May 5, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
02:07:31
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unidentified
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♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ | |
| All right, people, we are live on YouTube and Facebook today, | ||
| and joining me is an author, a clinical psychologist, and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, | ||
| Dr. Jordan Peterson. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks very much. | ||
| I'm glad we're gonna be able to do this live, because you saved me once, because I was in between studios, I had just moved into this house, and your whole situation had blown up, and everybody was saying, get Peterson on the show! | ||
| And we did it on Google Hangout, which is a little stiff, and you were pixelated, and there were moments of audio dropouts, but... Yeah, I'm not pixelated in real life. | ||
| No, you're completely, I'm shocked, you seem whole, and... I'm three-dimensional. | ||
| Completely three-dimensional. | ||
| I can see the whole thing. | ||
| So I'm glad we're doing this because I wanted to do it live. | ||
| I always find that the live interaction is better than the online interaction. | ||
| But also your whole situation... | ||
| Basically starting in September when you gave this this talk you sort of exploded onto the scene. | ||
| Is that is that a fair estimation? | ||
| That's a fair estimation Within I made three videos. | ||
| Yeah of approximately the same audio quality as our Google hangout I would say yeah, and I did it well to clarify some things in my own mind, but also As an experiment, I suppose, I had had a YouTube channel for about three years and it kept growing. | ||
| You know, not tremendously, but by April of last year I had about a million views for my lectures, right? | ||
| And, well, that made me perk up a bit in terms of attention because a million of anything is a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I thought, well, I'll lay this out on YouTube as an experiment and see what happens. | ||
| It's like... Next thing you know, you're all over the place. | ||
| Okay, so I want to talk about that lecture, obviously, but I thought that the best way we could start here, because you've done a ton of interviews now, and you've been on Sam Harris's podcast twice, you're doing Rogan in a couple days, and you've been on his show before, and you've chatted with a lot of the same people in this space, but I thought that the best thing we could do to start is just reset everything. | ||
| Because people are very passionate about what you do. | ||
| We're going to do a Q&A at the end of this, and we already have a whole queue of questions ready to roll. | ||
| So just for people that know nothing about you, what would be the first way? | ||
| Do we want to just talk about your academic work, or is there anything about your history, childhood, that you think sets you up to end up sitting right here? | ||
| No, I think in large part it's my academic work. | ||
| I wouldn't say it's the mainstream academic work I do, though. | ||
| I mean, I've done a lot of academic publishing in scientific journals in the field of personality and abnormal psychology. | ||
| That's pretty normal science, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Kuhn. | ||
| It's incremental and progressive. | ||
| I've worked with my students on delineating the structure of personality at a more fine-grained level. | ||
| But I wrote a book And published it in 1999 that I worked on for about 15 years for about two hours or three hours a day and I was attempting to understand the underlying structure of belief systems and to determine what psychological role they played because I was interested in the degree to which people adhere to their belief systems and | ||
| There has to be a psychological reason for that. | ||
| Lots of conflicts are over, not so much economics as the economists claim, and the Marxists, but over values. | ||
| And values play a very important role in the psychological ecosystem, a determining role, which was something I was trying to discuss with Sam Harris, but it's a very difficult discussion. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So, in that book I analyzed belief systems like Marxism and like Western capitalist democracy, associated, say, with Christianity, and then tried to go underneath that to look at what you might describe as the mythological substructure. | ||
| For me, this is how we are in the world. | ||
| We have an articulated viewpoint, and it's encapsulated in a dream. | ||
| Personally and culturally. | ||
| So basically, we're at this level. | ||
| So right now, everything we're discussing is sort of at this level. | ||
| It's articulated. | ||
| The unspoken piece is all the rest of the pieces that sort of put that all together that we don't really talk about. | ||
| Well, that we don't really understand. | ||
| It's like, imagine, I think of it this way, is there's a domain that you could consider known, explored, And that domain, technically, is where, when you do something, you get the outcome you want. | ||
| That's really the technical definition of it. | ||
| And that's a definition of a kind of knowledge. | ||
| It's practical knowledge, right? | ||
| I know what I'm doing if, when I do it, what I predict, what I want to have happen, happens. | ||
| And then I can feel comfortable there, because I've mastered the situation, and I'm not in danger. | ||
| That's one domain of reality. | ||
| And another domain is the unknown. | ||
| And the unknown is... Symbolically, it's often nature, as opposed to culture, say. | ||
| But it's more complex than that, because the unknown can manifest itself at any moment. | ||
| When you act in a certain way, and you desire an outcome, and that outcome doesn't happen, then the unknown manifests itself. | ||
| And the unknown is... | ||
| You could call it transcendent in some sense, because it's beyond what we know, obviously, and it's also unbelievably complicated. | ||
| And we have one part of our nervous system, so to speak, that deals with the realm of the known, and the other part of our nervous system, mostly, that deals with negative emotion, deals with the unknown, and it's negative emotion and fantasy. | ||
| So you might say, well, there's the known world, then there's the unknown world, but there's a bridge between the two. | ||
| And that bridge is the dream, or mythology. | ||
| It's something like that. | ||
| It's metaphor. | ||
| That's another way of thinking about it. | ||
| And it's sort of half-known and half-unknown. | ||
| It's this amorphous bridging point. | ||
| And our knowledge structures, our articulated knowledge structures, are embedded in that dream. | ||
| So here's an example. | ||
| Western democracies are predicated on the idea that individuals have an intrinsic value, essentially intrinsic value before God. | ||
| Because it's an equal value. | ||
| Everyone's equal before the law. | ||
| Even though we're very unequal as beings, we have this mythological idea, essentially. | ||
| It's not rational, precisely. | ||
| It's more like an axiomatic assumption. | ||
| It's something like that. | ||
| That there's something intrinsically valuable about each person. | ||
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unidentified
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And it isn't something you can prove. | |
| It's something you have to assume, and then go from there. | ||
| Now, the reason we assume that is very complicated. | ||
| I think it's not arbitrary. | ||
| See, one of the things I was trying to figure out in this book, called Maps of Meaning, was there was this huge fight going on between the Marxists, the Communists, and the Western world. | ||
| And one way of thinking about that is that it's a clash of opinions. | ||
| It's just a matter of opinion. | ||
| So I was trying to find out if there was something at the base of Western culture that might be considered more than mere opinion, more than mere rational opinion, grounded, say, well, what I think is grounded in this dream-like process, but then grounded in biology, grounded in the body, grounded in evolutionary psychology, grounded in our entire biological past. | ||
| And so I've been trying to make a case for the evolutionary psychology of religious propositions. | ||
| That's one way of thinking about it. | ||
| So this bridge that you're talking about between these two worlds, how much of that bridge is really just the biggest existential questions that there are? | ||
| Well it is that, because one of the things I've noticed as a clinical psychologist too, when you deal with really serious issues, say Issues of good and evil. | ||
| And you might think, well, do you deal with issues of good and evil as a clinical psychologist? | ||
| And the answer to that is, in serious cases, almost inevitably, so with post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, if it's a soldier who's experienced it, or, for that matter, a civilian, it's not often so much because of what happened to them, Although, that can happen. | ||
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unidentified
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It's because of what they did. | |
| They see them doing something, say, on the battlefield, or in normal life, that they cannot believe they did. | ||
| It's so far outside of their self-concept. | ||
| It opens them up to a different dimension of reality, and I would say that dimension is the dimension of evil. | ||
| Meaning that they killed someone, or that they made a mistake, so that they're basically sort of turning it on themselves? | ||
| Well, maybe they killed someone in a particularly brutal manner and enjoyed it, for example. | ||
| You know, or maybe they went into My Lai. | ||
| You know, you remember in Vietnam where they shot up the entire village. | ||
| I mean, you don't know what you'd be like on a battlefield. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you wouldn't be like you are sitting here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You'd be a different thing. | ||
| You'd be a different creature. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And, I mean, one example is that, you know, men often rape in battle. | ||
| But sex is very seldom a public display. | ||
| Although it can be in battle. | ||
| Well, to my way of thinking, that means there's a whole different neural circuit involved under those conditions. | ||
| It's much more brutal. | ||
| And you know, you have a self-concept. | ||
| Imagine that you're like a mid-American guy, you know, a young kid, basically. | ||
| You get shipped off somewhere and do something absolutely barbaric. | ||
| How do you fit that into your conception of the world? | ||
| One of the things you do with people who have post-traumatic stress disorder is guide them to find a philosophy of good and evil. | ||
| Because otherwise they can't orient themselves again in the world. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So They have to become more sophisticated and really they have to become more metaphysically sophisticated and it's very common in my experience for an encounter with malevolence and so I would describe malevolence as the desire to hurt for the sake of the hurt right as an art really and it's often an encounter with malevolence that Breaks people I had a client at one point I'll say she was in college. | ||
| She was bullied very badly by two kids that were out to get her and the she was so unable to cope with conceptualizing what they were doing because it was one of them had asked her out and she decided no and he decided he would make her life miserable and she was a naive girl which which matters right because you're more likely to get post-traumatic stress disorder if you're naive and the malevolence that the two displayed | ||
| Tossed her into a psychotic break. | ||
| And that's not so uncommon. | ||
| So when you talk about serious things in psychotherapy, you end up speaking what's essentially a religious language. | ||
| It's a language of the war between good and evil. | ||
| It's a huge part of it. | ||
| So do you think that right now in 2017, as we stand here on I think today's May 5th, that That we're at a strange place related to both of these worlds you're talking about. | ||
| Because I sense that what's happening here is that we don't trust the news sources anymore in the way that we used to. | ||
| We don't trust the politicians in the way we used to. | ||
| We are all catering information to ourselves online, all of this stuff, so that our known world What we would describe as this world right here, that that, I think, is starting to fray a little bit. | ||
| Do you agree with that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And what do you think that means for our ability to cope with the other world? | ||
| Well, part of what makes people peaceful, because we like to think we're peaceful, but we're not. | ||
| We're neither peaceful nor anxiety free. | ||
| In fact, I would say that The normative human being is just as much terrified and murderous as calm and collected. | ||
| Everything has to be right for you to be calm and collected. | ||
| Now, the reason you and I can sit here and talk is because we share a very large number of assumptions, and so I don't really see you I see this facade for this time that you're manifesting out of politeness and because you're socialized, and you see that of me. | ||
| And that means that we're two primates who can sit here and have a discussion without It breaking down into anything resembling, say, violence. | ||
| Right, but very quickly you could whip out a knife and the whole game would change. | ||
| Oh yes, yes. | ||
| You'd see how quickly my facade would disappear. | ||
| There's a fantastic scene in a book by Dostoevsky called The Possessed, or The Devils, which is a great book, by the way. | ||
| It's one of the books that outlines where we're headed, I would say, even though it was written more than a hundred years ago. | ||
| Because it's about people who are possessed by an ideology that's very much like the social justice ideology that's emerged again There's one scene in there. | ||
| I think the character's name is Stavrogan, but he's he's breaking down because these belief systems are starting to shift around and he isn't sure how to Conceptualize himself and at one point I may have the character's name wrong. | ||
| He grabs he goes into this club and You know, it's like an elite, aristocratic club, like... | ||
| And there's an old general sitting in there, and he grabs him by the nose and pulls him out onto the street. | ||
| Which, you know, in one sense, it's not a particularly brutal thing to do, | ||
| but it's such a violation, it was such a violation of the social norm that it just caused absolute outrage. | ||
| And that's a good example. | ||
| It's like, I wouldn't have to be particularly different. | ||
| I wouldn't have to pull out a knife in order to destabilize the conversation. | ||
| There's lots of subtly strange things that you could do, or that I could do, that would put a real undercurrent into the conversation. | ||
| You can experience that sometimes if you ever happen to talk to someone who's psychopathic and you get a sense of that That's actually what what they're like there's videos online of Paul Bernardo and I would recommend that people take a look at those because They'll give you some sense of what can be bubbling underneath the surface. | ||
| Yeah, so part of the reason that belief systems Regulate people's emotions aggression and fear let's say and disgust many many motions is because We act them out in the world And as long as we're both acting out the same set of assumptions Then we can get what we want from each other Because we can predict each other's behavior, and we can cooperate easily we can even compete because We know the rules of competition, but if that shared | ||
| The structure starts to fall apart. | ||
| then I don't know what you're going to be like. | ||
| So that I think gets to what my question is. | ||
| I sense that that's starting to fall apart. | ||
| I think the basic societal norms, the way we react to each other, | ||
| it has a lot to do with social media and how we, you know, the outrage machine | ||
