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July 20, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:30:28
The Architecture of Belief | Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I'm here with Dr. Jordan Peterson, a marriage of two minds oft-requested by the listenership and thus delivered in deference to your wishes and in great pleasure to myself.
He is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, actually my alma mater, a clinical psychologist, and the author of Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief and Other Works, of course.
You can follow his work at jordanbpeterson.com or youtube.com slash user slash Jordan Peterson videos.
And we'll put the links to all of those below.
Dr. Peterson, thank you so much for taking the time today.
My pleasure. One of the things...
And it is, of course, many things.
It's sort of a hydra that you and I have both involved our intellectual pursuits in, is trying to capture and remediate some of the significant spiritual moral challenges that Western civilization seems to have been facing today.
You know, arguably since the 1960s, perhaps even before.
And I've been rapidly devouring your material on trying to diagnose and provide solutions to what seems to be a loss of confidence, a drift from objective values, and sort of an empty hedonistic materialism the West seems to be consuming itself in.
I wonder if you, and I know it's a big task because it's a very big and deep book, and you talk about this stuff in great detail.
I wonder if you could give...
My listeners, your introduction as to what the ailment is and what can be done about it.
Well, the ailment, I think, is multidimensional.
But I'll start with the cultural problem, I think.
I think that it's reasonable to accept the idea that the contradiction between the claims of science and the claims of religion has...
It has damaged the psyche of the West.
I think that's the right way of thinking about it.
Most cultures in the history of the world haven't been scientific cultures.
They might have been engineering cultures like Rome or Greece, when you're thinking about technologically sophisticated cultures, but they weren't objective materialist cultures.
Now, our culture is both of those things, and there's good reason for it.
Developing the objective materialist technologies, let's say, and philosophy have made us incredibly technologically powerful.
And it's much better to live like we live than to live on a dollar a day in today's money, which is how everyone in the West basically lived in 1895.
And it's also the case that the consequence of expanding wealth because of the development of the scientific methodology has been of an inestimable benefit around the rest of the world.
Now there are estimates that 300,000 more people a day are being connected to the electrical grid, and about 250,000 a day being lifted out of abject poverty, which has halved, more than halved since 2000, right?
It halved between 2000 and 2013.
So we're going through an unparalleled time of wealth expansion across the world, even though there's maybe rising inequality in the West.
But the problem is, and I think this is a technical problem in part, is that the methodology of science, by definition, excludes the subjective from consideration.
And the problem is that you can't exclude the subjective from consideration without excluding the subject.
And since we're all subjects, that turns out to be a major problem.
Tolstoy wrote a book called Confession.
And in that book, He talked about what happened to him when he was at the height of his intellectual power and worldwide fame and wealth and status.
I mean, he was the world's most famous writer.
He had everything. And Russia was really the last society that went through the scientific philosophical revolution in the late 1800s, which is partly what laid it wide open to communism as an alternative.
But for Tolstoy...
The news coming in from Europe that God was dead was absolutely devastating.
It pushed him into a suicidal depression.
He was afraid to walk around his own estate for years because he thought he would hang himself from the nearest rafter or shoot himself.
And I think the reduction of the world of being to the objective world has reduced people's ability to believe in the reality of meaning in life.
And that's an awful catastrophe because it's more accurate to say that it's reduced people's ability to believe in the positive meaning of life because the negative meaning of life announces itself.
And no amount of rational disbelief will rid you of anxiety and pain.
But you can certainly subject anything positive you do to the sort of critique that you might sum up stupidly by saying something like, Well, in a million years, who the hell is going to know the difference?
Or, you know, we're just dust specks on this little dust mode of a planet in an infinitely large galaxy, and who the hell cares what we do or what I do today or tomorrow?
Why is it relevant?
Why is it meaningful? And because we can't get a sense of the meaning of meaning or the reality of meaning, it leaves us adrift and lost in a world of nihilism and pain.
Not psychologically tenable.
It's truly not. And this is one of the great paradoxes, as you point out.
There have been incredible steps forward in satisfying basic human needs.
You know, the needs of what is described in Lear as the bare-forked animal.
But at the same time, the production of resources that satisfies our physical needs seem to have strip-mined the meaning and purpose that we had prior to the scientific revolution, and to some degree the Freudian revolution, or the idea of excavating consciousness not to find a soul, but to find usually a somewhat dark, seething, tripartite pit of unwanted desires and frustrations.
Yeah, well, it's usually considered Darwin, Freud, Freud, And Copernicus, right, are the three who knocked humanity off its pedestal and left us wiser, I would say, in some ways, but sadder. And I think that this is extraordinarily unfortunate because, I mean, this is...
Because it doesn't strike me as absolutely necessary.
And I guess...
And it's also dangerous.
That's the last thing, is that, you know...
There are people who celebrate the demise of religion and religious belief, and I can understand why, because group-fostered belief can be a terribly destructive force.
To lay that at the feet of religion, I think, is foolish, because the danger of group-fostered belief is actually more profound than the danger of religion, because chimpanzees are very affiliative and group-centered, like human beings, and they're hyper-aggressive towards outsiders.
You don't need religion for tribalism.
In fact, religion is actually one of the forces that unites multiple tribes over long periods of time.
You don't get great civilizations without a unifying religious vision.
And you might say, well, yeah, that makes that great civilization prone to compete with other great civilizations in a conflictual manner and makes it internally repressive.
All of those things are true to some degree, but You can't blame religion for dividing people without noticing at the same time that it unites them.
To attribute that sort of divisiveness and conflict to religion is a foolish task.
But the thing that religion does do, and mythology, and all of the domains of knowledge that are on that half of the equation, is that it places people in a world that has a purpose.
And I don't think that's illusory.
I think we think it's illusory, but I don't think it's illusory at all.
And I actually don't think that's how we experience it.
It's just that we've started to doubt the validity of our own experience because we tend to reduce things to dead objective facts.
Well, and the great worry of the 19th century thinkers, as you mentioned, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and so on, was that in the absence of religion, what do human beings cleave to?
