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Nov. 14, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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Do I Believe in God, COVID Totalitarianism & the Climate | Jordan Peterson | POLITICS | Rubin Report
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jordan b peterson
I go out on my dock at night up north where I am now.
And it's dark.
And the expanse of the heavens is laid out above me.
And I look up.
Well, I'm not thinking religious thoughts.
I'm confronting the infinite itself.
And that moves you inside.
And I would say it even moves you to imitation.
You know?
Because you know what it means to have your head in the stars.
I mean, it means to be oriented up in the highest possible manner.
And so, we're so compelled to imitate, again at an instinctual level, that we can even imitate the infinite that we see spread above us in the night sky.
And that's a religious calling.
And all this talk about whether you believe in God, and it's all propositionalized.
It's like, well, it misses the point.
That's why I don't ever answer when people say, do you believe in God?
I say, what do you mean by believe?
And they think, well, you know what I mean.
It's like, no, you don't know what you mean.
You have a bunch of assumptions that you don't even recognize that you're peppering the question with to force me into a box to deliver the kind of answer that your question demands, given the way you phrased it.
It's like, no.
unidentified
[MUSIC]
dave rubin
I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is an author, a lecturer,
a psychologist, and the world's preeminent lobster expert, Jordan Peterson, my old friend.
Welcome back to The Rubin Report.
jordan b peterson
Hi, Dave, so good to see you and to be doing this again.
dave rubin
All right, here we go again.
We've done this a couple of times.
I thought we'd do it a little differently this time instead of just me tossing you up for some questions.
If we did a little kind of push and pull and churn through some of these ideas.
But I guess where we start first is you're in Toronto.
I'm in Los Angeles.
We live in places that are seemingly really out of touch with a lot of the things we talk about.
People ask me about that a lot.
How's life in Toronto right now?
jordan b peterson
Well, in relationship to the COVID restrictions, I talked to a senior advisor to one of the provincial governments a couple of weeks ago.
He told me flat out that the COVID policy here is driven by nothing but opinion polls related to the popularity of the government.
No science, no end game in sight, no real plan.
And so what that means is that the part of the population that's most afraid of COVID, I know it's what 50% of Democrats believe that you have a 50% shot at getting hospitalized if you catch COVID, and 25% of Republicans, And so I suspect it's similar in Canada.
And so policy is being driven by people who are more afraid than they should be.
And it's, well, it was a very disheartening conversation because I trust this guy and he knows what he's talking about.
And so, you know, I wouldn't say I'm cynical about governments exactly because...
Cynicism is, it's a cheap shortcut to approximating wisdom, let's say.
And you have to be judicious in your criticisms, but I still found that extremely disheartening, because I thought at least policies that I don't agree with, the restrictive policies, We're at least driven by something remotely resembling a scientifically informed plan.
And he was irate at what had been happening.
Enough to consider resigning.
So it's pretty appalling.
dave rubin
So what does that tell you just at a psychological level about fear in general?
If this isn't driven by science and people hear things on the media and then suddenly They say, okay, yes, please lock me in my house.
Please keep me in a mask forever.
Please keep me not going to holidays with my family.
Just psychologically, has that unearthed anything that maybe you thought wasn't as intense?
jordan b peterson
I think the thing that surprised me the most probably was how rapidly we stampeded to imitate a totalitarian state in the immediate aftermath of the release of COVID.
Now, if you think it through a little bit, No one really knew how serious the virus was going to be, and so it was an unknown threat.
And so you can imagine a herd of animals, or a school of fish for that matter, because this kind of phenomena is universal throughout the animal kingdom.
The cost of overreacting to a threat is generally minimal compared to underreacting to a real threat, right?
Overreacting to a hypothetical threat is cheap compared to underreacting to an actual threat.
Because if you underreact, you can die.
Whereas if you overreact, you generally just get tired for a minute.
So a herd will stampede because the most neurotic member of the herd jumps first, and then they'll instantly follow them.
And that's kind of what we did in the early stages of the pandemic.
The Chinese acted first.
Now, unfortunately, they are a totalitarian state, and we all followed.
And that's excusable in some sense, because we didn't know what sort of threat we were facing.
But then the breakdown, it's really appalling in Canada, the breakdown of our rights, let's say, for mobility, for freedom of speech, etc.
It's particularly grating to me in the Canadian context, because way back in the 80s, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, our current Prime Minister's father, who was quite an intellectual, He was very enamored of French civil law, and he grafted a bill of rights on top of the Canadian federal common law structure, essentially.
And I didn't like that at all.
I thought that was a bastardization of a great English common law tradition.
I'm not a fan of bills of rights, because they're predicated on the idea that you have a finite set of rights and that the social contract awards them to you or the government.
And I think that's backwards.
It's like, you have all the rights there are.
Except those that are expressly forbidden by detailed legislation that mostly was generated from the bottom up.
That's the English common law tradition.
Anyways, everybody celebrated the Bill of Rights.
Aren't you protected?
Oh my God, all our rights are protected now forever.
You know, it was Piero Trudeau's major accomplishment, hypothetically.
Now we have his son, and it's like...
Yeah?
What's it good for?
My father isn't vaccinated.
He decided not to, partly because they were telling him he had to, and he has his other reasons.
I have family members who aren't vaccinated for health reasons, who also had COVID twice and didn't really feel they needed to be vaccinated again.
In any case, It's extraordinarily annoying to see this happening and to then find out that there's nothing behind it except like the most instrumental and cowardly
Random polling is extremely disheartening, and also maddening, and also angering, all of those things at once.
dave rubin
Do you think it's possible that the polling is out of whack, too?
I mean, you've been doing polling forever, right?
I mean, this is one of the things that, yeah.
jordan b peterson
Of course it's out of whack!
Jesus Christ, you know?
I mean, how do you get accurate polling data?
Well, okay, over what time frame?
You're gonna poll every day?
How about every hour?
How about every minute?
Every week?
Every two weeks?
Who answers the phone calls when you do the polls?
How did you construct the questions?
Are you eliciting a particular kind of answer because you paid insufficient attention to the way the question was posed?
Et cetera, et cetera.
So it's not guidance from the polls.
It's a quasi-informed random walk, which is a lot easier than thinking it through.
But to see that happening, In spite of the much-vaunted protection for our rights.
Like, you know, Canadians who aren't vaccinated now cannot leave the country.
Like, what the hell?
Why is that?
And I'm... Look, I got vaccinated.
And people took me to task for that.
And I thought, all right, I'll get the damn vaccine.
Here's the deal, guys.
I'll get the vaccine.
You fucking leave me alone!
And did that work?
No.
So stupid me.
You know, that's how I feel about it.
It's like, well, now I have to get tested for COVID when I come back into Canada.
I have to get tested before I leave Canada.
Now, you know, that might be the latter issue.
That's an issue with the Americans.
