Dec. 19, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:10
3936 An Antidote to Chaos | Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux
Order "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos"United States: http://www.fdrurl.com/12-Rules-for-Life-USCanada: http://www.fdrurl.com/12-Rules-for-Life-CAUnited Kingdom: http://www.fdrurl.com/12-Rules-for-Life-UKDr. Jordan Peterson is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist and the author of “Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief” and the upcoming book "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos."Website: http://www.jordanbpeterson.comYouTube: http://www.youtube.com/JordanPetersonVideosTwitter: https://twitter.com/jordanbpetersonMaps of Meaning Book: http://www.fdrurl.com/Maps-of-MeaningSelf-Authoring Course: http://www.selfauthoring.com25% off until January 31 for Molyneux viewerscoupon code SMXMASNEWYEARPersonality Analysis: http://www.understandmyself.com25% off until January 31 for Molyneux viewerscoupon code SMXMASNEWYEARYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist, and the author of Maps of Meaning, the Architecture of Belief, and the, I think, eagerly awaited upcoming book, 12 Rules for Life, an Antidote to Chaos Set for Release.
January 23rd, 2018, the website is jordanbpeterson.com, youtube.com slash jordanpetersonvideos, twitter.com slash jordanbpeterson.
You can check out the excellent self-authoring at selfauthoring.com and a personality test at understandingmyself.com.
Dr. Peterson, thanks for taking the time today.
Thanks for the invitation.
Good to see you. Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas to you. As we have this conversation, I was having a coffee this morning, looking at the beautiful gentle snow draping down around, I guess, here in Southern Ontario.
It's a beautiful, peaceful time of year.
What was Christmas like for you growing up?
I know that you went fairly leftist in your teens.
Did that have any kind of prickly relationship to Christmas for you?
And how has it changed since then?
Well, I think Christmas was complicated for me.
There's a personal element to it.
There's a very vicious streak of familial depression that runs in my family.
And so my father was quite prone to that, although that's been rectified to some degree.
And so Christmas could be a dark time for us, although it was also All of the positive things it was supposed to be at the same time.
Because my father had seasonal affective disorder.
And of course, we didn't know what the hell was going on when I was growing up.
Nobody knew what that was.
And it took a long time to get that sorted out.
That time of year has been very complex over the years.
And then I guess the other thing is, so that's the personal end of it.
The more metaphysical end is, of course, that I've spent a lot of time over the last three decades trying to understand Christianity and what the rituals and routines and stories mean.
And so that's added another dimension to it.
I mean, I understand, for example, the mythological idea that at the darkest point of the year, that's when the hero emerges.
That's a very old mythological idea.
Of course, you don't need A hero unless the darkness is intense, right?
So it makes sense that that's what would call forth a hero.
And of course, that's a lot of what's celebrated symbolically at Christmas.
The idea of the lights on the trees is the return of illumination, right?
Because the sun is starting to come back.
All these things are layered on top of one another.
And so it's a remarkable It's one of the things that's really made me so struck as a consequence of studying Christianity is that so many levels of meaning stack on top of one another in an isomorphic manner and support one another.
You know, there's a cosmic story that's associated with Christmas, which is the death and rebirth of the sun.
And then there's, I mean, the actual solar orb.
And then there's the more prosaic story of the birth of a baby, which is, of course, a miraculous event in everyone's life.
So... Yeah. And it's a, I mean, I feel for you with the family stuff.
Both my mother's and my father's side have terrible history of mental illness, which is one of the reasons why for me, it's sort of like if you come from a family that has terrible heart disease, you better eat well and exercise or you're going the way of the dodo.
So for me, knowing what was going on on both sides of my family, very high functioning, very smart, but it's almost like the train is too fast for the rails for a lot of these people.
So I knew I was going to need a lot of mental structure.
I was going to need a lot of mental discipline.
I better have self-knowledge.
I better do therapy. I better get into philosophy because if you can harness that power, it's great, but it seems to destroy almost as many people as it empowers.
And when you have difficult family times at Christmas, Yeah.
of joy and peace and the movies and the commercials and other people's houses you go to.
It feels like everyone else is taking off in these multicolored starships of joy and you're kind of left down in a dungeon and I think this is why it's tough for a lot of people this time of year.
Absolutely, absolutely and I think you put your finger on it exactly Well, I mean, what we hope is that the time around Christmas gives us a glimpse into what human relations could be like if we organize them very carefully.
And I think that that can happen.
But the problem is that you don't get peace and goodwill towards man merely by having the time of year.
It's something that you really have to work at.
And I mean, a lot of the problems that I've I think we've indicated that we're characteristic of my family.
In my extended family, we've actually addressed with quite a bit of success over the last three decades as a consequence of, well, partly because I became a clinical psychologist and started to understand these things and because the biochemistry has been more well understood.
But it is hard on people around Christmas because, as you said, the hope And the reality, it's a point of the year where hope and reality can war most viciously.
And it can be very, very hard on people.
Suicide rates go up around Christmas for exactly that reason.
So it's a it's a magnification season.
It tends to not exaggerate, but in a sense, reveal both the strengths and joys of your relationships and the weaknesses and challenges in your relationship.