| and how we destroy each other and judge each other. | ||
| And I see some of this now leaking out into Antifa violence and that, you know, | ||
| that the trust in our institutions is so low that I think all of the things that we've been basing | ||
| our democracy on for the last, certainly for at least the last 50 years, | ||
| They seem to be frayed right now, and I'm wondering as you're saying this, it almost seems to me you'd only have to give it a light tap to really unfurl so much. | ||
| Well, I think a nice economic collapse like 2008 would do it. | ||
| You know, I think that's the sort of thing that happened in Nazi Germany in the 20s and the 30s. | ||
| You know, it wasn't just brutalized men back from World War I, and it wasn't just the conflict between communism and fascism. | ||
| I mean, communism was a real threat, right? | ||
| Because the Russian Revolution had just occurred. | ||
| It was also an absolute economic collapse. | ||
| I mean, we can't even really imagine that. | ||
| And it would be, in some sense, far worse today, because The machine is more complex and people are farther away from primary sources of food, for example. | ||
| So, yeah, we could get unlucky and in the present state of Chaos, dawning chaos, then things could fall apart badly. | ||
| I'm curious, when you first were writing the book, and as you said, it was over the course of many years and many hours a day, did you sort of see this leading to kind of where we are right now? | ||
| Like right now that you're kind of in this in a very intimate way, your whole life has sort of led to this and we're going to get to... | ||
| these crazy people that are protesting and all that sort of stuff. | ||
| But did you sense that if this thing didn't get corrected that we would end up right here? | ||
| Well, at that point, I didn't, it's a complicated question. | ||
| I didn't really foresee the degree to which ideas like equity, for example, equality of outcome, would come roaring back. | ||
| That's really quite shocking to me. | ||
| I still don't know what to make of that, and it's happening so rapidly that I can hardly believe it, and with so little opposition. | ||
| I did think, though, and that was from reading Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, I suppose, to some degree, that Without the proper cornerstone in place, the building can't stay up. | ||
| And that was Nietzsche's point about the death of Christianity, right? | ||
| He believed firmly that because Christianity had been criticized in some sense out of existence, that the foundations had been taken out from underneath the culture, and that it was going to Either fall or rigidify, or fall and rigidify. | ||
| I mean, you might think about those responses on the left and on the right. | ||
| And that struck me as very credible, because one of the things Nietzsche said was that what you don't understand about Western civilization is that it's a coherent metaphysics. | ||
| It's predicated on the idea of the existence of God. | ||
| And then of the, also the incarnation, let's say. | ||
| And those are the dream-like foundations of the entire building. | ||
| And if you remove those, then it becomes a matter of opinion. | ||
| And in some sense, that's what the postmodernists are claiming. | ||
| That it's just a matter of opinion. | ||
| Or they say it's a matter of power. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Because that's a huge claim on their part. | ||
| So I've had this discussion, this very point, with a couple people, some who are believers like Dennis Prager and some who are not believers like Sam Harris. | ||
| Do you think, if I go with you on the premise of what you're saying, within that system, I assume you believe that the individual themselves could be a non-believer and a perfectly productive part of society, right? | ||
| It's just that the institutions... Only for a time. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I think that, you know, it's like we're living in the corpse of a whale, you know? | ||
| There's lots to eat, but that's because there was a whale. | ||
| And once we eat the whole whale, then, well, there's not going to be much left. | ||
| People like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, they assume that the natural person is the civilized creature that you see before you in a discussion like this. | ||
| But I don't believe that. | ||
| I think that people are far crazier, and far more destructive, and far greater as well, than the typical rationalist approach. | ||
| Rationality is a surface facade. | ||
| That's all. | ||
| And the idea that people will eventually be rational, it's much more likely that they will be irrational than rational. | ||
| You could say, for example, that Catholicism, let's say, for all its irrationality, was as rational as people can get. | ||
| If you remove that level of irrationality, that's structural, say, then everything falls apart and people get so irrational, you can't believe it. | ||
| Not more rational. | ||
| You know, because Harrison and his crowd think that we were superstitious for thousands of years. | ||
| Kind of savage and superstitious. | ||
| And then, all of a sudden, the Enlightenment came along, and the Scientific Revolution, and poof! | ||
| We got rational. | ||
| And since then, things have been good. | ||
| And that's not how it looks to me at all. | ||
| I don't buy that. | ||
| I think that our rationality, as I said already, our rationality, even our science, is nested inside this larger metaphysical structure. | ||
| This is also something that Carl Jung would be an advocate of. | ||
| That there's an irrational, pragmatic, I would say evolutionarily determined ethic underneath this rationality. | ||
| And when it goes, then all that rationality goes too. | ||
| Yes, you can be a non-believer, but the funny thing about that is, too, you can't be a non-believer in your action, you see, because Harris's metaphysics is fundamentally Christian. | ||
| So he acts out a Christian metaphysics, but he says, well, I don't believe it. | ||
| It's like, well, yeah, you do, because you're acting it out. | ||
| You just say you don't believe it, but you believe it. | ||
| What do you mean he's acting it out? | ||
| Like what, for example? | ||
| Like doesn't rob banks, doesn't kill people, doesn't rape, doesn't murder, you know? | ||
| I mean, look, in crime and punishment, for example. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So you think when you don't do those things, basically, the underpinning of it, even though I think, I can't speak for Sam, and you guys have had, by the way, regardless of where we get with this, you guys have had, I think, two great conversations, one where you didn't quite get there, but one where you've come together, and I suspect you both really relish in that, right? | ||
| I mean, at the end of the day, this is someone that you respect, whether you, Oh yeah, he's, oh no, look, I mean. | ||
| I just think that's important to preface, because everyone is so at each other's throats all the time, that when I saw two people that I respect just disagreeing on things, but really trying to get there, I thought, this is good. | ||
| And yet there's a certain amount of people that want you guys to tear each other apart. | ||
| Well, there's a good case to be made for atheism. | ||
| I mean, let's make no bones about it. | ||
| I actually think it's an easier case to make than the alternative. | ||
| Because you could say in some sense there's been 300, 400 years of brilliant scientists who've been doing nothing but laying the foundation for an objective empirical atheism. | ||
| So it's an unbelievably powerful argument. | ||
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unidentified
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But... | |
| It's not going to lead to the rule of rationality. | ||
| See, I don't believe that. | ||
| I don't believe that. | ||
| Do you think anything could get you there? | ||
| Do you think that somebody could lay out a case that could eventually turn you on this the same way you would want someone like Sam to come around to what you're saying? | ||
| Do you think that that's even in the realm of possibility? | ||
| I can't see how, because it's not like I haven't thought these things through. | ||
| I mean, I am a scientist. | ||
| I understand the scientific worldview. | ||
| In fact, everything that I, I'm saying and thinking about religion is nested inside an evolutionary viewpoint, an evolutionary biology viewpoint, and an evolutionary psychology viewpoint. | ||
| So, I do believe there's a fundamental contrast between a Darwinian worldview and a Newtonian worldview, which is the worldview that I think Sam Harris and his crowd basically have. | ||
| He didn't agree with that, and it's complicated. | ||
| I guess in some sense, I'm more romantic in temperament than Sam. | ||
| And I think that his followers too. | ||
| And because of that, I can see the irrational and malevolent side of human beings. | ||
| I believe much more clearly than they can. | ||
| And I also think I have far more experience with that sort of thing. | ||
| Yeah, so do you think that, so I don't wanna get too lost here, but so we'll try to wrap it up here, right, because there's so much I wanna do with you here. | ||
| So let's say Earth is crumbling, we have two ships, we're gonna send the people that believe what you're saying here, basically, that we need this sort of religious underpinning, and then the Dawkins, Sam people, they're gonna take their 100 people, you're gonna take your 100 people, we're gonna go to two different planets and set things up the way they should be. | ||
| You know, blank slate for each. | ||
| I guess the part that I would struggle with here is to understand how their ship lands, they're rooted in science and in basic liberalism and acceptance of others and all that, how that society would not flourish from the base level if we could just reset. | ||
| Now, I think you could make a great argument that we can't do it here because there's just so much history here and all that stuff. | ||
| But if we were just resetting on another place, Why could we not do it that way and have it work? | ||
| Well, first of all, you know, there's an assumption that science and the scientific worldview, in some sense, has won. | ||
| And because it's so self-evident, let's say, because of what it can produce, that people just will accept it and move forward with it. | ||
| But I'm not sure about that either. | ||
| I mean, I think there's a strong anti-science movement afloat now. | ||
| I don't think there's any reason to assume that a scientific attitude of that sort would be stable. | ||
| I mean, it's only 300 years old. | ||
| I mean, people don't like it when I say that, because, okay, fine, you can chase it back to some degree to the ancient Greeks, you know, barely. | ||
| But really, it was Newton and Bacon and Descartes. | ||
| And that's not very long ago. | ||
| And we take it for granted, but there's anti-science movements popping up. | ||
| Well, look, the whole debate over biology, to some degree, is profoundly an anti-science movement. | ||
| And not unconsciously so, consciously so. | ||
| Very consciously so. | ||
| Intentionally so. | ||
| So I don't think that there's any reason to assume something like that would be stable. | ||
| There's no evidence that it's stable, let's say. | ||
| Whereas there is evidence for the stability of cultures that were non-scientific for thousands of years, millions of years for that matter, at least hundreds of thousands of years. | ||
| There was a lot of war and death involved in those cultures too, but that's sort of... Yes, definitely. | ||
| But I guess that would be your argument, is that this is just the nature of this battle between these two worlds that we live in. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, the other thing that often happens with Dawkins and Harrison and their crew is that they attribute war and conflict to religious motivations. | ||
| You know, and I find that quite interesting because, first of all, chimpanzees go to war. | ||
| So, you know, we could just lay that right on the table and say, well, so much for the religious theory. | ||
| They're territorial. | ||
| We're territorial. | ||
| You could consider religious sentiment as an aspect of territoriality, but the fundamental motivation for the battle is territorial. | ||
| And that's grounded in, like, you can see that in animals, always. | ||
| That was only discovered, you know, the chimps went to war in about mid-70s, and Goodall suppressed it for quite a while, because she thought maybe she had warped the chimpanzees by provisioning them, and so that they were manifesting abnormal behavior. | ||
| But they were studied for quite a while, and they do do raiding. | ||
| And they'll wipe out another colony. | ||
| No problem. | ||
| And brutally. | ||
| They seem to have absolutely no inhibitions on their aggression whatsoever. | ||
| They'll tear them into pieces. | ||
| And chimpanzees are about six times as strong as an adult male. | ||
| They're super strong. | ||
| And so, when they let loose, they're vicious with no control. | ||
| And so, unless you're willing to attribute religious sentiment to the chimpanzees, Which I think you could, to some degree, by the way. | ||
| How can we make that jump for a chimpanzee? | ||
| Well, because the precursors to religious belief are in place. | ||
| So, for example, animals organize themselves into a hierarchy. | ||
| You could call it a dominance hierarchy, but it's not exactly the right way to conceptualize it, because dominance sounds like power, right? | ||
| And that's sort of the social justice warrior postmodernist claim, that all hierarchies are based on power. | ||
| But Frans de Waal, who's a... | ||
| Dutch Anthropologist who studied chimps for a long time has noted | ||
| that the brutal chimp Dictatorship tends to be unstable and end in a very violent | ||
| mean manner well | ||
| so if you're brutal chimp leader and you're always Tormenting everyone and you don't do any reciprocal | ||
| grooming and you don't have any friends then one day Two chimps who are nicely bonded together three-quarters | ||
| your size Wait and ambush you and tear you into pieces | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And so, one of the things de Waal has noted is that the stable chimpanzee troops tend to have a leader that's quite pro-social. | ||
| A lot of friends, a lot of social bonds, a lot of mutual grooming. | ||
| And so, you can see even there, imagine that Imagine that there are sets of hierarchies among chimpanzees, and there's different principles of leadership at the top. | ||
| Then you could imagine a competition across time. | ||
| Which principle of leadership is going to produce the most stable and functional chimpanzee hierarchy? | ||
| Well, that is exactly what does happen. | ||
| And so, there's some shape that the top of the hierarchy starts to take, and you could think about that as the beginnings of an ideal. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And then, it's even more complicated than that, because let's say, you get a stable hierarchy set up, and then, this is what happens in human beings, it doesn't happen in chimps. | ||
| Or, it does, but only to a limited degree. | ||
| You get a stable hierarchy set up, and then, there's some pattern of behavior that emerges that reliably moves men to the top of that. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| They leave more offspring. | ||
| So what happens is that the male dominance hierarchy, the male hierarchy, forget about dominance, the male hierarchy becomes a selection mechanism. | ||
| It promotes men to the upper ranks, and then the women peel off the top, because we know that human females do that, chimpanzee females don't, they're promiscuous maters. | ||
| The dominant males are more likely to mate with the females, but that's because they chase the subordinates away. | ||
| It's not because the females are choosy. | ||
| So the reason I'm telling you this, it's really important, because Imagine that there's a reliable pattern of behavior that will move you up a male hierarchy across time. | ||
| What that means is that men over time have become biologically adapted to that pattern. | ||
| The hierarchy is there. | ||
