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Oct. 29, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:11:55
Jordan Peterson On Israel-Palestine Conflict, Symbolism & the Psyche - Stay Free #234
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So, I'm going to go ahead and get started.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
We've got a live shot there.
Hello there, you Awakening Wonders.
Thanks for joining me for a very special edition of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
We've had a massive, extraordinary, revealing, and deep conversation with Jordan Peterson.
It's the first time we've spoken for a long while, or certainly spoken publicly, because Jordan Peterson and I communicate a lot about the culture.
I talk to him personally about what I've been through and what I've been going through.
He's an extraordinary mind and an extraordinary man and he has an incredible ability to ascertain just what's going on and obviously he ain't afraid to offer his opinion on what's going wrong in the world.
Today, because he's over in the UK to talk about ARK, which is his consortium discussing potential solutions for the world, and you should check that out, there's a link in the description if you want to learn more.
We talk about, this being Jordan Peterson, is But in particular, the war in the Middle East, a kind of living, vivid symbol of end times.
What specifically is the legacy of Judaism to world faith and to world solutions?
The debt owed by, in Jordan Pearsons' view, Christianity and Islam to the originator of
the monotheistic faiths, the Abrahamic faiths as they're more commonly known.
Of course we talk about kindness, of course we talk about ways in which we can change
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Now we have the great privilege of a conversation with Jordan Peterson, who, if you don't know, is a clinical psychologist.
pending, a best-selling author without question. He is of course bringing ARK to the UK to discuss
a hopeful vision for a future that appears to be on the precipice of perpetual crisis,
perhaps precisely because of a tendency towards centralisation which we will be
discussing at some point. Thank you so much for joining us, Jordan.
Hey, it's always good to see you.
I wanted to ask you, with the current set of crises that are besetting the world,
perhaps most notable and extreme at least on first assessment, being the sequence of
ongoing wars and of those wars perhaps because of historical and even historic
break.
freight the Israel-Palestine conflict being the most notable and fraught of them.
I wonder how you regard war as a symbolic event, war as a crisis, and is there something particular to be gleaned that this is In particular, a war between Israel and Palestine.
Does this war carry freight that other wars do not carry?
If not, then why is it that Old Testament prophets use the conflict between Israel and their enemies as the kind of archetypal and defining conflict the conflict that in fact almost could be used to
understand what war in itself is. Is it even appropriate in the midst of this conflict to regard it in
its symbolic terms? And if it isn't appropriate, why have a symbolic assessment at all? Well,
the Jews are always troublesome because they're a successful minority. And so that if you're
inclined to view the world through a lens of power and you make the presumption that all you need to
explain all of human relations and all of human history is the narrative of oppressor and
oppressed, the Jews tend to stick in your throat because minorities should fail if they're oppressed.
and And the Jews succeed wherever they are, and there's very complex reasons for that.
And then if you're a right-wing ethno-nationalist, well, that's equally annoying.
Not because the success of the Jews devastates your oppressor narrative, but because, well, the only reason they could possibly be successful is because they're conspiring behind the scenes.
And so, the Jews always get targeted when societies start to destabilize.
I actually think they're canaries in the coal mine.
You know, when you see anti-Semitism on the rise, you know that your society is starting to shake and tremble.
If you can't tolerate the successful minority, then there's something gone deeply wrong with your culture.
From a clinical perspective, the idea that a patient's history, from a Jungian perspective in particular, could be regarded as the intercession of God in that patient's life, each crisis perhaps regarded as a collision with the capital S self, between the self and the ego.
Do you agree with Erdinger's assessment that all human history is the manifestation of God's relationship with mankind.
And if there is something to be gleaned from this very particular analytic,
what is this we're experiencing now with this current war, one aspect of which you have touched upon already,
and the set of accompanying wars and crises that appear to be constellating around it?
Well, it's hard to see how you can be Christian or Muslim without being burdened ethically by the debt that you owe
the Jews.
I mean, the Jews, the Jews, Old Testament mythology is the starting place for Islam and Christianity, and there are complex reasons for that.
I think the Jews did an unbelievably good job of formulating a monotheistic hypothesis and then buttressing that with a plethora of deep stories, but they were also among the first people, if not the first people, Per se, to hypothesize that the relationship with God was contractual and also psychological.
So one of the things you see happening in the Old Testament, this happens with the prophet Elijah, is that there's a realization that whatever God is, which is the sum of all that is good, I suppose, that's one way of thinking about it, is also manifest within you, for example, as the voice of conscience.
And that that voice is something that you have a relationship with, but that also has a certain kind of independence.
Now, it's a very strange hypothesis, but it's worth taking with some degree of seriousness.
Freud posited, and people are unconscious Freudians now, that we were religious, we believed in heaven, we believed in God to help us overcome our anxiety of death, right?
To give to mortal life significance and eternal significance and depth that it lacked because of its finitude.
And so he regarded the religious enterprise as something that was in some ways juvenile and infantile because of that requirement for dependence.
There's a variety of serious flaws with that theory.
And one is, well, why bother with the notion of hell then?
Because you could just dispense with that if all you were trying to do was delude yourself.
And the second one is, well, there are some stringent conditions that are laid upon you as an adherent of a religious belief.
