”SEX Evolved To Deal With Parasites” Jordan Peterson (Sex, Politics & Religion)
World-renowned clinical psychologist, professor, and best-selling author Dr. Jordan Peterson joins Russell to talk about the nature of truth, and the challenges of modern society. His views on the latest charges surrounding Donald Trump, the challenges of censorship, his debate with Richard Dawkins and his new upcoming University!The Peterson Academy launches this November: https://petersonacademy.com/Join us at ‘Community 2024' https://www.russellbrand.com/community/For a bit more from us join our Stay Free Community here: https://russellbrand.locals.com/NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
We've got an incredibly special show for you today.
In Here's the News, we're going to be asking about Trump's charges and corruption more broadly, but we've got a very special guest.
Jordan Peterson, the world-renowned clinical psychologist and best-selling author, is here with us today.
It's going to be an incredible conversation.
I'm going to ask Jordan Peterson about Trump, of course, about the culture wars, about the success of Sound of Freedom.
I'm going to talk to him about censorship.
Jordan Peterson, thanks for joining us.
It's good to see you, Russell.
We're in a maelstrom.
I see that you have adorned yourself in the accoutrements of the harlequin.
Is the role of the trickster necessary and integral at a time where authority appears to be melting, authenticity seems to be in decline, and people appear to be demanding new systems and their faith in the old answers and systems appears to be Waning.
Are you unconsciously indicating something to us or very deliberately indicating something to us?
Well, I don't know how much is play conscious and how much is it just something that automatically happens if you're conducting yourself properly.
These crazy people at LGFG have made me all sorts of suits.
And this one has a wooden tie, by the way, just so you know.
And it's supposed to be symbolic of the Native American art that I've been collecting.
These are like totem pole patches, essentially.
And so I don't know, they make me these crazy suits, Russell, and it turns out I like them.
So I wear them and it's fun.
And that's a good thing, you know?
JP, it's very curious that you have become, over the last five, ten years, one of the most, it appears, divisive figures in our culture.
Certainly that's how your icon and image is utilised.
And yet it appears to me that in numerous communities you are regarded as an elder.
I feel like I've seen you talk about being called a rabbi.
I know that you have interesting relationships with indigenous Canadian folk, or in the territory now known as Canada.
Do you think that what we're striving for is a kind of morality, a set of principles that is transcendent of the current cultural divisions that appear to be defining our time?
Do we need to find something akin to universalism to reorganize and reorientate our cultural conversations?
Are we in danger of arriving at a time of such enormous fragmentation and divisiveness But it almost makes it impossible to establish systems of governance and consensus even.
Well, the alternative to unity is conflict.
Now, unity can become so tight that it turns into tyranny, and obviously that's not acceptable.
But the problem with the continual emphasis on diversity that we hear is that it isn't accompanied by the obvious fact that if people aren't united by a vision, let's say, which is how you unite people properly, then they're divided, and divided people can't cooperate or compete peacefully, and their interests run afoul of one another.
Now, what's happening on the Unity front, as far as I can tell, is that There is a clamor for unity, particularly on the side of the people who are fear-mongering with the apocalypse, and they're trying to compel a unity with terror.
And to me, that's a hallmark of tyranny.
I think tyrants always use fear to compel unity.
What you need to do instead is to provide a unifying vision that people can adopt voluntarily.
You know, when you said, when you posed that question, that I'm a divisive figure, but I actually don't think that's true, Russell.
I'm a divisive figure online, but it doesn't seem to be the case in the actual world, because all the interactions I have with people in my actual life, in public, they're uniformly highly positive.
And so I don't think simulacrum of the real world.
In fact, I think it's dangerously demented in many ways.
And it's giving us a false sense of reality.
You know, it's a new sensory system, right?
The whole net and our new means of communication.
It's a whole new sensory and social system.
And there's no reason to assume that it's actually providing a valid representation of the actual world, especially because it also seems to be highly gameable by narcissists and psychopaths.
And that's not good.
That's not good.
Plainly, it is being used to leverage, engineer and amplify division.
There's no reason to imagine that part of the natural course of a free internet would be new confederacies, decentralisation of power, an end to the kind of gargantuan and centralist institutions, both state and corporate, that dominate our systems of power currently.
I wonder, before we delve into this subject, which I know is extremely significant and important to you, if you might for a moment comment on the current attempt to indict Donald Trump and what he continues to represent for, you might say, marginalised people, but he's an incredibly popular and populist figure.
Those of you watching this on YouTube now, we'll be on for about another five minutes and then we'll be exclusively available on Rumble.
Click the link on the description.
If you're watching this on Rumble, click the red button now and you can join us over on Locals.
And again, Dr. Peterson, what do you think is the significance of Trump and his ongoing persecution?
Do you think he legitimately is an insurrectionist and a criminal in the numerous ways that have been alleged?
Or do you consider this to be a kind of distraction and an attempt to foreclose on the possibility of a legitimate and a powerful opponent facing Biden in
2024?
Well, I read Victor Davis Hanson's book, The Case for Trump, which I would highly recommend
to anyone who's interested in Trump as a phenomenon.
And he pointed out, and I think quite rightly, and this is something for those who are sensible on the left to give some consideration to, that the Democrats, especially under Clinton, but it started with Obama, abandoned the American working class, regarded them essentially as deplorables, which is exactly the same thing that happened in Canada under Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh.
And they turn to Trump.