And it's to me tragic, particularly because it's one of the few times in the year that you do have the time and the proximity to be able to work on your relationships.
But there are, of course, families that studiously avoid that and avoid the dysfunction, which really tends to hollow out any festivity in the season.
Yeah, well, I think you're right about it serving as a magnifier.
It brings out the best and the worst.
And I suppose that's useful, too, because you need to have the worst brought out so that you can hypothetically deal with it.
But it's no joke.
I mean, even in the Christmas story itself, you know, I mean, so Christ is the eternal infant, the eternal hope, let's say, and the eternal hope of mankind, just like an infant is the eternal hope of mankind.
You know, he's born in lowly circumstances and in extreme peril, right?
Because all the firstborns are under death sentence, essentially.
And there's an archetypal element to that, too, which is really important to understand, which is that even if the hero is divine, Then he's always born in the extreme danger that characterizes existence itself.
And so in some sense, that balance between tragedy and catastrophe and tyranny and hope that typifies Christmas in reality for day-to-day people is also built right into the story.
I mean, they're in a manger for God's sake, right?
It's a stable. And so it's pretty unstable, so to speak.
And then, of course, there's all these radical political events going on and Well, that's the way of mankind.
Radical, political, and social events going on.
That's the way of mankind.
Now, the transition from a desert religion to Northern and Western Europe, to me, is really fascinating because people from Europe are essentially, in some ways, I think even biologically defined by the seasons.
And it's so fascinating to me.
That a desert religion, which doesn't have a huge amount to do with season, certainly not as much as, say, Germany or France or England, took root in Europe and flourished and changed in some ways to adapt to the seasonal rhythms.
You know, those who were not able to defer gratification and hoard and hold on to their food throughout the winter didn't tend to do Those who didn't work really hard when it was necessary to plant and to harvest and so on, and then rest when it was really necessary through the winter to conserve calories didn't do very well.
So I really find it fascinating how a religion that began in the Middle East ended up adapting so perfectly to the seasonal nature of European civilization.
Yeah, well, Christianity was like a giant vacuum cleaner in some sense.
It certainly integrated itself with and layered itself on top of existing pagan ceremonies, like the tree itself.
I mean, the tree is a very interesting symbol because, of course, The tree is the tree in the Garden of Eden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life.
And the tree for Christmas is mostly the tree of life.
And the tree is also the structure that unites heaven with earth and the lights on the tree symbolize or represent even I mean,
the tree idea, for example, that plays the idea that there's a tree that unites heaven and hell, which is sort of something akin to Jacob's Ladder, is a central tenet of shamanism.
And there are all sorts of strange shamanic echoes that permeate Christianity.
And the Christmas story, like Santa Claus is a good example.
Very interesting documentation about the relationship between the red and white of Santa Claus, for example, and the use of Amanita muscaria mushrooms in the shamanic tradition throughout Siberia and across the entire northern strata of Europe.
So yeah, it's a very, very deep and strange mixture of desert and frigid cold and celebration.
I guess that's also partly what's given it such longevity as a celebration, even though we also seem to be doing everything we can to undermine that as fast as possible.
Oh, this is fascinating as well to me, too.
The sort of power of myth and the power of culture.
I worked, you know, I was at the National Theatre School.
I wrote plays and novels and so on.
And so I worked a lot with allegory, metaphor and character.
And I read my Jung about sort of collective unconscious and universal archetypes, but it wasn't until I got into my 40s and really began to strip myself of the merely secular self and focus on deep myth and focus on the power of these kinds of archetypes that I realized just how much had been taken from me, how much had been stripped from me, how much had been withheld from me about the origins of all of the symbols and the echoes of what I had received.
Well, it's a funny thing because you actually can't live without that.
You know, one of the things that's been unbelievable, unbelievable to me over the last year is there's a couple of things because I've been communicating with so many people in public and also online.
So, one stream of response that's quite remarkable is that many, many people tell me that when they listen to what I've been talking about with regards to these deep symbolic structures, that it's as if they already know it, but don't have the words for it.
And that's exactly right. And I would literally say hundreds of people have said that to me.
So you say, well, you're reminding me of something I already know.
And of course, that's actually the hallmark of archetypal thinking, because the idea of the archetype is the idea that your thinking is structured.
Underneath it, like there's a structure underneath your thinking.
And then your thinking can reflect that structure when you become aware of the archetypes.
And then that kind of puts your conscious self-knowledge in alignment with who you most deeply are.
It's remembering in the platonic sense.
And I think that you do experience a coming home, so to speak, when that occurs.
You know, Jung himself said that that was a better occupation for the latter half of life, and so the fact that it really started to hit home for you in your 40s actually makes sense, let's say, from a developmental perspective, because let's say you're in the last half of your life, what you're supposed to be doing with that part of your life is accruing wisdom, you know, and that For your own psychological purposes to stabilize yourself, but also so that you can act as a stabilizing force in society.
This is the fascinating thing for me.
Over this Christmas season, I think one of the things that has occupied me particularly over the last year or two has been this question of why it seems so hard for the West to rouse itself to defend its own countries and institutions.