| It's stable. | ||
| It exists across millions of years. | ||
| And so it acts as a selection mechanism by promoting men. | ||
| And so the men who have the genes that are most likely to get them promoted Put those genes forward and so we get more like the group | ||
| ideal as we progress through time both Biologically and culturally and with then we also start to | ||
| articulate that group ideal And that's partly what a religion does when it's coming up | ||
| with the idea of an ideal so I was listing some of the | ||
| I've been wrestling with this idea because I'm going to give some biblical lectures starting in on May 16th | ||
| And so I've been starting to think about conceptualizations of God for example | ||
| One of the things that's very interesting about the Old Testament is that there's a distinction made between countries that rule by the ruler, who's God, and countries that are ruled by God, who's not the ruler. | ||
| Okay, so strip it for a minute of its religious language, and imagine this instead. | ||
| Imagine that what we consider God is the abstraction of the ideal by which people have to orient themselves to produce a functional society. | ||
| It's an abstraction, right? | ||
| So it's just sort of the basic underlying truth of how we are able to function as a group of people. | ||
| Yes, properly. | ||
| And you can't identify it with any one person, because when you identify it with a person, then the system gets corrupted, because the person gets inflated, let's say. | ||
| This would be like the Pharaoh, basically. | ||
| Yes, precisely like that. | ||
| That's the canonical story in the Old Testament. | ||
| The Pharaoh is the earthly ruler who demands everything that you should provide to God. | ||
| What's God? | ||
| Well, we can speak about it from an evolutionary psychology perspective. | ||
| God is the idea of the abstract ideal. | ||
| And you separate it out from the actual ruler. | ||
| Just like in our society, the idea of sovereignty is abstracted from the president. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The president comes and goes. | ||
| The sovereignty of the president remains. | ||
| The sovereignty of the president is a very abstract idea. | ||
| Because it's disembodied. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's disembodied. | ||
| Now, how... We were chimps, for God's sake! | ||
| How long do you think it took us to figure out how to disembody the idea of sovereignty from the individual? | ||
| Man, it was like... Well... It was... It was maybe up until a... Maybe it took us till 150,000 years ago to start... to start formulating that. | ||
| You know, in some articulated way, in some abstract way. | ||
| I think we could recognize it before then. | ||
| And the way you recognize it is through admiration. | ||
| If you meet someone that you admire, they're someone you want to imitate. | ||
| And what it is, imagine this pattern that will move you up the hierarchy. | ||
| And then you see people who manifest different elements of it. | ||
| And you see someone who manifests an element that you don't have, and something in you responds to that with admiration. | ||
| It's unconscious, right? | ||
| Because it pulls you towards them. | ||
| It's not voluntary. | ||
| You see that really with kids a lot, when they hero worship someone and start to imitate them. | ||
| But the same thing happens throughout culture. | ||
| You could probably make an interesting argument related to Trump with this, because it was like some people, I think subconsciously, although some are consciously, saw him and they said, wow, he says whatever he wants. | ||
| And they love that. | ||
| And then you could also argue the reverse. | ||
| Some people saw him saying whatever he wants and they thought, this is the end of civilization. | ||
| This is some monster for civilization. | ||
| So that does sort of also go to, I guess, self-deception and how we all are viewing things differently constantly all the time. | ||
| Well, there's a bunch of ways that you can bias your information intake, let's say. | ||
| Now what should happen is, roughly speaking, I guess, is that You have a field of information, let's say it's behavioral information, so it's information that would be relevant to how you conduct yourself, which isn't the same as factual information, which is another mistake that I think Harris makes. | ||
| What you want is an unbiased sample of that. | ||
| You can't understand all of it because it's too complex. | ||
| Wait, wait, let's just back up for a second, just to be clear. | ||
| So I think everyone would understand what factual information is. | ||
| What's the other part then? | ||
| Give me an example of the other part. | ||
| The other part is what makes you admire someone. | ||
| So it's just the innate feeling, sort of? | ||
| Well, it's what you get when you go to a movie, say, that's an animated movie. | ||
| We talked about that a little bit with Pinocchio, for example, is that what's being presented there are descriptions of patterns of behavior. | ||
| They're fact-like, but the reason that they're different than facts is because you can immediately act them out. | ||
| You can't act out a fact. | ||
| So imagine that you're standing in front of a field. | ||
| If you adopted Harris's point of view, as far as I can tell, the field would tell you how to walk through it. | ||
| But it doesn't. | ||
| It offers you an infinite number of ways to walk through it. | ||
| And then, how you walk through it depends on your value system. | ||
| It depends on what you want. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| That's where values enter in. | ||
| You're gonna walk through the field towards your goal. | ||
| And your goal is something you value. | ||
| And that's built right into our perception. | ||
| You can't even look at the world without a goal. | ||
| Because there's too much of the world. | ||
| And if you don't have a goal, then you don't know what to look at. | ||
| It'll just be chaotic. | ||
|
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Or meaningless. | |
| Either one of those two. | ||
|
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Overwhelming or meaningless. | |
| And so the value system is built into the perceptions. | ||
| Now, that brings us back to the bias issues, that when you look at a field of behavioral information, let's say, or even factual information for that matter, your temperament is going to screen a lot of it out for you. | ||
| And that's good, because otherwise you'd be overwhelmed. | ||
| But let's say you're a person who's not creative, and that generally tends to make people more conservative. | ||
| Anything that has to do with aesthetics, generally speaking, isn't going to glimmer for you, right? | ||
| It's not going to attract your interest. | ||
| Now, if you're an extrovert, then social things will attract your interest. | ||
| And if you're an agreeable person, then things about relationships will attract your interest. | ||
| If you're disagreeable, it's more likely to be about machines and things. | ||
| But that's all happening before you think. | ||
| Now, there's feedback loops, of course, but it happens before you think. | ||
| You're carving out a niche in the world, and there's lots of different ways you can be in the world. | ||
| So that's one form of bias. | ||
| And you see this in the realm of politics, because we know, for example, that you can predict people's political beliefs if you know their temperament, and quite well. | ||
| So... | ||
| If people are high in trait openness, which is creativity, creativity and interest in abstract ideas, roughly speaking, and low in conscientiousness, especially orderliness, you're going to be a liberal. | ||
| You're going to lean to the left. | ||
| You're going to be a liberal, but the politically correct types are different. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And if you're low in openness and high in conscientiousness, especially orderliness, you're going to be a conservative. | ||
| And the relationship is actually quite tight. | ||
| If you just look at how people vote, the relationship isn't that powerful. | ||
| But if you do a detailed analysis of their beliefs, say conservative versus liberal, the amount of political belief that temperament accounts for goes way up. | ||
| Do you think people can change those factors about them? | ||
| So if you're any of those personality types that you laid out and you really saw it, you know, someone's listening to you right this second at home and goes, yeah, I'm really, I'm one of these, this fits me, but I really do wanna change my thinking. | ||
| I wanna be a little more open or a little more, you know, accessible to the human interaction or care more about art or just any of these. | ||
| We can take it to as little degree as you want. | ||
| Do you think people can really fundamentally alter that in adulthood? | ||
| You can practice. | ||
| So, the thing is, your personality isn't just this abstract thing you carry around with you, that's like part of an ethereal spirit, you know, that you can just flip like that. | ||
| It's built into your body. | ||
| So, for example, if you're an orderly person, and say, that's been there since you were a tiny person. | ||
| You've built micro-habits of orderliness into your world and into your body. | ||
| Because as you practice something, you build neural circuits that underpin that ability. | ||
| And so, by the time you're 30 and you're an orderly person, you've got 30 years of being an orderly person. | ||
| It's like... Now, you might want to get the orderly person to relax a little bit, right? | ||
| Because they're orderly. | ||
| They want everything where it should be. | ||
| They don't want the concepts touching. | ||
| They want them separate. | ||
| Or you take a disorderly person, you want them to be orderly. | ||
| Well, you have to train them, in some sense, like you'd train a two-year-old. | ||
| You know, it's like, well, you have to clean up your room. | ||
| Well, I don't know how to do that. | ||
| Well, then you decompose it even further. | ||
| Maybe... I'm speaking as a behavior therapist. | ||
|
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You're a mess. | |
| Let's start by ordering your world a little bit. | ||
| Try making your bed every day for a week. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's what you have to do this week. | ||
| And, you know, you think, well, anybody could do that. | ||
| It's like, no, they can't. | ||
| I had a client at one point. | ||
| He was very disorderly. | ||
| He had a dream. | ||
| He just had a child. | ||
| And he dreamt that a lightning bolt came into the room and was bouncing around the room. | ||
| And we talked over that a bit. | ||
| And it turned out that he was afraid of the potential of the child. | ||
| He was afraid he would be a bad... And that's what the ball of lightning essentially represented. | ||
| This immense potential that the child represented. | ||
| It was an archetypal dream. | ||
| And he was afraid that he wouldn't be a good father. | ||
| And he had reason to be afraid that he wouldn't be a good father. | ||
| He's a very disorderly person. | ||
| And also working against himself. | ||
| We agreed that he would vacuum, I believe it was, his bedroom twice for the week. | ||
| And he came back the first week and he said that he put the vacuum cleaner, it was one of those uprights, in his doorway, you know, so it was leaning against the door jamb, and he stepped over it all week to get back and forth into his room. | ||
| And never vacuumed. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Wow! | ||
| No kidding! | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Absolutely! | ||
| And so, you can change your personality, but you have to understand that it's, like I said, it's not an ethereal spirit. | ||
| If you want to be more open, you could start reading more books, but that's hard, and you probably won't do it. | ||
| You could start listening to a broader variety of music, you could expose yourself to art museums, but you also don't have the knack for it, right? | ||
| So it doesn't glimmer for you. | ||
| And if you're an introvert, you can learn extroverted skills, but the probability that's going to make you extroverted is very low. | ||
| You're still going to be tired out when you interact with people too much, whereas an extrovert is energized by social interaction. | ||
| Does it depress you in a certain way that we don't focus on this stuff enough? | ||
| Just the basics of what makes us real, what makes our desire to interact with another person and be real and really try to get to some truth. | ||
| We spend almost no time on that. | ||
| I think that's why people are responding to you. | ||
| For the bulk of it, I see people that really like you and admire you. | ||
| Then I see this certain group of, let's say, intolerant people that don't. | ||
| We'll get to them in just a sec. | ||
| But does that depress you or does that inspire you, just that concept? | ||
| Well, a lot of what I'm talking about right now is pretty new. | ||
| You know, psychologists have only settled on a reasonably stable personality model in the last 40 years. | ||
| And started to really flesh it out, I would say, since about 1995, something like that. | ||
| So it's pretty new. | ||
| And the work relating personality to political belief is even newer than that, and we haven't begun to grapple with its full implications, I wouldn't say, because we tend to think, and this would be part of the Enlightenment rationality, is that you look dispassionately at the set of facts. | ||
| You abstract out a rational conclusion from that and you believe it. | ||
| And the thing is that isn't how it works. | ||
| Now it's kind of how it works, but we'll get to that. | ||
| What happens instead is you look at a field of facts that's so broad you can't see the edges. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you filter that a priori with your temperaments. | ||
| So some things, it's like, imagine there's a bright light, and then there's a black curtain in front of it, and there's holes in the curtain, and light shines through. | ||
| Well, depending on who you are, those holes are going to be in a different place. | ||
| So the thing is, is that the facts that present themselves to you will look different than the facts that present themselves to someone else. | ||
| Now, you can overcome that to some degree. | ||
| That's why free speech is so important as far as I'm concerned, because you're going to look at the world your way, honestly, and it can be different than mine, even if I look at it honestly. | ||
| But then we can talk, and I can listen to you, and I can alter my preconceptions, to some degree, by that exchange of ideas. | ||
| It's hard, because... | ||
| You unfold the idea and you blast it to me and then I have to unfold it into action | ||
| and into the restructuring of my perceptions. | ||
| It's very, very complicated. | ||
| If we have a profound conversation, I'm allowing little parts of me to die | ||
| and new parts to grow on a constant basis. | ||
| So it's effortful, but it's one of the mechanisms that we've evolved | ||
| to overcome the limitations of the individual human being. | ||
| We filter information. | ||
| We're lazy in our habits. | ||
| We're not good at thinking, which is an internal argument, let's say. | ||
| Very few people can do that. | ||
| They don't think... What they do is... Ideas appear to them and they believe them. | ||
| That's what happens. | ||
| Thinking is different thinking is saying okay. Well, here's a set of ideas and here's another set of ideas | ||
| All right, so let's put them in combat and see what emerges. | ||
| Well, that's very very hard often You have to do that by writing. Yeah, and we need that more | ||
| than anything else. It's why as I'm sitting here, I'm trying | ||
| It's actually I think it comes innately to me But I'm trying to be as open as I can to your ideas hearing | ||
| what I think makes Make sense trying to respond with questions that make sense | ||
| and understand your line of thinking and let you lay out Examples that make sense so that my audience that maybe | ||
| doesn't follow all of it can get all those pieces But that's the dance we're not doing very well as a society right now. | ||
