Christ on the peak of the dome.
And think about that as a representation of the ideal individual.
Speaking only psychologically.
It's like there's something of cosmic importance about that.
That's what you're aiming at, is that perfection of yourself.
And that'll keep you busy for your entire life.
And it'll do no harm, right?
It'll make you better.
It'll make your family better.
It'll make your community better.
And it'll give you...
And it's psychologically meaningful.
So there's all that.
It helps you withstand suffering and disperse malevolence.
But it's also extraordinarily practical because if you become a better person, then you start to be good for things, you know?
You can fix problems.
You can handle a funeral.
You can handle a difficult situation, you know?
And so it's not only that it's psychologically meaningful to pursue the highest of goals and the development of your character, but it's also the best possible thing that you can do practically here and now in the material world to make it less terrible than it might otherwise be.
Are your personal goals always going to be aligned with the needs of society, the needs of humanity?
Well, that's a trick.
You know, it's optimally the answer is yes.
And you can think about it like a musical score.
You know how there's levels in a musical score.
Each instrument is doing its own thing.
Each section is doing its own thing.
But it's all united into a single vision.
And that's the right This is another reason why critics of the hierarchical structure are wrong, because the proper way to set up a hierarchy is so that your interests are aligned with those of your family.
That's hard.
That requires a lot of negotiation.
And then you and your family have your interests aligned with those of your local community, right?
So that all of those levels are reinforcing each other and then those are united at the higher level, the higher political structure and that's an equilibrated state to use a phrase from the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget.
It's a game that everyone wants to play and it's working for everyone at the same time and so it isn't based on oppression or dominance from the top down and so I think that if you Formulate your character properly.
And you put yourself together.
You start also to realize that you're not...
Look, if you get married to someone, the idea is that you become one.
Right?
And so it isn't just your interest anymore.
Or maybe it's that your interest isn't your interest without it also being someone else's interest.
Right?
It's insufficiently formulated.
And you need that conflict with that other person to tap you into proper shape.
So what you're aiming at is you And the development of your character, but more than that.
And then you do the same when you introduce children into that.
You expand out that characterological capacity.
And then you can continue to expand that.
And so optimally, yes, what serves you should be serving at every level.
And I believe that part of the reason that music has such an overwhelming effect on people is because that's what it says.
It says, look, everything can work in a multi-level harmony.
And then people listen to music and, like, it produces...
Music produces a religious-like experience in everyone, right?
It transfixes them with the sense of intrinsic meaning.
It's really miraculous that it does that.
And the question is, why?
And I've puzzled over this for years.
And it seems to me that the reason is, is that...
In a musical piece, everything has its proper place at every level.
And so that speaks of, well, it speaks of heaven.
That's the right way to put it, which is why music is so often used in churches.
But it means that everyone's interests are being taken into account.
You know, and obviously it's a utopian ideal.
And it's something that has to be constantly worked on.
See, people often have accused me of an individualistic bias in my moral reasoning, you know, that, well, you should get yourself together.
It's like Ayn Rand.
It's like, no, it's not it!
You get yourself together, So that you can get your family together, so you can get your community together, so that you can get the world together.
All of that at the same time.
There's nothing selfish about that except the responsibility which is on you to start that and to bear that and to lift that and to act it out.
So it has nothing to do with chasing your Short-term, impulsive, pleasure-seeking goals.
Which is the real epiphany for me, because you'll know that you're doing the right thing for your personal growth when it's the same thing the society needs from you.
When your needs align with what society needs you to do for it, then you're doing the right thing probably for yourself.
Well, that's how it seems.
I mean, it seems then you've found your niche, right?
It's where you and what you have to offer Fit.
And, you know, I think of people as beasts of burden in some sense.
Like, we're built for a burden.
And we're not happy without that burden.
And we want to find the one that suits us.
And that's difficult.
It's part of the adventure of life to seek out the burden that suits you.
But when you have that, then yes, then hopefully you're operating in harmony with the requirements of those around you.
The thing to me is that everything else pales in comparison to that.
That's why it says in the New Testament that you should stack up riches in heaven.
It's like there isn't anything better than that.
You're functioning well.
Your family's functioning well.
You're contributing to your community.
What you're doing is worthwhile.
You're not tormented by your conscience.
You're aiming at something that...
The sacrifices that you have to make are that clearly justify the sacrifices you have to make.
Maybe even the sacrifice of your life because you're in this Like, this is a mortal game.
You're in this with your whole life.
And you'd think that what that would mean, at least in part, is that you need to find a game to play that's of sufficient grandeur and nobility so that perhaps even the fact that mortality is built into this structure now becomes justifiable.
I mean, it's a hell of a...
it's a hell of an ambition.
But...
But it doesn't seem to me to be something that's impossible.
I think you can live your life enough so that it justifies itself despite its limitation.
That's the real question.
Can you do that?
And I believe that you can, and I believe that what that means is that the human spirit fundamentally triumphs over death.
And so that's That's optimism, you know, in the midst of the...
the sorrow and the malevolence.
We have the capacity...
We have the capacity...
Sorry.
I'll be sorry.
We have the capacity to transcend that.
And there isn't anything more optimistic than that.
And there's nothing...
There's nothing in it that isn't good.
Right?
It's good for you.
It's good for the people you love.
It's good for the broader society.
It's like it's good.
And that'll take you through your times of travail.
There isn't anything else that will.
And then maybe on your deathbed you can think, I justified my The privilege, the terrible privilege of my existence.
And maybe that's good enough.
It's possible that that's good enough.
You certainly don't have anything better to do than that, as far as I can tell.
We all got to find our burden.
Dr. Peterson, I appreciate your passion for this.
It sinks through, and it's music, as you poetically describe the things we all struggle with day in and day out.
You put words to emotions most of us can't even touch.
Thank you for being with us.
Be sure to subscribe to my channel so you don't miss anything.
And remember to check back often to see what's new.
The suffering is part of the part of you that's disappointed.
in some sense, dying.
Let's talk about disappointment It happens to all of us.
It comes from unmet expectations.
It's inevitable.
But how do you modify your expectations or forgo the selfishness that is disappointment at its very core?
How does that happen?
I mean, it is a lot of self-pity sometimes when you're disappointed.
People around you probably don't feel the same pain you have, but it is a motivating force as well to be disappointed and feel pain from it.
Yeah, it depends on the magnitude of the disappointment, you know, because different beliefs we have stabilize us at different levels of resolution in some sense.
Some things are vitally important to us and stabilize our lives in vital ways and some things are more trivial.
So if you're disappointed in something trivial, well, that's not as consequential, obviously, as when the bottom falls out of your life.
How do you deal with it?
Well, hopefully, what you do is you learn from it.
You suffer first, I would say.
And you have to assume that that's going to happen.
And the suffering is the part of you that's disappointed.
In some sense, dying.
You put a lot of effort into that thing that's now gone and there's grieving that takes place but there's also physiological transformation because that system is no longer functional and that's a small death.
You have to learn to accept those small deaths and hopefully the rebirths that follow as part of what moves you forward in life.
And then I would say You look to yourself first and you think carefully.
Think through the causal pathways.
What errors, what missteps did you make?
What did you have mapped improperly that increased the probability that you were going to encounter that disappointment?
And you don't want to do that with too heavy a hand, right?
You don't want to start by assuming that you're guilty of the most major of sins, you know?