There was, of course, the promise of the rationalists that if we forego superstitious irrationality and we apply ourselves assiduously to a blank materialistic analysis of the universe, Paradise will erupt and emerge.
And materially, it's hard to argue with the free market that that has been the case.
However, however, and it's a big however...
The focus of people and their need for collective identity, their need for a meaning, has created a vacuum left by religion that, in many ways, more predatory and destructive ideologies like communism, socialism, fascism, and so on, have rushed in to fill, which has left a huge wake of corpses.
That's what it looks like to me.
That is definitely what Nietzsche and Dostoevsky prophesied.
And I think they were dead accurate.
I think that's exactly what happened.
I think of those ideologies as parasites on a fundamental religious substructure.
And so, an ideology is basically a religious system that only tells part of the story, usually half of the story.
And so, like the environmentalist mythology, let's say, and I'm not saying that in a pejorative sense, because it's half true.
The Environmentalist mythology is that human beings are destructive and adversarial creatures.
They're expanding their predatory and predatory raping culture into the virginal territory of warm and comforting Mother Nature.
And to me, you see that, so you can imagine that, so that's negative individual, negative culture, positive nature.
And those are three of the main archetypes.
But then, here's a counter-proposition.
It's exactly the opposite.
And it's the frontier myth that drove European colonization of North America.
It was the heroic individual pushing forward the peace, sanctity, and security of culture into the wild and treacherous unknown.
And so both of those stories are incredibly powerful, because they're both true.
But the problem is that you need both of them to be completely true, because the individual is a hero and an adversary at the same time.
We're dark and light, mixed together.
And our culture is tyrannical, but provides us with security.
And nature is our worst enemy, because she's trying all the time to kill us, but at the same time, she's the thing that gave birth to everything.
And so, like, what I've observed is that religious systems, and I think you can also say this about the Freudian system, by the way, religious systems represent all of those characters simultaneously, and they provide you with a balanced view of the world, and then tell you how to operate in it, which is the other critical issue, is that the thing about science, the problematic aspect of science, is that it cannot provide a guide to action.
And it's partly because In what it strips out, which is the subjective, before it even gets off the ground, before it even starts to produce its facts, is where the injunction to action actually occurs.
So the reason that science can't tell you how to behave is because it strips out all of the information about how to behave from the things that it's observing.
And it leaves you with the cold, hard facts.
They're dead facts, and you can use those facts.
But... There isn't something implicit within them that gives you a behavioral injunction.
And then you might say, well, there's no such thing as a behavioral injunction.
But I actually believe that's technically wrong as well.
So let me give you an example.
So I was lecturing to my personality class this week or last week about Jean Piaget.
And I really like Piaget.
Piaget is the only thinker I know who actually came up with a reasonable account of the Phylogenetic and ontogenetic emergence of morality.
And that wasn't accidental because, I mean, very few people know this about Jean Piaget.
But he was obsessed with the cleavage between science and religion.
And he spent his entire career trying to bridge the gap.
That was his goal.
And I actually think he did it in many ways.
And so one of the things Piaget said about knowledge, and he was thinking about Thomas Kuhn as well when he was saying this, is, you know, Our knowledge structures are obviously incomplete.
And now and then an anomaly arises that the knowledge structure can't account for.
It might be like the fact that the speed of light was the same in both directions of the Earth's movement back at the end of the 1800s.
No one could account for that.
People thought, well, it's not that big a deal.
It's like, yeah, it was a big deal.
It was a big, big deal.
And it blew the substructure out of Newtonian physics, roughly speaking, and forced its replacement.
Even it blew the substructure out of geometry and forced its replacement.
It turned out to be a pretty big deal to the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well.
It turned out to be the sort of big deal that is when you wake up in the morning and your side aches and then you find out you have cancer.
It's like, it's a big deal.
It's a major anomaly. Now Piaget said, well, our knowledge structures are continually blown apart by anomalies.
So you look across the history of ideas, you find out that an idea is considered true for a long period of time.
And then something comes along that it can't explain and blows its substructure out.
We have to recreate another knowledge structure.
And so what he derived from that was the idea that what you want to know about knowing isn't the facts that you know.
What you want to know are the facts about how you come to know.
And so for Piaget, for example, the child was engaged continually in in an exploratory relationship with the world and so the child through its actions was generating information and out of that information producing the world of perception and producing their own psyche it's so like it was like the substrat of the world was information and in interacting with that information you make the world and you make yourself and so what Piaget was concentrating on doing was to describe that process of information generation or that process of knowledge gathering and To me,
the process he described is indistinguishable from mythological representations of the hero.
Because the hero is exactly the same entity, the mythological hero.
So St. George is probably the simplest example.
St. George goes out beyond the confines of the community, so outside the knowledge structure, confronts the unknown, which has this dragon-like, predatory face.
Because... Throughout our evolutionary history, when we went outside the boundaries of what we knew, we ran into predators of all sorts.
So it's the predator's detection system in our mind that represents the unknown for us.
That's where the symbols come from.
And, you know, the dragon is something that has a treasure.
It's either a virginal woman or a hoard of gold.
And that's exactly the paradoxical situation that human beings face, is when we go out into the unknown, it's a terrible predatory danger.
That holds the promise of everything.
And the myths and the religious structures, the deep myths and the deep religious structures, basically tell people, get a grip and be a hero.
And then there's elaborations on what that means, because to be a hero is a complex phenomena.
It's not merely to be kind.
It's not merely to be strong.
It's not merely to be in pursuit of beauty or justice.
Or to be approved of.
Or to be approved of.
Yes, well, definitely.
You know, what we tend to do is, and this is, I think, one of the massive weaknesses of the left.
We know through our empirical studies that people who lean towards political correctness, say, are extraordinarily high in trait agreeableness.
And agreeableness is a big five trait, one of the standard personality traits, and it's basically associated with maternal compassion.
Well, maternal compassion works really well if you're a mother dealing with children.
And it means be kind to everyone.
And kind is kin, right?
Kind. The word is derived from the word kin.
Treat everyone as if they're members of your family.
Well, okay. Treat everyone like they're suffering children.