And it's not as if people don't understand that Trump is a bull in a china shop, and I think Robert F. Kennedy is in some ways the same sort of character, but they're actually calling for a bull in the china shop because increasingly people don't trust the centralized, the overarching centralized Institutions that have become too gigantic.
You made reference earlier to the fact that there's no necessary reason for us to assume that the internet communication system and information exchange system that we've set up would necessarily tilt towards decentralization and universalization.
I think that's absolutely true.
It's very difficult to stop a political system from becoming tyrannical.
That's the Tower of Babel situation, let's say.
Or degenerating into chaos.
You know, we've seen that with online games.
You know, some of those massive online games degenerated into absolute chaos because the rules by which they were constituted turned out not to engender a playable game.
And we have no idea if the internet communication system we've set up is actually a playable game.
We have no idea.
Like, look, already we do know some things.
About 35% of internet traffic is pornographic.
And if you don't think that that's under the control of psychopathic criminals, you're a fool.
And then there's absolute, what would you say, lawless West activity on the criminal financial fraud front.
I don't think there's an older person in the Western world who isn't targeted once a week by criminals trying to steal their bank accounts.
And then, so that's direct criminal activity of the obvious type.
Then there's all the online trolls who do nothing but cause trouble and sow divisiveness in their cowardly manner and with their LOL culture, trying to do nothing but cause trouble.
And we know from the psychological research that those people are much likely to have dark tetrad characteristics.
They're Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and, because that wasn't good enough, sadistic.
And we have no control mechanisms for their proliferation online, right?
Face-to-face, people like that get shut down right away, but they have absolutely free reign on the net.
And I think not only does that poison the public square in a terrible manner, but it also indicates to people falsely that we're much more divided than we are.
Yes, it appears to me sometimes, Jordan, that anthropology and ethnographics suggest that we all live in manageable communities, where the kind of narcissism and sadism that you describe cannot thrive because of the way that relationships break down when you encounter personalities of that type.
There is no ability to regulate a culture at this kind of scale.
And I know that what you believe in, it seems at least to me, that you believe in new ways of decentralising power, both corporate and state.
I wonder, are you saying something as significant as the The Nation Project has had its half, demi-millennia, and that it's time to review even the findings and the treasures of the Westphalian Treaty.
Is this a time where we review the way that we organise cultures and society?
Because it appears to me that the reason that we have these great gargoyles and demons occupying the public stage, vivid caricatures, A vile, lurid, and pornographic language, even outside of the erotic, is precisely because we are living in some outgrowth, in some exaggeration, in some unbearable amplification of the type of systems that we might live by.
Industrialization, it seems, ultimately introduced a great deal of tyranny, as well as the miracles it delivered.
Agriculture, perhaps the same could be said, but we have no contingency for the problems of scale that have been created by this new type of technology.
And it seems to me that unless we introduce real measures, as you say, control mechanisms, that tyranny now is appearing to be inevitable without significant and organized opposition.
So one of the things you said at the beginning of that was that when you extract relationships out of their local environment, You lose a regulatory function.
You lose an implicit regulatory function.
So imagine that, you know, you and I have had multiple opportunities to communicate.
And one of the things, and we want to sustain that.
So one of the things that we do while we're communicating, we might be trying to make our individual points for our own particular purposes.
Hopefully we're trying to do something like investigate the truth, you know, mutually.
But in any case, even if our own personal interests did creep into that, If we had any sense, our exchanges would be bounded by the realization that we're going to interact repeatedly for an indefinite amount of time into the future, right?
And so that makes us instantly, the dyad that we form, that makes us instantly into an interacting and iterative community.
Now, I believe that it's out of iterative interactions that fundamental morality emerges, and there's plenty of game theory that indicates precisely that.
Now, see, what happens to psychopaths and predators and parasites is that they sacrifice the possibility of a long-term relationship for immediate gratification.
And that's not good for them, by the way, because they tend to be very unsuccessful people, and they have to move from victim to victim very rapidly because people caught on to their games.
But they're not bounded by that necessity of responsible, iterated interaction.
You know, the same necessity that would govern you if you were in a long-term committed relationship, or the relationship that you have with your children.
And it's out of that that morality springs.
Now, if you eradicate that necessity, you disinhibit the psychopaths, and the predators, and the parasites.
Now, here's why this is such a major problem, and it might be a deadly problem.
The biological struggle is an arms race between parasites and hosts, and always has been, and it's such a profound race that that's why sex evolved.
Sex evolved because there are creatures that replicate, even some lizards, that can replicate essentially by cloning themselves.
So they produce identical duplicates of themselves.
But what happens is the parasites can optimize for their physiology and take them out.
So sex mixes genes.
Okay, so the reason I'm saying that is because the parasite problem is so deep and so profound that sex itself evolved as the method of replication to deal with it.
Now, the online communication systems facilitate the parasites, and you don't need that many of them to take a society down, you know?
Like, the real radical types who would rather dance around in the chaos and who are in it only for their immediate self-gratification, they're a very small percentage of the population.
Clinical data indicates about 3%.
But the problem with that is that if they have free reign, they can take everything down.
Like, they did that in the Russian Revolution, for example.
This happens.
That is pretty powerful stuff, Jordan Peterson.
Sex emerges as a solution to parasitic entities to introduce a new level of complexity that can outrun this parasitic mentality.
But I have a question for you, sir, and it is this.
What if more than enabling that 3% of the population that's psychopathic, we enable an archetype?