You start with the assumption of a relatively small error.
But you have to investigate till you find out where you walked off the path.
Because the purpose of memory, especially memory about disappointments, is to analyze your error so you don't repeat it in the future.
And so that's how you deal with disappointment.
You have a model that if we can go up, I'm going to show everybody.
Sure, sure.
This is a model to help people understand the paths of coping with unmet expectations.
I'm just going to start again.
You're lifting the burden of the planet above you and that's your goal and that's the unbearable present.
Yes, well, this is the map that we all inhabit, you know?
What is?
Well, I call it the unbearable present, and the reason for that is that, well, you're trying to change the present because it's not good enough, so obviously it's unbearable.
It's part of what you're trying to transform, and you want to transform it into what you're aiming at, you know?
And as you go along, You put into practice the sequence of behaviors that you think are appropriate, and then either what you want to have happen happens, predicted outcome, or what you didn't want to have happen happens.
And if it's predicted, then what that means is that your map is correct, Right?
And so is your strategy.
And so that produces positive emotion.
It's actually the genesis of positive emotion.
Promise and hope and pleasure.
Yeah, but it's a really important thing to know because one of the things that it implies is that unless you have a direction That's an important direction.
You don't feel any positive emotion, so you need an aim.
Now, the downside is if there's an unpredicted outcome, well, that's threatening and makes you anxious.
And if it's a really threatening outcome that indicates that your pathway to the ideal future you posited is blocked completely, well, then there's going to be a collapse into chaos, and that's the disappointment that we were talking about.
Where a part of you dies.
It burns away.
That's despair there.
That's the underworld.
That's the mythological underworld.
Hell is part of that.
And the reason for that is that if you're disappointed enough, you can visit the worst suburb of the underworld.
And that's where you get bitter and vicious and resentful and angry and You know, willing to destroy.
It's a very dangerous place to be.
You need to know that you can go there.
Well, the thing is, is you can learn from your immersion in chaos.
If you run into a disappointment, if you hit an obstacle, what it means, an unpredicted outcome, what it means is that there's something wrong with your representation of the present or there's something wrong with your representation of the future.
You don't know what it is, right?
There's two points, but you're headed the wrong way.
Your map's wrong.
It's either you didn't know where you were, or your destination was specified improperly, or something about the journey.
So the unpredicted outcome, the advantage to that, which is also why it's very useful to be attentive to your errors, is that If you are attentive to your errors, then you can update your representation of the present and your representation of the future, even though that might require a pathway through chaos, and then the next map you produce will be more accurate.
So you go to chaos, if you don't get stuck in the worst neighborhood, you reintegrate.
Yes, that's right.
Yeah, now maybe you're a new person.
You say to people, you know, you've gone through this disappointment, maybe it's the collapse of a love affair, and you say, geez, you know, that was really bitter and horrible, but I'm a new person.
I'm actually better for it.
I have a better understanding of myself.
I have a better understanding of other people.
I know more about what a real relationship would be like.
And so you've put yourself back together, but that's only because you passed through fire.
You know, and maybe you dispensed with some of the parts of you that weren't so necessary.
So just so I'm clear, in life, you have the unbearable present, you're aiming high, big aspirations, you make it or you don't, you don't you go to chaos, which is okay, because the point has come back out of that to reintegrate, to ascend, to repeat this process over and over and over again.
Yes, and what you hope is that the map that you're producing after you pass through chaos is a much more accurate representation of the moral world, and the moral world being The world in which you act, so that you understand yourself better, you know where you're situated better, but your aim is also higher and truer.
And hopefully, like, it's a process like this, as well as one that goes up and down, you know?
You're searching for the optimal pathway forward, and there's going to be deviations during that search.
And then you have to ask yourself, like, who are you?
You know, first of all, you're your...
You're your plan, and it gets blown into pieces, and then you're chaos, and then, you know, that's a catastrophe, and then you're your new plan.
Well, you're not, because it's going to fall apart too.
Eventually.
Yes.
In some domain.
So what you want to know is that you're the thing that does this movement.
Right?
You're the thing that's constantly transforming its map of the world and moving forward.
And that makes you also the thing that can transcend the whole process in some sense because you can function in the underworld.
You can.
Well, you need to know that's a place that people go and that you can function there.
There are things to learn there.
It's part of life.
It's scary.
It's the unknown, but you can still go and come out.
Well, and it's also the case that it doesn't hurt at all, and this is with regards to developing resilience, is that while you're moving from point A to point B, You might be looking for unpredicted outcomes, you know?
Because it's kind of...
that's curiosity.
It's like, well, is there something here I didn't expect?
You can spend a fair bit of time in voluntary exploration of what you don't know.
And that actually really works, because it means that you'll be able to make smaller self-improvements often.
Without that catastrophe of disappointment.
And so, you want to have a plan, but you want to kind of hold it in your hands loosely, and you think, well, I've got a plan, but, you know, what do I know?
I don't really know where I am, and I don't really know where I'm going, but I need a plan because I've got to move forward.
But as I move forward, I'm going to keep an eye out for what I don't know.
I'm going to keep an eye on what other people might tell me that might disturb me even, but that I don't know.
And that does build resilience, you know?
That's the acceptance of voluntary challenge.
And that strengthens you.
And it allows you to make incremental improvements to your map so that, you know, the chaos journey is, you know, not quite as deep and maybe not as catastrophic.
That's part of the adventure of life you've been speaking of.
The Maps of Meaning takes us through adventures.
That you wouldn't voluntarily normally want to go to chaos and...
And the unknown.
But without going there, you're not truly living the adventures of life.
But you can see, too, that people have this immense proclivity to do this.
I mean, think of all the crazy experiments that teenagers, in particular, do with themselves.
You know, they're putting themselves at risk all the time, and people go to horror movies, and they put themselves in extreme situations, and that's partly because they are testing, and they're pushing, and they're trying to learn.
So if this is your path To find a meaning in life.
How do you live the virtuous life?
How do you define what's a vice and what's a virtue if relativism seems to become a dominant way that we judge those today?
Well, I think you do that in discussion with yourself and in discussion with others.
You know, I mean, weirdly enough, you know, I've asked my psychology class this many years in a row.
I said, do you have a little voice in your head or a feeling that tells you that you're likely to do something wrong?
You're about to do something wrong and you shouldn't.
That would be one part of the voice.
Or that you have done something wrong.
Everybody puts up their hand.
Like the faculty of conscience is...
Not everybody says it's a voice.
Sometimes it's a feeling.
It doesn't matter.
People have this faculty that was identified thousands of years ago that orients you in some sense morally.
Well, you could start to have a dialogue with that, with your conscience.
It's like...
Well, this feels wrong to me.
Okay, feels wrong to me.
Why exactly?
Is it wrong?
Is the feeling that it's wrong, wrong?
It's like, if it is wrong, what does it imply?
If it is wrong, well, what would right be?
Well, if it's wrong, Does it mean I shouldn't do it?
If it's right, what sort of risk do I have to take?
That's a dialogue.
In the movie Pinocchio, Pinocchio's trying to not be a wooden-headed boy anymore, right?
A marionette who's being played by the strings that he doesn't understand.
And he has a conscience.
And his conscience isn't that bright.
It's a cricket that was like a tramp, you know?
And so the two of them have to adventure.
And as they adventure and communicate, each of them gets...
