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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:08:32
Sorting Yourself Out | Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio, back with Dr. Jordan Peterson.
He is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist, the author of many books and articles, including the Maps of Meaning, the Architecture of Belief, and he is the creator of the self-authoring suite.
The website is jordanbpeterson.com, twitter.com forward slash jordanbpeterson, YouTube slash Jordan Peterson videos.
And the self-authoring course, which we're going to be focusing on today, is at selfauthoring.com.
And if you find it valuable, and I hope that we can convince you that it is, and I hope that the data can convince you that it is, we have a special deal for you if you want to pursue it.
So thank you so much, Dr. Peterson, for taking the time today.
My pleasure.
Thanks very much for the invitation.
So one of the things I think is fairly true about modern society is we've kind of got out of the habit of introspection.
And I was thinking about one of the reasons why.
I think external stimuli like movies, video games, television, and all of the smartphone distractions and dopamine hits you can get from pursuing the pixels is one thing.
But it also struck me that...
That the fall of prayer has, I think, cut off an avenue for people to talk with themselves, to try and achieve a higher wisdom, whether people believe it comes from without or within is another question, but it seems that we've moved away from introspection, and I think we're finding that the short-term stimulus of pursuing sense pleasures is not making up for the increasing hollowing out, I think, of people's inner experiences.
Yeah, well, two things that you said there that struck a chord with me.
The first was that with regards to external stimulation, the question is, is that if you're continually bombarded by the outside world, it's telling you what to do all the time.
Like other people are always telling you what to do when they talk to you.
And of course, advertisers and social media are really like seriously and explicitly telling you what to do.
And the question is, well, how do you decide what you should do for you?
And the answer to that is that you have to consult yourself.
And unless there's time to do that, and you consult yourself partly through the use of your imagination daydreaming and daydreaming about what the future might hold and then actually consciously thinking about it and planning but you need to disconnect yourself from the external stimulation in order to do that and it might take some time and so yes I think that we're in danger of losing that I think children are in danger of having their play interfered with too and we don't know what the consequences of that would be but I don't suspect that it will be
That too much of that will be... If that happens to too great a degree, the consequences will be negative.
And then you also mentioned prayer.
You know, the cynical attitude towards prayer is something like asking God for favors.
And then, of course, the cynical analysis of that is that if you ask God for favors, like, he won't help you find your lost wallet, generally speaking.
You know, but...
That isn't... if you take a bit of a more sophisticated approach to it, you know, what you're doing, if you pray, we could even... people seem to find that more acceptable, is that you formulate a question and you wait for an answer.
And, like, a prayer might be, okay, I would like to do the best thing I could with my life.
Now you have to open yourself up to that.
That's to knock so the door will open.
I would like to do the best thing with my life.
What might that be?
Now you could say that you're thinking when you say that.
Or you could say that you're leaving yourself open for a revelation or an intuition.
But you're communing with whatever it is that enables you to receive wisdom.
And you can attribute all of that to you.
Or you can attribute it to your brain, I suppose.
But you're really communing with the structure of the cosmos when you're asking such a question, and especially if you do it properly.
And it's really useful to do that, and it's really necessary, because it orients you properly.
So, yeah, the demise of prayer, when prayer is considered in a sophisticated manner, which is, do I commune with the better part of myself, let's say, To determine how I should orient myself in the world.
It's a catastrophic loss not to do that.
And I think this question of a larger purpose to one's life, you know, I have a very libertarian-ish, independent-minded audience, and whenever I talk to them about the need to subjugate mere personal will and desire to a larger mission in life, it strikes them in a very odd way.
But this modern nihilism of meaning and of purpose is almost unique, I think, in human history.
In the past, of course, in the Christian model, you had the Ever imperfection of the soul and the goal of achieving heaven and communion with God, which was never going to be enough.
And there was a sense of the need for self-mastery.
We had imperialistic cultures that, for better or for worse, attempted to bring certain standards to other civilizations.
We had the conquering of the New World.
We had a larger purpose that we kind of swam in, like salmon in a current.
And that larger purpose seems to have diminished.
And it seems that that has weakened the West in enormous ways.
We're just interchangeable with other people.
We have nothing to defend, no particular values to protect.
And I think that this has a lot to do with this pursuit of immediate gratification, which is oddly combined with this kind of dissociated dreaminess and procrastination that seems to be one of the shadows cast by that pursuit of sense pleasure.
Well, you know, it is modern, I think, in its widespread distribution, but you can find pretty nihilistic statements, for example, in the book of Ecclesiastes, you know, where the writer says quite forthrightly and in a very modern sense that, you know, our life is bounded by suffering and death and that therefore we should strive to take every pleasure available in the moment.
And it ends on quite a nihilistic and malevolent note.
I'd like to find that passage, but I can't do it.
quickly enough, but So I mean that concern has been there since the beginning of time but it's it's at least at least perhaps in in more archaic days that was balanced out by the increased Willingness to posit the existence of a higher power or commune with it something like that And I mean, it's it's perfectly possible and reasonable to be cynical about that, but there's a huge loss in it Because you do need a purpose
That's higher, that unites all your impulsive and trivial purposes into one thing, or you're also weak.
You know, if you're not united within yourself, and you need to be united in relationship to a higher purpose to be united within yourself, then you're weak, and the world will take you apart.
And the reason it takes you apart, I think, is partly because life is rife with suffering, and it's certainly bounded by mortality, and those are very grim facts.
And unless you have hammered yourself together to find a destiny that's of sufficient nobility so that those negative elements become tolerable, then the suffering will take you apart and demolish you.
And so it's not optional, this.
And you might say, well, what does that have to do with God?
And I suppose that depends on how you interpret God.
But it certainly at least has to do with the finding of a transcendent purpose.
So, and you do that through consultation with yourself, you know, and yourself, and this is a kind of a way of looking at things that Carl Jung developed.
The self that I'm talking about is the higher self that tells you, for example, When your pursuit of impulsive pleasure has demeaned you or interfered with your proper mode of being, and people understand that experience very well.
You don't have to talk to someone very long until you can discover what they're ashamed of, for example, or what they hold themselves in contempt in relationship to.
We conceptualize that as, like, why be ashamed if you aren't doing something that demeans you?
Why have contempt for yourself if you're not missing the mark?
And the fact that you have shame and self-contempt indicates that there's something in you that's striving beyond what you're currently investigating.
And for your libertarian types, like I would say, look, you don't have to kowtow to an arbitrary external authority, although often there's use in that from a disciplinary perspective.
But I could say, just as straightforwardly and usefully, that your viewers and listeners Could merely stop doing what they know themselves to be wrong.