No. Wrong.
Wrong. You've taken the virtue so far at that point that it flips on you and becomes a vice.
Women can't treat men like they're suffering children.
It'll turn them into suffering children, or they'll end up with a suffering child as a man, or they'll devour their boys as they grow up by over-sheltering and over-protecting them.
I don't think it's a huge accident that a failure to distinguish qualities between cultures combined with the rise of political correctness has risen at the same time as the birth rates among women, of course, in the West have fallen.
The maternal instinct will find a way and if it doesn't have a direct object, it may spread to a much wider conceptual base that is dangerous.
One of the things that my psychologically knowledgeable friends and I always laugh about is that the very social justice warriors who Refuse to admit to the existence of biological, say, psychological differences between men and women, act out their femininity in an absolutely stereotypical manner in their political behavior, because they're doing exactly what you just said.
They're They're acting out their maternal behavior.
What they do is... And you might think, well, that's good because maternal behavior is all kind and wonderful.
It's like, no, no, no. It's kind and wonderful if you're the oppressed victim that's being protected.
But if you're the person who's tossed into the dangerous predator category, which would be anyone who's seen as a threat to the suffering infant, then you better look out because there's nothing more vicious than a mother who thinks that her infants are being threatened.
And it breaks the world into two categories right away.
Innocent victim, because there's nothing more innocent and victimized than a baby.
Like, no matter what a baby does, it's innocent.
And no matter what threatens a baby, it's a predator.
And that's reasonable.
That's actually true.
But when you start to divide the world up like that politically, Jesus, you better watch out.
And what we're seeing, perhaps for the first time in history, is what a female totalitarianism would look like.
Because we have no idea, right?
I mean, women have only been represented politically, especially as a majority, for a very tiny fraction of time.
We have no idea what female political pathology would look like, although I do think we're getting a glimpse of it.
Okay, so let's get to this question of evil.
And this is something that materialists have a great deal of problem with.
And of course, utopians have a great deal of problem with.
Because of course, for people like Marxists and so on, oh, it's your relationship to the means of production.
And if we change the economic environment, we can achieve perfectibility and infinite virtue in human nature.
The skepticism towards the perfectibility of human nature that comes out of Christianity in particular, to me, is one of the great safety stops on the escalation of our personal thirst for power.
The corruptibility of human nature from the fall to the temptations of the devil to the temptations of this world to the direct offer that the devil made to Jesus in the wilderness that he could run the world, he could own everything in it.
The fact that Christianity encapsulates a fear of the dark side of human nature, and as you point out, Jung talks about this with the shadow – Allows us to always remember that we are susceptible to corruption, we're susceptible to violence, and thus to give people more and more power to correct the ills in society becomes dangerous in the Christian model.
But in the left model, and to some degree in the right, mostly in the left, I would argue, they think everything can be perfected if you change the environment.
It's like this environmental determinism almost.
Very dangerous. Yeah, there's two things I want to say about that.
The first is I want to tell you something that took me like 40 years to figure out.
I don't know if I've discussed it anywhere else yet.
But, you know, in Christianity there's this weird insistence that the snake in the Garden of Eden is Satan.
And it's a very peculiar insistence because it's not obvious at all that in the original story, let's say you go back 5,000 years or who knows how old that story is.
It's really, really old. There's no real evidence that when that story came out, that idea was part of it.
But it's a brilliant idea.
So just let me walk you through it just for a second.
So imagine that I already mentioned that the part of the human mind that responds to the unknown is built out of the predator detection circuits.
And that makes sense, right?
Because you go beyond the confines of the campfire or you go out of your damn tree like 20 million years ago and some horrible thing eats you.
And so the unknown and the thing that eats you, they're the same thing.
When it comes right down to it, they're the same thing.
That's why kids are afraid of the dark when they're little, right?
Because they populate the dark with monsters of the imagination.
And you can say, well, there's no monsters in the dark, but you're an idiot if you say that, because there's plenty of monsters in the dark.
Okay, so what you have set up in the Garden of Eden is the idea that in the optimal human environment, a walled garden, so that's half culture and half nature, There's still to be found something of predatory danger and something that will simultaneously wake you up.
Because there's nothing that wakes you up more than an encounter with a predator.
But anyways, okay, so then you think, okay, what is the snake that always poses a danger to human beings?
And you could say, well, at one level, it's a snake, literally speaking.
And then you could say, well, it's not a snake, it's a predatory reptile.
And then you can say, well, no, wait a minute, it's not a predatory reptile, it's predators as such.
So the snake is a symbol for the existence of predators as such.
Okay, so far, you're still in the realm of concrete reality.
But here's what happens as the human mind develops its capacity to abstract.
Well, wait a sec, what's the most dangerous predator?
Well, it's not a predatory reptile, it's another person.
Okay, so now that's starting to become something psychological.
The snake is the snake in the other person's soul.
That's the really dangerous snake.
But then, you can take it one level of abstraction, even above that, you say, no, no, no, the most dangerous predator is the snake in your own soul.
Right, and that's why that relationship between Satan and the snake emerges in the mythological imagination.
It's trying to make a point.
It's like, well, yeah, there's danger.
There's always something lurking.
And then, well, the predator lurks, but...
Yeah, yeah, the predator lurks.
But how about the psychopathic predator who's bent on your destruction?
Well, that's like a meta-predator.
And so the snake becomes the meta-predator.
And then it's even more than that.
It goes one level of abstraction above that.
Imagine you took a thousand meta-predators, psychopathic predators, and you extracted out what was common across all of them.
That's what Satan represents.
Right. It's a killer work of imagination.
It's an artistic work to make that revelation appear in image across thousands of years without any real conscious realization of it.
And there is, I think, a great danger in the materialism and I think in terms of what you talk about with the psychopathy in that there are a lot of people out there who will say to you, I will relieve of you the burden of conscience, I will relieve of you the burden of your own corruptibility, and I will sell you a fantasy of perfectibility if you surrender resources to me.
And I think this in terms of like The welfare state says, well, you don't have to go and personally help the poor.
You don't have to get to know them.