And I think where I'm sort of getting to, I don't know if it's a final destination, but where I'm getting to is I thought that we would defend reason, evidence, abstractions, freedoms, political institutions, but we don't seem to rouse ourselves much to defend those.
And I actually believe now that, and I think the left really understands this, because the left goes for stories, they go for archetypes, they pull down statues, they do all of this, they attack myth in a sense.
And I really think that fundamentally we only really defend stories.
We only really defend archetypes.
We only really defend myth.
That's what we can rouse ourselves to do.
And that's why it gets stripped from us.
So we're defenseless. Well, that's actually the definition of archetypal.
Archetypal is precisely what would rouse you to its defense.
You know, and I mean, I've been...
Trying to understand to some degree what the proper level of analysis is with regard to the ongoing culture wars.
And as far as I can tell, this is why I did, you know, you may know that I did a series of 15 biblical lectures this year.
I only got through Genesis.
I'm going to start on Exodus next year.
But as far as I can tell, and this is sort of in keeping with the idea of I mean, I think that's a descent into the underworld to rescue the dying father, let's say, We won't rouse ourselves to defend anything that we have unless we go back to the source of those things and understand what it is that we actually possess.
Now, I've been trying to make a case over the last year for the divinity of the individual, essentially, which is the central idea of the Christian story, right?
I mean, the divine child is only potential, even.
But given the symbolic importance of A world-redeeming figure.
That's what the new infant is.
And the thing about that, you can strip that of its dogmatic connotations, although there's reasons not to, but you can and read it purely psychologically.
And it's a story about the fact that what truly is the light in the darkness is the potential in each individual human being.
And that's the story of the West.
And the thing about that story is that it's right.
It's correct. We got it right.
Because otherwise, it's chaos or the group.
Well, you don't want chaos unless you want chaos.
And believe me, man, if you want chaos, you better bloody well get prepared for it.
Because maybe you're not the kind of bloodthirsty monster that could really revel in it.
And maybe you are, too.
And then if all you want is the group, well, you better bloody well be prepared for that, too.
Because the group is not you.
And if push comes to shove, the group will sacrifice you for its own interest in no time flat.
And so if you think that salvation lies on those two ends of the distribution, you've got another thing coming.
Well, that's the mere Darwinian lust for power.
And this to me is one of the great stories that's important to remember about the first syllable of Christmas, which is Christ, which is that, to me, the elemental story, and it's not that there's one, but the one that's resonating for me most at the moment, Jordan, is this idea that if you reject material power, you achieve immortality.
Because that to me is the great temptation of the world.
And this to me is coming out of the Hollywood stuff where there is this basic satanic deal that's offered to a lot of these young actors and actresses, which is, you know, if you surrender to my earthly lusts, if you surrender to the humiliating subjugation to pretend to find me attractive, though I'm old and grizzled and look like if you surrender to the humiliating subjugation to pretend to find me attractive, though I'm old and grizzled and look like half a shaved bugbear, if you surrender, then I will
That, to me, is Jesus out in the desert, and this is a very strong thing that has happened.
But Jesus, of course, by rejecting that, achieved an influence far beyond anything he could have, even if he'd taken the entire world the devil offered.
It's really interesting, too, because it isn't even, I don't think, so much a matter of rejecting it.
It's formulating a better deal.
So, the story of Christ in the desert is, and I've spent a lot of time, in fact, I write about that a lot in my new book, in chapter 7, which is called, Do What is Meaningful, Not What is Expedient.
And I think of meaning as, first of all, I think that meaning is the most real of all phenomena, with the possible exception of pain, but I think it might even be more real than pain because it can supplant and transcend pain.
So, and meaning, the notion of meaning is not something that modern scientists have dealt well with in the main, although many of the, especially the physiologists like Jeffrey Gray, have done a very good job of laying the groundwork, and Jak Panksepp, who's a great neuroscientist, Have started to lay the groundwork for a neuroscience-oriented understanding of the phenomena of meaning.
But what happens in the desert is that what Christ tells the devil is that the bargain that the devil is offering is nowhere near as good as it seems.
Because he's after something greater.
He says, well, man does not live by bread alone.
And the idea is that it isn't so much that That you should reject the attractions of wealth and status and privilege and power.
It's that there's something that you could pursue that's way better than that in every possible way.
And that has to do with Well, first of all, developing the sort of character that's capable of withstanding evil, and second, setting your sights on reducing the suffering in the world.
It's something like that. It's laid out quite nicely in the Sermon on the Mount, I would say, which is a very difficult document to parse through.
But it's not all rejection.
It's like, why would you go for leaden weight when gold is right in front of you?
And I think one of the things I've really come to understand about these symbolic Representations is that they're metaphorical, and you might call them abstract and ideal, even.
And so then they tend to be otherworldly.
They tend to be viewed as if they're otherworldly virtues.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The practical advantage of genuine virtue is so striking that nothing else even exists in the same category.
And that's part of the warning in the desert.
It's like, well, Let me give you an example.
I don't know if this is quite appropriate, but I'm going to use it anyway.
I've been following what's been happening at Wilfrid Laurier, which I find surreally remarkable.
I can't I can't see how the university could be handling the scandal worse if they scripted it.
Can you just give a quick overview for the people who aren't aware?