Forget about what anyone else thinks.
It's like, you know when you've transgressed against your being.
And we could say, well, you have an ethical, it's an ethical necessity to limit the transgressions.
Transgressions that you can identify against the nature of your being and I don't see that that's a disputable point unless someone can step forward and claim Well, I never feel any shame in everything.
I do I believe to be a hundred percent, right?
It's like Get away from that person unless they're the Buddha.
That is a terrifying perspective.
This question of goals or standards or things you're working towards, you mentioned in a recent speech the concept of sin as in missing the target.
The question of what is the target, what is the goal, how will you know whether you've succeeded or failed, I think is the essence of this idea of self-authorship.
Know where you're coming from, know where you are, and know where you want to head.
People find that very anxiety-provoking because if you float along in the narcissism of the now, you never succeed or fail.
I think what happens is over time, I was very struck when I was younger reading
Jung talking about the arc of life you know that the first you have to plan for the second half of your life if you're a wise person and when you're young you don't think of the second half of your life and it often will be that you will make mistakes that make the second half of your life particularly crippling or unhappy at a time where it's really tough to go back and fix things so having a mark having a target gives you power it also gives you vulnerability in terms of loss or failure yes well it defines failure
You know, and it places a judge in your life, okay?
And the judge is also the redeemer.
That's a very deep Christian idea.
And the judge is the redeemer because the judge tells you what's insufficient about you.
And you can't be redeemed unless you know what's insufficient.
And so when you set yourself up an ideal, you also set yourself up a judge, and that judge redeems you.
And that's played out dramatically in the book of Revelation, by the way.
It's played out mythologically.
And so then the question is, well, what judge should you set up to judge you?
The answer to that is something like, you should set up the highest judge you can conceive of to judge you, and then you should be prepared to replace that with a higher judge yet.
And so it's something like, well, you could imagine that perhaps you're a primitive person, and you commune with a statue, and the statue contains your God, and then maybe you mature past that, and you think, well, that statue doesn't have God in it.
And then the question is, well, where did God go?
And maybe God goes to a bigger statue.
And then when you commune with that for a sufficient length of time, then God vanishes from that statue and goes to somewhere else.
And so what you do is conceptualize an ideal and then work towards it.
And you might say, well, what ideal should you conceptualize?
And I think that that's an answerable question.
I would say, first of all, take stock of the existence of the suffering and malevolence of the world.
And that your own finitude and insufficiency And then decide for yourself what path of life you would have to pursue in order to not allow the existence of those limitations to make you embittered and malevolent.
And that's a start.
And so it's something like, well, my leg is caught in a bear trap.
What can I do about it to make it not only tolerable, let's say, but worthwhile?
It's something like that.
And then you say, well, then you let your imagination go free and say, okay, well, this is a terrible world, this veil of tears that we all inhabit, this tragic slaughterhouse of reality.
Well, is there a mode of being that adds nobility and worth to that?
And then you pursue that.
And you know, you're going to be bad at it to begin with, because what the hell do you know?
But at least you've set yourself up on the path of successive approximations.
And that's what we've been trying to do with the... Really, that's what we've been trying to do with the self-authoring suite.
It's like, okay, you need to know... You need to go somewhere, because going somewhere gives your life meaning.
I just figured that out in relationship to the Abrahamic stories, which I just did a lecture that I released on the Abrahamic stories.
In the beginning of the Abrahamic stories, What God tells Abraham is, all right, he's old already.
Abraham's 75.
He should have done this a long time ago, man.
And God says, get away from your country and get away from the house of your father and go into the land of strangers and strive.
And so Abraham decides to do that.
And the first thing he encounters is starvation.
And the second thing he encounters is the tyranny of Egypt.
So he encounters terrible nature and terrible culture in his attempt to follow the dictum of God.
Well, it's the call to adventure, right?
That's the command of God.
Go forth into what you do not understand.
And God says, if you do that, says to Abram, if he does that, then he'll be a great man and the father of nations.
It's like, well, hey, that's not a bad start for a goal, you know?
And so you have to go somewhere.
So let's say, well, you want to figure out where you want to go and you need to figure out how to get there.
Well, the first thing you need to know, just like you do if you're in a car and you're trying to go somewhere is, well, where the hell are you?
And you might think you know, but you probably don't know because you're fragmented and fractured by the unresolved issues in your past.
And so you're kind of all over the place.
You haven't got your act together.
Things have fallen apart around you.
And so the first thing you do is you have to call yourself together.
And that's what the past authoring is for.
So what we have people do is To go over their past and to break their life into six sections.
We call them epochs.
And then to identify the most significant, the most emotionally significant events of each of those epochs and to write about them and to write about why they happened and what they meant and what the value was and what might have been done differently.
And to update yourself, to transform your implicit experience into explicit experience and to update yourself.
You do that with the past authoring exercise and that's quite difficult and the more undigested material you have that's related to the past, the more difficult that's going to be.
Let's mention that for a second because I think people...
Get so used to sort of the toothache of past pain that it almost blurs out in their mind.
It's like that sound, the ringing that eventually your brain stops processing.
But I think you have a very good rule of thumb, which is the 18 month rule.
And I wonder if you could help people understand that it is not a suffering that you have to take with you like a ball and chain for the rest of your life.
There are ways to release it, but it does involve circling back and processing it through language.
Yes.
Well, let's define what processing means.
Okay.
You know, let's say that you had a pretty painful history of being bullied when you were 13.
And you're still carrying that with you.
You carry it with you in your posture.
You carry it with you in your assumptions about people.
This is all implicit, right?
It's not explicit.
You carry it with you in the form of resentment and questions about what it might have been.
And you carry it with you because you've been demeaned by it.
But you know, you're not 13 anymore.
You're 40.
And those experiences are not transferable in any simple manner to your current reality.
So you go back and you think, okay, what happened?
What exactly happened?
And what happened means is, what were the causal pathways that put me in that position of vulnerability and inferiority?
And you want to specify them as carefully as possible, because what the part of you that's hanging on to that wants to know is, Have you changed enough so that that won't happen again?
And if the answer to that is yes, even through thinking, you realize, well, I'm not that person anymore, or you go back to the experience and you figure out, oh, this is what I did, and I could stop doing that, then the icy hands of that traumatic experience will release, that you will be released from it.
Because what your mind wants to know, your unconscious mind, let's say, is, have you resolved this issue to the degree that it is unlikely that it will occur again?
And that's what it means to have processed it.
And this, I think, is really important for people to understand that memories stick until you gain security.
Memories stick to alert you to dangers that you're recreating by avoiding the history.
So if you were bullied, you're going to either end up usually in the bully victim paradigm, right?