A deep psychopathy, latent in our species, unable to access the mainframe because of the way that our societies have previously functioned.
I know as a young Ian, you will be aware of these potent lurking psychological archetypes for which we are just utility, for which we are just vessels.
And it has been said, when you merge with an archetype, you merge with an archetype the same way you merge with a tiger.
There's only going to be one winner.
But to hear Jordan Peterson's response to this deep, Jungian question that we're flinging about just on Rumble.
You have to click the link in the description if you're watching us on YouTube because we're going to get deep.
In a minute, we're going to talk about the left.
We're going to be talking about identity politics and the potential war against nature.
We're going to be talking about new systems.
We're going to be talking about JP's Ark project as well as his new university and so much more.
I've got so many questions.
So click on the link.
Join us over on Rumble.
If you're watching us on Rumble, join us on Locals.
You can ask us questions there, although we did pre-record this earlier.
And if you'd known that, You could have joined us on Locals 4 It Live, like Joe's dog is, talking about parasites, even in computers.
Fantastic stuff.
So, what do you think, Jordan?
Perhaps the problem is even larger than enabling narcissistic, predatory and parasitic individuals.
Perhaps it somehow enables an archetype to function.
For example, the rather hacky analysis that a corporation behaves like a psychopath because it doesn't have individual culpability or the kind of morality that would evolve in an individual.
What happens if that is further charged by the type of technology that we're discussing?
What if it unlocks something even more powerful than individual psychopathy?
Well, you always ask the hardest questions, Russell, I would say, and that's very interesting.
Look, one of the things that's characteristic of the biblical corpus, and the biblical corpus is the narrative that lies at the bottom of all our narratives, one of the things it insists upon is an archetypal battle between what's known in this symbolic world, let's say, as the hostile brothers.
And the original Hostile Brothers are Cain and Abel, and they're magnified up into Christ and Satan as the symbolic narrative progresses.
And you see this reflected in all sorts of popular culture tropes.
You know, every superhero has his associated super villain.
And those are all—you see that with Thor and Loki, and of course their gods as well.
And you see this reflected constantly, say, with Batman and the Joker and Superman and Lex Luthor.
It's a constant trope.
Everyone knows it.
James Bond always fights some supervillain, and often nested in a whole pit of supervillains.
And there is a notion that's relevant to what you described, that there's a battle on the spiritual level—so you could think of that as the level of abstraction—between the spirit of Cain and the spirit of Abel.
And the spirit of Cain, Cain is the man whose sacrifices are rejected.
And there's an implication in the text that they're rejected because they're of second-rate quality.
It's never made quite clear, but you know, everybody's sacrifices are rejected from time to time.
You work hard, you do what you think you have to do, and fate doesn't deliver to you what you think you deserve.
Now, you have two choices under those conditions, and one choice is to take a good look at yourself, check your presuppositions, reformulate yourself, allow part of yourself to die and be reborn, regenerate yourself and try again, or to shake your fist at the sky and curse God and become bitter and resentful and then murderous and then genocidal.
And that's the temptation.
That's the dual pathways that have laid themselves forward to human beings since the beginning of time.
Now you asked if There's something archetypal going on under the surface that we're seeing the reflection of, and I would say, well, there's always been something archetypal going on.
That's in the nature of archetypes.
There's always been a battle between these two modes of existence.
But what happens in the midst of a technological revolution like the one we're in now is that it happens way faster and at a much larger scale, and maybe the outlines even become clearer.
People are inclined at the moment to think conspiratorially, you know, they say it's as if there's a cabal behind the scenes maneuvering in a particular direction.
And I would say there are micro cabals now and then acting out this archetypal pattern, but the The conspiracy itself is actually a network of associated ideas that have an animating spirit within them that possesses people en masse, and they act in accordance with its dictates.
If you read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, for example, one of the great things he did that was probably the fundamental contribution of his work was to show that the horrors of the communist regimes weren't an anomaly consequential to the instantiation of a potentially valid system, but the inevitable consequence of a non-playable game.
And so, the communist system laid itself out according to a certain set of animating principles, and that turned into this genocidal massacre.
The question is, so I know now, I'm writing a new book about this, I know now that the structure through which we look at the world is a story.
If you describe the structure through which we look at the world, that's what a story is.
That's why we value stories, because we need to know how to look at the world.
So the empiricists and the rationalists were wrong.
We cannot derive a picture of the world through mere reference to the facts, because there's one fact per phenomenon, and there's too many phenomena.
We're awash in them.
You have to arrange them hierarchically.
That's what a story is.
And once you know that, the next question obviously is, well, what's the correct story?
And I would say we at least know that it's not the story of Cain.
But plenty of people are playing that out.
Bitter, resentful, nihilistic, chaotic, you know, angry at the structure of existence itself for the implicit suffering, turning against humanity, well and the cosmos for that matter, in their vengeful anger.
And the problem with that, I can understand why that's justifiable because lots of people suffer, but the problem with that is that it makes a bad situation into hell.
And that seems like a bad idea if what you're trying to avoid is hell.
Yes, yes, that is what I'm trying to avoid.
We know that order rests continually upon chaos.
It's been a recurrent and defining theme of your work.
When you get the sense that the culture is being, beyond curated, censored, Organized and controlled by bad actors, it seems that you have a duty to oppose those actions and that telos.