| Well, see, the postmodernists believe that hierarchy is only based on power. | ||
| And power is only based on exploitation. | ||
|
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So this is the Marxists, this is... This is specifically the postmodernists. | |
| Like, they're nested in Marxism, and the reason for that is postmodernism doesn't tell you what to do. | ||
| And you have to know what to do, even if you're a postmodernist. | ||
| You can't just do nothing. | ||
| You have to act something out, or you just sit there and die, you know? | ||
| Because inaction is not good for people. | ||
| So you have to, there has to be an ethic, but postmodernists are basically aimed at destroying any ethic, especially any transcendent ethic that would unite people. | ||
| Okay, wait, I like that. | ||
| So they basically blew up the archetype because they're only focused on the power principle, right? | ||
| Yes, yes, yes, that's part of it. | ||
| Power and oppression, you see. | ||
| So, for someone like Derrida, the only reason you have a category system, roughly speaking, is to exclude some things from it for your purposes. | ||
| There's truth in that, because every category excludes. | ||
| But the reason it's not true is because there's actually such a thing, A, as the real world, and B, as competence. | ||
| And so, well, and not just competence, I should add another thing to that. | ||
| There's competence, both socially and naturalistically. | ||
| So, one of the postmodernist claims, this is really important to understand, because they got something right. | ||
| They got the same thing right that artificial intelligence researchers ran into in the 1960s when they were trying to make robots. | ||
| So what they first assumed was that there's the world, man. | ||
| It's just sitting there. | ||
| All you have to do is look at the thing and you see it. | ||
| It's simple. | ||
| What's hard is to figure out how to maneuver in the world. | ||
| So they started building robots that... they tried to start building robots that could see and act in the world. | ||
| And then they found out that seeing was way harder than anybody had ever possibly imagined. | ||
| That you probably even need a body to see. | ||
| Which Rodney Brooks figured that out, who was an MIT roboticist. | ||
| He invented the Roomba, by the way. | ||
| Yeah, so meaning that just putting a set of optic whatever in the robot, that in and of itself is not enough to see in the authentic way. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| Well, because partly what you're doing really when you're seeing is mapping the world onto your action. | ||
| In fact, there are connections from your eyes that go directly to your motor cortex. | ||
| They bypass your conscious vision. | ||
| So for example, when you look at that cup, Your eyes make your hands prepare to do this, because you say, well, that's an empirical object. | ||
| It's a cup. | ||
| But that isn't what your brain thinks. | ||
| Your brain thinks, no, that's a thing to drink from, right? | ||
| So that's its fundamental... See, here's another example of that. | ||
| It's kind of strange. | ||
| Why are a beanbag and a stump both chairs? | ||
| They share no objective features in common, except size. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, the answer is because you can sit on them. | ||
| And so a lot of our categories are of that sort. | ||
| They're not empirical categories, they're functional categories. | ||
| And so, when you look at the world, if you don't have a body, you can't segregate it into functional categories. | ||
| Okay, so that was called, partly, that was called the frame problem. | ||
| Too many things to look at. | ||
| How do you choose? | ||
| No one knows. | ||
| The answer to that is you evolve in a Darwinian sense over... | ||
| It's billions of years, in a trial and error fashion, figuring out how to map this exceptionally complex reality onto a body that can survive and propagate. | ||
| That's truly the answer. | ||
| So that basically evolution led us to the point where, with no thinking involved in any way, I can, out of the corner of my mind, see this, know what it is, know that there's some liquid in there, that I'm gonna drink it, I will feel satiated. | ||
| And that really is just the Darwinian evolution. | ||
| Yes, so there's a famous experiment called the visual cliff. | ||
| So, you do it with babies, and so you take a surface here and a surface here, about say this high, and you put a pane of glass over the hole in the middle. | ||
| Then you see if you can get the baby to crawl across the visual cliff. | ||
| Well, they won't do it, because they don't see the floor and a piece of glass, they see a falling off place. | ||
| So, and they directly see the falling-off place. | ||
| They don't see the whole and think, I'm going to fall, therefore I shouldn't. | ||
| They see it as a falling-off place. | ||
| Their body sees it, which is, and then it produces an emotion. | ||
| Eyes map right onto the emotion and stop the child. | ||
| We do that with snakes, too, and with fire and various, well, with sexual stimuli. | ||
| You know, you don't need thought. | ||
| The eyes map, and they map right onto your body. | ||
| I'm gonna give you some more water right now, because I can sense that perhaps you're thirsty, and I know that I was closer... Thank you. | ||
| ...to this, and you were closer to your cup. | ||
| Yeah, well, we take all that for granted. | ||
| So the AI people came up against this problem. | ||
| It's almost impossible to see the world, because it's too complex. | ||
| Well, the postmodernists, to the degree that they have something credible to say, came across the same problem. | ||
| In textual analysis, they thought, Well, there's an endless number of ways to interpret a Shakespearean play. | ||
| And that's true! | ||
| There's a near infinite number of ways you can interpret it. | ||
| So then they said, well, there's no canonical interpretation, there's no correct interpretation. | ||
| So then, in some sense, what are we doing? | ||
| Well, then the answer came, which is the wrong answer. | ||
| Well, we're basically playing power games to establish ourselves in the world, and... | ||
| And all of our interpretations are only in service of that. | ||
| Okay, so, why is that wrong? | ||
| Well, first of all, we aren't only playing power games. | ||
| So, that's where the Marxism creeps in, because, you know, Marx thought economics drove everything. | ||
| And the post-modernist power is just slight-of-hand economics. | ||
| Okay, so, that isn't all that drives us. | ||
| It's basically the same thing. | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| New language, same thing. | ||
| Allowed them to play the same game after the economics game became too self-evidently corrupt. | ||
| So, they said, well, we're just playing this power game. | ||
| But the thing is, that's not right. | ||
| And it's also the interpretations aren't arbitrary. | ||
| So, you say, well, there's an infinite number of ways to interpret this room. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But there's a finite number of ways that will enable you to make your desires manifest in this room. | ||
| A very finite number of ways. | ||
| And those desires are constrained biologically to begin with. | ||
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So, you're a limited perceiver. | |
| You come in here, With the capacity to turn the world into a functional entity built into you. | ||
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So, and then there's another. | |
| So that's a big constraint, man. | ||
| So, if you're analyzing Macbeth, you might say, well, what could you say about Macbeth? | ||
| You could never stop talking about Macbeth. | ||
| What do you want to do as a reader? | ||
| You want to extract out something from it that enables you to behave in a way that gives you a better grip on the world. | ||
| So you're more skillful in dealing with the world. | ||
| But more than that, you have to be more skillful in a way that other people also allow, or even better, support and admire. | ||
| So you're constrained by the world. | ||
| Like, if I want that water, I have to go like this. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So, I can't wish it here. | ||
| I can't use the other side of my hand. | ||
|
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This is it. | |
| This is the interpretation that would bring me water. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, I can't grab your water and swill it down either, because, I mean, I could, but that would be rude. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right, so, and, you know, norms around food sharing, for example, are very precise. | ||
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Right. | |
| We could also dive into an interesting discussion about free will here, but we'll put that aside. | ||
| Yeah, well, we can talk about that, too. | ||
| So I have to come up with an interpretation of the world that functions for me. | ||
| It has to function for me in a way that doesn't interfere with my function tomorrow, or next week, or next year. | ||
| So that's a tough one, man! | ||
| And then it has to function so that other people will cooperate and compete with me in a peaceful way around those interpretations, or otherwise it's not going to be good for me. | ||
| So, there is a very large number of potential interpretations, but what the postmodernists won't grapple with is that that doesn't mean the sphere of coherent interpretations is infinite. | ||
| It isn't! | ||
| It's because we're embodied, because we're social, because there's a world around us. | ||
| Those limit what we can do. | ||
| So really, in a certain way, they're trying to destroy the very structure that has enabled us to function in society, right? | ||
| I mean, would that be the end argument here? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| What they're doing is, I mean, they're taking a hatchet, basically, to the root of the tree that humanity has built, because they're trying to basically destroy the underpinnings of all of this. | ||
| Well, they're actually doing that Consciously to some degree like it's there in Derrida now. | ||
| You might say well if you took 15 social justice warriors Could you really say that any of them are consciously trying to undermine Western civilization, and I would say no 90% of the time they're regular people. | ||
| I completely agree. | ||
| They have good intentions, I think. | ||
| Do you grant them that? | ||
| That the average person that's in this has good intentions? | ||
| No, but I don't grant that to anyone. | ||
| So it's not that I would single them out necessarily. | ||
| It's very hard to have good intentions. | ||
| People say they have good intentions, but The world is a harsh place. | ||
| It is a very harsh place. | ||
| And it's very difficult for people not to be resentful and bitter. | ||
| And often for good reason. | ||
| Like, seriously good reason. | ||
| You know, they had a catastrophic childhood. | ||
| You know, they've got two or three ill relatives. | ||
| Their unemployment situation is dismal. | ||
| They have a drug and alcohol problem. | ||
| It's like things are rough. | ||
| Well, so they're bitter about that, and they're resentful, and they're hurt. | ||
| And they doubt the utility of existence. | ||
| And to the degree that all of those things are true, then they don't have good intentions. | ||
| Because you can't, under those circumstances. | ||
| You're driven by rage, and often the desire for vengeance. | ||
| Yeah, I actually like the way you split that because I usually say that they that most of them have good intentions But that does add a little subtext to it that that is an important piece of yeah, well, there's good good intentions are there Yeah, people spread out on across the whole spectrum, you know I mean and certainly the case that normal people in their burdened lives do heroic things regularly and They go to work in the morning, you know, and they do their difficult or dull job, and they do it credibly, and they do it mostly honestly. | ||
| And so hooray, you know, so I'm not doubting the good side of people, but I'm always aware of the other side. | ||
| And I think you have far more respect for people if you know about the other side. | ||
| Because if you're just good, well, you know, you're just running on good. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| A naive person is sort of like that. | ||
| But someone who's been fully stretched out in some sense, you know. | ||
| So you meet someone who you know is a monster, but controls usually himself, but sometimes herself. | ||
| You have a lot more respect for that person. | ||
| They've got that danger lurking right underneath the surface. | ||
| And whenever you meet someone like that, you know it. | ||
| You don't mess with them. | ||
| You know it. | ||
| They broadcast it. | ||
| And so, there are people for whom that capacity for violence is very close to the surface. | ||
| Now often, especially if they're civilized, they really keep that under control, and they also channel it into authority, right? | ||
| So... But it's much better to know it's there, because you have more respect for yourself that way too. | ||
| You're not as careless with yourself if you know that... | ||
| There's something terrible that could come out that's lurking underneath the surface. | ||
| You're also granting them the very capacity that you want within yourself. | ||
| Doesn't mean you're as equally as damaged or as intended as they are, but right? | ||
| You're looking at yourself. | ||
| You're looking at them through the same prism that you would want to look at yourself through. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think that's interesting. | ||
| Well, listen, we could do five hours here easily, and I clearly have no need for these notes, because I know that everyone wants to ask you questions. | ||
| I just want to do ten minutes on one thing, and then we're going to jump to the audience here. | ||
| So I just want to talk about the free speech thing in a sort of broader sense, because I'm sort of in on it now. | ||
| Sam Harris is obviously in on it and Joe Rogan, who you're gonna talk to in a couple of days. | ||
| And so many of us are in on this thing. | ||
| But you got thrust into it in September in a sort of very high profile way. | ||
| Now there's all these videos that people can see of you going to schools and being shouted down. | ||
| And as you said really eloquently 10 minutes or so ago, that it really all comes down to this. | ||
| This ability to exchange information and exchange ideas. | ||
| And I could not believe anything on this earth more than that that that is what we that's the only way out of any of this stuff How does this all feel for you right now? | ||
| How do you feel about being so? | ||
| Intimately your life is involved in this and I and you it's so obvious the way the passion comes through and the emotion all that But this is just sort of what you've become. | ||
| It's it's well, it's good. | ||
| It's crazy Yeah, I mean I don't know what to make of it, and I don't know what to do about it. | ||
| It's as simple as that at the moment, because my life has shifted so dramatically for a variety of reasons. | ||
| I wake up, I do what I need to do that day, and then I do the same thing the next day. | ||
| I've got some longer plans than that. | ||
| This biblical lecture series, for example, which starts on May 16th, and I'm going to do 12 lectures. | ||
| I don't know how far I'll get, but I'll get as far as I can get, because in the lectures I'm not going to be telling people what I know. | ||
| I'm going to be figuring things out, which is what I like to do when I lecture, or talk. | ||
| I don't have a pre-packaged Doctrine precisely or like their structure, but I'm trying to unfold it continually and differentiate it make it more comprehensive always that's that's my aim rather than to To maintain its current structure. | ||
| That's what I want to do with these biblical lectures, but back to your point I don't know what to make of it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Sometimes I think, this morning I thought, I woke up early in the morning and I thought, well, maybe you're just a crank, you know? | ||