You're either going to go out there and say, well, I'm going to get them before they get me.
Or you're going to go out there with you sort of shuffling along, staring at the sidewalk, you know, slumped shoulders, and you're going to be inviting more bullies into your life.
And so until you figure out the causality of how you ended up being bullied, you're going to gravitate to either of those two poles as either a fight or flight mechanism.
But if you go back and process and figure out, okay, here's the steps that happened that ended up with me being bullied.
Now I know how to avoid the bullying situation.
Then that pain will recede.
It's there until you listen.
It speaks until you're safe.
So there's this great scene in this documentary called Crumb, which is about the underground cartoonist Robert Crumb.
It's the most brilliant documentary I've ever seen.
And it's highly instructive, that documentary.
It's about a terribly Oedipal family.
But it's also about the successful struggle of one of the brothers in the family, who became a famous underground cartoonist, to free himself from that.
Part of the documentary details his terrible experiences as a 13 to 17 year old with women.
And he was one of these people, Robert Crumb, who was not at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy.
He was outside the dominance hierarchy in the land of absolute contempt.
And he made this card when he was about 13 or 14 with a broken heart on it and described his realization that he was such an outsider that he would never be successful.
with girls, you know, or period, but particularly with girls.
But then that freed him up and he started to cartoon more and draw more and listen to old music.
And he kind of developed his own pathway.
And then he became a very successful illustrator.
And then he became very successful with women.
But he drew this picture to illustrate what he was like when he was 13.
And it's very self-critical.
And he draws himself as kind of hunched over.
thick glasses, really skinny, underdeveloped, weak chin, bad attitude, poorly presented, badly dressed, like a walking testament to resentment and weakness.
And it wasn't until he realized that he was playing that part, and that that was also fueling his rejection, Was he really able to to move towards overcoming it?
And so partly what you want to do is to go over your past and figure out okay What stupid things did I do or what in what manner was I?
Insufficient so that this negative destiny was more likely to visit me now you you don't assume that everything that happened to you was your fault or under your control because Everything isn't your fault and everything isn't under your control, but you do want to figure out.
Okay?
Well if I played some hand in this And that could be rectified.
Well, then I should figure out how to rectify it because then I won't be in this situation anymore.
You know, you talked about the bully victim who invites more bullying.
It's like, well, if you've conducted yourself in a manner such that you've attracted the attention of bullies and you haven't stopped doing that, then you're still going to attract the attention of bullies.
And so your mind is very alert to such things.
It's always looking for where you're weak and vulnerable and warning you about it.
And it's just an alarm bell, right?
It isn't necessarily a problem-solving mechanism.
And so alarm bells might be going off in your head all the time, and that's very unpleasant.
But the difficult process of articulating it and thinking it through can free you from that.
And so that's what the Past Authoring Program is for.
So you might think of that as step one.
Where am I and can I get myself together where I stand?
Okay.
And then the next issue would be, well, who am I now?
So you can do a personality analysis, that's the present authoring, which helps you identify your virtues and your faults.
And your virtues are those tools that you have to deal with the world successfully.
And your faults are the places where you fall short of your own vision, for that matter, right?
And then the next step, and you can do these in any order, but the next step is, okay, Where should you go?
And one answer to that is, well, how about somewhere better?
That's the land of milk and honey, right?
Somewhere better, all right?
So you ask yourself, well, what would better look like?
I do this with my clients all the time.
It's like, okay, you want your life to be better so that there's less suffering and waste and terror.
Okay.
Hypothetically, if you had what you needed to have the life that would be best for you, As if you were taking care of yourself, as if you mattered to yourself, as if you could grant yourself what you needed to thrive.
What would that be?
And then we get concrete.
What do you want from your friends?
How are you going to interact with your friends?
What how is it that you're going to set your family straight or move from your family if that can't be done?
What how are you going to set up an intimate relationship?
What are you going to do in your career?
How are you going to educate yourself?
How are you going to deal with drugs and alcohol and other temptations like that?
What productive and meaningful activities are you going to engage in in your spare time?
What sort of person are you going to be three to five years down the road if you could be the sort of person that you would want to be?
Well, that's That's the first set of questions in the future authoring program.
Right.
And the next question is, okay, you get to have what you need.
It's five years from now.
What does that look like?
And then we have, so that's your own heaven, right?
It's like, let's detail out paradise as far as you're concerned.
Be realistic about it.
This isn't a game for children, right?
This is real life.
So you want to be realistic about it.
So you detail out.
Your vision of life more abundantly as far as you're concerned.
This is only for you.
You don't even have to tell anyone about it.
And then we have people flip it.
It's okay.
Now we figured out what you want and what would be good for you.
Let's play the game the other way.
All right.
Now you think of all your weaknesses and all your proclivity for malevolence and your resentment and your tendency to avoid and all your bad habits.
And then you let that get the upper hand.
And then that drives you into the ground over the next three to five years.
What hell do you inhabit?
Because everything's broken into pieces three to five years from now.
And you really want to contemplate that, because then you have a hell to run away from, and a heaven to run towards.
And that makes you maximally motivated, because your fear is behind you then, pushing you, instead of ahead of you, stopping you.
And then we ask people to make all of that into a detailed plan, a detailed implementable plan, with fully articulated and rationalized.
And let's talk about some of the empirical data that you have gathered.
I mean, I definitely want to encourage people to pursue this, you know, self-knowledge is power, and your muscles will rise to meet your ambitions.
People don't often think of that, that if you simply have a great goal and a great ambition, you want to do great things with your life, you grow wings when you jump off the building, almost in a kind of way that's been my experience.
But there is a lot of empirical data, particularly I really want to focus on something I've talked a lot In the show about which is ethnic IQ differences and how this helps close the gap and even eliminate it in some situations, because that to me is a very, very powerful outcome.
Well, so we've tested this program with universities, university and college students.
And it's not because it's designed for them, by the way, it's because, well, you can measure their performance quite, quite straightforwardly.
And so they're a good target audience if you want to look at the impact of an intervention on performance.
Now, What we found was that if you get, we started with business school in Holland, we've run several thousand people.
It's probably up to 10,000 people now, or maybe more in the school of management at the Rotterdam, at Erasmus University.
It's the Rotterdam School of Management.
I'm working there with Michaela Schipper and Ad Schippers.
And what we found was that we looked at the performance of different groups of people by ethnicity and gender.
And so the highest performing people were the Dutch women, the Dutch native women, let's say.
And then the second highest performing group were the Dutch native men.
And then the third group was non-Western ethnic minority women, and the fourth group was non-Western ethnic minority men.