We'll take the job over for you.
You don't have to go and personally help sick people.
We'll have a government-run healthcare system, and it's all taken care of for you.
And this idea that you are no longer responsible for the salvation of the suffering in your own society, that you can abstract that to some government bureaucracy, to me, is a great temptation, but I think it really creates more problems in the long run than it solves.
Okay, so there's a bunch of things about that.
Alright, so we'll go back to the idea of perfectibility.
There's a great naivety and a great wish in utopian schemes because the utopians don't want to admit that suffering is intrinsic to being.
They want to conjure up a fantasy where all suffering ceases.
And one of the things, one of the ways they're willing to do that is to gerrymander the reality.
And so what they say is that, well, all suffering is due to social inequality and social corruption.
It's like, well, no.
Half of suffering or a third of suffering is attributable to corrupt social institutions.
Fine, no problem. But then, well, then there's the suffering that is just an intrinsic part of human nature.
I mean, it's like...
None of these people have ever known anyone who is actually rich.
Because the first thing you find out when you know people who are actually rich, well, and as we are, all are, by the way, even though we don't notice.
Because by historical standards, we're so rich, it's ridiculous.
But it doesn't solve most of your problems.
So you still get divorced.
You still get old.
Your kids still have problems.
Like, you're still anxious and unstable and you get ill.
I mean, and we know from the...
From the well-constructed psychological economics literature that there's zero relationship between well-being and income once you have enough income to pay your damn bills.
So basically what happens is that a certain baseline level of income, say lower middle class, something like that, is sufficient to chase away all the devils that money can chase away.
But more than that doesn't help at all.
But then that's partly because suffering is built into the structure of existence in terms of its very nature.
You have to contend with your own weaknesses and demons and the weaknesses and demons in your family and state and money just doesn't keep them at bay.
In fact, in some situations it actually makes them worse.
Think of the lottery winners and what happens to their personal relationships.
Oh, definitely. Definitely.
Well, also, if you have a characterological weakness, money allows that to exploit you to the nth degree.
You know, I mean, by the time Howard Hughes was done with his obsessive-compulsive disorder, he was occupying entire floors of hotel buildings with all the windows blacked out, surrounded by jars of urine.
Like, you just can't do that unless you have a hundred million dollars.
There was a guy in Canada who was a drug addict and he won the lottery and his addiction of course took him by storm because all restraints were removed.
The guy ended up in jail and was like on his knees thanking God that he was in jail because it was a far better existence for him than being free, pathological and rich.
Oh man, if you're an addict, money is the worst thing that can possibly happen to you.
So the idea that money, it's so funny because the socialist types really critique The capitalist system, but they're just as obsessed with money.
They just think money can solve everything, it's just that the wrong people have it.
Look, there's a bit of truth to that, because I think the data showing that as inequality increases, societies destabilize, I think that's a good literature.
And it looks like the reason for that is that as you make it harder for aggressive, ambitious young men To move up dominance hierarchies, they turn According to their temperament, to violence.
They're more likely to turn to violence.
Society functions on the bribery of youthful testosterone.
I mean, if you don't have anything to offer young men in order to secure their compliance to social norms, they will not obey the social norms.
And society is rapidly running out of bribe mechanisms of conformity for young men.
And that's a huge challenge.
Of course, getting married and having children are the two major things that manage male ambition and testosterone, and they're gone.
Well, you're also supposed to get some credit for that.
This is also a very comical idea, that marriage is a patriarchal institution.
I love that argument.
It's so blatantly idiotic that it's almost indescribable.
But you can even think about it empirically, so we might as well do that instead of just insulting it, even though it's so stupid that you have to insult it.
The only people who get married now are rich people.
So you think, okay, so that means the rich women are voluntarily choosing to oppress themselves.
That's the theory. So it's the rich women who've internalized the patriarchal oppression and have decided to continue being married.
Or no, how about no?
It's that things have destabilized so badly that only the rich can afford to be married now, and the poorer women are stuck.
They're stuck terribly.
But if you buy the marriage as patriarchal oppression story, then Men get no credit for being good and so like I would say a good man is somebody who Isn't a sexual predator?
How about we start with that?
That's something we could agree with the people on the left.
But they encourage sexual predation constantly by saying that, well, you know, sex is just for pleasure and everyone can have exactly what they want when they want and we should allow any form of sexual expression whatsoever and not discriminate against any of them.
It's like, and then at the same time, they say, but if a man ever makes a move on you that's not wanted, man, you better put him in jail.
It's like, Okay, how the hell are you going to have both those things at the same time?
You know, and I just watched your video just a while back on the relationship between sexual, let's call it self-control, or denial of gratification, delay of gratification, and societal stability.
It's like, clearly...
Well, I mean, of course, sexuality produces children and human children are ridiculously dependent on caregivers, and two caregivers are required for a stable upbringing for the child.
So the idea that sexuality is a personal hedonistic plaything is something that you can sell to young people who have more hormones than wisdom, but it really destabilizes.
Something that, like, if Hugh Hefner had gone through the windshield and damaged his brain, that would be the philosophy that he would be describing.
It's so clueless that it's just beyond comprehension.
One of the things I do tell my students in my personality class when we're talking about Freud and the repression of sexuality, I tell them, look, the damn Victorians had every reason to repress sexuality.
It was so dangerous.
I mean, there was syphilis, which was just vicious, right?
I mean, it was the 19th century version of AIDS, and it was certainly no less catastrophic than AIDS, right?
Everyone was so damn poor, roughly speaking.
If you were female and you had a pregnancy out of wedlock, you were just screwed.
Your entire life was gone.
You're going to end up on the streets.
Sexuality puts the needs of the species before the needs of the individual.
It's as dangerous a force, as Freud pointed out, as untrammeled human aggression.
We're so immature about it.
You also talked about The proclivity of the left to lift responsibility off the individual.
Well, that's an interesting thing too, you know, because one of the best predictors of left-leaning political ideology is low conscientiousness.
And people who aren't conscientious aren't responsible.
And so they're motivated also to assume that power hierarchies can't be predicated on competence.