| You're a university professor, you have these crazy ideas about mythology. | ||
| And believe me, in my departments, no one ever thinks about mythology. | ||
| No one ever thinks about religious phenomenology. | ||
| Like, that's just not there. | ||
| Even psychoanalysis in experimental psychology is pushing it. | ||
| You know, so that realm of ideas makes me very much an outsider in my field. | ||
| Although I have done a lot of strict empirical science, right? | ||
| So that's how I can stay in the game. | ||
| But I think, well, maybe you're just a crank, you know? | ||
| You have these crazy ideas, now you made a splash on YouTube, you've got this biased population that's rooting for you, but it's just smoke and mirrors. | ||
| And I think, well, you know... | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| But I'm by no means so certain of myself that I would claim, you know, certitude around that issue. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| Not in the least. | ||
| And the notoriety, I think, is, I suppose in some fame, It's a peculiar thing for me to deal with. | ||
| I mean, I am actually a very private person. | ||
| I don't talk about myself very much with anyone, generally speaking. | ||
| I'm interested in ideas, clearly, obviously. | ||
| And then there's the other issue, which is for months, and even still now, I do not get to make a mistake, right? | ||
| If I make a mistake while I'm speaking, or had I made a mistake in the 500 hours of video lectures that are online, the fact that I became notorious among certain crowds would have done me in. | ||
| They would have found something. | ||
| Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that, because that was where I wanted to kind of get with this, that now you have all this lifetime's worth of work, You've now hit a chord that obviously is resonating. | ||
| You have a Patreon that's very successful. | ||
| An audience member of my show can basically create, was it an Indiegogo that they did for you or a Kickstarter to help you with the grant? | ||
| Well, that was Ezra Levant and the Rebel Media people did that. | ||
| But basically they funded a lot of some of the work you're doing. | ||
| My point is, I'm not trying to make it about the money, my point is it's resonating. | ||
| The thing is resonating, but as someone that wasn't in the public eye for a long time, right, you've got all these hours worth of stuff out there. | ||
| We know that people are just sitting there waiting for, oh man, you see, Peterson said, he forgot to say one word in that sentence, and now we can pin him. | ||
| And it'll deconstruct everything else that he said. | ||
| Do you consciously have to be aware of that all the time? | ||
| Absolutely, not just consciously. | ||
| I have people who are watching what I'm doing, In a non-paranoid sense. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Sure, there's that thing too. | ||
| You know, my friends, and they watch, and then we have a talk, and they tell me what they think I did wrong. | ||
| And then I try not to do it again, you know. | ||
| So, the one thing, my father always tells me this, he says I talk too much in interviews, and that's true, and he's told me that many times. | ||
| But last time we talked, he told me that he didn't think I could do anything about it. | ||
| And I think that's probably, I don't think I've ever been able to do anything about it since I was like two. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I can tell you that being on this side of the interview, an interviewee who knows what he's saying and has things to say is, that's what makes this fun. | ||
| Well, that's good. | ||
| Every now and again, I have someone here and I feel like I'm like, I have to like pull it out of them. | ||
| But when someone just comes in and they're overflowing with passion and information and curiosity, that's, That's basically as good as it gets. | ||
| Are you feeling that we have some good allies right now? | ||
| That maybe when this whole thing happened in September, and I'm sure there'll be questions related to it in a few minutes, that you were sort of like a bounty hunter in this? | ||
| That's kind of where I'm at with all this, that I felt very kind of alone in this, that there was just a few of us, but now I see these people coming out. | ||
| And not only that, but when I go speak at universities, and I'm sure when you do as well, even though you get protested more than I do, and maybe I'm doing something wrong, That the kids are coming out and they're going, enough of this bullshit. | ||
| I see it, it's real, we have to fight it. | ||
| That we are getting some real support right now in a special way that I think even four months ago people were not showing. | ||
| Yes, well, I mean, one of the things that's kept me both reasonably secure and also reasonably Confident, let's say, that I wasn't making a terrible mistake, is the feedback that I've received from the public. | ||
| You know, I get no hate mail. | ||
| None. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| I've got maybe three since September. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yes, really. | ||
| You must be really hiding your email address well. | ||
| Yeah, you'd think so, but I mean I'm getting so many emails, I can't keep up by any stretch of the imagination, but they're all positive. | ||
| And many of them are lengthy, you know, hundreds of words, heartfelt. | ||
| And so that's amazing. And then of course, in October or so, the press in Canada came out strongly in my favor once they | ||
| looked into what I was saying. | ||
| And so that was really helpful. And all of that public pressure and the press pressure | ||
| encouraged the university, or allowed the university, let's say. | ||
| That's better. Allowed the university to back off. | ||
| Because they were getting a lot of pressure from the SJW types, you know, because they're very well organized. | ||
| And so, you know, they had a petition against me and told me I was making the campus into an unsafe space and all of | ||
|
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|
that. | |
| For those that don't know, basically, the premise of your talk was that you didn't want to use these gender pronouns | ||
| that have become so common. | ||
| so insane and I think actually oppressive to how we function as humans. | ||
| That's the crux of it, right? | ||
| And next thing you knew, you said something that I think | ||
| most people basically agree with, that's not really rooted in bigotry | ||
| or any of that kind of stuff. | ||
| But basically right after that, suddenly you were the bad guy. | ||
| After never having been the bad guy the day before. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| Well, I said that I believe that those words didn't perform the function | ||
| that the activists claimed for them, and that they were the linguistic vanguard | ||
| of the postmodern Marxists, who I detest. | ||
| And I'm not using their language. | ||
| And I detest them for multiple reasons. | ||
| One is their failure to learn from history. | ||
| The fact that true Marxist regimes, of course they would dispute that, but... | ||
| Think the evidence is clear true Marxist regimes have been staggeringly murderous and the postmodern ethos Abandons all responsibility and is unidimensional and I think it's based on both ignorance and resentment with resentment probably coming first and so and I I I understand why the ideas are unfolding, and I'm not going to be a part of that. | ||
| And I don't care, because there isn't anything that I care about more, with the possible exception of my family, than not playing that game. | ||
| Because I think it's a terrible game, and I think we're gonna pay for it in a big way. | ||
| We're already paying for it. | ||
| I think the universities, I think the humanities are done. | ||
| Yeah, it feels like it's done, and that's why when you came on my radar, and as I said, suddenly I find there are months where suddenly a zillion people will all say at once, this is the person to talk to, and that's what it was for you in September. | ||
| What I liked is that You said, I will not give an inch here. | ||
| And that's sort of become a theme with some of the guests that I've talked to about not giving this monster any more food. | ||
| That the second you give it an inch, it's not done with the inch. | ||
| Now it wants a foot. | ||
| Now it wants a meter. | ||
| Now it wants a mile. | ||
| And I thought that sort of, and I guess maybe that's why they're so against you. | ||
| Because you won't even play in their game. | ||
| Where so many of us, out of guilt or whatever else it is, wanting to be liked, who knows, we kind of play that game. | ||
| But you refuse to. | ||
| I think it's a really admirable place to be. | ||
| Yeah, well, admirable or crazy, but it doesn't matter, I guess, to some degree, because what I've been thinking about led me to those conclusions, and I didn't come by that randomly, by any stretch of the imagination. | ||
| And so, yeah, because I've been wondering what happened, right? | ||
| Because, so what, some professor makes a video, you know, at midnight, to clarify some things about an obscure Canadian piece of legislation. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| But I think and so I've been thinking why it exploded and I think that I took a general issue that's Somewhat unspoken. | ||
| Somewhat spoken, but a lot unspoken. | ||
| And I made it very concrete. | ||
| And I think in order to make something real, that's what you do all the time. | ||
| You take the abstract and you make it concrete. | ||
| You make it real in your actions. | ||
| And then that pushes it to the point in some sense of confrontation, of reality. | ||
| It's like, you have your position, I have mine. | ||
| I'm willing to play out my position to the end. | ||
| That's a test of belief, I suppose, or at least of conviction. | ||
| Then the question is, are your convictions founded on anything of value? | ||
| And I think that part of the reason, too, that this hasn't just gone away, It's because people came to my YouTube channel because of the political material, but that isn't why they stayed. | ||
| They stayed to watch the psychological material, which was an explanation of why, a very long explanation of why, of the thinking underneath my particular stance. | ||
| And that's very... | ||
| See, you know, you talked about going to these crowds and seeing the positive response you're getting from young people. | ||
| See, what I see that's so cool and really unbelievable in some sense is, first of all, my audiences are almost all men, 90% probably, live. | ||
| And that's interesting, because the men are bailing out of the humanities like mad, right? | ||
| So they're female-dominated, or increasingly female-dominated, to a great degree. | ||
| All I talk to them about, essentially, is Speaking the truth and adopting responsibility. | ||
| Those are hard things to ask of people, right? | ||
| That's not some picnic in the park, man. | ||
| That's tough. | ||
| And it's so interesting to see the young guys, and not so young, too. | ||
| Their eyes light up, you know? | ||
| It's so interesting. | ||
| Well, it's always interesting to see people's eyes light up. | ||
| It's a little flash of insight, you know? | ||
| And it's helped me work out this proposition that The meaning in your life is proportional to the responsibility that you take. | ||
| And that's interesting, because that's way different than, well, here's some more rights, man. | ||
| That'll help you out. | ||
| It's like, no, don't. | ||
| No, that's powerful stuff. | ||
| That's take something in your life and believe in it and build around that. | ||
| Steak your life on it. | ||
| Yeah, that's a beautiful thing. | ||
| All right, we could do this for hours and hours. | ||
| We're gonna take a two-minute break. | ||
| I'll refill your water again, and then we're gonna do a live Q&A. | ||
| How does that sound? | ||
| Sounds good. | ||
|
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All right, guys, we'll be back in two minutes. | |
| We are gonna do a live Q&A with Dr. Jordan Peterson. | ||
| We just did a little over an hour together. | ||
| We could've done, we could've tripled a Rogan show right there. | ||
| We could've done 14 hours, but we did about an hour there, but I wanted to do about an hour of Q&A for you guys. | ||
| Dr. Peterson has been... | ||
| Kind enough to stick around, he's got about an hour. | ||
| So let's just get right to it. | ||
| And we've already got a zillion questions. | ||
| So we're doing this on Super Chat on YouTube because that cleans up a little bit of the chat mess over there. | ||
| And we're giving preferential treatment to anyone that is on Patreon, whatever level you are supporting us at. | ||
| And we've already got a ton of great questions. | ||
| Hi Dave and Dr. Peterson, I just wanted to say thanks to both of you for keeping up the fight of freedom of speech and believing that we all have a right to speak. | ||
| Also happy Cinco de Drinco, I mean Cinco de Mayo, that's not a question, but will you be having margaritas later? | ||
| No. | ||
| Do you not drink? | ||
| No. | ||
| You don't drink? | ||
| Okay, well I'll have... Not recently. | ||
| I'll have two for you, alright. | ||
| Alright, that's a good idea. | ||
| Okay, so here we go. | ||
| Do you think that a more traditionalist approach to religion can be detrimental to the progression of science? | ||
| So that's interesting, because you're saying that religion is sort of a necessary underpinning of this, but can it also take away from just the pure scientific method? | ||
| It's not self-evident that the relationship between science and religion, historically, was as unidimensional as it's generally portrayed. | ||
| I mean, science did emerge in the midst of a Christian society. | ||
| And so, the pressure from the religious side was not sufficient to stop it from occurring. | ||
| I mean, it was Nietzsche's idea that ...without Christianity and its emphasis on truth at all costs, that science would have never come about. | ||
| And so, Nietzsche's notion, in some sense, was that Christianity had promoted the idea of truth as the embodiment of Logos, as the embodiment of God in the world, so to speak. | ||
| And then that sense of truthfulness got so hyperdeveloped that it then branched out into science, but also went under the metaphysical foundations of the church itself and started to take it apart. | ||
| But... So... | ||
| Science has a tremendous emphasis on truth. | ||
| There's a belief that truth is redeeming, even among scientists, because otherwise why do it? | ||
| That's the metaphysics of science. | ||
| Why are we doing science? | ||
| Well, this is why Jung related science to alchemy. | ||
| The alchemists wanted to produce a substance that would transmute metal into gold, that would give everyone eternal life, and that would ensure health. | ||
| Well, that is what we're doing as scientists, right? | ||
| There's a dream. | ||
| You see how we're locked in a dream? | ||
| The dream is that the truthful empirical analysis of the material world will further our movement to paradise. | ||
| That's the dream. | ||
| Otherwise, why do it? | ||
| Well, so then, without that underlying dream, then why do it? | ||
| Yeah, and this is basically the Pinocchio story that you laid out so well last time we spoke. | ||
| All right, here's another one for Super Chat. | ||
| What do you think of the joke of identifying as an attack helicopter and why the left cannot see their own ridiculousness even faced with such strong sarcasm? | ||
| They claim to have sensitive feelings, but they seem to have lost the sense of shame. | ||
| I think there's a lot there. | ||
| Well, I think that that is too blunt a piece of sarcasm, I think, because it indicates such a distance from the problem that it's easy just to... | ||
| write it off, especially after it's been seen repeated times. | ||
| Okay, so remove the attack helicopter because it's a blunt trauma to the idea. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think it polarized. | ||
| Like, I'm not complaining about it. | ||
| I get the point. | ||
| You know, it's satire, fine, good. | ||