And so that's outside of the Canadian purview.
But the restrictions to get back into Canada are even more stringent.
It's like, well, why to get the vaccine then if you're not going to leave me alone?
And I don't think the evidence that unvaccinated or that vaccinated people are less contagious, let's say, I don't think it's very compelling.
dave rubin
Yeah.
jordan b peterson
So why are the unvaccinated all of a sudden a danger?
And I certainly don't understand the push to get children vaccinated.
I think that's absolutely reprehensible.
And I also can't figure out... Norman Doidge wrote a piece in Tablet called Needlepoints.
And one of the things he pointed out was that if you take the top 25 least trusted institutions, In that group, the most distrusted institutions include Big Pharma.
And for good reason, and he details out the lawsuits that Big Pharma has had to pay because of misbehavior on their part, broadly speaking, multiple companies, over the last 20 years.
And they're the biggest lawsuits in American history, which is really saying something, because your court system is set up so that Big lawsuits are really possible.
dave rubin
Right.
jordan b peterson
And so, I see the leftists, all of a sudden, it's like Big Pharma.
Yeah, trust them.
It's like, what?
What?
unidentified
Really?
jordan b peterson
You guys?
This is... I don't understand that at all.
Like, and psychologically, so what's going on here?
It's like, well, I think the underlying phenomenon is something like... Well, as long as it's for health and safety, it's always good.
And, you know, not to get conspiratorial here, but the same damn thing is going to happen with the climate change push.
Absolutely.
It's already being reconfigured as, well, it's the biggest public health issue of our time.
It's like, no, I don't think so.
I think overreaching bureaucrats are the biggest health, what would you say, the biggest challenge to our health of our time.
And I think that's especially true of the COP26 bunch.
You know, the Chinese just announced today, I believe it was today, they're building 150 new nuclear reactors.
Like, not one! 150!
And we can't get our act together in the States, and Canada for that matter, to build, like, one.
And in California, they're gonna shut, what, 10% of the power there down?
It's like, no nuclear.
Well, what are we gonna replace it with?
Wind.
Yeah, well, only if we put windmills in front of the politicians, pushing for wind.
You know, can you imagine how much wind it would take to blow your car down the road?
So, it's so...
And so if those people at the Climate Change Summit were serious, what they would be, and we could be very, very specific about this, here's what you do if you're a leftist who's concerned about the environment and the poor simultaneously.
Okay.
You make power, energy, as cheap as possible for everyone.
Because there's no difference between energy and wealth.
And because rich people can't hoard energy.
It's not a Pareto problem, right?
Because all the energy doesn't end up in the hands of a few.
So you try to build nuclear reactors, perhaps, there's a bit of a problem getting rid of the waste.
And there's a lot of bureaucratic wrangling around that.
It's not a solved problem entirely, but we don't have a better option than nuclear in the long run.
And so you make power as cheap as possible.
So if you want to save the climate, you want to make power everywhere in the world as cheap as possible, as fast as possible, to make people as rich as possible, because the richer they get, the more they care about the environment.
And that pattern is clear in China and India, which have greened substantially in the last 20 years.
Those two countries have greened an area the size of the Amazon in the last 20 years.
And that's in addition, by the way, just so everyone knows.
Here's a cool little fact.
You know that as carbon dioxide levels rise, Plants can grow in drier environments, semi-arid, like deserts, like the sandbanks on oceans and lakes, stabilizing that as well.
And so, because the carbon dioxide levels have risen, the plants can close their pores, the breathing pores, and so they don't evaporate water as much.
And so, an area the size of Alaska has greened in the last couple of decades, in addition to what China and India have planted.
And so, You know, so I worked for the UN Secretary General's Committee on Sustainable Development, and to some degree COP26 is an attempt to bring the corporate world in line with those developmental goals.
And there was a bunch of problems with the project, because there were 200 goals, and that's too many.
You have to prioritize them, and no one was willing to accept Bjorn Lomborg.
And that's a different conversation.
But what I learned, because I read about 200 books at that time on the environment and sustainable development, and what I learned was things are way better than anybody thinks.
We have a glorious future in front of us if we want to.
The best way to save the planet is to make poor people rich as fast as we possibly can.
So that means we can have our cake and eat it too, and isn't that absolutely lovely?
And the biggest environmental issue that's facing us isn't global warming, it's overfishing in the oceans, as far as I'm concerned.
Because that we could actually stop.
It's actually extremely damaging, and we know how to stop it.
And Trudeau, to his credit, by the way, has...
...produced a series of marine protected areas along Canada's coastline that weren't there before.
Now, I don't know how protected they are and how thorough that legislation is, but that's something that he's done that actually counts as a credible accomplishment, in my estimation.
dave rubin
So first off, I've interviewed Bjorn a couple times, but his last book basically illustrates, I mean it's mostly illustrations, that lay out almost everything you're saying here, so I just want people to know you're not making it up.
We'll link to that interview So they can see it.
Yeah, go ahead.
jordan b peterson
Okay.
So, well, look.
So there's these 200 development goals.
And sustainable.
It's like, okay, well, what does sustainable mean and over what time frame?
That's actually incredibly complicated, right?
Because time frame is a real problem.
Do we mean sustainable over 5,000 years?
Well, why should we care?
Because God only knows what the world's going to be like in 5,000 years.
Just look at what computer technology is doing.
We can't plan out that far.
So that's probably too long.
100 years?
Well, we're all dead then.
And you might think, well, we should care.
It's like, yeah, perhaps, but how should we care?
Because we can't predict that far out.
So the time frame is really crucial.
And then the fact that there are 200 goals, that's like zero goals.
Like, if you were trying to do 200 things, first of all, at any moment you wouldn't be able to do anything, because at any moment you can only do one thing.
And so you have to prioritize.
And I asked, repeatedly, when I was working on this committee, why aren't these goals prioritized?
And the answer was, well, they all have separate constituencies who are fighting for that particular value, and they get annoyed if there's any, like, sequential approach.
It's like, okay, well, that just means we do nothing.
Because 200 goals is just chaos.
And then I found Lomberg, and so what Lomberg does is he hires teams of economists to assess the goals in a given country, or globally, for that matter, by cost-benefit.
And you can argue about that, because there's assumptions that you have to use that are built into your analysis, right?
There's always a priori axioms, and prejudices, and biases, and so forth, and constraints.
But he does it with 10 different teams of economists, so that's kind of good.
And then he averages across the whole set of the economists.
And then you might say, well, it's an economic analysis, and that doesn't take everything into account.
It's like, A, everything can't be taken into account, and B, do you have a better idea?
And if not, then, well, what good is your criticism?
Like, I haven't seen a better idea than Lomberg's idea.