Wiser.
Until at the end they're wise enough so that Pinocchio becomes an actual autonomous being.
Well, that's part of the process of learning to distinguish vice from virtue.
It's like, you have a conscience.
Have a dialogue with it.
It's not omniscient.
It needs to mature like you do.
It can be rough on you.
It can be like a harsh Freudian superego that's too punitive, for example.
Or maybe it lets you off the hook too often.
It needs to mature as well.
But it's a separate part of you.
It's like...
You can think about it as the demand of society within, if you're thinking about it biologically, because people want you to act a certain way, and you are prone to be socialized.
Right?
Otherwise, well, you're a criminal and you're outside of society entirely.
So you have to have guilt and you have to have shame and self-disgust and all those things.
That's all part of conscience.
And you need to integrate that in and live in accordance with it and develop it.
So the Stoic movement now that's become so popular seems to be about allowing all this chaos to happen around you, the ascent, the descent, missing the targets, disappointment.
What that...
Much of a response.
Healthy, problematic, really beneficial.
Your thoughts as a psychologist?
Well, there's something to be said for endurance.
You know, I mean, it's better to face a challenge voluntarily.
That's a primary psychological truth.
It's better not to let a challenge faced that you failed at stop you.
Especially if it's crucial to your plan, right?
Because, well, otherwise then you won't be able to manifest the plan.
Maybe you could change the plan.
That might be an okay way around it if it's not a rationalization.
But, you know, let's say that you're pursuing a career that requires you to speak publicly and you get up and you speak publicly and it doesn't go very well.
Like it's 30th percentile talk or something.
It's like now you're terrified.
You were to begin with.
It's like, well, I'm so afraid.
I can't do this again.
It's like, no, that's no good.
It's like next time it's 35 percentile, right?
Prepare a little bit more.
You take some courses.
You get the obstacle out of your way.
And you build that part of your character that enables you to manifest that part of you that's going to let that dream manifest itself.
Otherwise you don't develop.
And so that's...
There's a stoic element to that.
It's like don't...
What is it?
It's a western.
Get back on the damn horse.
You know, if you want to ride the horse somewhere.
You get back on when you're thrown off.
Because otherwise you lose faith in yourself.
Right?
The horse loses faith in you.
That's not a good thing.
It's not going to listen to you anymore.
But you lose faith in yourself, too.
And so...
You face the challenges, you assess your failures, you develop your skills, you confront the obstacles that are in your way, forthrightly, and you progress.
That's the hope.
That's your best hope.
It might not happen.
Right?
I mean, I'm not a Pollyanna optimist.
People are hurt often in life arbitrarily.
Their dreams are destroyed by things that have nothing to do with them.
They develop an illness.
They're involved in a fatal accident.
We can be taken out, you know.
We're not omniscient.
But your best pathway forward is that.
It's the voluntary confrontation with those things that you don't understand.
That potential that surrounds you while you're trying to continually rebuild and And improve the moral representation of the world, the map of the world that you carry with you.
Dr. Jordan Peterson, God bless you.
Very nice talking to you today.
Be sure to subscribe to my channel so you don't miss anything.
And remember to check back often to see what's new.
This explains how you can improve yourself but also why you won't.
I've asked Dr. Peterson to review two slides that he uses in his lectures to describe, depict how we can be better versions of ourselves.
So I'll start to hear you in the middle of the walled garden.
It's beautiful.
It's elegant.
As you pull back from the walled garden, you now all of a sudden see that you have the opportunity to move into chaos if you descend and disintegrate into that.
And there's anomalous information that falls back from chaos that can mislead you.
So I'll turn it to you.
I've witnessed you do this brilliantly.
Well, this explains how you can improve yourself, but also why you won't.
So, the walled garden is a metaphor, among other things.
I'm not trying to reduce it to only a metaphor, but it suggests that the natural environment for people is something like the balance between culture and nature, because a walled garden is exactly that.
It has walls, borders, But inside it has the natural world and so our natural habitat is the balance between culture and nature and That's the balance between order and chaos at least in part and so that's our natural environment And that's part of the message in in Genesis is that that's that's where we should live wall a well watered place a walled garden that's Eden or paradise now the problem is is that You circumscribe your small space,
your walled garden, maybe that's the tightness of your family when you have little children, for example, because you want to set up a protective space around them, but there's always There's always the outside that's still there, right?
And outside the walled garden, there's everything that can disrupt and expand it, both at the same time.
And what happens is that as those things appear, sometimes because you search them out, which is probably the best way for them to appear, but sometimes because they just make themselves manifest.
Trouble comes to visit you.
And the trouble is something you don't understand.
That's what anomalous means.
It means you don't understand it.
And so it doesn't fit in with your conception of the way the world should be, and it shatters you.
And that's the dissent and disintegration.
This is an imitation or representation of an ancient representation of chaos itself, right?
It's the winged predatory serpent.
It's the predator itself.
That's one way of looking at it.
It's what lurks outside the safe confines of the walled garden.
And you can't keep it out.
It comes in.
And the consequence of that is you lose faith.
You lose faith, the walls are breached, and you descend.
And then you descend into chaos.
And that's a terrible situation.
And that can make people desperate.
It can make them lose hope.
And so it's also why people don't like to change.
You know, you change often because of pain.
And sometimes because of involuntary challenge.
Something comes along and knocks the slats out from underneath you.
And it breaks you into pieces.
And maybe you put yourself back together.
And maybe you're even stronger after you've been put back together.
But you break into pieces first.
And this is partly why the road to enlightenment is so difficult for people.
It's not uphill.
It's downhill and then uphill and then it's downhill and then it's uphill and maybe with each successive peak you rise higher and higher if you're fortunate But that doesn't mean that the descents are any less catastrophic so people will hide They'll hide in the walled garden like Adam hid from God.
They'll hide in the walled garden because Well, they don't want to let what's new in and it's no wonder but Does it work?
It doesn't work, no.
You also created a representation of an archetypal circumstance of life.
The idea that we always exist inside of a damaged structure that is partially biological and partially not.
So take a look, partly sociocultural.
So here you're pulling back, and again, you've got this fantastic palace, palatial place you're living from.
Maybe it's the ideal city.
Yeah, well that's it.
Well, that's it.
This is the constant complaint of the revolutionary.
It's like, well, look at this terrible damaged structure with its holes that we've inherited from the past.
It's like, well, that's an archetypal experience, is that the state is damaged.
That chaos threatens it.
It's always that way.
That's the monster at the gate.
The broken walled garden from earlier.
That's right.
Exactly that.
And so from that, the hero emerges, right?
Say, well, there's something wrong with the structure of the world.
The hero emerges to confront chaos voluntarily.
That's your best bet.
Well, there's the hole.
Well, what are you going to do?
Are you going to ignore it?
Or are you going to go and...
Explore its contours and try to repair it.
Well, that could be dangerous.
It's not a trivial undertaking to do that.
And it might very much annoy the people who are still, you know, ensconced, as they think, safely within that original structure.
But the hero emerges from the damaged structure, awake, right?
And takes...
And comes into contact with the chaotic forces that threaten the stability of everything.
Does that voluntarily.
And the consequence of that is the generation, the discovery of a treasure.
It's the archetypal hero myth.
The discovery of the gold that is then brought back to revitalize the community.
Or the freed Often a virgin is freed.
That happens in St. George.