And the ethnic minority groups were underperforming the Dutch groups, and the men were underperforming the women.
So the ethnic minority men were doing the worst.
And significantly too.
It was about a third, if I remember rightly.
Performance decrement of something like 83%.
It was a huge difference.
And far more dropout among that population as well.
We had them do the future authoring program as part of the coursework, and we dropped the overall dropout rate by about 25%.
So that's really quite staggering.
And we eliminated the performance difference between the non-Western ethnic minority men.
Those troublesome immigrants, let's say.
We eliminated the performance difference between them and the Dutch women.
In fact, their performance actually exceeded that of the Dutch women after two years, but the superiority wasn't significant.
And so we used a psychological intervention to completely eradicate the problems caused by a sociological circumstance.
And so, and then, you know, so we thought, wow, that's, that's pretty amazing.
I mean, we got an overall effect on grades, but the biggest effect on academic performance was from raising the people who were doing the worst, which is also weird because usually when you design a psychological intervention, it makes the better people even better.
Right?
So you increase the gap between the top performers and the bottom performers instead of decreasing it.
So then we're pretty excited about that.
It was like, really, that's well, you couldn't ask for a better outcome than that.
And so then we replicated it recently at a little college called Mohawk in Canada.
And we had the students come in and only do the future authoring program for about 90 minutes.
They did it on their orientation day and relatively rapidly, you know, because it's hard to plan your whole damn life.
So they only spent 60 to 75 minutes doing it.
And we dropped the dropout rate by about 30% in the first semester.
And again, it had the biggest effect on the men who were doing the worst.
And so those would be men who didn't do very well in high school and who had also enrolled in programs that were general rather than specifically aimed towards a particular profession.
So that was ridiculously cool and also disheartening to some degree because what it showed, both studies, was that If our education systems provided their students with the opportunity to engage in structured reflection and help them determine their destinies, to use a very archaic phrase, then their performance would increase very rapidly.
Oh, this is part of the ambivalence and I found this to be, this is the only study that I know of that has been able to close the gap to this degree.
Hopefully it lasts and so on, so this is one of the reasons I wanted to help talk to people about this.
It's lasted for two years!
Yes, and I think it's an incredible close and of course given what's going on in Europe and other places, finding ways to equalize performance outcomes between different ethnicities Is Canada key, I think, between a future potential civil war and a future potential wonderful peace?
So, you know, the stakes really couldn't be higher given the experiments going on in the Western world at the moment.
Well, in the West, you know, the West is predicated on the idea that you turn to the individual, the autonomous individual, to solve the problem.
And so we didn't treat ethnic minorities.
We intervened at the level of the individual.
We didn't give a damn about their ethnicity or their minority status except to measure it, you know.
The idea was get the individual together, and that's the great signal truth of the West.
Get the individual together.
Right.
And so this idea that there's this amazing breakthrough, and to me this should send ripples throughout the entire psychological, sociological, psychiatric community, and whatever we can do to get the word out, I will do.
But it does, as you say, when you get this great excitement, you also do, at least for me, get this great anger thinking back on the education that is so available.
This program you can do in a couple of concentrated days and it can change, as you point out, your life.
The cost-benefit, it's very, very cheap because it's largely self-administered.
You just need a little bit of web hosting.
It's scalable, right?
We can administer it to an indefinite number of people at low cost, which was one of the design parameters.
And think of the cost runs into the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands to educate someone partially.
And what that does for their sense of efficacy and success and what it does to their confidence if they bomb out, if they fail out.
We've got something which costs a few bucks to administer per person and the benefits can be enormous.
But it does make me look back through the tunnel of time and say, what the hell were the teachers doing for 12 years?
That this is something so revolutionary.
I can actually answer that question a little bit.
Because I got really curious about that, I thought, because I started using these programs in my own classes about 10 years ago in their beta form, let's say.
And so I had students write an autobiography in the class and then also to write out their future plan.
And then I thought about that a lot.
I thought, hmm, the students were really into it, you know.
I mean, some of them were writing 20,000 word documents.
So they were really into it.
Now, I set the context, you know, I taught the students that they live in a story, that people live in stories, and that you have to get your story straight, because otherwise it might be a catastrophic tragedy that you're living out.
And so, you know, they understood the utility and necessity of doing that, and that accounted to some degree for their concentration on the task at hand.
But then I started thinking about it, so I thought, You know, I'm teaching these students.
They're like 21 years old because it's an upper level course.
They've been in school for 16 years and more if they had preschool and no one Has ever sat them down and said, OK, who the hell are you and what are you doing?
Justify it.
Seriously.
And tell me why you're doing this.
Who are you and where are you going?
Write it down.
And I thought, that's so weird.
How the hell can that be?
How the hell can we be so blind that that's that we avoid that for 15 years?
And that's even with the high end students.
And so I started doing some investigations and I came across the work of this guy named John Gatto, who's a teacher who won The best teacher in New York City award and then the best teacher in New York State and then quit being a teacher.
Sorry, just to mention that people need to look up his work is available online.
Weapons of Mass Instruction is one of his best.
How he analyzes the history of school is very powerful.
Yes, exactly, exactly.
Here's the Cole's Notes version.
Okay, so back in the late 1800s when the Industrial Revolution was in full swing and the rural people were moving to the cities.
They were starting to work in the factories.
Huge working class.
And while they were working in the factories, their children needed to have a place to go.
Plus, their children were likely going to end up working in factories, and so they needed to be trained to do that.
And so, what happened was that a group of politicians, industrialists, capitalists, powerful people, turned to Prussia, which had instituted a public education system to produce obedient soldiers.
And Japan did the same thing, by the way.
That's why they produced all the soldiers who were like mindless automatons for World War II.
And that was a conscious decision on the part of the Japanese and on the part of us here in North America.
To produce obedient workers was the goal of the school system.
And it was set up by fascists, essentially.
And I'm not being... Those weren't post-World War II fascists, right?
That isn't after Hitler and Mussolini.
These were people who viewed the world in terms of power and who wanted to train workers.
And, you know, you can be cynical about that because they were training obedient serfs, you know.
But you can also say, well, look, I mean, industrialization was occurring and so was urbanization.
And it was reasonable, to some degree, to try to produce Workers who could function in the factory settings.
So that was the goal.
That's why the desks are in rows.
That's why the teacher is the authority.
That's why they ring bells.
It's a factory.
Okay, so what's the problem with that?
Well, maybe nothing in like 1905, but it's 2016 and those jobs are gone and people have to be increasingly autonomous and self-directed in their career decisions.
And so it's time to... And there's a middle class.
So everyone virtually is in the middle class, you know, unless you've fallen out of society completely.