But from anyone.
unidentified
So...
dave rubin
Is part of the problem that people, because our institutions have in so many ways failed us, and I know you've obviously talked about it and wrote about it in your last book, that we shouldn't just needlessly want to burn down these institutions, but they've sort of failed us to the point that when they do these conferences, like these climate conferences, I was listening to Obama's speech yesterday, and he's going on and on about how we're going to have to sacrifice and all that.
Meanwhile, he just bought- Yeah, who's going to have to sacrifice?
jordan b peterson
Who's gonna have to sacrifice and exactly what?
dave rubin
$15 million house.
He just bought a $15 million house on the water in Martha's Vineyard.
I was just down in Miami.
Trust me, there's plenty of $40 million mansions.
jordan b peterson
Well, there you go, Dave.
That's a sacrifice because he didn't buy a $40 million mansion.
dave rubin
Right, so we should be thankful for him as he flew there.
jordan b peterson
Okay, so let's talk about sacrifice.
Okay, so yeah, let's let the old people freeze in the dark.
That's what's gonna happen in Europe if we get a cold winter.
So, who's gonna sacrifice here?
Well, I can tell you the answer to that.
Let's play leftist here for a minute, okay?
So, there are hierarchies.
Well, I think they're competence hierarchies, but they're corrupted by power to some degree.
And how much is worthy of investigation, and we should always clean them up?
I mean, you just did that in some sense when you said our institutions are corrupt, right?
And we have to be very judicious.
Which institutions?
Where are they corrupt?
How are they corrupt?
Add a level of detail.
And analyzed in a manner that allows us to fix them instead of replace them wholesale, right?
So, okay.
In any case, in a hierarchy, when there's stress, Illness and death climb from the bottom up.
That's partly why you want to be nearer the top in a hierarchy, because it's actually psychophysiologically easier.
Well, obviously, because otherwise, why would you strive for it?
I mean, there are other reasons.
You know, maybe you want to do good for other people, maybe you're motivated by power, maybe you're a psychopath, maybe you're acting instrumentally.
There's lots of other reasons, but one of the consequences of success is that you don't die!
So who dies first?
Well, as soon as you stress the system, let's say we double energy prices.
Well, who's gonna... What's the sacrifice?
Well, old poor people.
Because they're more susceptible to, say, death when they can't afford air conditioning, when they can't afford heat.
And so, yeah, but there's too many people on the planet anyway, so, you know, what the hell, we cull a few.
Few, whatever, you know.
They're just poor people.
And this is the thing that bugs me so much.
It's like, okay, leftists.
Which side are you on here?
It's like, are you gonna, are you gonna sacrifice the poor to your hypothetical future utopia?
Yeah, but they're all gonna die anyways because the planet's gonna burn.
No, it's not.
The IPCC never said that.
So Bjorn's modeled out, you know, a reasonable amount of climate change, meaning temperature increase over the next hundred years.
He's taken what's promoted as the scientific consensus.
There is no consensus in science.
That's not how science works.
It's not a consensus enterprise.
But nonetheless, he's playing along with it.
Okay, we'll take your figures.
It's going to produce somewhat of a decrement in global economic growth, but growth is about 4% a year.
And so even if that declines a chunk because of global warming, everyone's still going to be like five times as rich as they are now in a hundred years if we don't screw things up.
And so maybe they'll be four times as rich.
Well, that's a cost, and fair enough, you know, and if we can ameliorate it, we should probably try not to change natural environments any faster than we have to, right?
Because of unexpected consequences.
It's a reasonable argument.
But, like, here's another thing, this net zero.
Okay, as soon as you hear someone say anything like that, zero, you know they're not thinking.
It's like zero tolerance for drugs.
dave rubin
You mean we can't get COVID deaths to zero?
We shouldn't be trying to get COVID deaths to zero?
jordan b peterson
Yeah, right, exactly, exactly.
Well, and we don't have zero tolerance for drugs.
Zero is the wrong number.
Zero pollution.
Well, no.
You know, cows, there's manure from cows.
People go to the bathroom.
There's not zero pollution.
So net zero, it's just, it's an empty talking point to put up a flag that you're on the right side.
It's not differentiated, careful, thoughtful, thorough, detail-oriented thinking at the level that will actually produce solutions.
And there's no discussion about like, what are we aiming at here?
Well, how about copious energy for everyone?
As clean as possible.
But in that order, copious energy for everyone, lowest possible price, resilient stable systems, and to their credit, the Democrats and their infrastructure bill are building resilience goals in relationship to the power grid, and that's necessary because we should be stress-testing those systems constantly.
But if you're on the left and you care about poor people, the only thing you should really care about is cheap energy.
And why is that?
Let's be very precise about this.
Okay, what makes people prosperous and secure?
Work.
What is work?
It is the expenditure of energy.
What is energy?
unidentified
Work.
jordan b peterson
What is work?
Wealth.
You want to deal with absolute poverty, or even relative poverty for that matter.
Energy is everything.
And here's, you know, here's another fact.
So, you know, you Americans have actually knocked your carbon dioxide output down 14% in the last couple of decades.
You know why?
Fracking.
Because it made natural gas cheap and replaced dirtier forms of energy.
Plus it made you way less reliant on OPEC and the Russians.
And how is that not good for planetary stability?
You talk about the environment.
How about not a third world war?
Because that's not so good for the environment.
And so fracking knocked carbon dioxide output in the US down 14%.
Who would have predicted that?
And in Schellenberger's book, Apocalypse Never, he interviewed an MIT scientist and he said, you really want to knock carbon dioxide output down, make India and China, but India he was speaking of more particularly, switch to coal as fast as possible.
You think, coal?
Why?
Oh, it's better than wood.
And we know the pattern.
Wood, that's not so good.
You cut down trees, you cut down forests, it's really polluting, especially indoors.
And that kills a lot of people, stunts a lot of children's growth.
You know, growth in the broad sense.
Because indoor pollution is much more deadly than outdoor pollution, generally speaking.
So, and wood, well, you have to cut down forests.
It's inefficient.
It puts particulates in the atmosphere as well.
So you switch to coal.
Coal's better.
It's not wood, to begin with.
And then it's not, we're near as polluting, and coal technologies have got quite clean.
Now, you still have to mine the coal, and there's an environmental cost for that.
Well, then you switch from coal to natural gas.
Natural gas is pretty damn good.
There's lots of it.
It's plentiful.
It's clean.
And then maybe, you know, if we can get our act together, and have some sense, we could switch from natural gas to Fission.
Well, and then we could have energy for everyone at the lowest possible cost.
And then what happens?
Well, people get rich.
And then what happens?
They care about the environment.
So how is that not the right solution to... Let's not call it climate change, because that's annoying.
It's like, let's not produce any more waste than we have to while we try to live.
Fair enough, you know.
That's a reasonable goal.
But all I see coming out of these COP26 conferences and that sort of thing is, here's a bunch of people doing it wrong and let's stop them.
It's like, yeah, yeah, right, guys.