Well, what happened at Wilfrid Laurier was that a TA, Lindsay Shepard, was brought in front of what can only be termed a minor inquisition for having the temerity to show five minutes of a Canadian public television show It's a show about Bill C-16 and pronoun usage.
And she was accused of breaking provincial and federal law, violating university policy and of being a transphobic bigot.
And that broke because she recorded the story and leaked it.
And I mean, there's been international outrage over this event.
And yet the university hasn't, I don't think it's learned a damn thing.
In fact, from what I've been able to tell, Every move it's made in reaction to this scandal has actually made the scandal worse.
And that's very interesting.
But, well, one of the side stories is that on that very same TV show, The Agenda with Steve Paik and the president of Wilfrid Laurier University, Deborah McClatchy, was invited to talk about the university's response to this scandal.
And I watched that and I thought it was so interesting to me because Deborah McClatchy has attained worldly dominion, let's say.
She's the president of a major university.
It's not a trivial position.
And then the interviewer, Steve Pakin, who's actually liberal left, I would say, in his fundamental orientation and inclined to be a decent interlocutor period and maybe even a friendly one to someone like Deborah McClatchy, he asked her a dozen questions about Whether she felt that Lindsey Shepard had actually made a mistake and what the university was going to do about it.
And what was so amazing to me was that despite her position of power and privilege, let's say, so-called, she didn't utter a single word that was her own during the entire interview.
It was like there was no person there at all.
And what that indicated to me was that in order to attain that position, which was hypothetically You know, an elevated position in the dominance hierarchy.
She had to give up everything that was actually powerful, including her own voice.
And that's a great object lesson.
It's like, you know, you want power, let's say, and you want And you're willing to make a bargain with the devil to get it.
And what you think is that when you get that power, you'll still be the same person that you were when you started seeking it.
And the problem with that is you're not going to be the same person even a little bit.
There'll be nothing left of you.
And you'll be a puppet of the position rather than being the master of the position.
Well, you think it's feeding you, but it's eating you.
And this is one of the great and terrible consequences to me.
This is why censorship tends to escalate.
Because if you let a little bit of censorship in, then people's muscles for dealing with oppositional ideas become weaker, which means that they become more hostile to the oppositional ideas that reveal their weakness and must keep everything at bay.
And I don't know where this...
Well, we all know where this ends up in the long run, which then ends up in concentration camps and mass slaughter, which is then all ideas...
of ultimate evil, of anti-persons, of that whom you can dehumanize and end up slaughtering, as we've seen, of course, in communism and fascism around the world throughout history.
And that is a strong statement to make.
But it seems to me that we have come to such a hysterical level in terms of censorship that people don't seem to have any welcome for robust debate, for opposing ideas, and And that means, of course, that we have vanity, because everybody thinks they have the final answer, and therefore they can just squelch all contrary opinions.
That is a demonic kind of vanity.
It's interesting though, like I would say I'm more optimistic at the end of this year than I was at the end of last year.
And the reason for that is that what I've seen happening, like I think the state of free expression on university campuses is To call it appalling is to barely scratch the surface.
And I think that the forces that are corrupting the university are in fact spreading out into broader society.
I think in corporations they're doing that through human resources.
And I think the university is directly to blame for this because it's produced Let's say, investigative tools like the implicit association test, which has been misused beyond comprehension.
You know, one of the things that's interesting about that implicit association test is that one of the people who designed it, Brian Nozek, has really started to turn against it.
So there's a fractionation occurring within the little coterie of people who produce that appalling process.
I mean, the test itself is quite interesting as a measurement device, but when it becomes a political weapon, it's the thing behind all of this unconscious bias, right?
And by the way, there was a new review article published by Nozek himself, who was one of the founders of the IAT, that indicated quite clearly that attempts to redress unconscious bias by staff training have zero effect, zero effect, right?
In the academy, and that's distributing itself out into broader society.
But one of the things that's happening is that platforms like YouTube, particularly YouTube, but also the other social media platforms are flipping that upside down.
So as the universities become more corrupt and more rigid, and as the old media sources become more ideologically driven and less competent, People are abandoning them at extraordinary rates.
And then you see what's happening instead is that on YouTube, you know, you get people like Joe Rogan and yourself.
But Rogan's a really good example of three-hour lengthy detailed podcasts that are so popular that it's beyond comprehension.
So much for the, you don't need the reporter, you don't need the soundbite.
It's like we're getting rid of the priesthood in some sense.
Again, you can talk directly to the public with no intermediation.
And I think we're just starting to see how powerful a force that's going to be.
Oh, I think it was about 10 years ago I did a show which was that the internet is the new Gutenberg.
It is that which allows you to bring the text directly to the audience.
It doesn't mean you don't need a priesthood because there's still you need experts, but you're right.
I mean, as far as the opportunities for breaking down oligarchical hierarchies, we've never had.
This kind of opportunity.
And I think, I really truly believe that universities as they're currently instituted are done.
They simply will not survive this transition.
Philosophy in particular, where did it start?
I mean, if you don't really count the pre-Socratics, it started with Socrates.
And what did Socrates do? He wandered around the marketplace and talked with people about philosophy and said, if you buy me lunch, that would be great.