So you need to develop your autonomous vision.
And the schools were never set up to do that.
And so it's like they haven't noticed that they're not doing it.
Right.
Well, whatever the government wraps in state power tends to become immune to the effects of time.
You know, 150 years ago, you had a teacher up there with a whiteboard and some chalk and a bunch of kids in a row.
And now 150 years later, after all of the technological advancements, the only thing that I can see that's changed is you've gone from a blackboard to a whiteboard in some places.
But the basic structure remains the same.
That's what happens when the state – Well, and you're probably not made literate with as much efficiency.
That's true.
No.
And so I really want to focus on this part of what self-authoring, I think, empowers people to do.
One of the wonderful passages in the Bible is, to me, the temptation of Jesus by Satan.
Because what does he do?
He says he offers him mastery over the world.
He offers him mastery over others.
There's this pole in society, this fork in the road that society takes, and each individual takes within that society, determines the character of that society.
Do you seek power over others?
Do you seek mastery over others?
Or do you seek mastery over yourself?
Now if you seek mastery over others, then you use other people as crops with which you can gain resources, either directly as a criminal, indirectly through a lobbyist or a politician or a capitalist who uses the power of the state to control competition and so on.
Other people fundamentally become dopamine utility robots or crops for you because you're seeking power over them.
If you seek power over yourself, mastery over yourself, which used to be common in the Christian model, even in the ancient Greek model was the saying, it is easier to rule a city than to rule yourself.
If you gain self-mastery in the Aristotelian sense, then you can actually interact with people in a positive way.
They're not utilities for you to harvest.
And what I love about this program, Jordan, is how much it teaches you the need for and the value of self-mastery so that you can control your own life, get resources in a productive and voluntary way and not be dependent on controlling and manipulating others in order to gain your sustenance.
Right?
You know, amen to that, let's say.
And I think it's perfectly reasonable for you to put that in the context of the temptation.
Because, look, one of the things the postmodern neo-Marxists insist upon is that hierarchies are predicated on power.
And that's wrong.
Some hierarchies are predicated on power, and mostly the pathological ones.
Because real hierarchies, functional hierarchies, are predicated on authority and competence.
And competence is the ability to formulate problems and solve them.
And so in a real functioning hierarchy, the people who are best at formulating problems and solving them rise to the top.
And so they're tools.
A hierarchy is a very complex, structured social tool.
And if you want to rise to the top, let's say, what that means is that you make yourself more disciplined and useful, and you make your ethical aims higher and more noble.
And enough damn cynicism!
You know, I've met a number of people in my life now who have been world-changing and I mean that in the most fundamental sense.
These are people who have invented things or developed technologies that have transformed the world and to a man, their ambitions are noble.
Their willingness, their desire is to make being better.
They're disciplined and bright.
And they've been successful because they've dealt fairly and forthrightly with people.
And they've allowed their talents to manifest themselves in the world.
And they are not power... In fact, the people who want power are often precisely those who are impeding their progress.
And hitting people when they're young with this fork in the road thing I think is important.
You've mentioned Piaget's description of the phase in sort of late adolescence when you get this messianistic idea that you want to go out and change the world.
And I think people do hang this fruit.
And this to me is the sort of leftist or social justice warrior.
It is this fruit that they hang before you which says the way that you change the world is you try and get the state to pass laws to get your way.
And that is how you're going to go out and make the world a better place.
Now the government loves it.
You change the world by stopping the bad people from being bad.
Right.
And those bad people aren't you.
In fact, you're a victim of those bad people.
And you set up a system wherein the bad people will forever multiply according to your definitions, which is why it never But offering people a sense of how to change the world by first changing yourself, it seems very counterintuitive.
It's like trying to make someone else thin by dieting yourself.
It doesn't make much sense.
But you can go forward, show yourself as an example of somebody who has self-mastery.
You can inspire other people and you can be so productive that you will in a sense drag people along in your successful wake, even if you're successful opportunities.
You hire people, or you teach people as you're doing, or you excite people as to the possibilities of life.
Self-mastery liberates other people from the addiction to control others, because when you are in control of yourself, other people can be of value to you outside of resource acquisition.
That is very inspiring, but it's kind of counterintuitive, because this shortcut of change the world by forcing others To obey your whims is very tempting and satanic, I think.
Yes, well, it's especially tempting if no other pathway has been delineated for you.
Because, as you said, maybe even amongst the best of young people, there is this messianic urge.
And it's a non-trivial phenomena and a positive phenomena, but it has to be channeled and disciplined properly.
And universities are failing in their mission to do that.
In fact, they're actually working at counter-purposes to that.
And I think that presents a mortal threat to the substructure of our culture.
And it has to be dealt with.
So I should tell you another project that we're engaging in because we're on this topic.
So within a month, I'm going to release a website.
We still haven't figured out how to brand it and how to promote it.
But what it will do, it has an AI core.
And what students will be able to do with this website is to go enter their course descriptions or the syllabi content.
So they enter the university, the sub-discipline, the professor's name, and the course content.
And the AI engine will analyze the terminology and tell them whether that's part of the cult of post-modern neo-Marxist indoctrination.
Right.
It's a radar for propaganda.
Well, so when people can use it either way if they want to, if they want to take a social justice course to find out what it's like, it's like, well, they can use it that way if they want to go to university and become indoctrinated into the PC neo-Marxist postmodern cult, then they can use it that way.
But if they want to use it to avoid that victim-oppressor mentality and the narrow-minded intellectual ideology that goes along with it, then they can use it for that purpose.
And so I have a goal.
And my goal is to reduce the enrollment in postmodern neo-Marxist indoctrination courses by 75% across the Western world within five years.
That's the goal of the website.
And I thought a lot about how to do that.
And I thought, well, you appeal to the individual.
Because I thought for a while, well, I could lobby the government and I've done this, I've had these conversations with people, some of the people who lead the Conservative Party in Canada, for example, that Perhaps 25% of the university's funding should be removed until they sort themselves out.
But then I thought, on reflection, I thought, well, you can't do that because you can't get the government's hand into the university systems because the long-term consequence of that is going to be worse.
It can't be that.
It has to be something like the students decide of their own accord to turn in another direction and leave that sterile, dead, nihilistic, pathological victim-oppressor mentality in the dust and the gloom where it belongs.
Well, I think the other application, and I've been talking to employers as well, saying, you know, if a person comes from this university with this kind of degree, you may not be getting the critical thinker that you want.
You may be getting somebody who's going to cause a lot of trouble.
I could also, Jordan, see the application of this for employers to say, oh, this person came from this university.
They took this stuff.
I'm going to go check out this website.