And you might say, well, you only abide by them because you're looking for eternal heaven.
But it's still the case that the religious structures are set up with a fair degree of stricture within them.
And if it was a mere matter of immature hedonism, let's say, the desire for eternal gratification, why make the preconditions for membership so stringent?
Then there's an additional complication as well, which is that the voice of conscience is Mysterious, because it obviously makes itself manifest within, but it isn't something that you have voluntary control over.
And then you might say, well, is it something you have a relationship with?
And I would say that's also an accurate way of putting it, because you see this detailed very well in the story of Pinocchio.
So when Pinocchio is, of course, attempting to become real instead of being a puppet, being controlled from behind the scenes.
And when he first encounters his conscience, this little voice that bugs him, hence the cricket, the conscience is also not very well tuned.
Like, Jiminy Cricket is just a tramp who's been everywhere, but he doesn't have a home, and he doesn't really know what he's doing.
And it's in the dialogue between the two of them that the ascension to the divine occurs, right?
And the full realization of individuality.
That, well, that's a good example of how a relationship with what's highest can be personal.
Like, modern people have a very difficult time with that idea, right?
It's like, most educated people, if they deign to contemplate God at all, it's as some abstract spiritual entity who really has very little to do with existence per se.
Kind of the God of Einstein, let's say.
When evangelical Protestants, for example, talk about a personal relationship with Jesus, they get pretty damn nervous and want to move out of the room, you know, the intellectual types, but they fail to understand that you have a relationship with a number of manifestations of spirit that aren't clearly yours.
So, for example, the voice of conscience, that's a very good one, but the other autonomous spiritual manifestation that affects all of us is the appearance of what compels our interest.
You know, there's an autonomy in that too.
That's summed up in the notion of a calling.
What's interesting beckons to you.
It isn't something that's fully under your control, right?
You can ignore it.
You can follow it.
You can pervert it.
But you can't fully control it.
And you have to enter into a dance with it.
You have to make your peace with it.
And that speaks of a certain autonomy of both interest and conscience.
And that autonomy seems to have a will, and historically speaking, and the Jews were very good at this, that will was associated with the manifestation of the spirit of being itself.
And I think that's true.
I don't see a more elegant definition.
It's not an explanation exactly.
So, well, so the Jews are freighted with all that because they were the first people to put those sorts of notions forward.
They've changed the world.
And so every time the Jews are involved in something, its significance is magnified, which is also, you know, a large part of mystery.
So...
The relationship between psyche and matter requires symbolism to catharsise it and to provide cartilage that would otherwise be absent, impossible to envisage without that Non-syntactical representation that symbols can provide.
If the conscience, Jiminy Cricket, and the being, the entity, the marionette, the puppet, the boy, Pinocchio, to have a relationship at all, there is a kind of a tension in it, there is a polarity in it, and both of them require one another for its realization, and perhaps that's as good an explanation for God creating our kind as any.
When you say that monotheism is the great Judaic artifact, do you feel that even in a secularized culture, the paradigm ultimately remains consistent?
Even if it's humanist?
Even if this alliance is transferred to the state?
Even if the pinnacle of authority and power becomes the state?
Is the imprature ultimately consistent?
Do even those of us, and I wouldn't include myself actually, do even those who consider themselves to live in a post-religious society still will live within this monotheistic template which I suppose if it's anything at all offers us a kind of a centrifugal point rather than a pantheonistic or pervasive or even Or a panoply of potential gods and deities.
There is one centralizing entity and we intersect with that reality.
I'd like to add to that already rather complex question even by my own standards when I'm dealing with you because I'm a different man when I'm dealing with you, you better believe it.
How do we fold into this What advances Christianity offer us on that template, particularly if Isaiah in particular is offering us the messianic event as his key and defining prophecy.
What is the function of Christianity as an advance of Judaism and even in a secularized society are we still operating within a kind of monotheistic template With the state, an increasingly authoritarian state, even under a liberal guise as a Canadian, you'll recognize what I'm saying there.
Is that still the paradigm we're operating within?
So there's two questions there, really.
Okay, well, the first one, well, imagine that there's only, well, there's three options.
Nothing is of any value.
That'd be the first option.
That's a real finalized nihilism.
Now, the problem with that option is that it's It's not realistic and in any sense, it's not existentially realistic in that it doesn't accord with our experience, but it's also not practically realistic.
It doesn't accord with our experience because if you dispense, even if you dispense with all the positive meaning in life as a consequence of being nihilistic, you won't dispense with the pain and the terror.
And so what you do if you're nihilistic is reduce life to pain and terror, not to nothing.
And so that seems like a really bad deal.
And then, because pain and terror are by definition what's negative about life, so you can't elevate them to what's positive.
That's not without inverting the very basis for communication itself.
Okay, so then we can put that off the table.
There's no life has no meaning theory, because you can't get rid of the pain and the terror.
So, You could say life has no meaning other than pain and terror, you know.
Now that's a pretty damn dismal judgment, and I also think that's not in accord with people's experience, but at least it's more logically coherent.
Okay, next.
Well, there's either a unity that attempts to make itself manifest, or there isn't.
There's a plurality.