And it's in their best interest to presume that because they don't work hard.
Now, they are open and creative, which is a non-trivial thing.
One of the things I've come to realize in the last three or four years, as a consequence of studying this, is that liberal types are the entrepreneurs and conservative types are the people who keep systems running, temperamentally speaking.
And so each needs the other.
But the conservatives are too, like this, to generate novel ideas.
But the liberals are too Like this, to run anything that has to run algorithmically.
And so, you know, that's why there's niches for conservatives and ecological niches for conservatives and for liberals.
So, but they have temperamental reasons.
Now, one final thing on the comments you made about responsibility.
So, listen, I thought something up a while back, you know, because it's become more and more evident to me as I get older that a lot of the positive meaning that you...
That you can find in your life to combat the suffering is as a consequence of Adopting responsibility, right?
You want to do something difficult and important that will help a lot of people And you want to take that burden on and that makes your life meaningful Okay, so But then you think well if that's the case, why don't people do it?
And then you think okay, well imagine you had a choice Which you do have here's the choice Nothing you do is meaningful, but you can do whatever you want because of that.
Or everything you do is meaningful, and you have to take responsibility for it.
Well, people go, I'd like my life to be meaningful.
It's like, yeah, okay, so the amount of meaning that your life is going to have is going to be directly proportionate to the amount of responsibility you're willing to shoulder.
There's the deal. Well, then you have the...
That's the dark side of the attraction to the leftist utopia.
It's like... Well, it isn't just that we're bringing about the utopia.
Maybe you believe that, maybe you don't.
It's that we can abandon all responsibility while simultaneously bringing about the utopia.
It's like, okay, well, that's a bit too much to believe there, bucko.
Well, this is, I think, gets to the core of something very, very important for me, at least.
I had a professor on recently talking about the proclivity of people on the left towards criminality.
You've talked about the lack of conscientiousness.
When I was growing up, and maybe it was an unusual upbringing, but it was a fairly common idea that – in projection, right?
The idea that whatever you accuse others of may have something to do with your own secret motives, but it requires a self-criticism, self-knowledge, a sort of sense of one's own corruptibility – To understand that.
And when I talk to people on the left and they say, well, you see, without the welfare state, nobody would help the poor.
And of course, people help the poor all the time.
But I guess if you have a tendency towards a lack of empathy, a lack of conscientiousness, and maybe even towards criminality, what you're saying is, if I'm not forced to help the poor, I won't lift a finger to help them rather than society as a whole.
I'm going to make a distinction there, a psychometric distinction, because The best predictor of criminality, male criminality, is actually low agreeableness.
And most of the social justice warrior types are validly high in agreeableness.
And you think about that.
Most of the incarcerated criminal types are tough guys who are doing bad things on their own.
I mean, there's gang members, but forget about them for a minute.
That's a slightly different case.
The criminality that might be more associated with the left is that Associated with low conscientiousness.
And that's more like parasitical lifestyle.
If you look at Robert Hare's work on psychopathy, it breaks into two factors that are roughly...
You can map them out roughly on the big five traits space.
And so the predator types, they're low in agreeableness.
And they're people who basically view you as a basket of exploitable resources.
And I'm not complaining about low agreeableness.
In measured doses, it's an extraordinarily useful trait because it makes people tough and blunt and willing to hurt other people's feelings when they tell the truth.
An airplane turns because it has a fin that produces resistance and society needs those who are going to resist its edicts.
That's exactly right. And managers, for example, who are low in agreeableness do better than managers who are high in agreeableness because they don't get pushed around.
Okay, but if agreeableness gets low enough, you get the predator types.
And those are tough guys.
They don't have any real empathy or compassion.
And they'll take what they want, especially if they don't see another alternative.
And then on the low conscientious front, so in the psychopathy domain, there's the predatory type and there's the parasite type.
And the parasite types are the ones that are low in conscientiousness.
And they won't work.
They don't do anything. They're low in industriousness.
And so other people ended up supporting them.
And the true psychopath is a Predatory parasite, right?
A very rough type of person.
They're out for themselves and they will not do anything that's productive.
So the social justice types, to the degree that they tend towards criminality, it's because of the low conscientiousness and not because of...
They're not disagreeable.
In fact, quite the contrary.
Too agreeable. Well, unless you disagree with them, right?
I mean, we've seen this in some of the...
Yeah, that's because...
I know, I know. I understand.
That's exactly it. If you disagree with a mother about her children, it's her empathy that makes her your enemy.
So it's a hard thing to get your head around because, you know, almost everybody, and obviously even as we have this discussion, the idea is that, well, if you were empathic, you wouldn't hurt someone.
It's like, no, no, wrong!
If you're empathic, you protect the people that you're empathic towards.
If that means that you have to step on someone's head...
Here's an example.
Let me give you an example.
This is a symbolic example from Christianity.
So, one of the most common and famous representations of Mary has Mary holding Christ up, often to her left, as an infant, and stepping on a snake or a reptile.
And that...
It has a whole variety of meanings, but one of them stems from what God tells Eve when he kicks Adam and Eve out of paradise.
He says that the descendants of Mary will bruise the head of the snake, roughly speaking.
Okay, so that's one reference point for that symbol.
But the other one, you can just look...
All you have to do is think biologically and look at that damn image for one second, and you know what it means.
It means that women have been protecting children from...
Predatory reptiles for like 60 million years.
Of course, we weren't people back then.
I mean, I know my evolutionary timeline.
But the point is that her empathy towards her infant makes her a deadly force towards the predator.
And I believe that's the right way to conceptualize this.
Someone is going to be very nice to you who's agreeable unless they think that you're a predator and then boy you better look out because they're a mother grizzly bear and you're the stupid hunter that's crossed between her and her cubs.
And it's, to me, incredible how people with particular political or social agendas have managed to harness female nature this way to make them almost a domesticated livestock of attacking their enemies.
And I think this has just been a brutalization of what is wonderful and glorious in human nature to turn into the service of political agendas by filling women with, particularly more educated women, with very I'm trying to think of the right phrase here.