And find out what kind of belief sets they're going to be bringing into my hopefully creative and industrious and optimistic workplace.
Because, of course, this is the one thing about the sort of neo-Marxist, the cultural Marxism stuff.
It's relentlessly depressing.
It's relentlessly hostile.
It hollows people out.
It's more like a brain rot than any kind of enthusiastic and open thinking system.
Oh, yeah.
It compromises its followers' mental health.
It makes them depressed and angry and nihilistic and resentful and malevolent and often dangerous.
It breeds the very failure it claims to oppose.
It's terrible.
Yes.
Now, I was thinking about, because you've talked about this and I've talked about it as well, this Pareto principle, and it just struck me, Jordan, while you were talking about this, I wonder if The people who produce this amazing productivity right is the square root of the workers produce half the wealth which you know if you've got three out of nine is not such a huge deal if you've got a hundred out of ten thousand you can certainly see why some people become richer.
Do you think if this process of self-authoring Explodes productivity in people.
Do you think that there may be people who get it instinctually or have pursued it accidentally or have got it as a side benefit of therapy or something else?
Do you think that the Pareto principle might be composed of people who've gone through this process consciously or unconsciously and that we might be able to herd more people in a sense into this maximum productivity area through this process of self-authoring?
Well, that's what the data indicates, right?
And I would say part of the way that happens is that the number of Pareto domains will multiply.
You can't get rid of the damn principle.
It's pretty hard.
Now, you might do what Henry Ford did, if you happen to be at the top of the heap, and say, hey, actually, it turns out that we should pay our workers so they can buy the things we're producing, which is a message that industrialists across the West, I think, could hearken to again, and even if for no other reason than for their own self-protection, because increased, what would you call it, inequality that increases beyond some Unknown maximum is going to cause massive social destabilization.
It's a real risk.
So but I would also say that there's although you can't remove the Pareto principle, you can dampen it.
And you can also multiply the domains in which it works.
And, and, you know, there's, there's lots of things that can be produced creatively.
And there's lots of domains that can be generated in which creative achievement can take place.
And so I would say that someone who's self Motivated.
Properly motivated, let's say, towards the good.
Just as it lays itself out in the Sermon on the Mount, right?
To put the highest possible good at the top of the hierarchy.
Whatever that is, it's God for all intents and purposes.
Whether you believe in God or not, it doesn't matter.
It becomes your God.
And so you put the right God at the top, and the God of power is the wrong God.
So that's the message that's implicit in the temptation narrative, which you already outlined.
So, what happens when people put the proper god in the highest possible position?
Well, what happens is that the world transforms itself increasingly into something that's paradisal.
And I truly believe that.
I truly believe that.
And that that's the proper way forward.
And for those of your viewers who are feeling nihilistic and depressed and upset about the state of the world, it's like, yes, the world is contaminated by hell, let's say, and catastrophe.
It's like, that gives you something to do.
Go out there and fix that.
And start with yourself.
Start by constraining the catastrophe of being within the domain of your own responsibility.
And then you have a meaning for your life.
It's like, life is meaningless and suffering is everywhere.
It's like, well, combat the suffering with your forthright and noble heart and see how that works.
Yeah, we should not let the only highly motivated people in the world be the worst among us.
So let's talk a little bit about our good old friend dopamine.
I've talked about this in the realm of addiction on the show before, but the relationship between dopamine and goal setting is something that people don't generally understand and I always love being able to look at the physical substructure behind the philosophy.
Absolutely.
Yes, well, so yes, the news there is very good.
Dopamine is part of the seeking system.
It's produced... Now, the seeking system has been very well defined by two neuroscientists, I would say.
One is Jaak Panksepp, that's J-A-A-K Panksepp, P-A-N-K-S-E-P-P, who wrote a great book called Affective Neuroscience.
And that's outlined in my reading list on my website.
And the other is Jeffrey Gray, who is a student of Hans Eysenck, who is the most highly cited psychologist that ever lived.
And Jeffrey Gray and Jack Panksepp are both geniuses.
Unfortunately, they're both demised.
They both are deceased.
But their research and the research of all the people they drew on because they were both familiar with hundreds of thousands of papers and hundreds of researchers.
Dopamine locks you on to the scent.
So what it does is It's a chemical that's manifested in relationship to the pursuit of goals.
Okay, so here's the issue.
The more valuable the goal, the higher the quality of the motivational state associated with its pursuit.
Now, man, you really want to know that.
Because I might say, well, aim high.
And you might say, well, why?
And I might say, well, because that's how you redeem the world from its suffering.
It's like, well, that's not bad.
That's not a bad start.
But then I can say, well, there's nothing that you can possibly do that will be better for you from a motivational perspective.
You know, like you don't want to set an impossible goal and continually fail.
You have to be intelligent and canny about this.
You have to set goals that You know, you can successively approximate, but you're aiming high.
And then what happens is that, you know, let's say you accomplish something, but it doesn't move you anywhere you care about.
Well, then the net psychophysiological consequence of the accomplishment is going to be zero.
But let's say you accomplish something small, even.
But it moves you towards something extremely valuable.
Well, you're going to get a kick out of that.
And that kick, that dopamine kick, that's going to bathe the neural processes that you use to attain that accomplishment in the fluid that rejuvenates and strengthens them.
Literally.
Literally.
That's what happens.
Because dopamine doesn't just feel good.
It reinforces the structures that produced it.
So it's nourishing.
It nourishes the you that you want to bring into existence.
And so, if you want to remain in stasis, then you can get your dopamine with alcohol and cocaine.
But you'll pay for that, because for every heavenly experience you get that way, you'll get a counterbalancing hellish experience that will be of greater significance, generally speaking.
It's a net negative game.
Or for a lot of the younger set, pornography and video games are the way.
Video games, of course, are specifically engineered as dopamine pellet dispensers.
They actually test these things out to make sure that the gradation of challenge and reward is enough to keep you hooked.
But of course, it is an empty experience because you can fool your dopamine system, but you can't fool your soul as to whether you're actually achieving anything in the world deep down.
Well, I'm a little bit more sanguine with regards to video games, because if the game is well structured, then there's a manner in which it's analogous to life.
So I think you can pick up generalizable skills in the video game environment, especially if you're a socially isolated introvert.
You know, I think that can be a way forward.
But let's be clear about that.
That doesn't mean that all you should be doing is playing video games, right?
It means that you should make your pursuit of video games part of having a life.
And you should use the video games to make you a more effective individual in the actual world.
Now pornography, well, I don't know if there's anything good that can be said about pornography.
I think that it's pretty much an untrammeled social evil.