Okay, now, if there's a plurality, what's the consequence?
Well, the consequence is that you're torn apart by inner conflict.
That's the psychological consequence, because you're pointing in all sorts of different directions at once.
Maybe you're a war of different desires, let's say, a war of different impulses, and that's a state of confusion and chaos, and we know technically that that's associated with both anxiety and hopelessness.
And I say we know that technically because the most advanced neuroscientists in the world, Carl Friston among them, foremost perhaps, has already determined that Anxiety indexes entropy, so chaos and confusion.
And chaos and confusion demolish hope, because hope is an emotional manifestation that makes itself known in relationship to a defined goal.
So you feel hope, and that's positive emotion.
That's dopaminergically mediated positive emotion.
You only feel that while you see yourself advancing towards a goal.
Now, if the goals are diverse and disunified, so no monotheism, let's say, then confusion reigns and so does hopelessness.
Now, if the goal is unified, which implies a unity underneath everything, let's say, then another problem arises, which is, well, what should the unity be predicated upon?
Now, your observation was, and this is something Nietzsche pointed out back in the late 1900s or 1800s, that It's very easy for the collective or the state or something hedonistic to become the highest unity and for everything to be bent in that direction.
Well, when the state becomes This source of unity, you have a Tower of Babel situation where people have built in a Luciferian manner, they have presumed to take on to themselves the value that should only be accorded what is truly transcendent.
Then you get the collapse of the religious into the state, the failure to separate Caesar and God, you get the collapse of God into the state, then everything that the state does becomes tinged with religious significance and Well, let's put it this way.
That's not good.
And so that's how it seems to me.
It's like, look, there's either a monotheism or there's a plurality.
The cost of plurality is psychologically, it's anxiety and hopelessness.
Socially, it's disunity, right?
Because if your goal and my goal cannot be unified, then If we're occupying the same territory, we're definitely in conflict.
It's the definition of conflict because we're pursuing.
Now, you know, we could be walking side by side and at the moment your pursuits and mine have nothing to do with one another.
But if there is a point where what you want and I want aren't in concordance, there's either going to be reversion to power.
I'll try to dominate you.
There's going to be conflict or some sort or one of us is going to give up.
The alternative is to unify it.
And a society is actually The manifestation of some implicit or transcendent unity.
Now, you asked as well, because that wasn't complicated enough, you asked, well, what does Christianity have to offer?
Let's say that Judaism didn't offer, and I'm not sure if Christianity offered more than the full realization of what was implicit in Judaism, and that was Christ's claim.
He said that he was the fulfillment of the law, so the tradition, let's say, and the prophets, which was the prophetic spirit.
He was the manifestation of both of those in the flesh.
And I actually think that that's technically true, too, because I think the simplest explanation for what happened in the case of Christ was that he allowed Or invited the full spirit that had been elaborated in the Old Testament books, let's say, and across that vast span of time to take residence within them and to become that.
Whatever that might mean, and when I walked through the narrative structure and attempted to analyze what it points at, that seems to me the simplest explanation.
Now, you can delve into that more deeply, because one of the things that happens in the Old Testament is there's a constant inquiry into the nature of proper sacrifice.
And you might say, well, that's archaic.
It has nothing to do with us.
And that's not wise.
I used to ask my students at the University of Toronto.
Many of whom were children of first-generation Asian immigrants.
I'd say, well, what did your parents sacrifice so that you could be at university?
That's a lot like they didn't know what I was talking about.
And it wasn't like their parents hadn't reminded them constantly of what they had sacrificed.
And the sacrifice is the foregoing of immediate gratification for medium to long-term sustainability and productivity.
Right?
And there's no difference between that and maturity.
And there's no difference between that and work.
Because work is sacrifice.
They're identical concepts.
And work is also a contract or a covenant because the reason you work is because you assume that you can strike a bargain with existence such that if you give up something of value now, you know, some whim, something you want immediately gratified, you put that on hold.
And the reason you do that is because you can make things better, all things considered in the future and for more people by doing so.
Okay.
So people are wrestling with the notion of what constitutes appropriate sacrifice all through the Old Testament.
And the Christian answer to that, I mean, it's developed in the Old Testament, which is why Christ says that He's the manifestation of that Spirit, essentially.
The idea is that the ultimate sacrifice is your narrow self.
Right?
Well, that's what you do.
You don't offer up your possessions.
You don't offer up other people.
You offer up the totality of your existence to death and to hell.
And by doing that, you, well, the hypothesis is by doing that, you conquer both.
And I actually think that's right, because Russell, it seems practical to me in many ways to assume that you cannot Adapt to what you will not face.
Now, we know in the psychotherapeutic world that if you lead people into voluntary confrontation with what terrifies and paralyzes them, their characters develop and they get braver and better.
Their vision expands.
Their capacity for adaptation increases.
And so then you might think, well, let's push that to its logical conclusion.
And the logical conclusion would be, Well, you have to face death itself and its full reality and all the torture that goes along with that.
And worse, you have to face the full reality of malevolence.
That would be hell.
And so that's why in the Christian resurrection account, Christ faces death at the hands of a judgmental mob, right, despite being innocent, and then descends to hell itself.
And so that is what we're called upon to do.