Manichaean or light and dark depictions of the world, this basket of deplorables that Hillary Clinton was talking about, that there's our side and then there's the completely demonized other.
And this, of course, is denied by Freud, denied by Jung, denied by people with self-knowledge, that you can't just take your own darker nature and Yes,
yes. Well, that's also why when I talk about this, so, you know, as I worked through my first book, it became obvious to me that human beings were impaled on the horns of many dilemmas, but this is the most fundamental, as far as I can tell, and that is that In order to get along with other people and to have an aim in life, so for life to be meaningful, you have to inhabit a value hierarchy.
And it's one you have to share with other people.
And the reason that works is not because your internal representation of your belief system regulates your death anxiety or something like that.
It's because if you and I are playing the same game, then we can cooperate and we can compete but remain predictable to one another.
And so if I share a culture with you, We can occupy the same space and act together without disrupting the agreement.
And the problem is that you're a horrible creature full of deadly snakes and so am I. And so if we don't have that agreement about how each of our actions is going to affect the other, then we'll step outside of that contractual space and we'll turn into killers.
That's what happens.
And so you want to keep your culture intact.
So that you can predict the behavior of other people and cooperate and compete with them.
Alright, the problem with that is that if you live in one value hierarchy and you encounter people who live in another, you either have to risk the disruption of your hierarchy or you have to fight.
Okay, well that's a problem because now we're so powerful if we fight too much everything goes up in flames.
But the alternative is to let your value structure go, which I think, to some degree, is what we're doing in the West.
And then, there's no up, and there's no down, and there's no way of regulating each other's behavior.
So, I came across that paradox, and I thought, oh God, this looks insolvable.
On the one hand, to get along with each other at all, we have to organize into groups, and that also gives our life some meaning.
But that causes us to fight.
And on the other hand, we could drop all that and then we're into this nihilism that's untenable psychologically.
And gets taken over historically by groups with stronger in-group preferences.
That's right. Those things loop.
And so that's when I started to study, more specifically, study hero mythology and understand that what the West had done was replace group identity or subordinate group identity to the Nobility of the individual, roughly speaking. So it's such an interesting, it's such a brilliant idea to take the group and say, yeah, the group is really important, but it's subordinate to the soul of the individual.
Jesus. It took us thousands of years to think that up, you know?
It's so brilliant.
That's the Egyptian eye, the all-seeing eye.
That's Horus. I mean, we've been working on this idea for thousands and thousands of years, and we need to understand it consciously now.
That's the thing. Carl Jung was very...
He was like a...
What would you call a shining beacon in this process?
Because he was the first person, I think, that really drew some of this implicit, imagistic, dramatic stuff out of the depths and said, look, this actually has a meaning, you know, that...
Life itself, human life, depends on the nobility of the individual.
And that's the central religious statement of Western culture, I would say.
And I think the one thing that I got out of Jung, who had enormous influence on me when I was going through a particularly difficult time in life, and I was in therapy and reading a lot of Jung, is that, to me, if you get enough depth, the question of meaning becomes irrelevant.
And the one thing that...
Jung gave to me was a sense of multiplicity, a sense of multidimensionality, a sense of, you know, the man and the woman, the evil and the good, the good and the evil.
If you're an ecosystem of intense, sometimes conflicting, deep and powerful psychological manifestations, in a sense, you have enough of a world within that the question of meaning becomes less relevant because the richness of your own experience gives satisfaction enough that you don't necessarily have to go and say, I need some imprinted hand-stamp Meaning from some other group because I have depth enough to be my own meaning.
Yeah, absolutely.
I agree with that completely.
And I would say that if people shouldered enough responsibility, the question of meaning would vanish.
You know, because, look, here's some experiment I used to do with my students.
It's not something I have in my class anymore, but I've replaced it with something else.
But I said, look, you know, One of the things that you can do, if you want to set the world right, is look around.
Just look around. And I mean this literally.
Look around when you're at home.
And look for things that you're not happy about.
You know, for something that isn't arranged in some manner that you're happy about.
So look for something that bugs you.
You can ask. I'm in this room.
I'm in the kitchen. Whatever.
There's something in here that I can set right.
Okay, go set it right.
It's just the right size for you.
You can see what's wrong, and you can fix it.
So what I used to do with my students is I'd say, okay, look, you go find something like that, and then I want you to try to fix it, and then I want you to document what would happen.
So remember, one kid, the kids took this seriously, you know, so one kid...
Living at home with a bunch of his family members, but his mother had died like two years ago And of course she was kind of the core She was the thing that kept the family organized and so what had happened or one of the things anyways They weren't eating properly and no one was getting up on time and no one was getting groceries and you know the domestic core of the house had died So he decided that he was going to try to fulfill that role and he wrote extensively about just how difficult How hard it was to organize the household.
And it was certainly sufficiently compelling to keep him occupied totally for the four or six months that he did that as part of this experiment.
And that's the thing, is that there are unsolved problems that are just your size, waiting around for you everywhere.
And if you would just fix them, Just attend to those problems.
You'd find that your life got so meaningful that you'd hardly be able to stand it, and almost immediately.
And you might say, well, that's not real meaning.
It's just because in the final analysis, everything is pointless.
And I've got a perfectly appropriate answer for that.
I mean, first of all, we should point out that's a really easy out.
So if your doubt is serving your uselessness, then you might question your doubt.
But then, more importantly, and this is something I got from reading Solzhenitsyn, and it really hit me hard.
He thought that the most important event of the 20th century was the Nuremberg Judgment.
And the reason he said that was because he believed that Europe, roughly speaking, had come to a consensus, not that there were some things that were transcendently good, But that there were some things that were transcendently evil that you did not get to do, no matter what your background, no matter what.
And that was what was called Crimes Against Humanity.
And the idea would be that you don't get to...
Well, we can push this to a limit that everyone would agree with.
You don't get to make lampshades out of people.
Okay, maybe we can start with that.
How about that's wrong?
Okay, well, if you're a relativist, that puts you in a rough position.
Is it wrong or not?
Well, if it's not wrong, fair enough, man.