It's extraordinary to me to think that when you emerged as a sort of gifted or a from the world of academia, doubtless At the inaugural point, an iconoclast, but nevertheless framed within a quite limited and liminal space that you would emerge and unfold with so many germane arguments.
I suppose your particular phenomena will always be alloyed to that.
That is, in fact, what your phenomena is.
How do you feel now that you're operating in a space where Some perspectives are censored on the basis that they are too right-wing.
Some perspectives are censored on the basis that they are not medically sound.
How can we have a framing where Donald Trump can be subject to these indictments, RFK, you know, your video of RFK was taken down, where you can't speak freely about the events of the last three years, even when you're using as your basis demonstrable empirical facts.
How are you going to continue to navigate this cancel culture and censorship when it appears that legislatively now significant moves are being made in the EU now to penalise social media companies, you're aware of that of course, and the Five Eyes Nations introducing comparable legislation to impose further censorship.
What kind of challenges do you envisage that we will face over the coming years and how might we oppose them?
Well, I think that we keep doing what we're doing.
You know, you and I and a number of other people, and people on a smaller scale, many people on a smaller scale, are trying to use whatever communication techniques they have accessible to them to stay one jump ahead of the people who would just as soon shut down free discourse.
Now, and it's possible as well that the free discourse that we're describing, fractious as though it may be, and offensive as though it may sometimes become, is part of the mechanism by which we keep the parasitic predators under control.
It's also part of the mechanism whereby we solve difficult problems without having to, you know, engage in real conflict with one another.
Difficult thought is the alternative to war.
And that's definitely the case.
Well, so what do I do?
I try to find all the avenues I can to communicate.
I try to keep the channels open.
I try to stay on top of the changing social media environment so that I can dance ahead of the censors, let's say.
And I tend also not to apologize for things I've said if I don't think they were wrong.
And so far, so far, you know, there's reason for me to be optimistic because people, the sensorial types who are irritated at me, have been trying to take me out for seven years.
And none of that's been, it's been dreadful in some ways, but it hasn't been successful.
In fact, I think quite the contrary, you know, there's an injunction that In the Gospels that you should embrace your enemy.
And you know what that means in part is even to regard enmity as an opportunity to dance with it, you know?
And there's some real truth in that, if you can manage it, you know?
I mean, one of the things my family has learned is if we are subject to a particularly grotesque attack, and I would say the most emblematic of those was the attempt to cast me as Red Skull in the Captain America comics, you know, it's preposterous to the point of surreality.
But we turned it into a productive joke, and that's part of that trickster mentality, I suppose, on the positive side.
And all that happened were positive things.
You know, it was stressful as hell when it first broke and unfolded, but the longer-term consequences were very positive.
And so I think, Russell, I think we all could be secure in the knowledge that if we faced enmity with truth, And with the true desire to aim up, that even the worst of adversarial situations could be transformed into something that would further the enterprise.
You know, you see this in Goethe and Faust as well.
When he characterizes Mephistopheles, who's a figure, a satanic figure, he's the figure to whom Faust sells his soul for infinite knowledge.
He describes himself as part of the process that always, what would you say, always aims at evil but ends up producing good.
And so, I mean, that's a high level of moral standard, right, to embrace your enemy to that degree, to regard enmity itself as an opportunity to do good.
But, well, if you're talking about archetypal realities, then you also end up talking about what constitutes the highest ideal.
I mean, it's very hard to live like that.
I mean, it's not like I don't get irritated, let's say, and sometimes worse than that, when these attacks occur.
But you have to keep in mind what you're after.
If one of these archetypal notions that we're attempting to understand is that behind apparent separateness there is a unitive force, and that it is benign, and that it is loving, Loving not, I don't mean that in an erotic sense, neither really in an emotional sense, but in that is the felt experience of unity.
Then the idea that enmity, conflict and suffering represent the erosion of the edges that keep you from unity.
And that in suffering there is sacrifice and there are, as you referenced earlier, deaths that have to be undertaken.
Then I suppose this would represent a kind of embrace of the enemy.
Do you sense in identity politics a further fetishisation of individualism that can no longer really be sustained.
That rationalism has brought us to this point where all of our functions tend to be predicated on the service of our preferences and our aversions, that our individual likes and dislikes become our Qur'an, they become our religion.
And do you feel, Jordan, that partly what you are trying to do is reintroduce Transcendent spiritual ideas to a cultural conversation that is bereft in them and is framed only really within the lexicon of materialism and the tropes of post-enlightenment philosophy that really doesn't embrace mysticism the way that perhaps it could.
And within this idea around identity politics and it being a kind of the ultimate celebration of the individual that it has baked into it, kind of is preventative of unity almost in the way that it defines itself, Could you also touch upon this attack perhaps on nature, nature's self, and within that, masculinity?
I know it's an idea you've talked about extensively, but in relation to identity politics in particular.
So, interesting.
It's very interesting, Russell.
One of the things that Carl Jung intimated near the end of the Second World War was that the fundamental danger of Protestantism as such was the continual fragmentation of the religious enterprise.
And you see this with the multiplication of Protestant sects, let's say.
And he thought that the ultimate extension of that would be that each individual, in some sense, would become their own church.
And so when God identifies himself to Moses in Exodus, he says, I am that I am, or I am what I am.
He identifies himself as the principle of being and becoming itself.
All right.
Now, If you identify reality with your subjective experience only, you attribute to yourself that quality.
I am the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes reality.