The only thing I can say about pornography is that its introduction into communities seems to decrease the probability of violent rape.
There's some reasonable data on that.
But in terms of psychological development, it's not to be recommended.
And for the reasons that you described, it's a stimulus that has been detached from its purpose.
And there's nothing noble about masturbating to pornography.
And I think everyone knows that, even if you regard it as a physiological necessity for people who are deprived.
But there's nothing about it that's a noble pursuit.
And I don't think anyone would ever make that claim to the contrary.
And so if it's not a noble pursuit, then perhaps you shouldn't be pursuing it.
So with drugs like cocaine, cocaine is a direct dopamine agonist.
And you know, with rats, you can get lonely, isolated rats who live singly in cages to take cocaine In preference even to eating and sex.
But you can get rats that are living in a natural environment and doing the proper rat things addicted to cocaine.
Well and this is I've talked about before with regards to addiction that people who have a dopamine deficiency will often feel normal for the first time in their life.
They're not pursuing at high, they're pursuing basic normal functioning.
And what happens is when they get the extra dopamine it crashes down lower than it was before.
If people are normally at like a hundred And then somebody who's normally at like 20 gets to 80.
They feel vaguely normal.
And then they realize the agony of their existence even more, which is one of the reasons why they pursue it again.
Whereas people who go from 100 to 150 go back down to 100.
They're like, hey, you know, this is not so bad.
So let's talk about the – we talked about the difficulty of it.
While you were talking, the thought popped into my mind, you know, Edmund Hillary's famous phrase, you know, why did you climb?
Why do you climb Mount Everest?
Why do you want to climb that mountain?
He says, well, because it's there, you know, well, because that's where the most dopamine is, right at the top, because it's the most challenging thing you can do.
So you want a significant amount of challenge and also the goals are ideally Intrinsic to your value system and something that you want, not something where you're fulfilling somebody else's script.
That's not going to give you the satisfaction that you want.
Well, you can start because you're ignorant and know little about the world and malevolent and broken and fractured and clueless.
You might want to listen to what other people have to say about what is worth pursuing.
And that's especially true if you're young and might even be especially true if you're young, male and fatherless, something like that.
You know, so So if people are suggesting to you that certain pathways forward are tried and true, you might not want to be too cynical about that.
But fundamentally, it is the case, and it's the philosophy behind the self-authoring program, that you're asked to commune with yourself.
It's like, it's your tragedy that we're dealing with.
It's your catastrophe in life.
It's your destiny.
And you can ask yourself, well, as far as I'm concerned, What pathway would make my life worth living?
And then you can add more to that.
You could say, well, what pathway would make my life worth living optimally, in a way that would also improve other people's lives around me, so that we could all stroll together as brothers, let's say, towards a higher mode of being.
It's like, well, that's a good game to play.
Why not play that one?
Right.
I also wanted to talk about, and people find it kind of confusing because we all think we have this identity and that we use language.
My own experience, Jordan, when going through therapy for a number of years, and I, I mean, I dove in, I dove in headfirst and very deep.
I was doing like three hours a week in the office.
I did like 10 to 12 hours of journaling and it was an amazing experience because what I found Well, my identity was much more complex than I thought.
I call it the Miko system.
I'm not just one thing.
I'm like a multiplicity of systems and voices and ideas and arguments and trying to find balance.
Like a rainforest, you've got to find balance in the ecosystem.
Finding balance seems to be the key.
But I found that my identity was so founded on language.
That the two were absolutely inextricable.
I could not even think of myself outside of language.
I could not describe my own experience.
I could not describe my own thoughts, ambitions, or dreams without language and without conversations with myself.
And so the idea that we have an identity based on language that is alterable by language is really quite astounding.
You know, we don't try and build a bridge by yelling the word bridge at a pile of rocks, you know, but the idea that we can fundamentally alter Yeah, we sort of do that, you know, we sort of do that.
It's like you look at a pile of rocks and you yell bridge and then, you know, a lot of other people come together and soon you have a bridge.
And so it is through language that imagination is transformed into reality.
That's a very powerful force.
Yeah, we have a quote from William James on the website.
He said, just a remark, off the cuff as he was a great psychologist, he said he did not know what he thought until he had written his thoughts down.
I wonder if you could help people understand how much they can literally create their own future through Language.
It's like magic.
You know, we have this whole idea of spells, you know, that you say things and the world changes.
You get fireballs.
You can alter the future.
You can compel truth.
But this is actually how language works with identity.
Exactly.
Well, that's why you should watch very carefully what you say.
Because you bring the world into being through language.
And that's why you shouldn't say anything that you don't... You shouldn't say things that make you weak and wrong.
And so if you listen to yourself talk, you can tell when you say things that make you weak and wrong, because you get weak and wrong as soon as you say them.
And you don't want to pay any attention to that, because you may have your proximal reasons for saying them.
But one of the most effective exercises that a young person can undertake, and perhaps even people who are not so young, is to start listening to yourself talk.
And feeling it in your body.
Something Carl Rogers recommended.
And notice, When you say things that make you strong and when you say things that make you weak, and unless you want to be weak, stop saying the things that make you weak.
And it's a very uncanny experience to do that because you'll find that so much of what you say, you're sacrificing yourself to the to the whims of the moment.
And it's a very bad thing to do.
It's because you end up as the sacrificial victim to the whims of the moment.
And there's nothing in that except Self-contempt and and the waste of a life So yes, you'd be very careful with what you say and and then with regards to the use of language while writing See the right way to write is to write down what you think and not worry too much about its content Just write down what you think like William James said and then to think about what you think it's a recurring process, you know, and that's also what you're doing when you're talking to someone because
The person listens and criticizes and exchange ideas, and it's a dance.
And if it's the right dance, you're both dancing towards the truth.
But you can do that with writing.
It's like, well, what do I think about this?
Well, I don't know.
Well, write it down.
Write down everything you think about that.
Don't worry about if it's right or wrong.
And then take a look at it and separate the wheat from the chaff.
Right?
That's what the Logos does.
At the end of time, Christ comes back with a sword in his mouth.
He's language incarnate.
He divides the world into the saved and the damned.
That's what you should be doing with yourself all the time.
And you use the language to do that.
You let yourself out.
Who am I?
What multitudes are within me?
Let me express them on paper.
Let me cast the multitudes within me that I do not wish to associate into the pit and retain only what's best.
How could that be anything but perfect?
And the idea that we must defer gratification fades away if we don't have a higher aspiration.
I mean, I think everybody's known in their life, pretty much, people who will do or say anything to achieve a Pyrrhic victory in the moment, you know, like, I'll escalate to the point where other people will just, whoa, back off and back away.