Why don't you try to do something instead?
dave rubin
So, okay, that's exactly where I wanted to go with this.
Are we just at the point where the machinery, the institutions, the media, tech, the whole machinery of how we communicate to each other has broken down to the point that if everything you said right there, you stepped into an office and you were sitting down with all of those people, or even just AOC and the people here that want the Green New Deal, and you laid all that out, that they would basically just say, yeah, well, you know, okay, good for him.
He's got some studies.
jordan b peterson
I don't believe that.
I don't believe that.
I think we have to be judicious in our institutional criticisms.
Well, there's a bunch of reasons for that.
First of all, that infrastructure bill that was just passed, that's nowhere near as stupid as it could have been.
And if you look at the White House messaging, well, that's something, isn't it?
dave rubin
Yeah, it's something, it's something.
jordan b peterson
It's something, man.
And if you look at the White House messaging, it's about 2% diversity, inclusivity and equity.
And that's not too bad, because zero is asking for too much, as we already discussed.
And you know, I've talked to lots of Democrats and lots of Republicans, and there are people of goodwill who are competent on both sides, and they're trying.
You know, people don't understand.
So you're a congressman, federally.
You know, all right, so I went to Washington and I talked to a whole bunch of them, trying to find out.
I read this book a long time ago called System Antics.
It's a great book by John Gall.
It's a great book, System Antics.
One of its dictums is, the system does not do what its name says it does.
And so then the question is, what does it do?
Well, then you have to look.
So, like, I worked at social services for the Alberta government when I was a kid.
And social services, what do they do?
Well, I was tasked, weirdly enough, when I was about 19, to find out, to update a big consulting company's analysis of spending of the social services department.
They had paid them some hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I was just working as a summer intern, and they said, update this.
And I thought, Okay.
And so I phoned around trying to get the figures and no one knew what they were.
The system had no idea where the money it was spending went.
So I was trying to get stats like, uh, how much of the welfare money spent actually goes to recipients?
Couldn't find the data.
And then I realized, okay, social services, what does it do?
It probably spends 95% of its money on bureaucrats who are implementing social service programs.
And then I thought, well, should I be cynical about that?
It's like, Well, no.
It's actually hard to distribute money, and if 5% of it goes to its target, that might not be too bad.
It's not great, by the way, but it's better than running at a deficit, or zero.
And many charities are like that.
If they get 10% to the recipients, they're doing pretty well.
And you can be cynical about that.
In any case, when I went to Washington, I thought, OK, these are Congress people.
What do they do?
Well, hypothetically, they analyze policy, they set out strategy, they talk to their constituents.
No, they spend 25 hours a week fundraising.
25 hours a week.
Both sides.
Both sides.
They can't do it in their congressional offices because that's illegal.
So they have other offices in these industrial warehouses, you know, with drop ceilings, and they basically are telemarketers 25 hours a week.
Well, how the hell can those people get anything done?
And then I had lunches where there were some Democrats and some Republicans, generally more junior members, just trying to get to know each other.
And I had them go around the table and say why they went into public service.
And you couldn't have asked for more patriotic, heartfelt declarations of virtuous intent.
And you couldn't tell the Democrats from the Republicans.
Not on the basis of that.
And so then you say, well, why do they fundraise 25 hours a week?
Well, they have to be elected every two years.
And then the party apparatus, because they don't really know how to spend money effectively, communicating with people to get them to vote for them.
They think money will do it.
They won't support them unless they raise a certain amount of money.
Well, how the hell can those people do their job?
And so you sit down and you talk to them, and the vast majority of them are They're even self-sacrificing.
It's like it's not a job I would want.
There isn't a lot of security in it.
If you're competent, you could go do something else and be paid more and be harassed a hell of a lot less.
They're trying.
And when you lay out the sorts of arguments that I've been laying out, I rarely talk to anyone who's competent of goodwill, and I don't care whether on the Democrat or Republican side, that doesn't see the logic in this.
And so, what we've got to beware of on the conservative end and on the leftist end, especially you guys in the States, is do not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Like, I went to New York City here four days ago.
That's a great city.
You have a great country.
It's a work of art.
Don't screw it up with facile criticisms.
Like, there are things wrong, because there always are, but the devil's in the details, man.
You gotta do a detailed analysis.
It's like, you know, the leftists say, well, the whole judicial system is corrupt.
Well, what's the evidence?
Well, the disproportionate incarceration rate.
It's like, you know, that's a fairly damning indictment.
Okay, where exactly is it going wrong?
Exactly, precisely, procedurally?
So that we could fix it.
Well, the whole thing has to be burned to the ground.
It's like... Yeah, well... No, and you aren't thinking.
So, you're not helpful.
And then you take a problem like that apart, the differential incarceration rate, man, that's a rat's nest.
It's complicated, man.
You know, it's tangled up with slavery, it's tangled up with Jim Crow, it's tangled up with differential exposure to literacy in childhood, it's tangled up with single-parent families, violent communities, the drug war, drug policy, Just to name a few, and then we could say whatever implicit racism still exists, because that's not zero.
It's very, very complicated.
And people don't want a detailed, on-the-ground analysis of such problems.
What they want to do is label it with a low-resolution representation, so like a one-pixel representation.
And then they want to contrast that with the wrong one-pixel representation.
Then they want to feel the moral virtue that they would have felt if they had actually solved the problem.
dave rubin
So how do we fix the resolution?
And when I ask you this, I include myself in this.
You know, I'm talking about news every day on the show.
I try to do it in the most honest way possible.
Obviously, I have my biases.
I'm not pretending that I have no opinions.
But, you know, often when you get bludgeoned over the head with sort of the low-resolution stuff enough, Your resolution starts getting screwed up.
So how do we arbitrage those two positions?
jordan b peterson
Well, it's not just bias, right?
It's not just bias.
It's also heuristics.
And there's a difference.
Like, a heuristic is a functional simplification.
And we use heuristics all the time.
Like, the image you see of me is a heuristic.
Because you are not seeing me.
Well, first of all, I'm not there.
Second, even if you were seeing me, if we were in person, you'd still be seeing a heuristic.
Because you don't see my subatomic structure.
You don't see my cellular structure.
You don't see the context that I'm embedded in.
You see an iconic image that stands for the reality that's too complex to perceive.
And so, it's not easy to tell when you're using an appropriate heuristic.
And the basic rule of thumb is use the simplest thumbnail you can use that will get the job done.
Now the question is, then the question is, well, what is the job?
And you have to ask yourself, well, how much unearned moral superiority are you actually striving for?
And the answer generally is a lot.
And that's how a heuristic turns into a bias.
And so it's partly ignorance, some of it's malevolence and willful blindness, but it's partly ignorance.
It's like you just don't know.
Right?
You don't even know what you don't know.
And then you think, well, isn't it interesting that you have people who will pontificate about fixing the electrical system, the power system.