But there's a weird twist in that, and it's one that I don't exactly understand, because The subjectivity to which all things are to be subordinated tends to be allied with an extremely narrow hedonism.
And so the people who are pushing forward an identity politics seem to identify their own individuality with nothing more, let's say, than their immediate sexual desire.
And I would say sexual particularly because so much of identity politics is about sexual attraction.
And then you might say, well, it's a pretty strange theory of human existence that you are to be identified with one biological whim, let's say.
And the unity that you're describing, I don't even think in some sense is metaphysical or transcendent.
I think what it is, is the hammering into a higher order unity of the plethora of fundamental motivational and emotional systems that would otherwise manifest themselves as a pure local subjectivity.
And if that happens, you run into the psychopath problem.
Like, if you're only out, let's say you identify yourself with your desires, your immediate desires.
Well, then you're going to treat everyone around you and yourself like a means to the gratification of those immediate desires.
And what that will do is that'll destroy you in the future, because you're not giving your future self any allowance.
You do terrible things now because they're pleasurable, regardless of consequences, and you treat everyone else as if they're lesser and subordinate to your whims.
This higher unity, you know, it isn't less real than the subordinate whims.
It's more real.
Like the hero archetype is the most real representation of the human self.
It's the most real, and it's based on the idea of something approximating courageous self-sacrifice.
So, for example, you see in the dragon fight story the notion that you have to confront what you're terrified of and repelled by.
You have to do that voluntarily.
Assiduously, you pursue that.
The bigger the treasure you garner, if you garner the treasure, you're obligated to distribute it generously to the community.
And it's all of that that makes up that central archetype of the hero.
And that is the central unity, right?
That unites the individual internally, unites motivation and emotion, and then unites each individual with the community.
A sense that the hero cannot be mobilized or galvanized without that motivation.
That the fuel doesn't arrive until the hero transcends from egoic motivation to communal motivation.
That when fueled by the ego, you cannot confront the dragon sufficiently.
There's a few things that I want to pick up on.
And this idea, if I may, sir, of utility.
That when we see other only in terms of utility, it's obviously restrictive.
But I would love to fold into this one of the things you taught us earlier in the conversation,
the role of sex in our evolution, and indeed all of evolution,
in order to introduce new complexity.
If sex has such an epochal role in the evolution of our entire species,
surely then it is connected to this consciousness that is ulterior to manifestation and materialization.
And therefore its role is almost archetypically significant.
I also want to offer you this, if I may, regarding the Cain and Abel analysis.
There has to be an ongoing tension between the assertion of our roles as individuals.
I have to exist as Russell in the world.
I have to know that it is Russell's mouth that I put food into.
rather than the mouths of others on the most basic biological level, that I am indeed, that my entire reality is subjective, that is all I know of reality, and yet I am aware of my insignificance.
Somewhere within us there is some fractal interface between our relative insignificance and our total omni-, if not omnipotent, omniscience, that all reality takes place within my consciousness, yet materially I'm borderline irrelevant.
Perhaps there is something of this Cain and Abel tension here.
I believe that if people don't have a felt and personal subjective experience of God, whether that's through Christ or the Prophet Muhammad or Buddha, or yogically, some sense of a self beyond self, or some sense of an entity beyond self, some felt experience of knowing that is not about what Russell wants and what Russell doesn't want, then we do become victim to this hedonism, A hedonic ideology that seems to assert itself in the absence of a more deliberate ideology.
I've been thinking too of the distinction between bliss and ecstasy.
Bliss perhaps offers us the idea of fulfilment.
Fulfilment.
Our cup is full.
Ecstasy offers us the idea that my cup runneth over, that boundaries are being burst.
This seems to me relevant with your hedonic analysis.
So I say that when we strip away God and the possibility of God, then that subjective experience becomes God.
That becomes the higher principle around which we organise.
So there does need to be some new way of introducing to politics The sacredness, the sacrament, the idea, somehow the representation of this tension, that we are part of the divine, that we have rights, but we are not only our rights, we are also our duties.
I know that's not a question, but I also know you'll have things to say.
Well, okay, so there is a gospel injunction as well to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's, and you mentioned a reintroduction of the sacred into the political, and what has happened, as you also intimated, is that the sacred has collapsed into the political, And that means there are now sacred cows in the political, which is why we can't discuss politics with each other.
You need to separate the sacred and the political, and the political has to be subordinate to the sacred.
I mean, this is one of the most remarkable and powerful discoveries of mankind as a whole, is that The principle of political sovereignty has to be subordinate to the principle of sacred sovereignty.
And the Christian idea, and this develops out of the Jewish tradition, is that the fundamental principle of sovereignty is, what would you say, is voluntary.
It's voluntary.
It's a voluntary sacrifice.
That's what's at the center of the community, and that the highest is properly devoted to serving the lowest.
That's an inversion of the, let's say, the classical notion of power.
Might makes right, if I can crush you.
And if might isn't the principle of sovereignty, you have to ask yourself, well, what is?
And you could say, well, nothing, in which case you have a kind of nihilistic chaos, and then hedonism rules.
And if there's something sovereign above power, then you have to ask yourself what that is.
And that is exactly what the biblical corpus, by the way, is trying to sort out.
So you see prophets, for example, emerging repetitively in the Old Testament, and they are people who What would you say?
The events faith that the fundamental structure of reality is good, and that if you live in truth, you can bring about a new reality that's even better.