| But as a gesture to initiate. | ||
| It's not going to get you. | ||
| Realization, it's not going to work. | ||
| It's not enough to work. | ||
| Clearly it's not enough to work. | ||
| But, you know, more power to satire as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| What do you think about that idea that the left has lost the idea of shame? | ||
| I think it's more lost the idea of humor. | ||
| He's just dying a slow death. | ||
| Well, that's really a bad thing, because comedians are like artists. | ||
| They tell the truth. | ||
| Realists. | ||
| I've been saying lately, when I'm doing these speaking gigs, I'm doing a lot more stand-up again. | ||
| Not even that I wanted to, but it's like they're dragging me back in, because it's become so humorless. | ||
| All right, let's jump over to, oh, this is a great one on Patreon. | ||
| As a teacher, am I complicit in regressive leftist dogma if I'm too scared to risk social suicide? | ||
| This is a great question. | ||
| Well, because it transcends everything, right? | ||
| I get this from people that, someone will say I'm a janitor and I don't wanna say what I think at work. | ||
| It's not just teachers and professors and academics. | ||
| It's everybody. | ||
| Their silence, I think, is now becoming a problem, which I'm glad to hear, but what do you think? | ||
| Well, Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, said something like, the worst thing that a human being can do, can have happen to them, is to sacrifice their God-given soul for human dogma. | ||
| And so yeah, yeah, I mean and he had a right to say that, you know, and so I would say That's something to have a discussion with yourself about you know, you're if you you're gonna come to hate going to work You're gonna come to hate your colleagues. | ||
| You're gonna Turn your soul into more of a worm than it already is because by not allowing Your impetus towards truth to manifest itself, then you train yourself to be hidden and deceitful. | ||
| I mean, look, in the Soviet Union, people lied about everything all the time to everyone, including their family members. | ||
| Right, so how does that start? | ||
| People don't go from telling the truth to being dishonest in one leap. | ||
| It's sins of omission that begins it. | ||
| And the sin of omission is, well, I really should say something, but I won't. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| It's like you're that much weaker then, and they're that much stronger. | ||
| And so what that means is the next time you're called forth to speak, you'll be 95% as likely to, and then it'll be 90% as likely to. | ||
| And by the time you make a thousand decisions like that, no matter what happens, you won't say anything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you're done. | ||
| Yeah, and I always say to these kids when they say, well, how can I get them up? | ||
| I just created a YouTube channel. | ||
| I'm some guy that created a YouTube channel. | ||
| You're some guy that put, you know, that had an academic background, but you put your beliefs into action and we just need more people that'll stand up and say what they believe. | ||
| This is a good one on Super Chat. | ||
| What do you believe, what belief or thought is the most dangerous to Homo sapiens survival as a species? | ||
| Existence is corrupt and therefore should be eradicated. | ||
| That's the doctrine of Goethe's Mephistopheles in Faust. | ||
| So the devil looks at the world and says, like Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, he says, there's too much suffering. | ||
| It's a parody. | ||
| It's a catastrophe. | ||
| It's not worth it. | ||
| We should just end it. | ||
| That's the most dangerous thought, partly because you can make a very strong case for it. | ||
| Is there an end to this regressivism and the Antifa movement, or will they continue to destroy free speech and free thought with no boundaries? | ||
| I suspect you wouldn't do what you do if you thought it was just going to end poorly. | ||
| Well, the likelihood that things will end poorly is always higher than the likelihood that they will end well, because there's a billion ways for things to end poorly, and like two ways for them to go well. | ||
| So, I would say it's up in the air. | ||
| This is a personal one that kind of makes some sense in the scheme of all this. | ||
| What do you think about all the absurd internet memes about you, roughly speaking? | ||
| Like, when you see all this stuff, like... I think we got the answer with your immediate laugh, right? | ||
| Well, yes, it's absurd, which is also one of the memes, because apparently I'm supposed to say absurd. | ||
| Yeah, absurd. | ||
| They spelled it correctly. | ||
| A-B-Z. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I have these... | ||
| I have a few characteristic speech habits, apparently, which people like to make fun of, but that's fine with me. | ||
| It's good for people to have a laugh, and it's done playfully, as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| And I look at all of this in a pretty detached way. | ||
| I wouldn't say it's going to my head at all. | ||
| To me, it's just like... | ||
| It's literally surreal. | ||
| I don't know what to make of it. | ||
| So it's funny. | ||
| My father looks at the memes all the time and laughs. | ||
| My kids laugh about it, so it's funny. | ||
| All right, this is an interesting one because it links back to another interview that I did. | ||
| David Horowitz mentioned that Trump could actually enforce a sort of fairness policy in place for public universities and make them balance out leftists With an equal amount of conservative professors, do you view this basically as a solution because the leftist ideology is taking over our universities? | ||
| I mean, that part at least seems self-evident to me, that that ideology has just taken root there, and they've done studies, right? | ||
| It's something like 90% of the professors identify with the left. | ||
| Yeah, well, and in the humanities, it's more than that. | ||
| I don't know if the universities Can be salvaged in their present form. | ||
| There's too many catastrophes besetting them simultaneously. | ||
| Student loan debt, student debt load. | ||
| Administrative overhead, this cult-like behavior on the part of the humanities, which is the core of the universities, because if the humanities go, the universities go. | ||
| And then this technological revolution that's making information much more freely available. | ||
| Like, that's a lot of challenges. | ||
| It's too many as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| I suspect that... | ||
| The universities are going to radically alter in the next 10 years. | ||
| Now, that's not much of a prediction, because everything is going to radically alter in the next 10 years. | ||
| But no, I don't think... I don't think that you can enforce something like that. | ||
| Because what will happen is... It sounds simple to do that, but it's not. | ||
| It's really, really, really complicated. | ||
| First of all, people would have to cooperate, and they won't. | ||
| So, you know, just because you... | ||
| Make an adjustment at the top doesn't mean that the wheels necessarily turn in the direction you're trying to make them turn. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And it would also be using identity politics to solve identity politics if you said, well, we have to have 50% conservative thinkers. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Even though I would prefer more of a diversity of thought, you'd be using their logic. | ||
| Well, right. | ||
| And how do you measure and how conservative is conservative enough? | ||
| And no, it's not tenable. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Oh, this is interesting. | ||
| I just wanted to ask how clean Dr. Peterson's room is, and also to say thanks for everything you've done. | ||
| They've never encountered such a powerful fighter for truth and decency and bravery. | ||
| I think that's an interesting question. | ||
| How clean is your room? | ||
| Well, at the moment it could use some ordering, I'll tell you. | ||
| But I do believe, as I've said in many of my lectures, that your local circumstances reflect your state of mind. | ||
| And part of the reason my room is somewhat chaotic now, there's two. | ||
| We did a fair number of renovations and got to my room in terms of ordering it last. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But also, I can't keep up. | ||
| And so, it's evident when you walk into my room because there's piles of things that need to be sorted out in too many places. | ||
| And I'm acutely aware of that. | ||
| But there are times when There are so many things demanding your attention that it's actually not possible to either figure out what to attend to properly, just how do you make a hierarchy out of it? | ||
| And I have no idea how many public speaking engagements to engage in. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| I've got way more invitations than I know what to do with. | ||
| And I don't like saying no to people, but it's taxing the traveling, and it's expensive. | ||
| Anyways, it's not that clean and it needs to be cleaned up. | ||
|
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Sometimes a pile does pile up. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Patreon, why do you think it's important to conceive of motivational states slash drives as sub-personalities rather than as cognitive circuits? | ||
| What are the upstream and downstream consequences of this characterization that are so significant? | ||
| That's a heavy one. | ||
| Oh, well, the reason they're personalities is because they're alive. | ||
| And alive things have a personality. | ||
| And so, the sub-parts of you are also alive. | ||
| You know, if we ablated a part of your brain, a big part, say, there'd still be your personality. | ||
| It would be a lower-resolution you. | ||
| And then we took more off, it'd be a lower-resolution you. | ||
| But, unless you were dead, there would still be something that was a personality. | ||
| And the personality is not only how you think about the world, it's how you perceive the world. | ||
| And so, for example, if you're hungry, a motivational state, then the world manifests itself to you as a place to obtain food. | ||
| And that's driven by the hypothalamic circuit. | ||
| And it's a unidimensional personality. | ||
| It has a goal. | ||
| It has a way of looking at the world. | ||
| It has arguments at its disposal and rationales. | ||
| It has the capacity to suppress other competitors. | ||
| It's... It's a live thing. | ||
| And it's... It's just a... It's a much better... It's much more accurate. | ||
| It's a better metaphor, because... | ||
| If you're hungry, there are behaviors that are primed. | ||
| They're not driven exactly, although there's a drive-like element to that as the motivation increases. | ||
| We're not deterministic machines in that sense. | ||
| So we're not driven precisely, because driven implies determinism. | ||
| But we're very good and flexible at making our way through a complex environment. | ||
| Your hunger has thoughts, it has emotions, it has a viewpoint, it has arguments. | ||
| It has everything a personality has, except that it's like a cyclops, mythologically speaking. | ||
| It's got one eye, right? | ||
| It's looking one way. | ||
| But if you get that thing revved up enough, it dominates. | ||
| That's why often motivational states in old societies were gods, like Mars, the god of war. | ||
| It's like that could overtake you. | ||
| And why was it a god? | ||
| Well, because it wasn't just in you. | ||
| It wasn't just in me, it was in everyone, all the time, and even in animals. | ||
| So the God idea is like, it's an abstraction! | ||
| There's this force... whatever, that's not a bad metaphor... | ||
| That never dies, and that's manifest everywhere at the same time that you're subject to. | ||
| That's the Greek idea, right? | ||
| I was gonna say, I like this. | ||
| You're giving me Greek mythology and a little Star Wars at the same time. | ||
| Now you're fully giving me everything. | ||
| Okay, back to Super Chat. | ||
| Is there any truth to social psychology's view of race, such as outgroup favoritism or prejudice? | ||
| It seems that social psychology's worldview is seen through an SJW lens that's similar to sociology. | ||
| Well, I think social psychology is a very corrupt discipline. | ||
| I've thought that for years. | ||
| And, in fact, the social psychologists themselves have been arguing about that bitterly for about the last three years, because many of their primary studies aren't replicating. | ||
| There's a big attempt to replicate them. | ||
| I think that... Now, that doesn't mean that all social psychology is worthless. | ||
| It isn't. | ||
| By any stretch of the imagination, but the discipline isn't well oriented as far. | ||
| It's too careerist in my estimation and it's it is informed by Like an anti-establishment ethos. | ||
| I know that's an old term, but it's correct, you know, so with with the political work for example It's almost always the case that conservatism is being put forth as something that requires explanation, whereas liberalism, well, obviously, that's the water that the fish are swimming in. | ||
| Of course you should be liberal! | ||
| And I don't have anything against liberals, by the way. | ||
| Of course you should be liberal! | ||
| What the hell's up with those conservatives? | ||
| It's like, well, that's no way to run the show, you know. | ||
| It's not from a scientific perspective. | ||
| It's like, you should first of all make the presupposition that, thinking biologically, that these are both They're valid modes of being. | ||
| They're being expressed differently for different purposes. | ||
| And that's how I look at it. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what we're losing now, which is why everyone loves to just demonize the hell out of everybody, because we're not even viewing the opposite opinion as something that could remotely be legit. | ||
| Well, the thing that's interesting about conservatives, say, by and large, is they're good at running organizations. | ||
| They're good at algorithmic implementation. | ||
| And you need people like that, man, because Someone's got to do that and it's it's necessary. | ||
| It's duty. | ||
| That's that's conservatives are What would you say they're they're impelled by duty to a tremendous degree and duty is do what you should do now and if you're an entrepreneur You need a bunch of people around like that, because they make your business work. | ||
| You think of the ideas, so you're the liberal, because the liberals are more creative, technically speaking. | ||
| They're higher in openness, so they make better entrepreneurs. | ||
| But they can't, without that conscientiousness, they can't implement. | ||
| And so, there's this tension, which is why we have this political tension between, let's call it originality and innovation, and structure and stability. | ||
| Well, obviously there's a tension there, but Innovation without implementation is just fantasy. | ||
| And implementation without innovation falls behind. | ||
| So you have to have a dialogue to get one working with the other. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| That's exactly what I'm trying to do here. | ||
| Maybe you need the idea guy to have the other guy who can actually make some things happen. | ||
| We sort of touched on this, but I think it's an interesting question. | ||
| Can I be Christian and not believe in... Oh, the question's just changed on me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I lost it there, sorry. | |
| The basic question was, can I be Christian and not believe in the myths, and just believe in sort of learned wisdom instead? | ||
| It depends on what you mean by believe. | ||
| It's not like believing something is one thing. | ||
| It's a bunch of things. | ||
| And the existentialists, for example, were the first to point out that perhaps the best marker of belief is action. | ||
| Because you act out things, and you may not even be aware of why you act them out. | ||
| You just act them out. | ||
| You imitated them. | ||
| You're socialized. | ||
| So, you're reflecting a pattern that everyone taught you. | ||