And part of the reason for that is because that can represent wisdom, but also because I believe historically and biologically that women are attracted to men who do that, who go beyond the damaged structure of the current state, and who voluntarily encounter the unknown.
And that means that they've developed themselves into the sort of individual that can now have a relationship with a woman.
And she wants someone who has that capacity.
And so that's part of, well, why St. George frees a virgin from the grips of a dragon.
It's not an easy thing to understand otherwise, you know?
But if it happens, then you have reintegration and you ascend back into that structure we started.
Well, that's the hope, is that, you know, you...
Your incorporation of the new information, whatever you've learned by venturing outside of the safety of your damaged community, is now something that you integrate and you rebuild the community as a consequence.
And then that puts the walls back.
You know, and now it's temporary because the walls are always under assault.
And so, you might think, here's a way of thinking about it.
Well, what are you?
Are you the damaged city?
You certainly might feel that way.
That's depression.
You know?
Or cynicism?
Or then, are you chaos itself?
Because you can certainly feel that way too, that everything's falling apart around you and that there's nothing to you or your life but chaos.
And so, or you can think, well, maybe I'm the re-established order.
You know, and that seems like the best of the three deals, right?
It's like, well...
I'd want that.
But there's something better than that.
There's something better than...
Being the damaged city, and being chaos itself, and even being the city that's revitalized.
And that is to be the process that continually does this.
Because this is, the destiny of this, is that.
It'll happen again.
It'll break again.
It'll break again.
So what you want to recognize is that this is what you are.
You're this.
You're the thing that confronts chaos when it makes itself manifest.
And I think that's the oldest story of mankind.
It's the story that emerged when, as who knows how long ago, millions of years ago perhaps, we decided that we were no longer going to hide like frightened rabbits and wait for the predators to take us out.
We were going to organize ourselves and go out into the unknown and make the space safe.
And that's whose descendants we are.
And that story is so deep, the idea of the confrontation with chaos.
It's the story that opens Genesis, for example, and it's echoed in the idea that the fact that people are made in the image of God is partially a consequence of our ability to confront chaos and to regenerate order.
Come sit down for a second.
So I watch you tell these stories And respect tremendously the psychology of it, but I simultaneously see the profound emotion in you as you share with us deep wisdom, millennia-old wisdom.
What's that coming from?
Well, it's partly coming from a chronic inability to regulate my negative emotion pretty fairly well.
So there's that, but...
Look, here's partly what it's coming from recently, you know, because I've become more emotional, I would say, over the last few years, and it's partly a consequence of the encounters that I have with individual people all the time, and I don't really know What to make of it?
You know like I was sitting in the airport yesterday in Toronto and about six people came and talked to me and they're very polite and this is always the case when people come and talk to me they apologize for interrupting me and I tell them that it's fine they're not interrupting me and then they tell me about being in chaos or they tell me about being the damaged city you know they tell me about something that wasn't right in their life you know they weren't making progress with towards
a marriage with their girlfriend they were stuck in stasis or they're alcoholic or they're addicted or they're in a career that they didn't like or they weren't getting along with their parents or you know all the terrible places that people could get stuck and they say well look I was watching your lectures or reading listening to your podcast or reading your book and then Well, I decided that I'd start to pursue what was meaningful.
I'd develop a vision for my life.
I started to take on more responsibility.
I started to tell the truth.
And everything is way better.
And they're emotional.
When they discuss this and I think this is partly what's made me more emotional is that I have all these stories that people have told me now sort of lodged inside me that are representatives of this and and the thing that that's emotion producing is that this isn't this isn't This is fundamental.
People cannot live without knowing this.
They don't live properly.
And so they discover some of these things.
And everything gets better.
And it's affecting to have people tell those stories.
It's also saddening to me that people are so desperate for this knowledge.
You know, it's ancient knowledge.
We clearly need it.
It doesn't take that much to distribute it so that people understand it.
And the effect is overwhelming.
And so, well, and then there's the fact that I just haven't adjusted to the fact that people keep telling me these stories, you know.
And so when I'm talking about this, it's not abstract to me.
Like, I do believe that this is the fundamental structure of the world.
There's no more accurate way of portraying the world than...
Then that order, descent into chaos, restructuring of order, that's Sisyphus' journey, and it's the way uphill.
And it's punctuated by catastrophe, which is why the way uphill is so difficult.
Is the pain you feel because so many haven't heard this message yet, and you realize they're in pain and they don't have to be?
The unbelievable experiences of witnessing people change in ways...
Well it's joy, partly.
You know, I'm so thrilled that You know, when someone comes and tells you a story like that, you know, and then just little stories.
I went to this restaurant in Toronto, and one of the waiters there had been listening to my lectures, and he said, you know, I just have this waiter job, so, you know, it's not a very high-status job.
And he said, but six months ago, I started watching your lectures, and I thought, man, I'm really going to do this job, you know?
Like, I'm going to put myself into it.
He said, I got three promotions in six months.
And so I'm doing way better.
Because he took this domain around him that he had control of.
Trivial as it might appear.
Contemptible as it might appear.
If you're in an arrogant state of mind.
I'm just a waiter at a restaurant.
What can I do?
It's like you could be good at it.
And God only knows how good you could be at it.
And that means you can hone your interpersonal skills.
And you can become hospitable.
And you can take some pride in the fact that Well, you can offer people the opportunity to have a little happiness, maybe, even if you're only contributing that to some degree.
And you can strengthen yourself characterologically.
And so he tells that story, and he's smiling away, you know?
It's like...
So, that's great.
And it's great to hear those stories constantly.
But then there's a sadness that goes along with it.
And the sadness is that...
While that encouragement is lacking, people lack it terribly.
That's one of the things I've realized on this world tour that I've been on is that you have no idea how many people have never heard an encouraging word.
You know, so that's deeply affecting and also how little encouragement people need if it's True encouragement, you know?
Be courageous!
You know, that's true encouragement.
It's amazing how little they need to start changing.
And so that's also sad because it's like there's a terrible illness and you don't need much medicine and it's available, but it's not being used.
And so Well, for you also personally, as you pointed out for others, the more you do, the more you know you can do.
So your burden doesn't get lighter, it gets heavier the more you do.
Well, that's what you see.
You know, you hope that while you do that, you get more organized, you know, so that you can manage it better.
And the other thing, too, is that it's very important to understand, you know, let's say as your burden grows.
I learned this about two years ago.
I had this very profound experience, which I can't really talk about.
That's the worst thing you can say on a television show.
Now we all want to know what it was.
I know, but I can tell you what the consequences of it were.
It was like a vision of paradise.
That was part of it.
Along with that vision came the knowledge in some sense of what paradise required.
And then as the vision disappeared, I realized that I'd lost the secret to whatever that was.
Like on the way back, so to speak, I'd lost that secret.
It was like Gilgamesh when he returns from the depths.
He has the tree of immortality, but a snake steals it from him.
So I think that that was based on an experience that was similar to the one that I had.
In many ways, it doesn't matter.
But then, and it was really hurting me that I had this knowledge and then I lost it.
And then I realized that, well, this isn't something that you have to do by yourself.
That the journey forward to the proper destination isn't...
And this is part of what makes the burden lighter.
Is that it's not just on you.
Like it is on you, man.
It's on you.
But everyone has a role to play.
And so there's no reason not to reach out for help.