And what is the donation model?
Other than a return to the origins of philosophy, people bringing their wisdom to the marketplace of ideas and saying, hey, buy me lunch if you like it.
Right, right, right. Well, yeah, you could really have your cake and eat it too on YouTube because, I mean, you know, I decided last year in April, thereabouts, before any of this scandal broke around me, that I was going to experiment with Patreon because I've been interested in the monetization of creative production for a long time from a research perspective.
My sense has always been to investigate things personally to find out how they work so that that can feed what I'm doing from a research perspective.
So I set up this Patreon account and I also decided not to monetize my YouTube videos Because I didn't think that the advertising was appropriate given the content.
It was something like that. And so I thought, well, I'll try Patreon instead because then I can see if it works.
And if I generate any income, I can increase the quality of my offerings.
And that's been unbelievably useful because I'm in this very weird situation where I give away everything I produce.
I mean, I've got some commercial programs, which are a different issue, but I give away everything I produce intellectually and it's produced far more consequences, including financial consequences, than could have possibly been imagined.
And I do. Look at how quickly the new media, let's say, especially YouTube, has eviscerated the old media.
I mean, that's just going to accelerate over the next two or three years.
So I see classic news institutions or media institutions like CBC, they're so dead in the water, they can't even imagine it.
Well, here's a funny thing.
And I'd like you to talk about this, if you don't mind, Jordan, because it's an amazing perspective that you get when you're a public intellectual.
Because the mainstream institutions, I want to speak for you, the mainstream institutions that I've experienced are fairly hostile and negative towards this kind of stuff that we're doing.
And the people, though, the people that you're actually talking to are, you know, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, engaged, robust, positive about the interaction.
I think you have to kind of be at this fulcrum.
You have to be at this apex to see the difference between elite institutions and the people as a whole.
Because if you're kind of in between these two worlds and you're being attacked by the mainstream media and you're, in a sense, being beloved by the people you're talking to, I don't think that there's a view that shows the culture wars and the culture gap between the elites and the people more so than doing what we're doing.
I agree. It's funny, too, because I've been treated extremely, I would say, by the mainstream press.
And by that I mean I've had Stories about me that are so dreadful that they're hard to even take seriously because it's as if they're written by someone who I don't understand.
It's sort of like, I'd love to meet this evil twin of mine about whom you are writing.
Well, and they're so badly researched that even the accusations aren't...
It's hard to be offended by an accusation that doesn't even seem like it's about you.
But by the same token, I've had many, many people, credible people in the mainstream press mount extraordinarily strong defenses of what I've been doing, but also of the principles that I've been trying to put forward.
And I would say that includes the most powerful columnists.
And media people in Canada.
It's not all of them, obviously, but it's been people like Margaret Wenta and Conrad Black and Rex Murphy, who's deadly with the pen and with his voice, and Antonella Artuso.
And that's not an exhaustive list by any stretch of the imagination, but I also get the impression from those people, some of whom I've got to know quite well, that their Like, they're cast adrift from a sinking ship in a very unstable life raft.
And those are people who wielded tremendous journalistic power.
They feel that there's no stability whatsoever in their future because they can see the old media forms rocking and being pulled apart like mad.
And, you know, the fact that this is happening so quickly to the classic media To me, indicates exactly what's going to happen to the universities.
Their model is so flawed.
So I've been thinking about, I've watched major institutions fall apart, corporations, and I see how it happens.
And it accelerates once it starts to happen rather than decelerating.
But imagine, it's way too expensive to educate a university student.
It's probably 10 times too expensive, about $50,000 a year in Canada and more in the US. It's administratively top-heavy beyond belief.
They're producing all these kangaroo courts and emphasis on diversity, inclusivity, and equity at the expense of actual intellectual endeavor.
The ethics committees are impeding high-quality scientific research.
Students are being laden with debt loads that are absolutely unsustainable.
The faculty is being stripped of their power and replaced by adjuncts.
The accreditation process is becoming completely untrustworthy because of de-emphasis on qualitative distinctions.
And the universities itself, especially in the humanities, which is the heart of the universities, have become ideologically possessed to such a degree that they no longer even offer what it was that you were supposed to be paying for to begin with.
So as far as I can tell, They're done.
That's what it looks like to me.
A huge thing takes a long time to fall over.
Here's an example. If you're in an oil tanker and you see an iceberg in your path, let's say, it's too late to turn.
Because the thing has so much momentum, given its size, that you can't make a course correction in time to stop from hitting it.
You have to detect it miles or tens of miles out.
And that's the same thing, as far as I can tell, that's happening to the universities.
Like Oberlin College, which is one of the places last year that we really flipped out from a social justice perspective, is just getting slaughtered in the marketplace right now because students are not going.
And that's what's going to happen.
As soon as there are viable alternatives, men are already doing this.
They're leaving the university in droves.
Well, I mean, I think everything, almost everything rots behind the high walls of state power and this protection from the marketplace.
The rawest and most productive intellectual exercises, I think, are happening on the edge of the marketplace of ideas.
And that's YouTube. That's where people do podcasting and so on, where there is not that...
Filter. There is not that self-censorship.