That's the axiom of faith.
Then they'll confront, let's say, the tyrant or the catastrophes of the natural world with that banner in hand and revitalize.
And the biblical narrative is predicated on the idea that the Christian savior is the ultimate expression of that Developing spirit, right?
The manifestation of that, the embodied manifestation of that.
I got it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm going to ask you now some questions that will be elicited and have been elicited from our audience.
Excuse me.
See Sound of Freedom, what does this mean, the success of this movie?
Does it mean that you can now bypass the typical and former establishment models of promo?
Does it mean that people are interested in stories that have a sort of a plain sort of Christian ethos?
What do you think is the significance of this film and its success, Jordan?
Well, you know, I was just in Hollywood two weeks ago and I met some stars there and they were older and very well-established people trying to make their way forward appropriately to the best of their ability and doing that well, I would say.
But I really got the sense, and it was from other things that happened in L.A.
too, that that time is over.
And I know from talking to my friends in LA, and you know, I can't be sure that this is 100% correct, but that the only star now, for example, who can ensure box office success is Tom Cruise.
And interestingly, Cruise is also one of the stars who's completely dissociated himself from the political.
I mean, I know he's involved with Scientologists, and that's neither here nor there for the moment, although it might have given him somewhere to put his religious enterprise, you know, and kept him out of the political.
But then you see that also happening at the same time as the writer's strike.
And my sense of the writer's strike is that no one cares.
And I think that system has collapsed.
Now, you look at what happened with The Sound of Freedom.
Part of that is people saying, to hell with the woke entertainment mob.
We'll go watch this just because we're being told not to.
But part of it also is the desire for people The desire that people have for a truly archetypal story.
And whatever else you might say about The Sound of Freedom, it's essentially a hero story.
I mean, it has political connotations, and it's grounded in the events of the real world, let's say.
But fundamentally, it's, you know, one lone guy, supported by his dutiful wife, who's motivated by higher order principles, to take on the worst of the predators and the parasites.
And so yes, people are dying for that people have always died for that story, like psychologically and literally, because it's the it's the right story.
The hero stands up against the tyrant, right?
The hero leads people out of slavery, the hero confronts the dragon.
There's no getting away from that.
That's our, that's our, that's the intrinsic pattern of our instinctual being.
And the reason we find those stories meaningful is because meaning is the instinct that guides us on that on that on that revelatory and redemptive pathway.
And you see, this is where the atheist types get it so wrong, you know, because they tend, like the more literal Protestants, to assume that what religious practice is is the mouthing of a set of propositions.
It's like a theory of the world, and that's not the case.
It's a manner of conducting yourself, directing your attention, and acting.
And then there's representations of that in imagination and semantically, but the fundamental issue is the actual pattern of action.
You know, that's why the highest level of religious devotion in the Christian tradition It's the same in Buddhism with regard to Buddha.
It's the imitation of Christ.
It's the attempt to act out the archetype in the confines of your life.
And the offering there is that this is a strange offering.
The offering there is that that's possible.
It's possible for each person to operate as a center of divinity in the world.
And I believe that I don't believe that there is a more reliable truth than that.
And I also think that's true scientifically, by the way.
Yes, it's beautiful that the word conduct obviously has those connotations of being a carriage for energy or for heat that you can connect to the source through conduct.
Regarding atheism, tell us a little of your recent challenge.
We did a video on it to Richard Dawkins, who we've had on the show, I've had conversations with.
Do you think that he's an example of the reductive atheism and deliberate straw man atheism?
Oh yes and yes and no.
You know, the thing about Dawkins is I like Dawkins and he's super smart and I learned a lot from reading his books.
And I think that Dawkins fundamentally is an intellectually honest man.
I don't think he knows how to reconcile the gap between the propositional view of religion and the scientific view.
Now, I think he's wrong on a variety of fronts.
I don't think that his reading of the biblical corpus is particularly sophisticated.
It's dismissive.
Now, what Dawkins does is the same thing that Harris does, is that they're very opposed to the totalitarian proclivity, and rightly so.
But they identify the totalitarian proclivity with the religious enterprise.
Now, there are totalitarian proclivities within the religious enterprise, right?
Because the most psychopathic tyrants will use the highest principles to justify their own self-interest.
So the worst totalitarians are likely the ones who subvert religion.
And that's rightfully objected to, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Dawkins and Harris both underestimate the necessity of narrative, irreducible necessity of narrative, and they don't contend with the fact of religious phenomenology, the religious experience as such, the instinct of meaning.
Now, Harris has moved in that direction because he is a devoted meditator, and so he admits in practice that there is a religious enterprise.
He doesn't like to concretize it, but partly that's because Sam knows perfectly well at some level that if he concretized his relationship with the divine, his rational mind would tear it to shreds and leave him bereft.
I have been in contact with Dawkins' representatives since you made that video, and since Richard, Dr. Dawkins, and I have been bandying back and forth on Twitter, and there is some possibility that we will meet and discuss these things.
I would like it to be a discussion, because this is not simple, and I don't think it's not the place where you want to have a defeat.
I understand where Dawkins is coming from, but I think that See, he's such an interesting person, because his notion of meme is right on the threshold of the notion of archetype.
If he would have pursued that, he would have entered the Jungian world, because the ultimate memes are sacred stories.
Now, then the question is, does the meme bear any relationship to reality?
And the answer is, well, it depends on what you mean by reality.