And so as you take on more responsibility, you build a structure around you that enables that responsibility to be...
Hoisted in a manner that doesn't crush you and because Crushing you isn't helpful.
It's not it's not moving you forward And so there's a humility in that right it's it's even though it is on you to put things together It's also on everyone else and everyone else has a role to play and they need to be invited into the process.
It's like this It's everyone's fault Individually, but we all collectively have to take responsibility for it.
And that's possible.
And so that was...
Well, that was the way out of that conundrum because I did really feel terrible about it.
That I had, you know, felt in this strange state that I had discovered something profound.
And then it was a great relief to understand that, well, you don't have to...
Even though it's your responsibility that this is not something you have to do alone.
You have your community and it's fine to reach out As much as possible.
Not to grant to people, but to help people realize what role they have to play in moving this whole process forward.
And so that was a great relief to understand that.
I don't know what you didn't bring back, but I know you give all of us a glimpse of heaven and the courage to seek it.
So thanks for being with me.
Be sure to subscribe to my channel so you don't miss anything.
And remember to check back often to see what's new.
You have the responsibility to be the eyes and the voice of your government.
That's what keeps it alive.
Each civilization has determined its balance of rights with responsibilities.
So what do we owe our government and what does it owe us?
Probably the fundamental question that created this Entity the United States.
How do you define that?
Well, I think we owe our government our attention more than anything else because without our the government is a dead entity it's the past and The past is blind and the past is blind and it can't change itself and so it's always in danger of Losing contact with the realities of the present and degenerating it to something that's anachronistic as the environment changes and what we owe it is Wide
-open eyes and the ability to speak, because it's wide-open eyes and the ability to speak that updates the structure that maintains peace and harmony and productivity.
So we owe it our attention.
And along with that, that's our responsibility.
Things manifest themselves to people as problems.
That's why people are obsessed with political problems.
This bugs me.
It's okay.
Well, the first question is, well, why does it bug you?
Why that thing and why does it bug you?
Well, it speaks to your soul in some manner.
That's why it bugs you.
And what should you do about it?
Well, something.
Because it wouldn't be bothering you otherwise.
That's a message from very, very primordial Levels of your consciousness that something is out of kilter that has something to do with you.
And so then you owe your government the responsibility of taking on that problem and trying to address it.
But you have to be very careful when you do that, you know, because...
If it's a complicated problem, then you better have your act together if you're going to try to address it.
You have the responsibility to be the eyes and the voice of your government.
That's what keeps it alive.
People have known that since the time of the ancient Egyptians, right?
Their god, Horus.
Was a speaker of truth and a visionary.
He could see and he could speak the truth.
And it was his power that revitalized the state.
That's us.
That's our consciousness.
That's what we owe the government.
So if we owe that to the government, and theoretically the government owes us protection and making us interact with other countries in some organized way, organizing our tribe, what happens...
To the covenant between people and their government, a nation and its citizen, women become borderless.
Why is that issue so painful right now in America?
Well, the first question is what constitutes a border?
You know, like if you're playing a monopoly game, then the border is the edge of the board.
But it's also the edge of the rule structure that's organizing your behavior.
And the reason you can play a monopoly game peacefully is because there are borders.
There's a place, there's a structure that defines what constitutes appropriate behavior in that defined space.
And you need that because otherwise you fight.
And you see this, children will fight when they're playing monopoly because they can't stay within the borders.
You can't have a borderless condition because there's no up and there's no down.
Everything's twisting and turning all the time.
It's nothing but chaos and people can't tolerate that.
And then So then the question is, well, we have to organize ourselves into groups with borders.
That's why we have walls around our houses.
That's why we have borders around our cities.
That's why we have borders around our states and our countries.
Because we can organize and agree upon the appropriate mode of social behavior within those borders.
You dissolve that and no one knows what to do.
You think, well, that's going to bring about peace.
It won't bring about peace.
It'll bring about chaos.
And so that's not acceptable.
Now, you might say, well, let's expand the borders as much as possible so that we can include as many people as possible in the game.
And I would say that's a pretty good ambition.
It's worked well in the United States, but you have to remember that in the United States, You don't just have a country here.
You have municipal governments that are fragmented into smaller forms of government than that.
You have state governments.
You have a national government.
You have a whole hierarchy of institutions that enable you as an individual to maintain contact with the borders, let's say.
You blow apart the borders casually.
You don't have any of that structure.
And that's not good.
First of all, you have the chaos problem, and then you have the problem that I think the EEC is facing, which is that The ordinary citizen starts to see so many layers of complexity between them and their rulers that they lose their allegiance.
So, in a country that has agreed they have to have a border, they fight about what that border should look like, how poor it should be, and especially when everyone's rights become the dominant theme, what happens when those rights are mutually exclusive?
My right to free speech versus your right to a safe space, for example.
Well, that's politics.
Or sometimes more deeply philosophy or sometimes more deeply theology.
But political solutions don't seem to be offering us a remedy.
Instead, people become more and more extreme for a bunch of reasons that I think most folks know about.
We live in bubbles.
We, you know, it's confirmation bias.
We have a desire that that's the case and we only look at that data.
But it's become difficult through politics to make some of those difficult decisions.
You know, if you and I are living in a little camp and we can see the border and we can both say, well, I don't want that.
That's a dangerous thing to come into our camp.
That's a good thing.
That makes it sort of straightforward.
Yeah, well, that's why I think and I suppose have been trying to participate in a discussion that I hope is deeper than the political.
Because when the political fails, it means that something that is holding it up is no longer working.
And I believe that Our belief in the structure that justifies free speech is shaking and that has to be reinstituted and part of the mode of reinstituting that is to go back to, in my opinion,
to go back to the foundational stories of our community and to point out, you know, that we're each made in the image of God, let's say, and that we are sovereign individuals and that we have the ability to communicate and that that's something that we lose at our peril.
But the idea that borders can be dispensed with is, they do cause suffering.
It's not a pleasant thing to have nothing and to be turned away from a place where you could move ahead.
And borders do that.
But by the same token, you have to define a space where everyone is playing an agreed-upon game because otherwise no one knows what to do and then that degenerates into, well, it degenerates into sectarianism and it degenerates into all sorts of things.
Nihilism and violence and...
Come on up here.
As you use your fingers like this, I started thinking about this image.
This is renowned artist Martin Allen's piece.
It's called Balancing Desire Consciousness.
Consciousness and desire are not easy to always...
As I see it, there's a hand coming down with little hands at the ends of the fingers pulling at the fabric of consciousness.
You have a desire to touch it.
When you look at a border, for example, some people are trying to touch the people or the other experience at the other side of that border.
And It has perceptions that are different than we expect.
Please, what do you say?
Well, the first thing is it looks to me like it's a right hand.
And the right hand is the hand that really rules the world, let's say, because most people are right-handed.
It's the hand that we use to manipulate the fabric of the world.
We use our hands to manipulate the potential of the world and to bring order or perhaps sometimes more chaos into being, but to change it.
And then you see at the fingertips of each of the of the fingers on the hand, you see another hand, so there's real emphasis on the hand, and that makes sense to me, because the hand is a real locale of consciousness.
It's hyper-represented cortically.
You're unbelievably conscious of your hand, especially your thumb, and it gives you the grip on the world.