There is not that necessarily concern with long-term career, but there is a dedication to the truth and the audience.
And I think what's going to happen is, right now, having a university degree is still considered on the balance of positive by employers.
But I think that once they realize what's being taught, how much hostility towards whites, towards males, towards the free market, towards you name it, I think at some point there's going to be a tipping point.
And the employers are going to say, oh, you have an arts degree from XYZ institution.
Well, that means that you're going to be dangerous and a liability.
It's an inverse IQ test almost now.
And the other thing is, if you're smart enough to not go to university, that's going to be a kind of proxy IQ test for them as well.
Well, the corporations are learning.
I mean, they knew that... They've known for a long time that, say, if you have an arts degree, you still have to be trained specifically to do whatever job you're being hired for.
But they could assume a certain level of literary competence and capacity to learn, let's say.
So there was value there.
But the corporations are certainly starting to understand that they could hire people younger, even before university, and train them themselves and just circumvent all that ideological idiocy.
And also offer people a lower starting salary because they're not burdened with debt.
And so, yeah, that's happening.
And I would hope, although I'm not certain of this, That CEOs in particular would start to wake up and realize that human resources has become an anti-capitalist fifth column in the middle of their organizations.
And that the human resources people in general are trained as social justice warriors and are pursuing an agenda that's absolutely antithetical to the principles upon which the corporation itself is founded.
Sorry to interrupt, but they also act as a powerful filter to keep non-leftists out of the organization, which is why you see big corporations lurching from social justice warrior crisis to social justice warrior crisis, because they don't have opposing voices in the institution pushing back because human resources has acted as a giant filter to keep non-leftists out of the organization.
Well, and they do things like Apple, I think, most recently that had hired a vice president of Equity, diversity, and inclusivity or something.
They actually had to get rid of her because she turned out to be pretty damn sensible.
You know, and she said some things like, well, maybe we should consider diversity of opinion.
And like that mob just ripped her apart and she had to resign or was fired.
I don't remember which it was.
But I don't think...
I don't think that big companies understand how much trouble they're allowing themselves to get into by letting this ideological movement loose in the organization.
But on the upside, Stefan, I would say one of the things that's wonderful about capitalism is that corporations that make mistakes die.
It's hard, as you know, as a nimble mammal of the internet, it's hard for me to look at the incoming meteor and the dinosaurs and their uniting with great sorrow, because it's just going to open up a lot of opportunities.
So there's two other things I'd like to touch on regarding Christmas.
The first... The question which I have wrestled with for many years and I have yet to resolve, the question of sacrifice.
So I come out of the sort of objectivist Ayn Rand tradition where sacrifice is considered a seven deadly sin.
I've really revised that over time because there are certainly times as a public thinker that it does feel a little bit like there's some sacrifices involved, to put it mildly.
But it's worth it.
And this question of sacrifice, Christmas is a lot about self-indulgence in terms of materialism, which I have no particular problem with in terms of good eating, which I also enjoy to do.
But I think this question of sacrifice has really been lost from Christmas and from a lot of people's thinking as a whole.
This kind of what's in it for me, how can I accrue material gains is very central.
So where does sacrifice sit in your mind at the moment?
Well, in these biblical lectures I did, I talked about sacrifice a lot because we walked through Genesis and of course, especially from Cain and Abel forward, which is basically right from the beginning of the document, there's a tremendous emphasis on the rituals that are associated with sacrifice.
And sacrifice is an unbelievably powerful idea.
It's perhaps the most brilliant idea of mankind.
Because the sacrificial idea is you can give up something of value now, strategically and carefully, ethically, and be rewarded for it manifold in the future.
And that's basically the discovery of the future.
It's the same thing.
Because when you discover the future, it means that you have to start to think strategically about your actions in the present in relationship to the future.
And that's a sacrificial attitude because what happens is you realize that things that could bring you impulsive pleasure right now, getting well, the getting's good, is not a good medium to long-term strategy and might not be a good individual or collective strategy.
So here's one way of thinking, and this is where I think Ayn Rand was wrong.
There's very little difference between, so there's the you I'm talking to, right?
But there's the you that hypothetically extends, let's say, 30 years out into the future.
And so you could think there's the day-to-day you, 30 years into the future, and the week-to-week, and the month-to-month, and the year-to-year you.
And in some sense, that you that extends into the future isn't much different than other people.
So if you're acting in the moment to ensure that your long-term thriving is potentiated, you're going to act in a manner towards yourself that's not much different than the way that you would react to others that you were treating properly.
And so I would say, like, Rand's problem is that I think that she draws too tight a line between competition, say competition, selfishness, and public good.
Those do not have to be antithetical.
In fact, I don't think they are.
I think that when you act most wisely in Your own best self-interest.
You simultaneously act in the best interest of the people around you and broader society.
And that's part of this stacking up of levels of analysis.
You can have your cake and eat it too.
And so the reason that you should regulate your impulses, let's say, and discipline yourself isn't so that you can suffer the kind of privation and self-sacrifice in relationship to being an altruist that Ayn Rand complained about with good reason.
It's because you want to regulate and discipline yourself because that way you can serve a master, let's say, that serves everything at once.