You know, people say to me, you know, do you believe in God?
And I would say, well, if you believed in God, no one who hasn't taken on to himself the full burden of Christ can say that he is a believer in God.
Not in the final analysis.
You know, and you might say, well, God's mercy is such that even if we struggle towards that, we'll find our reward.
And I would say there is some moral, there's something morally admirable about progress, but that doesn't eliminate the remaining insufficiency.
And I would also say in closing to this question, look, man, it's like, Every bit of responsibility that is rightfully yours that you haven't taken on makes the world a lesser place in a serious manner.
And worse than that, it turns you into a slave, and it opens the door to tyrants.
And that's always been true, and it's true now, and it will always be true.
So, here we are.
If you're watching this on YouTube, we're going to have to leave you now.
Click the link in the description, join us over on Rumble.
We talk about, this is one of my favourite moments in the conversation, I ask Jordan Peterson, when he says that a kind of psychopathic energy is required in order to move out of shame and apathy, that the culture offers you a kind of bizarre Energised, innovated, psychopathy as an alternative to the lethargy, the kind of larvae life that you're being sold.
Just sit and look at your screen, eat your pap, when you get diabetic and sick, take your medicine, get on the conveyor belt to the boneyard.
He has an incredible take on this.
Of course, this being JP, he talks about Heath Ledger's Joker.
Of course, he talks about Pinocchio.
Of course, he talks about myths of awakening.
And these are the times when we must discuss awakening together.
Click the link in the description now.
Watch the rest of this conversation.
You're going to love it.
See you over there.
Stay free.
Of course, my first question was, war is a symbolic event, and if war and this war, these wars, are a symbolic event, then I suppose that would indicate a relationship between psyche and material.
It would indicate a potential unifying event.
Obviously, much of your genius and its success has, it appears at least from my perspective, to have been built on your ability to map complex ideas onto applicable modalities that a person might deploy in their everyday life.
Tidy a damn room, stroke a cat, take responsibility.
When we're talking about the function of monotheism and the defining contribution of Judaic culture being the bestowing of monotheism even on the immediate or relatively immediate subsequent cultures of Islam and Christianity, I wonder If we neglect the historical reality that it was a tribalised faith in direct opposition to an oppressor, and when we apply that, as we were talking around a moment ago, the new role of the state as the apex of all values, the arbiter of right and wrong, the punitive patriarch or matriarch, depending on your perspective.
I know you've no strong views when it comes to gender on who Who adjudicates?
Who decides what's wrong?
Who goes to prison?
Who gets to speak?
Who doesn't get to speak?
I wonder.
I wonder, Jordan, if it is possible to track from the individual to an entire culture these sets of values, and indeed, if not, why not?
And may I add even to that, even though I can see you closing your eyes, as I've observed you do, when you're chewing with your mind, masticating this giant question, trying to get it into sizable chunks of cud, I would say, I would say this.
This monotheism ought create unity among people, even if help us to acknowledge the division within the self, perhaps between the ego and the self.
I wonder if we have to consider a Schmittian dialectic here, the possibility, as became evident in 5th century Christianity, that there was a kind of utility in Christianity that allowed it and alloyed it to Catholicism and Roman Catholicism, allowing it to become a tool of empire and requiring the exact opposite of a unitive and unitary force, a oppositional force, a religion that in a sense became
defined by in-tribes and out-tribes.
I wonder if you feel that that was embedded in this original Judaic monotheism and I wonder also
if if we're able to track all the way from an individual like what is how do we apply
soteriology and sacrifice as individuals?
How does a society apply soteriology and sacrifice?
And how do we align this complexity of this monotheism that could give us a unitive vision with its application as a tool for conflict, or at least the potential for it to expedite conflict?
Okay, so the first thing I would say in relationship to that is the alternative that's been put forward before us with regards to what is the most appropriate central story of history and mankind psychologically and in relationship to marriage and all other forms of social relationship, past and present, is that the human story is by necessity one of power.
And this is a very astute alternative hypothesis, because Whenever human relations, psychologically or socially, become corrupt, they do tend to corrupt in the direction of power.
Now, there's an alternative contender, which would be that of sex, and that's where the evolutionary biologists go, for example.
But let's stick to power for a moment.
The accusation, and this primarily comes from the left, is that All you really need to understand human motivation is to understand that all relationships, except those that are strictly egalitarian, are predicated on power.
And I don't think there's any evidence that that's true, except in the breach.
When a relationship deteriorates, it deteriorates in the direction of power.
So, for example, if you're not able to come up with a voluntary agreement with your wife, one or the other of you is going to default to being a tyrant and one or the other to being a slave.
But the fact that that necessarily occurs when the negotiation fails doesn't mean that that's the fundamental motivating force that can be used to explain psychology, history or society.
Now, why would I say that?
And the answer to that is, well...
It's actually the case, and I think this has been demonstrated extremely clearly, that power is not a very good basis for the establishment of productive, sustainable social relationships.
It's certainly no basis on which to erect an integrated psyche.
The psyche is too complex for its integration to be acquired through force.
Like, if you tyrannize yourself, well, Freud figured this out very early on, You will be a mess of unconscious contradictions in precise proportion to the degree that you tyrannize yourself.