Who couldn't wire up a plug-in in their house?
And you think, well, does that matter?
It's like, well, yes, in some sense it does matter, because unless there's a chain of causality built from the highest level abstractions right down to the power outlet itself, the plan, in some sense, is deeply flawed.
And then we have another problem, David.
So, look, when I worked on this UN committee, I was on the Canadian subsection of the committee.
There was only one Canadian subsection.
And I was pulled in by the man who ran that.
And I worked on it for about two years.
And I was serious about it.
And I rewrote fair chunks of that.
Document this the sustainable goals guide partly because it was stuck in like 1985 with this old Cold War mentality It was terribly written So I just rewrote a bunch of it and what happened was a lot of those rewrites stuck and that was shocking.
It's like What the hell?
How did that happen?
And the answer was well, I did the work and in order for someone to change it they would have had to Rewrite it And then you think, well, why didn't they?
And the answer is, well, they didn't really have time.
So these things work in a weird way.
So this Guide to Sustainable Development has become sort of a centerpiece of, I wouldn't say COP26 exactly, but similar large-scale endeavors to sort of steer where the planet's going.
Okay, so how is that put together?
Well, the UN Secretary General nominated a bunch of ex-presidents and ex-prime ministers, like high-end people, right?
But the thing about those people is they're busy.
Like their days are scheduled.
It doesn't matter if they're former presidents or prime ministers.
Their days are scheduled to the minute for like 16 hours.
Well, they don't have time to sit and analyze the sustainable goals development.
Sustainable development goals.
So then it falls down the hierarchy of bureaucracy until it lands on the desk of someone who actually either wants to or has time to do it.
And God only knows how many tears down it has to fall before that person takes it on.
And then are they trained to do this?
Well, no.
The only person I know that's trained to do it would be Lomberg.
You know, and he doesn't have the expertise necessary to really do it, but he's still the one I would say knows better than anyone, broadly speaking, that I've met.
And it's not like we have training schools to prepare people to prepare documents on sustainable development over the next hundred years for the planet.
It requires so much expertise.
And so, these things are cobbled together, you know.
And it's not even a conspiracy, you know.
You don't have to posit a conspiracy.
Ideas can take on a conspiratorial form all by themselves, you know.
This is no conspiracy.
It's so badly done that it's quite frightening.
dave rubin
So then where would you piece the algorithmic part of this, the tech part, that then you have a bunch of people that are not quite qualified to be, well, they can be discussing it, but perhaps analyzing it or giving the policy prescriptions, that are constantly fighting about these things all day and then keeping a whole bunch of other people in a perpetual state of confusion or fear.
I mean, that's the piece of this that emerged just in the last 20 years that seems to hide the rest of it, like it sits higher in that hierarchy than the rest of it.
jordan b peterson
Okay, I need more specificity.
So what do you mean exactly?
Are you talking about the political battles around this sort of thing?
dave rubin
I'm talking about the political battles, I'm talking about the cultural battles, all of it.
The stuff that generates the clicks, that keeps us all watching things, that keeps us all looking at our phones, often is done by a class of people that are not the ones that you're saying should be sort of analyzing this stuff properly.
jordan b peterson
Well, okay, let's look at what the tech companies are doing.
Well, let's play angel's advocate for a minute.
Okay, they are really trying to deliver you something you will attend to.
They really are trying to do that.
And they are building unbelievably powerful AI machines to analyze even your bloody eye movements to see what you're looking at.
You think, oh my God, that's scary.
It's like, yes and no.
They are also trying to figure out what you want and need and deliver it to you as fast as possible.
Amazon, click, bang at your doorstep.
Yeah, okay, well they know a lot about you, but it turns out you actually have to know a lot about someone in order to be able to do that.
So can we trust them?
Can we trust us?
Well, not if we're lying.
Like, that's the critical issue here.
It's not even ideology, exactly, although we could get into that.
It's lying.
That corrupts all of this.
That turns a heuristic into a bias.
That turns information into misinformation.
And so, these companies that are trying to serve us, to the degree that there's deceit, and let's say the naked desire for power and control, is kind of a psychopathic edge, to the degree that that's operative, all these systems get contaminated, and we definitely have to be on the lookout for that.
But we can't demonize the corporations, the tech corporations, in the same way.
I mean, look what we're doing!
I'm, like, 3,000 miles away from you, and you and I are having a conversation that a million people are going to watch, that we can publish in five minutes, and it'll be distributed like a book used to be, instantly.
It's like, my God!
What a miracle!
Like, here's another miracle.
This is something, man.
So, I have these teams of translators working on my YouTube content, and that's been put together by a very diligent team who have familiarized themselves in 13 languages with the idiom of the languages.
It's not Google Translate.
It's proved very hard to take English YouTube content, let's say, video content, and translate it to other languages, because it hasn't been thought through carefully enough.
And this has particularly been the case for my Russian translation team.
And so, three weeks ago, I talked to my head Russian translator, who I hadn't met before.
Very bright guy.
And we had a real-time conversation, because Zoom has now enabled a feature, so if you have a simultaneous translator, it'll suppress the Russian, and only let you hear the English.
And so now, with a real-time translator, I can talk to anyone in the world.
And then I can record that.
I mean, this is a technological marvel that's unparalleled.
It's unbelievable.
It's just like one thing that Zoom added as a feature, you know, in the last couple of months.
This demonization, this oversimplification and demonization, this has to stop.
You know, here's something horrible.
I talked to Andy Ngo yesterday.
Okay, and I said, look, I talked to a bunch of Democrats, influential Democrats, about Antifa, and they said, Antifa is illusory.
And I thought, okay, you believe that, but you believe there's a conspiratorial force that's very powerful on the right that's real.
Okay, so they believe that, but they don't believe Antifa is real.
So, we give the devil his due.
Well, what do you mean real, exactly?
Okay, so I asked Andy Ngo, who's been, like, half... He's been beat mostly to death twice and been severely hurt twice while reporting on this.
He's a brave guy.
I said, well, you know, these lefties, the moderates, these are reasonable people I'm talking to.
They're certainly people who are as morally good as me, let's say.
So, what do they mean?
Is it illusory?
Well, I said, well, how many actually organized Antifa groups are there?
Like, organized.
So there's an identifiable group with identifiable people.
They're kind of working full-time on this.
They have a leader.
They have a website.
You can point to them.
He figured maybe 20.
I said, well, like, how many people do you think in each of those groups are committed to the Antifa ethos?
Whatever that is.
Fascist.
Anarchist.
Left-wing.
Paramilitary.
Like, who the hell are these people?
Are they left or right?
Or does that matter?
Or maybe they're a weird mixture of both and it's to their advantage to have the left think they're right and the right think they're left because really what they're after is chaos.
And that could easily be the case.
In fact, I'm sure it is the case.