You go ahead and decide that, and you live according to that presupposition and see where you get.
And if it is wrong, well, then you've got a problem, too, because if it's wrong, the opposite of that, whatever that is, is right.
You can't identify evil without simultaneously identifying good, even though the space of good might not be as well defined.
Well, then... So if you accept the Nuremberg judgment, you're out of the moral relativist space.
And so that's what Solzhenitsyn thought.
Look, we've identified evil.
Great. We've actually identified it.
And people should read Hannah Arendt for more on that as well.
Both of those writers were very powerful with this.
This question when people complain about a lack of meaning, listen, I understand it can be an example of a spiritual or existential malaise that needs addressing.
But I gotta tell you, Jordan, a lot of times it strikes me as a rank self-indulgent surrender to cowardice.
Because when you say to someone, hey, would you like a piece of cheesecake?
And they love cheesecake.
They don't say, well, no, because in a million years it won't matter.
They'll say, great, I like cheesecake.
I'll eat it.
There's no lack of meaning of that.
But when it comes to, say, confronting immorality for standing up for goodness, then suddenly there's this big white flag of, well, it's meaningless and this, that, and the other.
And when people inhabit a world that is specifically made comfortable, if not downright bearable by the fact that other people have rejected meaninglessness to do things like create your house.
You know, the guy who built your house wasn't sitting there saying, well, the house will eventually rot and fall over.
So what's the point of building it?
No, he built something. No, it wasn't going to last.
Separation of church and state, the subjugation of secular powers under the law, philosophical innovations of every kind, air conditioning, food, all of these things are provided to people by people who've rejected the concept of meaninglessness.
So if you're kept alive and sheltered and protected by all these people who've rejected this concept of meaninglessness, to sit there and wallow and say, well, it's all so meaningless...
You're preying upon everyone else's opposite perspective as regards to meaning.
Yes. Well, that's the everyday heroism that you can see everywhere if your eyes are open to it.
And to me, and this is literally true, like I'm sitting here talking to you on this gadget, which is bloody well amazing just to begin with, and it's actually working, which is phenomenally impossible.
But at the same time, like it's snowing out there.
If I was out there If I was out there right now, or if all these complex systems in my house weren't working, I would be dying, and yet I'm in this absurd state of comfort.
Right after Dr. Peterson praised the efficacy of technology, it rampantly failed on us.
I don't know, it's just some sort of backlash karmic curse, but we're going to continue with his thought about responsibility on with the show.
I think that I've had plenty of people come and talk to me who are in existential crises.
And it's very common among university students, for example, because they're trying to orient themselves.
And one of the things our culture doesn't do very well is teach people to notice when they're doing things right.
You know, you use the example of you don't think about the fact that the cheesecake isn't going to exist in a million years when you're eating it.
There's enough intrinsic pleasure in the action so that that Dispenses with that sort of criticism.
I think that sort of thing happens to people when they listen to music, for example.
Even the most nihilistic people generally still take pleasure in music.
And one of the things that I try to help my students learn to do is to notice when they are engaged in something meaningful.
If you just watch yourself over the course of a week, You can tell when what you're doing is of high quality and engages you, and you can tell when you're doing something that makes you feel like everything's point come to an end.
One of the things you can learn is to stop doing much of the class of the latter things and start doing a lot more of the class of the four things.
The other thing that people have a hard time with is they're not very good at criticizing their own doubts.
So someone will be doing something and a stray thought will come into mind like, oh, what the hell is the point of this?
And because it comes with a negative emotional punch and some power, they think, oh, yeah, that's definitely true.
It's not definitely true.
It's just some chattering devil in your head that makes the same stupid criticisms to everyone.
It's not just because it's negative doesn't mean it's true.
So... The other thing I guess that I've tried to help people with is to also notice what their own speech does to them.
One of the things you can find out if you pay attention again, sort of outside of your belief system attention, is that sometimes you'll say things and do things that make you feel strong and together, and other times you say things or do things that make you feel weak and falling apart.
It's like, well...
Stop saying the latter things and say more of the former things and try that for five years and see what happens.
A lot of that nihilism will disappear.
That is one of the great things to me that came out of Jung, and I had Dr.
Schwartz on who runs something called Internal Family Systems Therapy, which is the idea that we are an aggregation of psychological entities.
Some call them alters or alter egos and so on.
Not everything that's in you is you, and this is a very important thing for people to understand.
We try to own every voice and every perspective in our head.
But, you know, if you had, I don't know, an abusive father who would yell at you that you were worthless and good for nothing, when that voice arises in your head, it's not organic to your personality.
It's something that's been inflicted on you from outside.
If somebody leaves you with a stab wound in your side, you carry that stab wound around, but it's not organic to your body.
You still have to adjust to it, but it's not the same as you entire.
And when you split yourself, in a sense, into these, I won't say fragments, but components, you get the depth, you get the meaning.
And you also get to work on what's called individuation, which is who am I outside of destructive influences from the past?
And that, I think, gives you a kind of strength because you don't have to own everything that's in you as if it's all you.
There's things that you can pick and choose.
Everything should get a seat at the table.
Sure, I think that that's part of what's useful about the Buddhist idea of detachment.
Now, obviously that can be taken to an absurd extreme because, for example, detaching yourself from the suffering of other people I don't think is a particularly...
That's taking it too far.
Not that, you know, having said that, I still know that you approach a drowning person in the water with your foot out, right?
It doesn't help if you drown too.
So some detachment when you're dealing with people who are suffering is also necessary.
But detaching yourself from the voices in your head, so to speak, can be extraordinarily useful.
You know, part of what Jung described was the process of differentiation and then synthesis.
I'm a house in which many conflicting sub-personalities simultaneously live.
Okay, so how do I sort that out?
How do I get them to make peace with one another?
How do I criticize them?
And that's some detachment is a good place to start.
I found that exercise about noticing when you say things that make you weak, that's extraordinarily useful because I think it's a reasonable hypothesis that When you utter things that make you feel like you're standing on firm ground, then that might be the real you speaking.