That's what suppression is, or repression.
That's how you drive unwanted impulses into the unconscious, where they become positively demonic.
You have to come up with a negotiated solution to your own problem of integration.
And it has to be voluntary.
And the same is true with the relationships that you enter into with other people.
I mean, no one who's married, who's the least bit wise, thinks that they can win their marriage by imposing force.
At best, you can terrorize the person you're with into complying with you.
But if that's your sorry and pathetic substitute for love, then the victory you'll obtain will be indistinguishable from hell for you and for your wife.
And so what integrates us, the leftist notion that what integrates us and motivates us is power is, I think, the most bitter possible conclusion from the analysis of human striving that can possibly be derived.
Having said that, I understand why it's such a powerful proposition, because when things do corrupt, that is how they corrupt.
You know, and people might say, too, well, you know, you think that voluntary organization, agreement between intrinsically valuable citizens is the proper basis for the establishment of the state.
But what about all those power-mad, dictatorial, tyrannical capitalist types who thrive?
And I would say, The thriving that's consequential to the use of power is illusory.
If you're the biggest dictator in the worst tyrannical state, you're the largest devil in hell.
But that makes you the biggest loser, not a kind of winner.
And, you know, it's Milton's Satan who famously says he'd rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.
But, of course, he's Lucifer.
And so that is what he would say.
And he's king of hell for a reason, right?
People have viewed Milton's Satan as a heroic figure of rebellion, failing to note entirely that all he gains for his efforts is captainship of the worst possible place.
And so, while so power The power story, this is where the French postmodernists, for all their brilliance, went so spectacularly wrong, is they started to understand that we did look at the world through a story, and that was necessary, and that even the scientific viewpoint was therefore necessarily insufficient, which is absolutely true.
But then when push came to shove and they had to face the next question, which was which story does and should motivate us, they defaulted to power because they were all Marxists and that was at hand.
And it's just not right.
It's not the case.
The rest of the people People who use power as their primary motivation are psychopaths.
That's what a psychopath is.
And you might say, well, what about all the successful psychopaths?
But the truth of the matter is that psychopathy is not a successful strategy.
It's more successful than nihilistic depression.
But that doesn't mean it's an optimized solution.
You know, and part of the reason that psychopaths appeal to people who are nihilistically depressed is because they see in that monstrousness of the willingness to use power and dominance a potential way out of their pathetic dependence.
And that is partly a realization of the necessity of integrating the shadow, but it's a dismal final vision.
You know, the man with the biggest, highest leather boots wins.
It's like, well, yeah, but what do you win?
You know, you win success in hell.
There's nothing in that that's success.
It's foolish.
Now, it might be better than, you know, suicidal depression.
Although, it's harder on other people.
I suppose if you extract the sublime, And perhaps more specifically, even, love, if the idea that the nuministic includes within it, as well as, or a type of fear, if it includes a type of love, a type of awareness of a unitive force,
Then, and all you're left with is kind of material rationalism, then power to organize this material and rational space does become the only observable metric.
You speak a lot, George.
That's exactly what happens in the story of Genesis.
That's exactly what happens.
Well, the people who build the Tower of Babel are basically engineering technocrats who presume that the manipulation of the material world can produce the proper pyramid of power.
That's a way of thinking about it.
That's what the Tower of Babel is.
It's a ziggurat that reaches to the sky.
And as you just said, you can understand and you can see You can see why this is an attractive proposition.
If we could only master the material world, we would be the masters of the cosmos and our psyches.
And the problem with that is that it's simply not true.
You know, you can be lost amidst the most glorious toys.
And the other problem, of course, with the technological enterprise is that it produces Immense capacity for catastrophe along with all of its abundance.
And so if you don't have a wisdom, the wisdom that enables you to utilize your technical technological tools, they'll just destroy you.
And that is what happens in the Tower of Babel, because it eventually collapses under its own weight, so to speak, and the people who inhabit it to no longer even communicate with one another, because it's oriented in the wrong direction.
Now you You implied what the right direction might be.
You know, so I've been writing about the story of Job recently.
And Job, the story of Job, is a precursor to the Christian passion because Job is an innocent man who's tortured beyond his capacity to endure.
And Job says nonetheless that he is going to regard himself with love and proclaim his innocence Despite his suffering while simultaneously proclaiming the essential goodness of existence itself.
And that's a reflection of his belief that the appropriate relationship to establish with existence is something like love.
And love is the desire that all things flourish.
It's something like that.
Look, is this true?
Well, let's think about it practically for a minute.
So, we know that children, infants will die without love.
Now, and I mean this technically, this is well studied.
So, a hundred years ago, this is a very interesting story, a hundred years ago, in the typical orphanage, the mortality rate for kids under one was a hundred percent.
And this was despite the fact that these orphanages would provide Shelter and food.
Let's say that the so-called necessities of life but They all died and no one knew why and and this woman appeared in Germany She worked in a ward where the mortality rate was quite low and a physician from New York got interested in this and went to Germany to see what was going on and there was a nurse there named Fat Anna and Fat Anna would take the orphans out of their cribs which wasn't common practice at the time and just like Pick them up and hold them and pack them around on her hip and, you know, have a relationship with them.