And I know that sounds like a cop-out, but it isn't, because Memes that survive.
You can make a perfectly reasonable argument that the memes that survive over the longest spans of times are the ones that most effectively serve the purposes of reproduction.
That's a Darwinian argument which Dawkins should support.
And I would say that the memes that have guided us, let's say the memes that are part of the biblical tradition that have lasted for at least thousands and likely tens of thousands of years, are the memes that have been selected By two processes of reproduction, right?
The transmission of information, so the propagation of information as reproduction, but that have also facilitated genuine reproduction itself.
And so I don't understand, I don't see how someone who's Darwinian in their thinking can avoid that conclusion if they take their thinking right to the logical end.
Successful memes have emerged as a consequence of Darwinian competition.
And so why would you not say, then they're adapted to the world, then they're microcosms of the world.
Dawkins himself said that an adapted organism, he said this explicitly in a brilliant paper, An adapted organism must be a microcosm of the world.
Well, we're storied organisms.
So how in the world can you not derive the conclusion that what we live in is best construed as a story?
I think it is.
I think it's inevitable.
And then the question is, well, what's the story?
Well, we've been trying to figure that out for Since we've been able to communicate thousands, tens of thousands of years, and voluntary self-sacrifice, the dragon fight motif, the bearing of the cross, the voluntary bearing of the cross, that being the precondition for redemption and renewal.
That's all part of that system of ideas, and I think it's inescapable.
Yes, there would have to be some concomitant magnetism for a meme to land, for a meme to imprint.
It can't sustain its own ongoing randomness and simultaneously narrativize.
Those two things, there's a juxtaposition in that.
Another way of looking at it, you're absolutely right.
Here's another way of looking at it.
The stories that survive are those that are maximally adapted to the structure of human
memory and communication.
Obviously, because they wouldn't be remembered or transmitted.
They wouldn't strike home.
They wouldn't have any compelling power.
So the stories have to arrange themselves so they're analogs of the biological substrate
that's representing them.
And that means they're an echo of, you could say, they're an echo of the soul, right?
And you can make that case biologically.
And I don't see any escape from it.
So one of the things I've learned, for example, is that The instinct of meaning itself.
It's a reflection of something the Russian neuropsychologist called the orienting reflex, the orienting response, which is the response that orients you to the emergence of new information in the environment.
That grips you.
It's like the burning bush.
It grips you.
And that grip is represented at multiple levels in the nervous system.
And that grip occurs on the border between order and chaos.
Like, technically speaking, that happens to be the case.
You want to be somewhere where you have one foot in order and one foot in the unknown.
That's the eternal dragon fight.
That way you're stable enough to maintain yourself, but you're also challenging yourself enough to continue to grow and change.
Meaning signifies your existence in that place, right?
And that's part of the divine order.
And I see absolutely no evidence in the relevant neuropsychological literature that any of that is less than biologically accurate.
And I know the great literature Jeffrey Gray's book, The Neuropsychology of Anxiety, in particular, and Jaak Panksepp's Affect of Neuroscience.
I've talked to many neuroscientists, What's his name now?
He's the most cited neuroscientist in the world.
He wrote a lot about emotional responses and entropy.
I asked him specifically—his name will come to me—whether or not object perception was a micro-narrative, and he said, necessarily, yes.
You think about that.
Every object we see is a prop in a play.
At the perceptual level, that shatters empiricism.
You don't see facts and objects and attribute to them meaning.
You see props in a play.
And the question is, well, what play are you playing?
What part are you playing?
There's no detaching perception from the underlying narrative.
It's not technically possible.
Yes, I like that because it suggests that consciousness is the prima materia of our reality, that consciousness is the baseline, is the fundamental frequency from which secondary phenomena emerge, that this is Genesis, this is the point of origin, this is what precedes that molecular explosion that grants us all reality.
Is this the way that you might conduct yourself at the Peterson Academy, bringing together a variety of subjects to create a multi-discipline education?
Would you house debates between yourself and Dickie Dawkins?
Would you find me in some cyber corridor, in a mortarboard, in a Hogwarts scarf?
Will there be inter-house competitions and Quidditch matches?
Would you invite J.K.
Rowling so you can be the most controversial?
In the staff room.
What's it going to be like at the Peterson Academy, JP?
Well, I think all of that would be great fun, you know, and as you know, we've invited you to participate.
We'll work out the details of that as we move along.
What we're doing at the moment is we're trying to find people who are great communicators, who believe fervently in the integrity of their ideas, and then inviting them to produce eight hours of content pertaining to what they would love to teach most if the restrictions were stripped from them.
So, you know, we're trying to produce a diverse range of courses.
Our first goal is to produce a Bachelor of Arts for people, an online equivalent to a Bachelor of Arts.
I don't think we'll accredit the university because we have to deal with the accrediting agencies and that's so much of a bureaucratic nightmare that it would be fundamentally counterproductive.
But I think we'll be able to guarantee potential employers that our graduates will be accredited in a manner that truly indicates their ability to learn and their disciplined conscientiousness and their potential creativity.
So the market value should be there.
And we want to walk people through a corpus of courses that will What would you say?
Enable them to think more clearly and make them sophisticated players so that if they want to be successful in whatever way they define success, they're going to be armed with the tools that enable them to do that.
And we produced a writing app, too, called Essay, Essay.app, that teaches people to write.
And, you know, a cynic might say, well, I don't have to write because I have ChatGPT.