He figured, oh, maybe in each of those groups there's 20 to 30 people.
unidentified
40, maybe.
jordan b peterson
So there's like 800 of them.
Okay, so that means they don't exist in some sense.
So if you took a city the size of Halifax, which isn't a big city, but it's a city, there'd be one guy like that in the whole city.
So does it exist?
Well...
Not really.
It's not an organization.
He talked about Rose City Antifa as the sort of epicenter of this trouble.
But here's what we're really facing.
It isn't left-wing radicals who are trying to take over cities.
That's a way of looking at it.
Agents of chaos in whose interest it is to sow discord as thoroughly as possible.
And then the question is, well, how do in this age of interconnectedness, how do we protect ourselves?
We, Republicans and Democrats alike, the 95% of people who make up the reasonable middle, how do we protect ourselves against 800 malevolent psychopaths?
And that's the endless question of the human race.
So, I want to spin something off sideways from that, just momentarily.
Men are less agreeable than women.
It's a reliable personality difference.
It's only about 60-40.
So if you picked a man and a woman out of a crowd and you tried to figure out who was least agreeable, if you bet on the man, you'd be right 60% of the time.
That's not that much, but it's not nothing.
It means all the really disagreeable people are men.
Right?
Out of the extremes.
Okay, so... And women actually like disagreeable men more than agreeable men.
So, there's a preference, which is why we're like that, because women are powerful agents of sexual selection, and they decide that that's how disagreeable men should be.
Why?
Okay, so here's the trade-off, right?
The more disagreeable you are, the less empathic and compassionate and polite you are.
So the less, in some sense, the less generous, the less concerned with others, the more concerned with yourself and your victories.
Okay, so why would women pick men who are more disagreeable than them?
Well, that's the beauty and the beast problem in some part, right?
Now, so you want a disagreeable man, but you want him to be tameable.
So it means you don't want him to be so disagreeable he can't be generous and caring and share.
But you don't want him to be so agreeable that a psychopath can take him out.
And I mean, this is a technical issue.
Because So you might say... So, Noah also talked about what happened in one of these cities that set up one of those sort of autonomous zones.
The mayor, I think it was... I can't remember the city.
dave rubin
Probably Seattle.
It was CHOP.
jordan b peterson
Yeah, it was Seattle.
It was Seattle.
You're exactly right.
The mayor said something like, well, maybe it'll be sort of like a summer of love.
It's like, yeah, maybe.
But we remember how the Summer of Love ended, by the way.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Hells Angels, biker gangs at the Rolling Stones concert.
So anyways, Summer of Love.
Okay, so everybody's agreeable and they're getting along and they're handing out food, which isn't free, by the way, but it's free in the States because we're so efficient, essentially.
It's all Summer of Love stuff.
Yeah, but what about the psychopaths?
Well, when do they come out?
How about at night?
So, like, this is naive beyond belief.
And there are computer models of this.
So if you set up communities of hyper-agreeable people, all they do is share, and, you know, there are daisies growing out of their orifices.
What happens?
You throw one shark in the water, and everyone gets eaten.
Okay, so women have this tough problem, because they have to protect their infants, and they can't really do it, because they're smaller, and they're, you know, they're concerned with their infants.
They're occupied.
They need men to guard them.
Well, that means they need men who can be guards so that they have to pay a price in agreeableness.
The women do.
And, you know, sometimes I've seen couples where the man is just so masculine and the woman so feminine that they can't even communicate.
They're like from different planets, Mars and Venus.
They just can't bridge the gap.
And so this is a really tough evolutionary problem.
It's like you have to have generosity.
You have to have toughness.
Because you got to keep down the cheaters and the miscreants.
They have to be held under control.
And you're naive to think that that's not the case.
Psychopaths, by the way, psychopaths vary in the general population between about 1 and 5% and seem to stabilize at about 3%.
And so that's also a big critique of the leftist notion that hierarchies are nothing but power.
Because if that was true, psychopaths would be much more prevalent than they are, and way more successful.
And what happens is, once the psychopaths get past a certain percentage of the population, people wake up to them, and the tough guys stop them.
And like, is that really surprising to anyone?
It's like, the tough policemen stop them?
The tough military guys stop them?
There's no such thing as tough guys?
And isn't it the case that they're actually tougher than tough women?
And so what are we, children here?
Or are we gonna look at this straightforwardly and clearly?
dave rubin
Yeah, and that is what so much of this seems to boil down to, to me, that we just seem to be afraid to confront these, what I don't think are actually that, it's not that they're not complex issues, but they're things that we used to talk about honestly.
I mean, you know how frustrated I've been with, you know, with a lot of the sort of liberal intelligentsia that in many ways I think ushered So much of this in that is now saying, oh, now we've got a problem.
jordan b peterson
But it's like, guys... Yeah, well, I'm still appalled at the faculty.
And, you know, what I saw happening when I was a faculty member, I retired this year.
In some sense, I'm teaching like hundreds of thousands of people now instead of hundreds.
And so that seems like a better idea.
But what I saw the faculty do in my career, not at Harvard, by the way, was continually cede territory to the administration, one cowardly decision at a time, one cowardly micro decision at a time.
And I really think that's the sin of the left, the moderate left.
It's cowardly retreats on micro-issues.
The sin on the right is probably... The right has bigger sins, and they're more obvious, and they're sort of clumped together, you know?
So, but the left, it's like this continual retreat.
So, first of all, the faculty retreated, and the administration took over, which was a really bad idea.
I used to fight with my faculty members at the University of Toronto.
The administration would do something arbitrary, like say, well, how about your third-year seminars, fourth-year seminars have, like, 30 people in them instead of 15?
Oh, it's like, well, then they're not a seminar.
So then I say, well, how about we just say, no.
Hire more faculty.
Just no.
We will not do that.
Well, they would have capitulated instantly, the administration, if we would have said no.
For sure.
But they never said no.
And I said, well, why won't you say no?
Well, they won't give us what we want then.
Well, they don't give you what you want anyways.
I saw an endless number of five-year plans come and go where nothing that was promised was ever delivered.
I'm not being cynical about this.
I mean, the University of Toronto ran pretty reasonably for an overgrown and heavily bureaucratized institution.
So it was all these retreats.
Well, then these insane ideas came in.
You know, and here's the fundamental idea.
And it really deals with the mystery.
I'm writing this new book about it called, We Who Wrestle With God.
We don't know how we manage the act of perception.
We actually don't know.
It's really complicated.
That's why we don't have general purpose robots.
It's because perceiving the world turns out to be way more complicated than anybody ever imagined.
Because we kind of think, well there's objects out there and you just see them.
It's like, if you take a picture of a landscape and you put it in Photoshop and then you blow it up, you can't tell where the lines are between the objects.
Well, the real world is kind of like that.
It's like... And even defining simple things is like... What's a table?
Well, it's a flat surface with four legs.
Well, okay.