Some physical manifestation of love.
And those infants didn't die.
And then we saw this in Romania, again, when there were orphans there who had the benefits of the state utopia, everything but love.
And they were, if they didn't die, they were damaged beyond belief.
Without love, children cannot live.
Literally.
Like, metaphysically, yes.
Philosophically, theologically, all that too.
But no, just absolutely practically, love is what entices the infant to the adventure of life.
That's definitely the case.
And so and then you think, well, what on what basis would you want your marriage established?
And if it's not the basis of love, well, then it might be on the basis of sex.
But sex with love is a lot better than sex without love.
So that's a problem.
And then There's not going to be much sex for much of any time span if there's no love.
And if there's no love, the couple isn't going to be able to negotiate in good faith, and then there's going to be no love for the children.
And so to say that love is the ground of being, Well, the evidence for that is crystal clear in the structure of the family.
And then I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the basis for the stable state is kindness.
And kindness means to treat others as if they were kin.
And that means that love has to be the basis of the stable state.
And then you might say, too, well, is love as powerful as power?
The difference in power between love and pure power is overwhelming.
Love isn't even in the same category as power with regards to its potency.
It's way more powerful, incomparably more powerful.
And you can say that without being naive.
In fact, if you're naive, you think, well, it's love that makes the world go round.
But you're not awake.
You just deny the existence of evil and the fact that there are forces at work that are extraordinarily dark.
But you can wake up and still see that it's love that makes the world go round.
And so it is the proper basis for the organization of Society at all levels and for the psyche as well and it's it's it's a strange thing a because once you're a bit awake and you're not naive and you see the reality of Tragedy and the catastrophe of malevolence.
It's harder to make the case that The attitude you should have towards this terrible world is still one of love But then I think that requires a kind of courage When I try to understand love in as unflorid and as straightforward a way as I am able to, I consider it to sometimes be the felt experience of unity.
That I'm not coming from a position of separateness.
I'm not coming from a position of competition.
I'm able, even in a most prosaic way, to think this person or situation in front of me warrants love.
And if I'm able to locate love within myself and a love that transmits beyond myself, I'm going to be better served when dealing with this situation.
I'll get a better outcome, even if I'm not looking at it entirely from a tactical perspective, say, but just like I want to operate on that frequency.
And I suppose, Jordan, that's the kind of idea that shows that there is a continuum between the ideas that you discuss and popularise as a clinical psychologist, and now as a highly regarded, if deeply controversial, perhaps even The archetype now of the controversial figure when it comes to discussing world events.
A figure of polarity.
A figure of polarity with some people almost to the degree of Donald Trump saying that Jordan Peterson, he's the avatar of love that I follow.
He's the person that's gotten me out of my slump.
I was struck when you were saying about how this psychopathic archetype might only have value as a mobiliser of someone who might otherwise be trapped in basement depression.
That some of your detractors, maybe ten controversies back for you, I know you chew through them fast, might have used you almost as an archetype.
I'm thinking of that moment, you know, that red skull moment and how you were
used in a sort of a film here or there, you know, that they might say, oh well
what Jordan Peterson does is he appeals to those sort of adrift and castrated
and incel men as a kind of priapic and potent male archetype. It's odd because
I recognize from observing you and experience from knowing you that
continually you're reverting to integrity and I mean that in sort of in every
sense of the word and a kind of optimism and hope.
When we're having a conversation as rangy as this, where it seems to me that some of the themes we're discussing is, you know, personal crisis and how you might move through personal crisis, and certainly that's something I'd like to talk to you about more in a moment, and global crisis, a war as global crisis, it seems actually pertinent that you would have figures that are able to talk about archetypal energy, and indeed, if anything's worthy of that name, It would be useful in the life of an individual trying to get you up and at them in a society that's pretty hard to live in sometimes, and it would also be applicable when pontificating on vast geopolitical events.
So for me it doesn't seem contradictory, although sometimes it does seem difficult to be a person, and this is something that's emerged, you know, perhaps because of technology.
You have people now that are experts in neurology or clinical psychology pontificating on cultural events and Some people don't like that because it brings new voices and brings new potential and brings new ideas into the space.
It's challenging to power, I think, to all of a sudden have Jungian archetypes flung about in conversations that were pretty devoid of morality until pretty recently.
Morality was by the wayside.
Another of the themes we've touched on again and again here is What is the role of God and what is God now?
And we've discussed before and you've discussed extensively elsewhere that you are going to have a hierarchy of values.
God is going to be something.
God is either going to be kindness and love or God is going to be the pursuit of power.
So I suppose I wonder now, if you do, when you look at the culture we're living in, and it does appear to be a truly global culture, with a truly unipolar goal, this is one of the things we talk about on our channel all the time, is like, when they're passing these censorship laws in Canada and the UK and Ireland, near simultaneously, with a near identical impact,
When you see that the EU want to manage social media spaces and censor some free speech and amplify other speech, do you consider that there is a project towards a global and centralised authoritarian order And if you do think that that is happening, do you think it's just the unconscious convergence of interests, or do you think that there is actually an intention behind it?
Because I'm continually trying to provide us a... You go, man, you go.