You know, what this indicates to me is the encounter, at least in part, especially with the snake-like forms that are surrounding it, is that what we're doing is reaching out into the chaotic unknown, That's often represented by serpentine forms.
I suppose that's because serpents inhabited the chaotic exterior of our environments forever.
And that we're attempting to manipulate the world.
That is the essence of consciousness, is that it reaches out to grip what we don't yet understand and to shape it.
So as we resolve this concept of our rights versus our responsibilities, We're going to have to look at guideposts bigger than ourselves.
And it takes me to, again, how historically humans resolved this problem, because it's been there since day one.
And faith has always played a role in offering some advice on this.
The weakness of that structure, that morality, that narrative, is one of the problems.
And his treatment, his strengthening might be one of the solutions.
Well, it undermines...
To me, sometimes it's about rights, but mostly it's about responsibility.
Citizenship is about responsibility.
And your responsibility is to constrain unnecessary suffering and to push back against malevolence.
That's your own malevolence.
It's the malevolence of the social world.
It's the malevolence of the natural world.
That's your moral obligation.
And to be responsible is to act in accordance with that moral obligation.
And I don't believe that we have done a good job of communicating that.
We haven't articulated it properly.
Partly it's because when the Conservatives articulate it, you owe your country.
There's this duty It's a patriarchal voice demanding that you sacrifice yourself for your country.
There's duty.
It's all duty.
And duty is a perfectly reasonable virtue, but it does engender rebellion.
And for good reason, because it can be tyrannical.
It misses the point.
And the point is that you need to accept responsibility.
It's your essence.
And you need it, not least, because by accepting responsibility, you find meaning.
And people know this.
Like, if you look at the people you admire, let's assume those are the people who are living properly, that you have a natural tendency to admire people who are living properly, Because you want to imitate them, and it's an instinct, you know?
And I think that's a well-substantiated notion.
You admire people who take responsibility for themselves, and for their family, and for their communities, you know?
It's natural.
And you see in that a valid mode of being.
You think, well, why do you need a valid mode of being?
Why do you need to take on that responsibility?
And the answer to that is simple.
It's because You're going to be subject to suffering.
And you're going to be subject to malevolence.
And that's going to embitter you unless you have a purpose.
And you need a purpose that's high enough So that it's an antidote to the suffering and the malevolence.
And the faith that you described, which is the faith in the sovereignty of the individual.
It's the faith in the divinity within the individual.
It's the faith that the consciousness that we share, that's the remarkably miraculous element of us, can contend with the structure of what might be and to make it into something good.
And we can't lose that.
It's not optional.
People literally die without that knowledge because they become purposeless and nihilistic and then the suffering and the malevolence overtakes them and that either crushes them into depression and they can't live or it embitters them and they become cruel and vengeful and worse.
And so, these aren't optional concepts, and the notion that responsibility is what gives you the meaning to withstand suffering, that's a killer idea.
Every time I talk to the audiences that I've been speaking to across the world, it's about 350,000 people now, every time I make that case, that argument, the audience is dead silent, because everyone knows.
It's like, yeah, it's that the truly meaningful things I do, Occur when I take responsibility.
And the more responsibility, the more meaning.
Like the more weight and the more burden.
It's not nothing.
You know, it's the tragic acceptance of destiny, I suppose.
But everyone knows it to be true.
And everyone Berates themselves endlessly when they're failing to live up to their potential and not accepting the responsibility they know is part of their...
What would you say?
It's part of what's ethically required of them to live properly in the world.
I think the reason you're so popular, especially among young people, is you're telling them that truth and they've been told not to have responsibility.
It's not a big deal.
And they know it's not the reality.
Dr. Peterson, thank you very much.
My pleasure.
Be sure to subscribe to my channel so you don't miss anything.
And remember to check back often to see what's new.
The best way to address that is to put your own house in order.
That means morally, means financially, to use your money wisely.
My friend, legendary hedge fund founder Ray Daly wrote an excellent article helping us all understand our nation's, in fact, the world's financial challenges under a capitalistic society. 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 happened around the world, including the Second World War and the Great Depression.
The wealth of 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 and 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 offer some ideas that I think we can all benefit from.
In the 1930s, when we had similar numbers that we're talking about now, we did some things.
We started to believe in political philosophies.
We followed leaders like Hitler and Mussolini and 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 Americans, of humans killed because we follow 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 we make?
And I don't want to let capitalism off the hook yet because capitalism is very, very good at creating value.
Yes.
Part of the essence of capitalism to distribute it fairly.
No, 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.
Yes.
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 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.
Well, 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 that?
Well, no one likes 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.
But 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 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.
Excessive reliance on luxury and decadence.
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 that access to that power.
Why is it not happening now?
The numbers that I just quoted to you reveal the opposite is happening.
That 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.
Yes.
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.
Let me ask a leading question then.
Historically, faith, at least the values that came from faith, and 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, like the extremes that we could go.
If you don't have that cultural, almost at this point, morality, then you begin to slip.
And 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, 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 What would you say?
They could be adding 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.
But 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 deeper problem than that.
And we've tried solutions.
We've tried to radically egalitarianize societies.
You know, the Soviets tried that.
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, it 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 destabilize.
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.
Dr. Pearson, thank you very much.
Could knowing your personality type be the key to unlocking your hidden potential?
A groundbreaking new quiz says, yes.
Understanding the truth about character traits like compassion, enthusiasm, openness, can help everybody better cope with the unrelenting chaos of the day.
And set yourselves up for success.
Today, clinical psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson is here with a personality type quiz you need to take.
It'll reveal new things you didn't know about yourself and the people around you.
An unconventional hero to some, he's become an outspoken critic to others.
Jordan is someone who's not afraid to ruffle feathers and go against politically correct culture.
Yet despite backlash, Peterson fills auditoriums with followers who say he's brought order to the chaos of their lives.
Welcome to Dr. Peterson.
For many viewers, it's gonna be the first time they've heard about you, so I'm glad they got to see that little piece.
And you've become a rock star for a lot of folks.
I'm just curious, what is your hope of how you can get people to change their lives for the better?
I'm hoping that I can help people understand that they can find deep meaning in their life, that that's better and more nourishing, let's say, than the pursuit of happiness, and that they can find that meaning mostly as a consequence of voluntarily adopting responsibility.
And so that seems to be going quite well at the moment, that idea.
The idea is resonating with a lot of folks, but there are critics who don't like your philosophies of psychology.
They find them provocative and controversial is probably the word that's most associated with you.
Explain that to us.
Well, some of what's controversial in relationship to the personality quiz, for example, is that Credible social scientists, psychologists, know that there are differences in personality between men and women and that those can't only be attributed to socialization.
And so that's apparently become a controversial issue.
The idea that there are fundamentally five personality types, let's say, or traits, that's somewhat controversial as well.
The idea that these have biological roots, that's also controversial, but the science is well-founded and people need to know the truth as far as I'm concerned.
So I'd like the audience to hear this out and try to incorporate it into their lives and take what works for you as always is the case.
So let's talk about specifically our audience.
What are the biggest mistakes people watching right now are making as individuals when they try to live the life of chaos that so often engulfs us?
Well, I think there's two fundamental problems.
One is it's really hard to see yourself as other people see you.
So it's not easy to get an objective view of your personality and it's helpful.
It can help you understand your strengths and weaknesses better and capitalize on your strengths and rectify your weaknesses.