And then you feel this sense of victory in the moment.
Or people who've done wrong but refuse to apologize because they think it will make them look weak, which is quite the opposite of the truth.
People who genuinely apologize are perceived by any reasonable person as incredibly strong.
And so all that virtue is, is in a way of just having a higher goal that sacrifices immediate comfort.
And if you don't have that higher goal, you have no reason to sacrifice immediate comfort, which means you devolve to a kind of animalistic level.
You have no God to sacrifice to.
Yes, and those ancient people who were sacrificing in the most primordial manner, offering blood sacrifices, were playing that out as a ritual before they could understand it psychologically.
You know, when you identify the highest good, then you sacrifice the whims of the moment to it, and that is the delay of gratification.
And that's what we learned.
Even the concept of delay of gratification wouldn't have been possible for us to formulate without centuries of blood sacrifice.
And you need something in your life that's worth making sacrifices to.
And then the question is, well, what do you sacrifice to the highest possible good?
And that's easy.
You offer up your own life to the highest possible good, and you sacrifice everything about yourself that isn't worthy.
And that's terrifying for people, because maybe 95% of you is unworthy.
Highly likely!
And so, you know, that's a lot of burning off to do.
And it feels like if your identity is around more immediate pleasures or victories in the moment, sacrificing yourself to a higher ideal feels that you are self-erasing.
It feels like you won't have an identity or you feel like you're hollowed out and you become sort of a puppet for something else.
Which is quite the opposite of the truth.
You actually gain an individuality.
I think an individuation is around having a life purpose that is around bettering the world and struggling against... We always know that there are going to be bad people out there in the world who are going to struggle to achieve their aims and as the old saying goes, the only The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing, and so it is a cosmic battle.
It is a battle for good and evil.
We can expect evil to give little quarter, and if you're not going to sacrifice yourself to a higher purpose and to be a better person, the life that you live or the life of your children will end up being absolutely unbearable because we'll all end up like Ivan Denisovich, some frozen Siberian camp of starvation.
And I do believe that the most appropriate way to conceptualize the world is as the battleground between good and evil.
And you know, you might say, well, no, but look, here's something, man.
You know, that's like, that is one of the most common tropes in video games.
So look, let's take video games seriously for a minute.
Okay.
So the first thing we might note is that It's video game replication of reality that's driving computer technology forward.
Because the highest possible demands for computational technology are made by people who want to build artificial realities.
And those are manifest in games.
So those are artificial realities.
Okay, now you want to entice someone into the artificial reality by making it as engaging as possible.
What do you do?
You set it up as the stage between good and evil and you have people act out a heroic adventure.
And then you might say, well, Aren't you trying to replicate reality?
Why do that?
And the answer is, because that is reality, and you are replicating it.
And if you don't do it, it won't attract your game players.
And so the game players are playing this out.
Now, you don't want to... And that's okay.
That's what children should do.
They should play it out in fictional worlds.
Now, there's time to grow up and put away childish things, of course, and sometimes that might involve video games.
It's not tenable in our modern world to make the pronouncement that the notion that the cosmos is a battleground between good and evil is some far-fetched and archaic superstition.
Quite the contrary.
No.
The 20th century was witness to that with bodies piled high on both sides.
That's absolutely for sure.
If you can't see evil in the 20th century, it's because you've either blinded yourself or you have not looked.
Those are the options.
Yeah, or you're on the wrong team completely.
So let's close off with, and I hate to sort of say the elevator pitch, but I really, really do want to.
We'll put the links below.
People, go check out selfauthoring.com.
It is not expensive at all, a couple of bucks.
A couple of hours.
Everybody has time and you really, really need to do it.
But of course, as somebody who's been at the forefront of getting people motivated and who've seen the effects, I wonder if you can give people a sense of what they can gain by going through this very cheap and not even that time consuming process.
What is on the other side that they can look forward to?
Okay, so I'll remind you that we're going to set up a A discount for your listeners.
We'll use Molyneux as the discount code with the small, small M. Okay.
And that's just for those who are just listening.
M O L Y N E U X all lowercase.
Okay, go ahead.
Right.
And we'll, we'll set up a 20% discount on the, on the full suite and you'll be able to give one of them to a friend.
That's the deal.
Okay.
So now here's my advice.
Chip away at it a little bit every day.
Don't wait for a large batch of time to do it because you probably won't find a large batch of time.
Don't do it perfectly.
Don't do it like it's an assignment.
Don't do it for someone else.
Don't do it because you should do it.
Do it because you want to put your life in order.
And do it badly.
Because you're not going to be able to do it well.
And if you do it badly and quickly, That will help a lot and then later in six months you can do it again or in a year you can do it again because you're a work in progress.
So you do it so badly that you'll do it.
That's the thing.
Set your sights low enough so that you will actually accomplish it.
You can say, well, I could spend 15 minutes a day on this for the next six days or 10 minutes a day or five minutes a day and I can whip it off, you know, because that's the best I'm capable of.
It's like, Two thumbs up for you, man.
Do it badly.
And do it quickly.
And that's good enough.
You'll get a huge part of the benefit from it right there and then.
And do it with faith, I would say.
And here's the faith.
The faith is that there's a lot more to you than has been revealed.
And what it is about you that has not yet been revealed, it might be the lack of that that's causing your undue suffering.
So that's worth thinking about, because it's possible.
And then the other thing is, with regards to being nihilistic, it's like, let's stop that, because there is suffering and malevolence in the world, and there's lots of it, and some of it's unnecessary.
And there's no reason for you not to devote your life towards reducing that suffering, starting with yourself and what you have control of in your own life.
And pushing back the forces of malevolence.
And that's a noble goal.
And if you do that in earnest, if you commit yourself to it, then the worst of you will disappear and the world will improve.
And you'll be able to tolerate and perhaps find, I would say, glory in your existence and the world.
And if you want something to do, then do that.
And it'll all be good.
It'll be good for you.
It'll be good for your family.
It'll be good for the world.
And who knows what it'll be good for beyond that.
So that's the goal.
Well said.
And as I've always said to people, we've got a fixed amount of time.
We don't know how long.
Why not aim high?
We all end up with the same dirt nap at the end of it anyway.
So why not go as high as possible?
Nothing to lose.
You're going to die anyways, man.
You might as well aim high.
all right so thanks again for your time today just to remind everyone jordanbpeterson.com same thing for twitter.com jordan pp jordan b peterson we'll put the links to all of this below if you want to go onto youtube you can find jordan's videos there jordan peterson videos and most importantly and it has a Very nice talking to you and good luck to all your viewers and listeners.
I hope you bloody well knock it dead.
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