| The question is, where did that pattern come from? | ||
| Well, it came from the same process that produced these religious underpinnings. | ||
| You reflect those in your behavior. | ||
| So, modern Western people say, well, I'm not Christian anymore. | ||
| It's like, well, yes you are. | ||
| You act out the Christian ethos. | ||
| You don't know you're doing that because you don't know what you're doing. | ||
| I mean, I know you do, but in a more comprehensive sense, you don't. | ||
| You don't understand where all your behaviors, your customs, your traditions, all of what we consider social norms, you don't know where they came from, but you act them out. | ||
| So there's a belief that's implicit in that. | ||
| Now, then you might say, well, I don't believe the representation of that belief. | ||
| Well, all right, so you're criticizing, you're still acting it out, so you're... It isn't that you don't believe, precisely, it's that you're confused, and no wonder, because the modern world is in a state of confusion, and partly what I'm trying to do is to rectify that confusion by pointing out how the myths map onto the behaviors, and why, so that they can be revitalized to some degree. | ||
| This is interesting. | ||
| This is from Patreon. | ||
| What do you think the effect of free and widely available pornography is having on young people, especially men, in our society at this time? | ||
| Well, I think it's like Treasure Island in Pinocchio. | ||
| It's all pleasure with no responsibility. | ||
| That's deadening. | ||
| It's parasitical in a sense. | ||
| And I don't mean that... I'm not... | ||
| Making a value judgment. | ||
| I mean, it's no wonder the young guys are caught up in this, because it's an unbelievably powerful technology. | ||
| It drove the development of the internet, let's not forget, right? | ||
| So it taps into one viciously primordial motivation. | ||
| And so these guys are being blasted by what biologists call super stimuli all the time. | ||
| So imagine that there's a biological stimulus that has an effect on you, and then you can magnify it. | ||
| And the typical porn actress Not the amateurs, but the professionals, have their sexually provocative physical elements exaggerated. | ||
| And so, men are very visual in terms of their sexual processing. | ||
| And so, you know, the guys are pulled into it. | ||
| And they're pulled into it also by curiosity. | ||
| But I think that, ethically, it's a... It's not good. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| It's an easy out. | ||
| That's the other thing, you know, is... | ||
| What you should be doing is going out and finding someone to have a relationship with. | ||
| And if you can gratify yourself with no transformation... | ||
| But let's say you can't find someone. | ||
| Well, then you might say, that's an indication you should change. | ||
| It is in fact an indication that you should change. | ||
| Because... | ||
| What better indication are you going to get than that no one wants to be intimate with you? | ||
| It's the ultimate rejection, and that's partly why men are terrified of it, and I understand that. | ||
| And I also understand the MGTOW guys, you know, who are just recommending that men don't enter into long-term permanent relationships with women. | ||
| I understand where they're coming from, although I called them pathetic weasels a while back. | ||
| I shouldn't have done that. | ||
| See, that's where I said you're worried about every little thing. | ||
| Once you say some... Well, they're providing a lot of young guys who Who need a kick to go out there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're actually giving them the back door. | ||
| They're giving them a rationale. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I've seen this have very detrimental effects on a number of people already and partly in my clinical practice, because these guys, the young guys who aren't successful, they're looking for a reason why women are terrible, because otherwise they have to think, well, they're just not presentable, which is what they do have to think, because that's almost the definition of presentable. | ||
| And then the MGTOW guys give them a rationale, you know, we are in a gynocentric world and females have got control | ||
| and they'll wipe you out if they have the opportunity, it's like, well, some females will do that to some guys some of | ||
| the time and sometimes it's brutal, I've had clients who've been | ||
| dragged through the court systems and just ruined and I was unable to help them, I did everything I could to | ||
| maneuver and negotiate and plan and strategize so carefully to get them to do everything right and... | ||
| It didn't help. | ||
| I mean, the court systems can be absolutely brutal to men. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| Yeah, that's really interesting. | ||
| So the guys that are taking the easy out on that, so to speak, and disconnecting from having those relationships, in a way it's the same, it's just a different out that porn is replacing for that human connection, too. | ||
| So that's kind of fascinating. | ||
| All right, this is interesting. | ||
| This was a $200 question on On superchat, Naus, Hermeticism, Hermes Thoth, Anthropos, the true vessel of alchemy being man, the magnum plus, M.A. | ||
| Atwood. | ||
| Would it surprise you that I read all this midsummer only months before your videos went viral? | ||
| Please extrapolate on the terms above and leave the new age bullshit out of it. | ||
| All right, so there's a lot there. | ||
| What can you take from a question like that? | ||
| You want to go with one of these? | ||
| Okay, sure. | ||
| Hermes, we're going to call him Mercury, Mercurius, for the sake of argument. | ||
| Okay, so I'm going to lay this out a little bit. | ||
| This is an alchemical idea. | ||
| So, first of all, if you mix mercury with ore that has gold in it, the mercury will pick up the gold. | ||
| So that's interesting. | ||
| So that's the magic of mercury, is that it will take the gold out of the raw material. | ||
| Okay, so now, remember, at the beginning of the conversation, I said that if you're going to read Macbeth, the idea is to extract out from it a valid, implementable philosophy, behavioral pattern. | ||
| Well, that's extracting the gold out from the ore. | ||
| Okay, so, now, Mercurius is also the winged messenger of the gods. | ||
| And so he flits around. | ||
| Now, that's what your attention does, you see, because your attention is always being pulled in different ways by forces that you don't understand. | ||
| This is the fundamental insight of psychoanalysis, and probably its most terrifying insight, is that your very attention is controlled by forces that you do not understand. | ||
| Now, the ancient people considered those forces... It's more complex than this, but they considered them gods, because the gods could direct your attention. | ||
| And so... | ||
| Now, how does... Mercurius is the winged messenger of the gods. | ||
| Okay, so, now let's say the gods, we'll call them unconscious forces, or we'll call them gods. | ||
| They're trying to orient you in a particular direction, for some reason. | ||
| They do that by making things more vivid for you than they would otherwise be. | ||
| Those things attract your attention. | ||
| Now... Interestingly, this is just the same way you described the porn actresses a second ago. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| It's a very similar mechanism. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But some of that's your choice, because you aim at something and then things manifest themselves, but some of that's the result of these unconscious forces illuminating parts of the world and darkening other parts. | ||
| Well, they illuminate your path. | ||
| Well, you could say that all those unconscious forces, imagine those as the pantheon of the gods, and they're trying to send you a message about how to act. | ||
| Well, they do that by sending Mercurius, who flips around, and he's the thing that glimmers that captures your attention. | ||
| Okay, now the Jungian idea, it's a brilliant idea. | ||
| Is that the integration of all these unconscious elements, their integration into a functional unit, then manifests itself in your field of experience as an interesting pathway. | ||
| And if you take that interesting pathway, you unfold. | ||
| And so it's the manner in which the instinct that drives you to self-realization interacts with you. | ||
| And so for Jung, he would say, well, that's the self. | ||
| Jung thought of the self as a four-dimensional entity that extended across time and space. | ||
| That was the totality of you. | ||
| And he thought that that totality, which was ineffable, It's your full potential, or something like that, manifested itself in cross-sections of time as that which grabbed your interest. | ||
| It's an amazing, absolutely amazing idea. | ||
| You know, now think about it this way. | ||
| A book will grip you. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| that it gripped you. It means it had you in its palm. Well, what had you in its palm? You know, | ||
| these are things, and you're inspired by it. Well, inspired by what? What does that even mean? | ||
| It means all of a sudden a new path has illuminated itself for you. And the Greek idea would be that | ||
| the panoply of gods had sent a messenger, Mercurius, who flits around, and he captured | ||
| your attention and pulled you down that path. | ||
| And he's in that book, and ironically, you could burn that book in two seconds and it would be gone, but the path would be forever illuminated, which is really a beautiful thing. | ||
| This is from Patreon. | ||
| What are the long-term effects of diversity policies and equity targets on campuses? | ||
| I mean, we've sort of hit this, but basically it's rotting. | ||
| You see, what happens, Okay, here's how a company collapses, and I've watched this. | ||
| Because, you know, one of the things the lefties don't really give capitalism credit for is its capacity to destroy itself continually. | ||
| So there is a 1%, but it transforms across time. | ||
| The fact of the 1% remains the same, but the contents of the 1% transform. | ||
| Okay, so... Well, what happens, let's say a company has a bad quarter. | ||
| And they announce layoffs. | ||
| And they're not going to take the time to sort through everybody properly, by merit. | ||
| They're going to do it fairly, which means easily, and without too much controversy. | ||
| And they're just going to arbitrarily select people to lay off. | ||
| Well, what happens? | ||
| In most institutions, a small proportion of the people do the vast majority of the genuine work. | ||
| That's a law called Price's Law. | ||
| The square root of the number of people involved do half the work. | ||
| So if you took a discipline of science and there was a hundred people in that subspecialty, ten of them would write 50% of the publications. | ||
| Okay, those are people typically who have options. | ||
| Right? Because they're on top of it, man. | ||
| They're smart. They're conscientious. | ||
| They're working 70 hours a week. | ||
| They can get another gig. | ||
| They can get another gig real fast. | ||
| And maybe one that pays more. | ||
| And so as soon as the thing gets shaky, it's like the good people go away. | ||
| Because why wouldn't they? | ||
| And so, and you don't need to knock the quality of an institution down very much | ||
| before that starts to perpetuate itself. | ||
| perpetuate itself. | ||
| You know, they say, A people hire A people, but B people hire C people. | ||
| And in my opinion, that's correct. | ||
| I mean, if you're not, let's say, a higher order intellect, for whatever that's worth, and I'm no worshipper of the intellect, by the way, You are unable to evaluate someone who is. | ||
| You'll just think that there's, well, maybe something wrong with them, or they'll be threatening to you, or... You won't be able to talk to them. | ||
| And you're going to go for someone who's at your level or lower. | ||
| And believe me, it doesn't take very long for that to have true effects. | ||
| It makes people cynical, too, because... Well, with the research chairs in Canada, for example, the Canada Research Chairs, which are these very prestigious Named chairs set up by the federal government across Canada in universities to pull international talent into Canada of the highest caliber Well, they just announced yesterday that they've put on they're not going to award They're threatening the universities with withholding the function unless they came up come up with diversity targets for the Canadian chairs based on gender and that you know the typical offenders primarily gender and race well | ||
| As soon as some of these get awarded on the basis of gender and race, the validity of the chair is eradicated and everyone gets cynical. | ||
| And even let's say someone deserving gets it, just for the sake of argument. | ||
| Well, everyone's still thinking, okay, you know, Why did you get that position? | ||
| And B, if the plum positions are awarded on dimensions that have nothing to do with merit, then I'm an idiot for acting meritoriously. | ||
| Because it's difficult! | ||
| You know, it's not... And the other thing that's so funny is that the federal government, for example, is they're treating these chairs like they're rewards for good behavior, right? | ||
| So everybody should have access to those rewards. | ||
| But that isn't how they should be. | ||
| Conceptualized, they should be conceptualized as, okay, well, we found a productive person, and we're going to set it up to extract every cent of value we can out of that person before they die, right? | ||
| For the benefit of society. | ||
| It's like, we want you to work yourself to death, and here's some money, you know, thank you. | ||
| It's not, it's not, well, everyone deserves a chance. | ||
| That isn't it. | ||
| It's the productivity that counts, not the consumption. | ||
| It's the productivity that counts. | ||
| And so, Well, it's such a backwards way of looking at things. | ||
| Right, because you're rotting the very institution that you're supposedly trying to build. | ||
| Well, that's the supposedly part, because if we go back to the postmodernists... Right, we can debate that for the rest of the day. | ||
| This is interesting from Super Chat. | ||
| Is there any word or phrase that should remain unspoken? | ||
| Does offending or hurting one's feelings with your speech require any tangible punishment or public shaming that's good enough? | ||
| So I suspect for the latter half that you certainly don't agree with that. | ||
| But is there any word or phrase, let's focus there, that should remain unsaid? | ||
| You've always been like that. | ||
| You're like that now, and you're never gonna change. | ||
| That's a conversation killer, that one. | ||
| Yeah, that is a conversation killer. | ||
| Yeah, that's the heavy artillery in a fight between spouses, for example, right? | ||
| That's a killer. | ||
| That's fighting words, because where do you go from there? | ||
| Look, in a public exchange of ideas, you put up with what you get. | ||
| You know, I mean, there's lots of forms of speech that I regard as detestable that I think, in fact, are detestable. | ||
| And if people put those points of view forward, then they should be chastised in the proper manner. | ||
| Now, we already have laws for some things. | ||
| You can't incite someone to a crime, for example. | ||
| And so there are restrictions on what you can say, although there haven't been There hasn't been a push to say what you have to say until these bills in Canada, which is another reason I objected to them. | ||
| The fact that, well, in this Linfield lecture I gave just a week or two ago, I was talking about what I regard as the ethical constraints surrounding free speech. | ||
| It's like free speech should serve the truth. | ||
| That if you're going to engage in free speech, you have a responsibility, a corresponding responsibility, which is to say what you believe to be true. | ||
| And that doesn't mean what will further your agenda in a practical manner, right? | ||
| The truth is a different thing than that. | ||
| So... Now you're not saying that those other people can't speak? | ||