I think also that people don't do as much conscious planning for their life as they might to think out into the future and decide what they need and want and then to work strategically towards that.
Those are both...
And the other thing people lack, too, they lack a really good vocabulary for personality, you know.
And to think things through clearly, you have to understand the proper terminology.
And it's not surprising that people don't have that, because it hasn't been that long since personality psychologists have converged on a stable vocabulary.
So this is the goal today, to give folks some words that we can all use to describe ourselves, to understand what's really happening in your life and hopefully react to it.
So we've got a quiz that's going to reveal your new personality type, right?
It's going to help you achieve your goals.
Audience, you all have clipboards.
Are you all interested in participating?
All right.
So all you got to do is pay attention to these six questions.
They're A, B, C, D, E. Circle the ones, everyone at home.
You can follow along on DrRaj.com.
It's pretty straightforward.
These six questions are all going to help us figure out at the end what type of personality you appear to have.
Marissa's going to start us off.
How are you?
What are your goals that seem to be just out of your reach right now?
Well, just like everybody else my age, I'm trying to find the perfect career that really suits my personality.
That it job that I just love.
So how can your quiz help her reach her goals?
Marissa's not alone with that goal.
Well, generally speaking, it's better to find a job that matches your personality than it is to match yourself to the job.
Now, you have to do a little bit of both, obviously, because life is about negotiation.
So if you know who you are and what your personality is, then you can find a career that not only will you find more meaningful and engaging, but that you're likely to do better at, which is also, obviously, of crucial importance, assuming you want to do better.
You ready?
I'm ready.
Take it away.
First question, Dr. Peterson, is...
Choose a word from this list that describes you best.
A. Talkative.
B. Kind.
C. Anxious.
D. Efficient.
Or E. Imaginative.
Right, Marissa.
Your best answer.
I would definitely have to say A. Talkative.
I'm a social butterfly in every situation.
I can sort of see that.
All right.
Our audience, keep track.
We're going to keep moving.
Go ahead and label yourself.
Again, don't cheat on it because it's going to be your wisdom that you're going to share with yourself later on.
Dr. Peterson, the next question.
Think about your best friend.
What single word from this list would he or she use to describe you?
A, enthusiastic.
B, cooperative.
C, worrisome.
D, organized.
Or E, creative.
Everyone has your letter, pick it, whatever suits you, as you feel you describe it.
Marissa, what would you pick?
I would definitely say that I'm E, creative.
I'm always coming up with new ideas and different situations that are thrown at me.
Next quiz question is actually one that I wrote up.
Take a listen.
Here's the next question on the new personality type quiz.
Pick the activity that sounds most like something you would do.
A. Plan a party.
B. Donate to a charity.
C. Share a problem with a close friend.
D. Make a schedule for your week.
Or E. Create a piece of art.
All right, everyone, circle your answer.
Dr. Peterson, what answer did you circle?
Let me ask the doctor.
Make a schedule for the week.
D. Yep.
Alright.
It was a bit of a toss-up, because I could have answered E, because I do engage in creative activities.
That's probably common that you could pick more than one.
Yeah, yeah.
So you're looking for preponderance, you know, where you're leaning towards most of the time.
Exactly.
Hi, it's Lisa Oz and I'm here with the next question on Dr. Peterson's personality type quiz.
Are you ready?
Okay, here are some adages to live by.
If you could only choose one, would it be...
A. Spend as much time as you can with friends.
B. Take care of those in need.
C. Safety first.
D. Do your duty.
Or E, beauty will save the world.
Remember, circle the answer that best relates to you.
All right, why don't you guys all circle, right?
I hope you circle one of everyone at home as well.
That was my wife Lisa with one of the questions of the new personality quiz that can help you unlock your hidden potential.
Now remember, pay attention to the letters you're circling.
We've got all the stuff on DrRoz.com.
We've got two more key questions you don't want to miss.
Dr. Peterson, take it away.
If you had to admit to a single fault, what would it be?
A. I dominate conversations.
B. I let people take advantage of me.
C. I worry too much.
D. I can be a perfectionist.
E. I can be scatterbrained.
Audience, how many B's were there out of curiosity?
B's?
Yell out your answers.
What was it?
Just yell them out.
Perfect.
Everybody's different.
And that's part of the beauty of this.
We're supposed to be different.
And just to be clear, it's not about tolerating each other.
We want differences.
It makes this tabula base taste better.
All right.
Actually, you know what?
Come back here.
Jill, is that your name?
I'm Jill, yes.
What'd you pick?
I can tend to be a perfectionist.
You're a perfectionist?
I can tend to be, yes.
Oh my goodness.
Do people give you a hard time for that?
Not so much anymore.
I've been working on it over the years.
We'll see.
But why is it important to focus on your faults?
Because if you do things badly, then you're going to run into trouble in life.
And so you have to understand that with every gift that you have, there comes an equivalent risk, and you want to manage the risk and amplify the benefit of the positive.
And so it's very useful to know when you can go too far.
If you're conscientious, you're a good manager, you're a good administrative type, you can organize things, but you might manage people to the point where they can't work with you.
And so that's when you've gone too far.
Every good thing can go too far.
So my wife calls me the meddler.
I'm a D too, by the way, on that.
You know, I'm a perfectionist, and I get into things I shouldn't be getting into, like what time the kids are getting picked up.
Right.
And then she'll put me, say, put your cape on, Mr. The Meddler.
Right.
Like the superhero that you don't want to be one.
And I think that's important, though.
You know, so these aren't all good or bad.
They're what you make out of them.
They're the cards you were dealt.
Well, if you're conscientious like that, sometimes you have a hard time seeing the forest for the trees, right?
And that's a problem if you need to concentrate on the forest.
You're not speaking to me personally, are you?
Well, maybe.
All right.
The last question, Dr. Peterson.
When faced with a problem, I tend to approach it energetically, cooperatively, nervously, dependably, or curiously.
Why is that important?
Well, there's lots of ways to solve problems, which is why there's lots of different personality traits and types.
And so if you're an extroverted type, then you're going to be able to rely on your ability to use your social skills to bring in information and solve problems.
If you're more on the nervous end of things, you're going to be concerned with security and safety, and that can be very useful in lots of occupations.
If you're agreeable, then the fact that people like you and you like them is one of your skills.
If you're organized and conscientious, then you can use that scheduling ability to move yourself ahead.
And if you're open, then you can think laterally and creatively.
And you need to know which of those is your forte.
And to understand that those are all valid means of solving problems.
You ready for the answers?
Coming over here.
We're going to give you the truth about your personality type.
But first, let's reveal how to interpret your answers.
Talia, which letter you circled first?
If you did mostly A's, then you're a personality type that is called extroverted.
That's the most dominant one.
That's what Dr. Peterson was just speaking about.
If you answered mostly B's, then you're mainly an agreeable person.
Mostly C's means you are neurotic.
But let me be clear about this.
This is not a bad thing.
You need some neuroses.
We all need a little bit of it.
That's one of the things that's most interesting.
We don't have the vocabulary, as Dr. Peterson was mentioning.
We need to have the words.
If you're a neurotic person and you know how to use it right, it's a wonderful asset to have.
You have to be sensitive to risk.
Exactly.
And we need one member of the tribe to be sensitive to risk or else we all get eaten by the saber-toothed tiger.
Mostly D's, you're conscientious.
And mostly E's, your dominant type is openness.