And the proper response to that is, and this might be the motto of our university, Think or die.
Right?
That's the purpose of thinking.
Alfred North Whitehead said this.
You think so your thoughts can die instead of you.
You engage in combative dialogue so your idiot notions can perish before you act them out and suffer.
And the reason you think, and the reason you write, and the reason you don't cheat when you do that, because if you don't think, you suffer and die.
And so we would like to arm people with the best of thoughts and also with the skills necessary to think so that they can make their way forward properly in the world.
That's the goal.
And then we want to do this.
And this is part of the comical element of it.
I'd like to knock the price of a bachelor's degree down 95% because I think that's possible.
And I think it would be It's comical.
It's comical that that's a possibility.
But I think it is a possibility.
We have great lectures lined up already.
We've taped 20 courses.
They're very nicely filmed, very professionally.
They'll be delivered at a much higher quality than the typical university lecture.
Now, we know that a university isn't just lectures and tests, right?
There's a social element to it.
You want to meet new peers.
Perhaps you want to meet your mate.
That's maybe why you're willing to give a university $250,000.
And so we're trying to set up a social media platform around it that will enable people to communicate about what they're learning, to aggregate together in their local communities, and perhaps to figure out how to come together now and then on a larger scale so that they can have some more of the actual, you know, bricks-and-mortar university experience.
And so, you know, we'll see if we can manage it.
But so far, We have had enthusiastic participation from our lecturers, and that's also partly because we treat them nicely.
You know, one of the things that's really struck me working with the Oxford and Cambridge professors, because we have a number of them, is that they are so grateful to be treated Decently, that it's really quite heartbreaking.
You know, it's like, we make them a decent financial offer, but when they come to do their lectures, like, we're actually really happy they're there.
And we're pleased that they're willing to share our knowledge with them, and we treat them like they're worthy of respect.
And all of the people that we've had come to lecture have indicated their interest to repeat the experience.
And so we want to bring people together who want to teach, and we want to leave them the hell alone.
So they can teach.
And then we want to offer that to people at as broad a level as possible, as inexpensively as possible.
And we'll see.
It's a ridiculously ambitious goal.
But I can't see why it's impossible, you know?
I don't think it is.
I'm beginning to experience that independent media conflates with independent politics almost organically because the issues that you cover are essentially political and unavoidably political.
Adding education to that now triumvirate It appears necessary and essential and a significant part of your modality of decentralization and your desire for decentralized models.
Professor, please finish.
There are people all over the world that are clamoring for high quality education, not least in the West, but also everywhere else.
And the new technologies of translation also may make it possible, at least in principle, to offer what we're offering in a multitude of languages.
And you know, and the translations are very accurate and very high quality.
And so, well, we'll see what happens.
We're very much looking forward to doing it.
We figured the eight-hour format seems to be about right.
You know, maybe we'll bundle like two eight-hour courses together to make a single university credit, something like that.
But, you know, obviously people can tolerate a three-hour podcast, and those are educational content.
I think 30 hours, which is a standard university course, is actually too long for online provision.
There's no reason not to break that up and to not overwhelm people with, you know, content that would require a devotion of time that they might not be able to manage, especially when you can aggregate courses together anyways.
And so four two-hour lectures seems to be Maybe the sweet spot for the electronic delivery of educational material.
We'll see.
You know, we launched this Exodus seminar on YouTube, and it's 16 two-hour seminars devoted to an explication of the Exodus story, which was a remarkable thing to participate in, by the way.
And people are responding very positively to that, as they did to my series on Genesis.
So there's definitely a hunger for high-quality educational material.
It's also lovely to be—one of the things that's been quite delightful in some ways about no longer being associated with the university, even though there's parts of it I miss, is that when I'm lecturing, I'm only teaching people who actually want to learn.
And hopefully this Peterson Academy will be set up that way, too.
We'll only have teachers who want to teach, and we'll only be teaching students who actually want to learn.
So that's an optimized play situation, right?
And so hopefully there can be some joy in it, and some playfulness.
You know, you referred to that as a possibility, and that would be Well, that's the goal.
I shall set about designing my lectures even now.
You will find me a renegade, teacher.
Sure, I don't play by the rules, but I get the job done.
While people are in my class, they'll play by my rules.
First rule, there is no rules.
Twelve rules for life, I give you thirteen rules for life.
The thirteenth rule is ignore the preceding twelve.
It's gonna be An education in skullduggery and needless trickery.
JP, thank you so much for joining us today.
We're only curtailing our conversation to broadcast it, as a matter of fact, because we're putting it out this evening.
Otherwise, I'll carry on long into the English night.
Thank you so much for joining me.
I look forward to seeing you soon.
I'm aware we're in comms around the Ark thing, and I don't mean to be dismissive, and I'll help you in any way I can, sir.
Yes, well, and hopefully you'll be moderating my discussion with Richard Dawkins.
I think that would be ridiculously comical and interesting.
And hopefully we can do it in a manner that's truly productive.
I think we could manage it, you know?
And like I said, I have a lot of respect for Dawkins.
He's the most effective voice there is for that reductive materialist atheism, and that's a non-trivial force to be reckoned with.
Right, and the totalitarian contamination of the religious enterprise is also something that has to be hashed out.
Thank you so much, Jordan.
Now, the Peterson Academy is launching soon, and you can see Jordan Peterson speaking at the O2 in London on Wednesday, November the 1st.