| Not at all! | ||
| But that you're missing the sort of societal Yeah, well, there have to be punishments and rewards associated with the public discussion, because how otherwise would you evaluate it? | ||
| So, you know, some of that can be contempt, some of it can be shame. | ||
| Better if it's a thought-out argument indicating why this is a bad way of looking at the world, or an incomplete way. | ||
| I think that's more... It has longer-term effect, because it educates people. | ||
| All right, let's jump back to Patreon for a second. | ||
| What would you say Trump's IQ really is? | ||
| Does 160 seem reasonable? | ||
| No. | ||
| This will be quoted in... No, 160 is really, really high. | ||
| I mean, the typical The smart person that you're likely to meet in your life has an IQ of around 145. | ||
| 160 is getting pretty damn rare. | ||
| And Trump's old. | ||
| And IQ goes down with age, fluid IQ, although crystallized IQ either stays the same or goes up slightly. | ||
| So he isn't the problem solver or the learner that he was when he was 20. | ||
| No one is. | ||
| If you're in good physical shape, that helps a lot. | ||
| His IQ is clearly well above average. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| And he's done complex things in his life, and a lot of them. | ||
| And that indicates that there's something to him, you know. | ||
| And he hasn't been successful just in one domain. | ||
| He's been successful in multiple complex domains, each of which were quite difficult. | ||
| It's very difficult to be a reality TV star that's successful, right? | ||
| It's very difficult to work in the construction business, and especially on large projects. | ||
| And I know he's had his economic ups and downs, but he stayed in the game for a long time. | ||
| Very stressful. | ||
| He's very stress-resistant. | ||
| So, he's no dummy. | ||
| I mean, it's nice to always think that your political opponent is just stupid, but he's done too many complex things for me to assume that he's somehow... If he wasn't smart, he couldn't have done those things. | ||
| Yeah, I'm glad you're acknowledging that because when I see the people that are in hysteric mode and just saying he's this evil nutbag who doesn't know what he's doing and all this stuff, it just seems like such a lazy way of thinking about it. | ||
| You don't have to like any of the things. | ||
| You may not like the way he speaks or any of that, but the idea that somehow this is a dumb person, I think, Discounting of just the way humans have to work. | ||
| This is interesting from super chat. | ||
| Do you know he also won the presidency right with a completely original? | ||
| Campaign and it's like and without without spending much money. | ||
| It's like okay. | ||
| Is he lucky because is that what you're saying? | ||
| It's just lucky right well. | ||
| I don't think it was just luck it was it was at least maybe Well, it looked, at least to some degree, like courage. | ||
| Maybe it was just blind, throwing caution to the wind, you know? | ||
| I don't know if he ever expected that he could possibly win. | ||
| Yeah, and as I'm sure you'd argue, it probably had a little something to do with all those things, that maybe there was some courage, but that he also surrounded himself with people who maybe understood politics more than he did. | ||
| Well, he could obviously, he can also obviously read a crowd. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because he was appealing to crowds, and that was partly because he didn't. | ||
| He did, I think, try to say what he thought. | ||
| Now, you could criticize what he thought, and that's fine, but he also didn't prepare a speech and then deliver the same one everywhere, which I think is... I really find that rather reprehensible for people to do that, because they're... | ||
| They're parroting themselves, or someone else writes their speeches, which is something I can't even imagine. | ||
| For what we do, I can't even fathom it, actually. | ||
| I think this is really interesting. | ||
| Do you have any thoughts or insights on how a gay man can handle himself, one, after figuring out that he's gay, two, place himself as a man and at the same time different from most men, including his father? | ||
| I think this is sort of interesting because Think because you've talked about gender pronouns somehow somehow people think that you're somehow anti-gay or something I've never seen any evidence of that, but I think this gets to Well, I think so one of the things Let's take the LGBT community at large. | ||
| Let's say okay. | ||
| What are they trying to do well? | ||
| One out answer is they're trying to not be discriminated against and the other answer is and maybe it's the same thing They want to be included in the norm Okay, I'm going to assume the latter, because maybe that's why the marriage issue came up. | ||
| All right. | ||
| The thing is, you can't be in the center, in the norm, and on the margin at the same time. | ||
| Now, there's utility in being on the margin. | ||
| You want to be a drag queen? | ||
| You're likely going to be on the margin. | ||
| And that's where your customers are. | ||
| That's where your draw power is. | ||
| That's where your satire is. | ||
| That's where your entertainment is. | ||
| It's on the margin. | ||
| You want to move to the center? | ||
| You have to go along with the ethic of the center. | ||
| And so what I would say is, well, if marriage is the ideal, then if it's worth pursuing as a right, then it seems to me to come with the commensurate responsibilities. | ||
| And so... | ||
| To the degree that being in a monogamous, long-term, emotionally fulfilling, honest relationship constitutes the central core of marriage, then it seems to me that you're obligated to do that. | ||
| Unless you want to be on the margin! | ||
| As I said, it's not like there's no reason to be on the margin. | ||
| There's freedom out there, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
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You're not normal. | |
| You're like the avant-garde in art. | ||
| Do you want to be normal? | ||
| That's the question. | ||
| I had a really interesting discussion with Milo about this, because he said that the gay community basically is giving up all of the things that made them so edgy and funny and interesting and irreverent and all that, because they're trading it for normalcy. | ||
| And I think that's sort of what you're talking about. | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| I think it's a great conversation. | ||
| There's a lot of richness there that we should discuss. | ||
| Well, the alternative is to blow apart the center so it doesn't mean anything. | ||
| But that's a bad idea. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's a bad idea. | ||
| Is there any truth to social psychology's view of race, such as outgroup favoritism prejudice? | ||
| Oh wait, did we do this one already? | ||
| We did something. | ||
| We did something close to that. | ||
| I mean there is truth in in-group favoritism. | ||
| I mean, of course people favor their in-group. | ||
| That's what it means to love your family. | ||
| And you can't love everyone equally, you know? | ||
| I mean, you can respond to another person as if they're valuable in a personal encounter. | ||
| But you're the center of your experience, and then you have your close people, and of course you're going to favor them. | ||
| But we'd think there was something wrong with you if you didn't. | ||
| Now if you're going to favor them, you're going to favor other people less. | ||
| So, what do you want to just give up? | ||
| Close relationships? | ||
| In the name of equality? | ||
| No, I think would be the worst thing. | ||
| Well, hopefully. | ||
| Now some of the shit posters have gotten in here, so here we go. | ||
| Will you support the liberation of the oppressed people of Kekistan? | ||
| No, they have to liberate themselves. | ||
| Ah, so I've been blindly supporting these people. | ||
| I want them to be free, but you want it to come from within. | ||
| Yes, I would think that would be, that's the way to be truly not oppressed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, this is interesting from Super Chat. | ||
| Is there a chance for a new religion that provides all the lessons, but doesn't lie about the reality? | ||
| So really kind of molding both of the things that you're talking about. | ||
| That's an open question. | ||
| It better be. | ||
| I mean, part of the reason I'm doing these biblical lectures, and I'm going to start with a discussion like this, it's like... Well, we've got this book. | ||
| And, you know, it's a problematic thing. | ||
| And we've been working on it for a long time. | ||
| And if it isn't worth anything, then we've got nothing. | ||
| And we better not have nothing, because that's not a good thing to have. | ||
| And so, maybe there's something to it. | ||
| So, let's move forward with that hope. | ||
| That's the idea. | ||
| Now, you can dispute my claim that... | ||
| The mythological stories, let's say, in the Judeo-Christian tradition are somehow foundational. | ||
| I don't believe that you can dispute that claim reasonably, merely because of the way things unfolded across history. | ||
| I mean, you can say that the Enlightenment was the opposite, but I don't believe that. | ||
| But you can make that case. | ||
| We can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. | ||
| And so I'm trying to figure out what I want to do is make an empirical case for the biblical stories, and leave the metaphysical case hanging. | ||
| You know, there is an interesting empirical case even to be made for the metaphysics, for example. | ||
| We know that mystical experiences can be reliably induced in the lab, for example. | ||
| You can use psilocybin to do that. | ||
| And no one knows how to account for that. | ||
| And they're not trivial. | ||
| The same thing is true of DMA. | ||
| And people might say, well, those are hallucinogens, and can you consider those a valid form of experience? | ||
| And the answer to that is... | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| There was a long-term follow-up study of hallucinogen users four or five years ago. | ||
| It looked at 250,000 people and found that, as a population, they were healthier than the people who hadn't experimented in many, many ways, including psychologically. | ||
| They even had fewer flashbacks. | ||
| You know, and I've known a number of people with psilocybin, in particular, who told me, in various contexts, that one experience with that straightened out their lives in some important way. | ||
| I know it's also been used as a very successful aid to the cessation of smoking by the researchers down at Johns Hopkins, I believe. | ||
| So, anyways, back to the question. | ||
| Every generation has to rescue their dead father from the abyss. | ||
| And so that's what we need to do. | ||
| That's what I'm trying to do. | ||
| And we better be able to do it. | ||
| Because without a central narrative, we will fractionate and we'll be weak. | ||
| And that will be the end of us. | ||
| Because weak people do not survive in this world. | ||
| Well, this is a good segue, then, to this one. | ||
| This is from Patreon. | ||
| What are your thoughts on kids being over-prescribed drugs for ADD, etc.? | ||
| It seems like we're taking the dream away from them, right? | ||
| Well, Jaak Panksepp, who recently died, unfortunately, He's done stellar work on that. | ||
| He used to use amphetamines on rats. | ||
| And you might say, well, a rat isn't a very good model for a person. | ||
| But I can tell you that a rat is a much better model for a person than your stupid idea about a person. | ||
| So you can get a long way with rats. | ||
| He found that ADHD medication suppresses the inclination to play. | ||
| It does heighten the inclination to pay focused attention to whatever is being attended to that moment. | ||
| But it suppresses the play instinct. | ||
| Now, children need to play. | ||
| They really, really, really need to play. | ||
| Because when you grow up, all you're doing is playing with people. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so, if you don't learn that really at a young age, and if you don't become super proficient in it, you're just not in a good place. | ||
| The fact that so many boys need ADHD medication is a much more serious indictment of the education system than it is an indication of the prevalence of ADHD in the general population. | ||
| There was also a large-scale study done in Quebec just a few years ago showing that there were no long-term positive effects of using amphetamines on kids. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I need to do more on that topic in general. | ||
| I really like this question. | ||
| This is Super Chat. | ||
| Could technological or physical exit, say through living off-grid, be a strategy for those who see the troubles facing the West? | ||
| Can it complement the quote-unquote voice of truth speakers today in society, or does it leave them and our values more vulnerable? | ||
| The basic premise being if people just said enough of this nonsense and just kind of got off, would that ultimately be good or does that leave the few of us, you know, people like you that are out there doing this, does that just leave us exposed and hanging? | ||
| Well, I think that it seems to me that there's great danger in centralized systems, you know, and we've centralized some of our systems. | ||
| You know that old adage, too big to fail? | ||
| It's exactly wrong, right? | ||
| Because what it is is so big, it has to fail. | ||
| That's the story of the Tower of Babel, by the way. | ||
| It's so big, it had to fail, right? | ||
| Everything fractionated and went its own way. | ||
| That's what happens when things get too big. | ||
| Maybe that's what's happening to the EEC, right? | ||
| Because there has to be... Once something is too big, you have no relationship between the bottom, where you are, and the top. | ||
| So it's like God has disappeared in some sense. | ||
| You've got no... Who has allegiance to the EEC? | ||
| Well, no one. | ||
| It's like abstract workings of some sky demon, you know, that's distant. | ||
| There's no identity. | ||
| There's no way to be there. | ||
| And there's a way to be with national identity, at least to some degree. | ||
| I know, wait a second, I lost track of the question. | ||
| What was... So basically, getting off grid... Oh, yes. | ||
| It's reasonable, I think, for people to try to move away from vast centralized systems, at least to some degree. | ||
| I mean, it's interesting to me what Tesla is doing with the batteries and the solar power, you know, because a system that isn't so centralized has fewer single points of failure, and we could really use that. | ||
| A distributed power system would be a nice thing as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| So, I think there's some utility in trying to make yourself not too dependent on too much centralized provision. | ||
| If you want to go live by yourself off the grid, like, there's some people whose temperament inclines them to do that. | ||
| They're usually introverted and disagreeable. | ||
| So they don't... they're not touchy-feely types. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they don't want a lot of social contact and so, you know... | ||
| More power to you, as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| Maybe you're right. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, for the purpose of this, we're gonna stay on the grid. | ||
| All right, so guys, here's what we're gonna do. | ||
| Jordan's gonna stick around. | ||
| He has to leave here in four minutes. | ||
| We're gonna do a final piece of this as a one more thing for Patreon subscribers only. | ||
| Then you're free to wander the universe. | ||
| How does that feel? | ||
| Sounds good. | ||
| Sounds good? | ||
| Okay, thank you guys for watching. | ||
| This was a pleasure. | ||
| I like doing these things live. | ||
| I think the energy was great, and I thank Dr. Peterson, of course. | ||
| And if you are a member on Patreon, you'll catch this next segment. | ||
| Should be up, I think, by the end of today. |
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