Well, okay, so there's three main questions in that, I would say.
The first is, Why, for example, might I have emerged as a controversial figure?
And I think that's actually pretty straightforward.
I mean, the New York Times did a hit piece on me a while back, written by Nellie Bowles, who later admitted that what Nellie Bowles did for the New York Times was write hit pieces, and that the reason she did that was to further her career.
Um, which was, you know, a pretty forthright admission, although whether or not it went deep enough is a matter for speculation.
But in any case, they described me as defender of the patriarchy.
And I think that's accurate.
Now, the problem with that is that if you're If you're dealing with people who've already decided that the central figure behind the patriarchy is Satan, so to speak, right?
The avatar of power, right?
Of deception and exploitation and deceit, all of that.
Then anyone who aligns themselves with tradition is immediately going to be awarded that archetypal stance.
And the reason that hasn't really worked, in my case, You know, to take me out permanently is because the idea that the central spirit of the patriarchy is
Satan, the demand for power and the willingness to use exploitation is simply false.
The patriarchy has a corrupt element, but that's a deviation from the ideal.
It's not its most true manifestation, right?
And the radical critics of tradition and authority claim Universally that that's all power and part of the problem with that is it's like well, what about you guys?
It's not power for you.
I Thought there was nothing but power and they might say well, it's there's only the competition between competing interests It's like well if you want to live in that world you go right ahead, but that's certainly not how I see it now We talked a little bit about love Imagine we could conduct the conversation that we're conducting.
You and I could play this all sorts of different ways, you know.
We don't share everything we believe in common.
You know, you're a figure that has been more identified with the left, and I'm a figure that's been more identified with the right.
And we could spend our whole time trying to figure out who's right and playing a zero-sum game in that regard.
And we could also spend our time trying to score points on each other to see who's smarter, or more charismatic, or more attractive, or God, there's a whole variety of zero-sum games that could be played.
Or we could just scrap all that.
We could think, look, and you talked about the manifestation of something like an underlying inner unity between people.
We could say, no, there's more than enough In front of us for both, and if we conducted ourselves properly, what we would do is take a voyage together that revealed riches that neither of us had realized even existed beforehand.
And I think that's the right attitude to take toward the world.
The world is an inexhaustible treasure house, and the degree to which we can make that available to us depends on the ethic of our conduct.
And this is not the model by which we conceptualize our political and economic structures now, because we tend to default to a greedy zero-sum model and presume there's just not enough for everyone.
And I don't believe that.
I think there's more than enough for everyone, by any measure, if we only could see it and conduct it ourselves properly.
And so, while I'm an archetype of the evil patriarchy and Satan himself, insofar as you think the patriarchy itself, social structure and history, is nothing but the manifestation of oppressive forces, but my God, that's a dismal... it's a dismal view, and it's also... it's simply incorrect.
It's way... it's far too much of an oversimplification.
No, I mean, we do have an intrinsic impulse to dominate rather than submit.
Although that's complicated, because some people would rather submit, you know?
So even there it's not universal, but that tendency in and of itself is a fragment of what should be an integrated totality, and it's not the flag under which the unity can make itself manifest.
And you know that.
All you have to do is look at cultures that organize themselves according to power.
Jesus, they're Horrible authoritarian hell holes instantly.
And a marriage is like that if you do that to your wife.
And you're like that if you do that to yourself.
It's not the idea that power rules is wrong.
And it's not just wrong.
It's also convenient.
Because if you think that power rules, then all you're doing is waiting for your turn.
And that makes you the very thing whose existence you decry.
So, not appropriate.
Yeah.
Yeah, Jordan.
I feel that what it appears is taking place is that there appears to be no reliable coordinates, no reliable principles with which people can align.
This total pessimism, this pessimistic take that the power dynamic modality offers, even though I can understand it as a lens because that is one way of observing trends and by the nature of power, power will determine outcomes.
That's what power actually is.
But you said some stuff earlier about nihilism which when married to this power narrative that we're currently discussing makes a lot of sense because I've seen an absence of values when under attack that I recognize a kind of war against nature A war against any kind of universal principle to which we might align ourselves, with which we might align ourselves.
That nothing is constant or consistent.
That there is no benign force behind any of these avatars.
There's no such thing as the Good Father, except perhaps for a submissive father.
There is no complexity afforded in its opposite, if indeed you want to see masculine and feminine as opposites, certainly perhaps we could regard them as pairs, but there is no acknowledgement that there is a clear mandacity taking place in many narratives that I've personally encountered and experienced.
Principles like innocent before innocent till proven guilty are just Just cast aside in an instant and I see a sense within this mode an appetite to destroy many components that certainly are within the remit of morality, within the rubric of morality, i.e.
sexuality, humor, maleness, femaleness, like all of these, it's almost as if there is a kind of Atomised slaves.
attempt to strip us down into molecules in some way, meaningless molecules, which is
part of nihilism, to strip away the possibility of benign and loving and successful relationships
between men and women, the removal of nuance and complexity, in order to create... you
know, certainly what I'm struck by, I don't know in order to create what, but I do recognise...
atomised slaves, atomised slaves. Well, so... there's no escaping the drive to unity.