Is a dollhouse table a table?
How about if you put a plate full of food on a stump and sit down to it?
Is that a table?
What if this stump is actually kind of slanted?
What if it has a soft surface, like maybe you put a plate on a beanbag?
Is that now a table?
Well, a table might not be a flat surface with four legs, or one leg, or three legs, or a triangular surface.
It might be a place you put a plate full of food on to sit down and eat at, which is a functional definition.
And it turns out that most of the things we see are actually functional icons, rather than objects.
And then, you can't get a machine to see that, because they're not embodied.
In any case, the mystery of perception.
How do we categorize?
It's a great mystery.
And the answer the left leapt to in the face of this immense mystery, which is how can finite creatures comprehend the infinite well enough to function?
That's the mystery.
Their answer was, all our categories are based on the expression of will to power.
And you know, that's actually partly true.
Because part of our motivation is to move up hierarchies, but that can be based on competence.
And all of our institutions are corrupted by power and deceit.
So if they would have said...
Part of our categorization is will to power.
No problem.
It would have left a mystery open.
And this is a huge mystery.
It's a religious mystery in the final analysis, I believe.
And, you know, if you have faith, you believe that it's something like the spirit of goodness itself that does categorization, that lays out our basic perceptions, and that would depend on your motivation.
So we could say, like, if you were oriented In the highest manner you could be oriented, then the contents of your categories would be subservient to the good.
And I think you have to be immensely cynical to think that will to power is a more powerful force than that.
And that sort of cynicism, that devours the world.
And so we don't want to do that, that's... And I can see why the universities fell into that, because this was... I think this was the biggest mystery that emerged philosophically in the last half of the 20th century.
It's like, oh my... See, because what happened on... In the English departments, it was... Well, we don't know how we perceive even, like, a simple landscape.
Okay, well, how about a text?
Oh, well, wait a minute.
How many ways can you interpret a text?
Oh, a near-infinite number of ways.
This is true, technically.
A near-infinite number of ways.
Well, okay, which of those interpretations should take priority?
Well, we don't know how we figure that out.
And so, well, how do we know it's not just the naked expression of power?
Well, sometimes it is.
And that's the idea.
It's like, this is a problem.
Now, it's the wrong solution, because it isn't the naked will to... The fundamental human motivation is not the naked will to power.
Here's the fundamental human motivation.
It's... I'll tell you a quick story, if you don't mind.
Hopefully, it'll be quick.
I went to see Die Meistersinger in New York, the opera.
Okay, so it's very cool, this opera.
I'm going to write about it in detail in this book.
But here's the basic story.
There's a town called Nuremberg, and there's a bunch of guilds in the town.
Craftsmen.
Cobblers.
Like, blacksmiths.
Guys who work, who make things.
unidentified
Right?
jordan b peterson
So they're glued right to the bottom.
They know how to wire the electrical outlet.
Now, they've all organized together and elected a master singer in each guild.
So the head of the guild isn't one of the craftsmen, although he is a craftsman.
He also has to be a singer.
Okay, now all these guild guys get together, the singers, and they elect each new singer.
And so, the story is set up so that...
A new singer is going to be elected, and one of the craftsmen singers says he'll stake his entire fortune and his daughter on this new contest.
He'll award his daughter to the new master singer, although she has a choice.
She doesn't have to do it, by the way, so this isn't like patriarchal oppression.
It's a father trying to offer his daughter the best after judicious consideration, fully cognizant of the fact that he loves her and allowing her her choice, encouraging her choice.
A knight comes in, who's wandered around in the natural world, and he's such a great singer that they can't help but recognize his talent, but he breaks all the rules.
And the girl falls in love with him.
Okay, so, this guy who puts up his fortune, he says, I'm willing to subordinate my fortune, because people have criticized me for only pursuing money.
I'm willing to subordinate my fortune to the pursuit of this highest art.
And I'll put my daughter on the line too. It's like this is real.
Okay, so the rest now, so the men all get together in these guilds and they try to elect
the top figure and this guy's name is All right, the next thing that happens is that the guilds
degenerate into competition because they're all fighting for this girl
[BLANK_AUDIO]
And that's what happens among men.
It's like they do get together, they do elect someone who's highest among them, and then the highest get together and elect what is highest yet.
That's what unites us.
That's real.
And we do fragment because of competition.
So that can fall apart.
Anyways, the opera is a masterful exploration of all of that.
But it isn't will to power that is at the basis of categorization.
It's something like respect for the divine word.
And that's indistinguishable from truth.
From truth.
And that's set against the will to power.
And it's way more... Try it out in your own life!
Do things for power.
See what happens.
That's hell.
Because even if you get what you want, by the time you get it, you'll be a psychopath.
No love.
Nothing.
Just corruption everywhere around you.
Truth?
That's a whole different thing.
And we're so powerful now, we better tell the truth.
We could have paradise laid out in front of us, if we're careful.
Or we could let everything burn.
dave rubin
Do you think you've made headway on this?
When you've talked, I watched just about a week ago with your chat with Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt, two guys who I hold in the highest intellectual regard.
I've had them on the show.
I like them both very much.
They come from the more atheist perspective on this.
You know, we've talked about this a million times.
jordan b peterson
Yeah, so they think.
dave rubin
Right, right.
Okay, so that's it.
That's where your argument is.
jordan b peterson
I'm going to Cambridge and Oxford to talk about this, in detail, what I just laid out.
Because what I want to do is, especially when I go to the UK, in these conversations, is I want to lay out a technical argument for sacred depth.
So imagine this.
We have an intuition that there's depth in literature.
Because we think, well, that's a shallow story, and that's a deep story.
And we think, well, that was really compelling and gripping.
It hit me at a profound level, right?
Versus, well, that was just light entertainment.
Light, right?
We all have those intuitions.
So what is this depth?
And how far down does it go?
Well, it goes down to the bottom of things.
What's at the bottom?
Well, what's at the bottom is, by definition, religious.
And why would I say that?
Well, it's because when things move you at that level, that's how you experience it.
It's not thought.
It's way deeper.
So it's like, I go out on my dock at night up north where I am now.
And it's dark.
And the expanse of the heavens is laid out above me.
And I look up.
Well, I'm not thinking religious thoughts.
I'm confronting the infinite itself.
And that moves you inside.
And I would say it even moves you to imitation.
You know, because you know what it means to have your head in the stars.
Right?
I mean, it means to be oriented up in the highest possible manner.
And so, we're so compelled to imitate, again at an instinctual level, that we can even imitate the infinite that we see spread above us in the night sky.
And that's a religious calling.
And all this talk about whether you believe in God, and it's all propositionalized.
It's like, well, it misses the point.
That's why I don't ever answer when people say, do you believe in God?
I say, what do you mean by believe?
And they think, well, you know what I mean.
It's like, no, you don't know what you mean.