And I've ceased believing that that's merely a metaphysical statement.
You know, like if I conduct myself so that my family maximally benefits along with me, how could that be anything but good also for me?
So, sacrifice properly understood isn't, again, it's back to our earlier discussion, it's not the rejection of worldly goods, it's not self-abnegation and flagellation, it's the replacement of a relatively Unsuccessful strategy, power, domination, like worldly pleasure, let's say, with an ethic that's inconceivably better on all dimensions.
Here's the big challenge as well, I guess this is maybe just asking for advice, around the question of forgiveness.
So forgiveness to me has become very muddied of late.
And the reason for that is that I understand that if someone wrongs me, and they show contrition, they apologize, they make amends, and I refuse to forgive them, that's giving me unfair and unjust power over them.
And that's a wrong thing for me to do.
On the other hand, if someone has wronged me, refuses to admit wrong, escalates and so on, then forgiveness is not earned.
And I think it's unjust to provide forgiveness to someone like that.
And so the idea that forgiveness is something to be earned, that forgiveness should be willed regardless of whether it's earned or not, that's something I'm still spinning kind of my wheels around.
Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, there's a couple of things there.
I mean, I would say in the Christian tradition, Forgiveness and repentance have always been tightly allied.
You can't separate them.
And I would also say that the best source that I've found for walking through that particular dilemma is Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.
Because especially in the second volume, he addresses very specifically, okay, so here's the scenario.
So you're in a gulag concentration camp, and that's not very pleasant.
And the newest inmate is a high-ranking communist official who's just been devoured by the system that he produced.
And he's now done in every possible way.
What do you do with him?
Because he's simultaneously victim and perpetrator.
And Solzhenitsyn walks through that very carefully, and his fundamental Realization I think is something along the lines of don't cast pearls before swine.
So Solzhenitsyn's meditation led him to the conclusion that as long as the victim is still the perpetrator, so still Putting forward, say, these communist propositions and identifying with the state and feeling that they're an unjust but innocent victim and everyone else in the prison is guilty, then there's no communication with them.
They're still in the valley of the damned.
But as soon as they break and realize the catastrophe that's occurred to them and start to question the validity of the system, then you offer a hand and help pull them out of the mire, right?
Because that's when they repent.
Let's say you want to forgive someone.
Maybe there's two reasons for that.
One is because you could help redeem them.
But the other is so that you don't have to carry the weight of the hatred and resentment.
And so there's a certain amount of psychological utility in having a forgiving attitude just so you don't carry around any more slings and arrows than you have to.
So that's pure self-interest.
With regards to forgiving someone, though, in a deeper sense, it's like repentance is vital to that process.
I'll forgive you assuming if you wrong me, I'll forgive you if you come and say, well, look, here's Why I wronged you.
Here's the specific things that I was thinking that were wrong and the specific things that I was doing that were wrong motivating me that led me to transgressing against you.
I've laid them out as my sins, let's say.
I figured out a way that I won't do it anymore.
I figured out why I shouldn't do it anymore and so can we wipe the slate clean?
And your answer in that situation should be Well, absolutely.
It's like, yes. Well, and sorry to interrupt, but the wrong, in my experience, Jordan, the wrongs that people do to you or the wrongs that you do to people can be part of making the relationship stronger and better.
Because when you've done wrong and repaired it and learned from it, you don't repeat it.
And the ties that bind you, like we always think, oh, I've done something wrong to someone.
That's a bad thing. Sure, it's bad.
But if successfully resolved, it can make the relationship far stronger and far deeper.
Look, that happens with children and husbands and wives all the time.
Even Frans de Waal, who's done a lot of studies of chimpanzee behavior, has noted the same thing among chimps.
The issue isn't whether or not they fight, because they fight.
The issue is whether or not they make up And that is it.
It's like there's going to be conflict in a relationship and who's doing wrong to who is not often obvious to begin with.
A lot of arguments are about that.
Well, no, I think you did it wrong.
No, I think it's you. No, I think it's you.
I mean, if you're smart and it's someone you're tethered to like a child or a spouse, then You're both wrong, and you should both be figuring out what you did wrong so you don't have to do it again if you had any sense, because then it won't be replicated.
But it's definitely the case that having that conflict, laying out the repentance and forgiveness process, and then re-tying those bonds makes the relationship way stronger.
Because that's what trust is.
You don't need trust if someone's behaving perfectly.
Like any more than you need to see the doctor if you never ever experience any ill health.
So trust to me is when people have problems and successfully resolve them.
That is the very basis of trust.
And one of the things that drives me nuts about the younger generation's relationships is they seem so volatile to the point where even if there's some ideological disagreement, there's this massive tearing and everybody just flees in opposite directions.
They don't build the trust of repairing that which they've torn.
Yeah, well, that's reconciliation, you know, and that's a very tough thing.
Well, I also think because the transaction costs of relationship transformation have fallen tremendously over the last 30 years.
I mean, you know, we're bombarded by so many technological and even biological revolutions that we can't even keep track of them.
You know, I would say For any society that hadn't gone completely manic in its rate of transformation, the mere introduction of something like Tinder is a major biological revolution.