Now what do these personality types mean?
Dr. Jordan Peterson says there are five major personality types, and uncovering the truth about who you really are can unlock your hidden potential.
Did you find out you're an extroverted type?
If so, that means you're often assertive, enthusiastic, and social.
Extroverts are energized by contact with others in a big group.
However, highly extroverted people can also be highly impulsive and not consider future risk.
What about the openness type?
If this is you, that means you often think outside the box and are highly creative.
But people who are high in openness can sometimes find it hard to find a sense of self because of their diverse interests.
So try to zero in on what really makes you happy.
Those are two of the personality types from our new quiz that everyone should take to unlock their hidden potential.
Now it's time to break down the three others.
Clinical psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson is back.
Some of these personality types may have negative connotations.
So I'm going to start with one, which is neuroticism.
And Monique, you tell us that that's what you uncovered.
Yes.
How'd you react to that?
How'd you deal with that possibility?
Is that how you would describe yourself?
Not at all.
I definitely always look ahead for things, and I'm, you know, always planning for the future, but I never would have called myself neurotic.
But...
I'm neurotic, apparently.
That's not a bad thing, Dr. Peterson.
Monique and others who are...
It also sounds like you're conscientious.
Yes.
Yes.
And so everybody scores on all five traits.
So the thing about neuroticism, it's the negative emotion dimension.
And people who are higher in neuroticism feel more anxiety and emotional pain than average.
But the advantage to that is they can make you very risk-sensitive and watching for where things of danger might lie.
And so if you're planning your future, for example, you can see pitfalls and then you can avoid them, which is a big deal.
Whoever would thought we would celebrate neuroticism is a good thing.
Thank you, Monique.
Thank you so much.
Okay, come on over.
Now, the next personality type...
Well, it's mine.
Because when I did the survey, I ended up being the conscientious personality type, which is, you know, seemingly good, but not good in all the different ways.
So please explain the goods and the bads.
I know that all of these have a little bit of each.
Well, you can rely on conscientious people to do what they say they're going to do.
So we have duty and responsibility.
Yep, duty and responsibility.
They're reliable and organized, but they also have a...
Hey.
How do you like that?
Well, it's a very organized show, so you can see that.
Thank you.
But the downside is that people who are high in conscientiousness have a tendency to micromanage.
If you have to know what's going on all the time, then no one else gets to step in and do that.
But I hear that voice all the time that I have to because I'm not sure anybody else will.
So how does someone like me deal with that?
Well, partly what you do is do what you can to surround yourself with people who are reliable.
It involves a little bit of a risk, but you've got to pull back if you're micromanaging.
I started writing down things that I had to do, not things because I wanted to, not all the things that I needed to do.
And that's one way I began to triage my life, because I would have just gone down the rabbit hole.
Okay, we've got Hala here.
Her dominant personality is being agreeable over you.
Okay.
So, that seems like a good thing to be agreeable, but as I read more and more of your work, I begin to think that's not always a plus.
So, do you describe yourself as being agreeable?
I do.
I like to keep things, like, light and positive, and when it comes to, like, going out with my friends, I'm always the one that's, like, down for whatever, you know.
Are you a warm person?
I am.
I am.
I'm the one that people confine it in.
Right.
There you go.
That's part of agreeableness.
Yeah.
So, well, so the downside of that, that's the self-sacrificing element, is that It's harder for agreeable people to argue on their own behalf, and it's easy for them to get resentful, you know, because you're kind of caring for the world, and maybe you assume that that's going to be reciprocated, or maybe you care for other people more than you even care for yourself.
That's harder for agreeable people.
Awesome.
There you go.
I tell you, this is a call to action.
This is really important, clearly.
So for people who are agreeable, God, thank you for being agreeable, but make sure we're doing the right thing by you as well.
And so agreeable people often don't make as much money, and part of the reason for that is that it's harder for them to negotiate on their own behalf.
They're not as demanding in situations where they need to be, and it can be a bad medium to long-term strategy.
I love these insights.
Go ask for a raise right after the show.
Right?
Yeah.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
I hope that's helpful.
Dr. Peterson has been extraordinarily valuable.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
For the full personality test, you can go to DrOz.com.
You can hear more in Dr. Peterson's book, 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos.
And he has joined me on a series of podcasts that I think will be very helpful for a lot of folks watching in order to figure out what they should be doing in their lives.
We'll be right back.
Be sure to subscribe to my channel so you don't miss anything.
And remember to check back often to see what's new.
We're back with clinical psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson and Stacey and Tracy are also with us.
They say their marriage is in trouble.
Today we're asking the question, are you sabotaging your relationship without even knowing it?
Stacey, I was caught off guard when you said that you'd actually already printed out the divorce papers.
Why haven't you signed them?
Because there's always that hope.
There's always the glimmer of hope that we can change.
My heart's still in it.
I just don't know how to put the pieces back together to make it right.
Dr. Peterson, this is a challenge that I think we're seeing all over the country.
You're an expert in this area, so I hand the ball to you.
Well, there's lots of things that are positive about your relationship that are obvious right away.
I mean, the first is that you have the grounds of real friendship.
The second is, you both actually appear to want this to work.
I think a lot of your problem is actually practical, to tell you the truth.
And I would say it's also not so much a matter of global change.
It's like, I see things that aren't working in your marriage that will sink a marriage.
So, for example, People need to talk to each other for about 90 minutes a week just about what they're doing in their lives and their problems.
You need that.
And you need to have a date like at least once a week and probably twice a week.
It's absolutely crucial.
And then it's also the same with re-establishing a romantic bond.
It's like you're not romantically entangled right now because you're alienated from one another.
And you might not want to get close physically.
But this isn't a matter of wanting to to begin with.
It's a matter of having to in order to rekindle what's going on in your relationship.
And so I would say And the last thing I would say is it's probably useful for you guys to sit down and figure out how to distribute the duties in your life because it's a big part of your life and I would say to what you should do practically since you do appear to like each other and you want the relationship to work is to start micro negotiating so you know who's responsible for what and you want to fight and argue about that till you get it straight I've heard you say that don't agree to things you don't agree to.
Yeah, well, that's a great negotiation.
Is that something you think is happening?
Do you feel like that, either of you?
Mm-hmm.
Okay, so here's a hint about that.
So, it's okay to say no to things.
You want to only say yes to things that you agree with, especially when you realize you're going to repeat them endlessly, right?
So you have a right to say no.
If you're an agreeable person, then, which is a personality trait associated with warmth and compassion, it's really easy to try to please someone else.
And you can tell if you're doing that too much if you get resentful.
You know how terrible that is.
And so even though it's a battle to do that negotiation, it's way better than ending up in the situation that you're in.
What about all these small things?
Well, that's another thing, you know.
People think, well, we shouldn't fight.
It's like, no, you should fight.
A lot.
But you should make up.
So you fight because there's problems.
Like, who should do what?
That's a big problem.
How are we going to handle our finances?
That's a big problem.
How are we going to handle our mutual careers and the trouble of having children?
Of course you're going to argue about that because you don't see things the same way.
You think, well, but what you want to do is you want to argue towards peace.
Fight.
Make up.
Make peace.
Make an agreement.
Move forward.
And then fight again.
And then fight again.
Well, eventually what'll happen...
The fights will get farther apart and then they'll decrease in intensity.
That's what'll happen.
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