The only question is unity under what principle, and if it's not the proper principle, it's the Tower of Babel, and that is a degenerating totalitarianism, or the dynamic between Tyrant and slave.
And of course, that begs the question, is there a proper principle?
Right?
And your point is, we're in an era where even the notion of proper principle itself is under full-out assault.
And that's certainly a consequence of the deconstructionist tendency.
But it's entirely counterproductive because it does fail to take into account the existence, well, the existence of the very goodness whose absence is the reason for the accusation of tyranny and power to begin with, right?
Now, you might say, well, why is that happening?
And I would say it's part, it's part the desire to allow It's not a personal wish for superordinate power to reign supreme.
It's partly the wish to have no restriction whatsoever on the gratification of hedonistic desire.
That's another thing, and I think this is again true of the radical left.
The radical left offers endless hedonistic gratification as the potential reward for full subordination to the utopia of the state.
And that's an illusory offering, partly because self-serving, hedonistic gratification is actually indistinguishable from the power that is being resisted.
Right?
We know, we know... I'll leave that, I'll leave that for the time being.
Now you asked earlier too, is it that there's a conspiracy that's working behind the scenes?
And I would say this is something I learned primarily from reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Solzhenitsyn noted that there is the best way to conceptualize the ideas of communism.
aren't as ideas.
They're not descriptions of the nature of reality.
They're not objective scientific theories.
They're animating principles.
They're more like a spirit.
And if you launch a spirit into the world, which is like a principality of ideas, the spirit unfolds in accordance with its nature.
And that was Solzhenitsyn's explanation, for example, for why No matter where communism was tried, the same dreadful outcomes occurred.
That was in keeping with the nature of that spirit.
And so there is a spirit afoot that is attempting to centralize, and it acts as if it's a conspiracy, and there are conspiratorial elements to it.
But it's mostly a manifestation of something that's best regarded as Well, look, it's a principality, or you could even think about it as a transcendent spirit.
Like, think about the idea of Satan for a minute.
You might say, well, is Satan real?
And I don't like questions like that, because those questions are always predicated on the assumption that we know what real means.
And we don't, right?
Because we don't have access to the fundamental The fundamental truths of what is real and what isn't.
But I can tell you the ways in which Satan is real.
So, imagine the figure of the Joker, who we've seen emerge repeatedly in popular culture in recent years.
Well, the Joker is an approximation of the satanic figure.
And the best Joker was Heath Ledger, I would say.
And he was king of the criminals.
And why?
Well, the criminals, they weren't entirely criminal.
They were mafia types, you know?
They still wanted money.
They still wanted women.
They still wanted power.
So they were sort of like you.
Now, they'd bend the rules to get it, but they weren't heretical to the point where they would burn a pile of money just to make a point.
Right?
Whereas the Heath Ledger Joker, it was like nothing's sacred to him.
Like nothing.
Absolutely.
100%.
Nothing.
Now, is that a real spirit?
Well, you know, when you've been pushed past your limit by the suffering in your life, and you believe that you've been put upon to a degree that's 100% untenable, Because of the underlying inadequacy of the cosmic structure, then it could easily be that you will invite the spirit that holds nothing sacred to dwell within you and let its destructive force entirely loose.
Now, is that real?
I'll tell you, man, it's real enough to entice 17-year-olds to shoot up their high schools.
It's plenty real.
And you might say, well, is it an external reality?
Well, If you decide to take a turn in the abysmal direction, you have plenty of role models.
And the archetypal role model of the abyss is Satan.
Is that real?
You could make a case that that's as real as it gets, buddy.
Like, how real is Auschwitz?
Like, that's real.
Love it.
What I love there is your repetition of the refrain, nothing sacred, and of course, that declarative motif within communism that there can be no God, there can be nothing sacred, of course, though, sancrosanct with inversions of it are all sorts of principles of centralization, and even in original Marxism, I would say some of the folk aspects of that, like, you know, you should have a bit of time off now and again.
Well, as close to sacred as I dare to say that goes.
I love, too, the analysis of the Joker there as a true nihilist, that there is no possibility of anything other than heresy because the Sancre Sancte exists nowhere, not even in Mammon.
I love that idea and I'm reminded of a British group stroke artist group called KLF who burned
a million pounds once as a sort of like literally piled it up and burned it as a sort of a
kind of you know as a installation.
So like an interesting moment to sort of like to transcend the values of a pop culture that
ultimately does have a kind of embedded nihilism woven through its materialism which I suppose
is you know that as you talked about earlier it's not true nihilism materialism tends to
emerge from it as well as terror and dread and the shadows of all that are good start
to emerge there.
We're going to leave our conversation with Jordan Peterson there, but there's more tomorrow and the second half is even better.
I loosen up a bit.
I use a few less long words and go on a few more jazz-like verbal rants as we move into deep psychic territory and solutions.
Also on the show tomorrow, we're talking about Biden's Armageddon.
Is Biden right That we're more likely to die as a result of climate change.
Press 1 if you think that's likely.
Or 2, because he's provoking a man with nuclear weapons into a nuclear war.
That man is Vladimir Putin.
We're talking about that in depth tomorrow.
Coming up on the show soon, we've got Bobby Kennedy joining us and Vandana Shiva.
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