Think about Tinder. Tinder has removed rejection from male sexual behavior for the first time in human history because you get rejected invisibly.
So you put out your profile and thousands of women, in principle, look at you and all of them reject you, except two.
But you don't know. And the fact that two didn't is fine, because all you care about is that two didn't.
And so the reason I'm bringing that up in relationship to what you said is that Because it's become less costly to just switch a relationship, even that's all surface, it's not less costly, it's far more costly, but on the surface it's become less costly, then there's no Logical reason why people should have to stay together and fight it through.
You know, because if I think, oh, Jesus, you're such a pain.
I should replace you.
It's like, yeah, well, first of all, can I? Because why would anyone want to be with something as wretched as me?
And second, the transaction cost is going to be punishingly high.
Like maybe it'll take three years.
And there's no guarantee and I'm going to get older and so maybe like bad as you are I might as well just stick it out with you.
But if I think well I can replace you in 15 seconds well then I don't have to fight with you.
And then you can also fall prey to the delusion that that next person that you find is somehow going to be less problematic than the person that you've already traded in.
And the problem with that is is that it's It's not the person that you traded in that's the problem, probably.
It's probably you, and you're going to bring yourself to the next relationship.
So, yeah, it is really useful to teach children and to also understand that reconciliation is the answer to conflict, not the reduction of conflict, right?
You have to have conflict, because otherwise you're not living.
Yeah, like I remember even when I was younger, like when I was a kid, Oh, sure.
You made a commitment to stay together for your life.
You broke that commitment at the expense of your children.
That is a massive failure.
Now, it may be for the best in some, you know, he was horribly abusive and so on.
Then you've got to figure out why you were with an abusive person.
But can we call it for what it is a failure?
This seems to have gone out of the window.
I don't think there's any evidence that liberalizing the divorce laws was a useful move.
I think it was a catastrophic move.
I think the people who paid the price for that are children.
And, you know, we say, well, we're only staying together for the sake of the children.
It's like, hey, that's not so bad.
That's not so bad. I think the children prefer that.
They are children, after all, and you have a primary moral obligation.
Once you have those children, who cares about you?
You're an epiphenomena.
Right. Your well-being is to be put clearly secondary, not to be eradicated completely because you don't want to be a martyr to your children.
And your children don't want that from you, that's for sure.
But the idea that, yeah, it's shallow.
It's the idea that relationships are infinitely divisible and fractionable and you can pop out of your primary commitment and go find yourself, especially once you've had children.
I find that morally reprehensible.
And I think it's done incalculable damage to our society.
It's like, and I also, and I learned this from Jung a fair bit, is like, One of the things he keeps pointing out is that there are some games that you do not get to play unless you're all in.
And marriage is one of those games.
The idea behind marriage is, I'm not going to leave.
Period. But what should be understood along with that is the unspoken subtext, which is, you're fucking horrible.
You're malevolent.
Life is tragic.
The complexity is going to overwhelm us.
This is going to be terrible.
But I'm not going to leave.
So, what would you like?
Because we kind of think, I'm not going to leave as long as I'm happy.
Oh, yeah. No.
No. I mean, you don't need virtue.
I mean, you don't need nutrition if you only eat what you want and what you like.
I mean, you need these disciplines because we have to act against their instincts from time to time.
And, of course, as you know, the studies are very clear that couples who are considering divorce, who stay together, five years later, they're like, well, thank God we never got divorced.
That was great. Well, and the studies with regards to...
The proper construction of a family, let's say, are also clear.
It's way better for kids to have an intact family with two parents, period.
There's just no debate about that.
Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't some single parents struggling valiantly who do a better job than some intact families.
But on...
Look at from any reasonable objective perspective.
The data is crystal clear and painfully self-evident.
Do you realize how much of the internet would be saved?
How much bandwidth and typing would be saved if we just taught statistics starting in grade school so that you wouldn't have to put these qualifiers in all the time?
It's a bell curve. I know there are exceptions, but yeah.
Yeah, yeah. It is tricky.
Let's close with what you would like to say to, I guess, the millions of people who are going to end up listening to and watching this.
What's your Christmas message, particularly, I guess, looking forward into, I think, what's going to be an extremely exciting year in 2018?
Well, let's think about it sociopolitically.
Let's manifest some hope and say, well, it is a dark time and we're badly polarized and this is the perfect time for the rebirth of the hero.
And that's what... That's what Christmas is about.
And it's about that at every level.
So you can allow that to be reborn in your own heart.
And the birth of Christ is the birth of the logos, right?
The word that extracts order out of chaos.
It's the thing that always, always, eternally sets things right.
That's what we're celebrating at Christmas.
And you want to welcome that into your heart and into your family.
Because if you don't, you're lost.
These ideas are so necessary and so vital that you cannot live without them.
And so it's useful to understand profoundly what Christmas means.
It means that the Logos is eternally reborn at the darkest period of time.
And if you're not on your knees in gratitude for that, then you know very little about the horrors of the world.
Well, thank you very much.
I also want to thank you, of course, at a personal level for the work that you're doing out there in the world for some of the great conversations we've had.
I look forward to many more to come, and thanks so much for your time this season.
Good talking to you. Thanks for the invitation, and Merry Christmas.