You have a bunch of assumptions that you don't even recognize that you're peppering the question with to force me into a box to deliver the kind of answer that your question demands, given the way you phrased it.
It's like, no.
You say you don't believe in God.
It's like, well, God is ineffable.
What do you mean you don't believe in God?
Well, what do you believe in then?
Nothing?
Well, no.
Everything?
Well, no, that doesn't work, because then you're chaotic.
Well, what's your highest value?
Diversity?
Equity?
Inclusivity?
Well, I don't need a highest value.
Well, yes you do, because otherwise nothing orients you through the landscape of choices.
This isn't optional.
dave rubin
So to give the devil his due, then, when you've had the conversations with a lot of these guys, you just talked to Sam Harris again, also, you know, all of these guys... Yeah, that went great, by the way.
At the end, you know, people that are not necessarily believers, your basic argument, I'm doing a little 101 here, is that you're a believer whether you believe it or not, that you're being driven... Well, Harris... Yeah.
jordan b peterson
Okay, let's take Harris as a good example.
Harris does not believe in God, but he believes in the devil.
So he's halfway there.
And why do I say he believes in the devil?
dave rubin
I think he believes Trump is the devil, yeah.
jordan b peterson
Yeah, but that's a mistake.
He also believes religion is the devil, and that's also a mistake.
So what do I mean when I say that he believes in the devil?
Well, all I did the last time I talked to Sam was ask him questions.
And that's something I highly recommend as a strategy.
Just find out from the person you're talking to what they think, you know?
And don't try to win.
Try to learn.
Well, so Sam is really motivated by the same thing that motivated me, like, 30 years ago.
He looked at the panoply of human atrocity.
It terrified him, right?
Right to the core.
It's like, well, anything but this.
And he wants something like an objective standard of values.
Now, he thinks it can be found in science.
I think that's technically wrong, but it's an argument worth having, and we don't know how to sort out the relationship between science and values.
But the thing is, is that Sam certainly believes in evil.
Okay, well, if you believe in evil, you also believe in good.
Because good is the opposite of evil, whatever that is.
And, well, what's God?
Well, God is what's good.
Well, okay, what does that mean?
Is he a spirit?
Like, is he a spirit in the sky?
What do you mean by spirit?
So here's something to think about.
This is what I think.
When I look back at the good men that I've been fortunate enough to know in my life, there's a spirit that shines through each of them.
That makes them good.
That's how I can tell that each of them is good.
Well, the essence of that good, that's no different than God.
It might even be God.
Now, you say, well, what does that mean, that spirit?
Well, it's whatever is common among good men, let's say.
Was that real?
Well, isn't what's common among things more real than what's different?
And why a spirit?
Well, it animates them.
It's an animating force.
It's not a disembodied abstraction, which is the problem with conceptions of God, like Einstein's conception.
It's so disembodied, it has no connection to the world.
And that causes the death of God, that abstraction.
Mircea Eliade documented deaths of God in many cultures across history.
It's not only something that happened in the West that Nietzsche announced.
And it happens when the idea of God gets so abstracted that it no longer has any connection with the world.
Well, and those are the things I'm going to talk about at Cambridge and Oxford.
And I'm going to talk to Richard Dawkins.
So that's so cool, because I'd like to ask him some questions.
Because Dawkins is smart, and he's put forward maybe the most coherent, biologically-oriented argument for clockwork determinism.
Something like that.
dave rubin
Well, Jordan, I mean, I have to tell you, this is what, I mean, I know you know this, but when we were on tour, I think the thing that you changed me on more than anything else I talk about in my book, there were two things.
It was the importance of being a parent, because you would always say most people to live a fully actualized life have to go through that experience.
There are some exceptions, but most people.
But the other one was connecting to belief, and I think what changed me on this was watching you do these lectures every night,
saying the truth, saying, I'm just saying what I believe to be true
and trying to take my thoughts to the end and then I'll explore them further the next night.
But then seeing that translate into real world change for people,
the literally thousands of people who had unbelievable stories about the terrors
that they had been through that had turned their lives around.
And I thought that is the higher good, that is God, that it's not,
that it's, we can do the whole definition game and all that, but that you, especially at the peak of that thing,
were expressing something that was so profoundly true that we all know that maybe we can't exactly get into the
box that we can just hand to somebody and say, this is it.
But that was enough to move me.
I think that's really the argument you're trying to make that you'll bring to Cambridge and Oxford and to Dawkins and everybody else.
jordan b peterson
Yeah, well, and I would say in your situation, I know you're contemplating fatherhood and it's probably the right spirit to inhabit you as a political commentator.
Let's say a cultural commentator.
That's a good way to reconstrue it, you know, to the degree that you can be... because you're getting old enough now to...
That's the right role.
You know, you're not sort of upward-striving hero youth.
It's that you're in that transition.
And, like, benevolent father?
That's a good one, man.
And there's no limit to the number of people you can bring that to.
And there's no limit to how much good that'll do in your own life, and in relationship to your own children.
dave rubin
So let me, I know you got to go here, so let me just ask you one other thing just to tie all of this together.
Now, looking back at these last couple of years, the intellectual pursuits, obviously your health is better, at least to some degree, you know, you're getting back out on the road, you're going to start touring again, all of this stuff.
Do you feel that this is all really making a dent?
Do you feel like that it's heavy and it's real and doing something?
jordan b peterson
Yes, it's more real than anything else.
I don't mean what I'm doing specifically, but the sorts of things that we've been talking about.
I think the will to power just folds in its presence.
It's so much more powerful.
Well, how can it not be if it's actually the truth?
How can it not be more powerful than falsehood?
How can what isn't there be more powerful than what is there?
And why wouldn't we want to align ourselves with the truth?
You know, it's really painful in the short term, because there's so much mess you have to clear up.
Your own and historical mess, even, for that matter.
But it's better than living in filth.
And so...
Onward and upward.
And yes, and I'm optimistic, man.
And I've seen great people in your country, on both sides of the political spectrum, striving with all their might to bring things away from the insane edges.
Don't lose faith.
Don't lose faith in your institutions.
They're great institutions.
They're great institutions fundamentally.
And remember, we could have... Everyone could have enough to eat.
Everyone could have enough energy.
Everyone can have an opportunity for their children.
All of that.
We have all of that in front of us.
We have it right now.
We have it in the next 20 years.
If we don't get suspicious and paranoid and power-mad and especially deceitful.
dave rubin
Jordan, I will do the best I can.
Actually, no, I'll try to do a little better than the best I can.
How about that?
jordan b peterson
Yeah, well, that would not be lovely.
dave rubin
It was good seeing you, my friend.
jordan b peterson
Good to see you, Dave.
dave rubin
If you'd like to see more honest and insightful conversations with Jordan Peterson himself, check out our Jordan Peterson playlist, which includes every interview I've ever done with him.
And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist.
Both are right over here.
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