And when you first start that, with me anyways, when I first realized this, which was many years ago, probably in the early 80s, I was absolutely shocked, right to my core, to realize just how much of what I was saying had nothing to do with me.
It was games and status routines and fragments of things I had learned.
95% of it, I think, likely.
That's what I figured at the time.
There's a wonderful scene in one of Oscar Wilde's stories where the woman is self-consciously playing to the gallery, the imaginary gallery, of people who are observing her actions and giving her marks for good or bad behavior.
And John Fowles writes about this in the Magus, that life is not a contest.
Life is not an exam where you get good or bad marks.
It's something where you have to become authentically yourself and act, I think, hopefully for good in the world.
Now, one of the things that we have in common is starting with Christianity and moving to the left, which I think you've described in an amazing way in your book.
the starting with Christianity and then the replacement of religion with God and with the soul, with socially manipulative, economically manipulative ideology.
Can you help people understand what that was for you?
I think it's very common and I've talked a lot in this show about the degree to which atheists give up God and take the state in place, which is far more dangerous in my mind because the state is a diminishment of free will, whereas you are allowed free will in Christianity.
Can you tell people a little bit about that journey?
Because the amount of psychological upheaval and turmoil and the rescue, I would argue, from the Socratic demon, the voice that told you when you were being honest, is an amazing story.
Well, I thought after I had gone through it and then written it down that it was...
I mean, one of the things Jung pointed out was that great social movements...
Also occurs simultaneously in the personal and familial space.
And so you can see, for example, that it's rare to go, it's very common to go into a household where there's a war in the kitchen.
And that's the manifestation of the war between men and women in the households.
That to me is also a secondary consequence of the invention of the birth control pill.
Great social movements manifest themselves in people's personal lives as well.
What happened to me was, I went to church with my mother when I was a kid, like many people did back then, most people.
My father never attended, or very rarely.
My mother was, I would say, a habitual believer, let's say.
It wasn't an intellectual issue for her.
It was something that good people did, roughly speaking.
And she enjoyed singing and so forth.
And I was in a mainstream Protestant church, the mainstream Protestant church in Canada, the United Church, which has become a hotbed of social justice warriors over the last 10 years.
But I was...
I was a very intellectually curious person back then, and I read a lot.
And by the time I was 12 or 13, the contradiction between the claims of evolutionary biology, say, and the stories that were being put forth in the church were unbearable to me, fundamentally.
I mean, unbearable in that I couldn't stand to sit through a church service listening to the minister tell me things that If they were scientific truths that I could not swallow and so not only was it dull and and Unfashionable which is important when you're 13 but It it I couldn't see in any manner how it could possibly be true or relevant and I talked to the minister and A number of times,
because at about 13, you're supposed to decide if you're going to become an adult member of the church.
And I thought, I talked to him, and I put forward my doubts.
I mean, well, he had the same doubts, but he wouldn't admit it, and he had nothing to say.
And I thought, well, I was looking for an excuse anyways, in all likelihood, and away I left, you know.
And... I'm sorry to interrupt the story, but I just wanted to mention that there is a moment in most young people's lives when you're intellectually curious.
When you go to your elders and you ask for wisdom, and that line from Lear, that should not have been old before there were wise, the lack of wisdom that can be passed down, at least in the modern world, seems to be quite large.
We seem to have lost a lot of authority with the young.
I went through the same experience.
You go to the priest, you ask And you get very little, if anything, in return, and it seems like it's a runaround, and that, you know, in a sense, breaks your faith not just in God, but in the structures of society as well.
Right, right, right. Well, that was the Nietzschean line, you know, the observation that one system of belief is untrue makes you skeptical thereafter of all forms of belief.
Right. And so it's the destruction of one thing and then the destruction of that category of things.
But, you know, one of the things I learned from Jung many, many years later was that people never knew the answers to these questions.
What happened was that they existed inside of a mythological system that was partly ritual and partly drama and partly image.
And it wasn't that They chose to believe that rather than something else.
That was just the way the world was.
And so, you know, for me to go to my mom and say, well, how do you reconcile Darwinian evolutionary theory with the claims of Judeo-Christianity?
It's like it's just too much to ask.
No one knew. No one knows.
We hadn't made any of that articulate yet.
And I mean, I do believe that Jung was one of the, you know, he was a brilliant pioneer in that area.
One of the first people in history, I would say, who took a very careful look at the rituals and the images and the story and said, look, this is what it means, consciously.
And we're at the point now where we have to articulate what it means.
We can't just imitate it in a dramatic way, in a ritual way.
We can't just act out.
We also have to know what we mean by it.
And what I found, because I dug into it as deeply as I possibly could, was that At the bottom, it's one of the things that's so interesting about Christianity to me is that I know quite well most of the major theories of human personality.
You know, I'm pretty familiar with Freud.
I'm really familiar with Jung, Rogers, Abraham Maslow.
The phenomenological psychologists that emerged in the 50s, the humanists, the existentialists.
I know their literature.
I know what they mean. I know what they had to offer.
And it's tremendous what they had to offer.
But Christianity is the only system of behavioral ethics that gets deeper and deeper the farther into it I look.
And this is what makes me upset about people like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins.
The Christianity they criticize is the Christianity understood by a smart 13-year-old, biologically-minded kid.
They don't take it seriously.
It's like, well, yeah, everybody until the year 1500, when Newton and Bacon popped up, roughly speaking, everybody before that was stupid and...
What's that word?
Superstitious. Like, no.
Wrong. Wrong. That isn't what people were like.
They were tough as damn boots, those people.
And they weren't stupid.
And they were struggling towards realization of things.
And those people, they have no idea how thoughts emerge over centuries.
Which is another thing I loved about Jung.
His grasp of the history of ideas.
You know, like a modern scientist who looks back 500 years...
Has got an amazing vista of the development of the human mind.
Jung looked back thousands of years and maybe tens of thousands of years.
He's a truly biological thinker.
He said, look, we evolved systems of orientation and they're real.
They're not superstitions.
The idea that human beings are the heroes that explore the unknown.
It's like, that is us.
That's us.
That's like That's the niche we occupy.
Well, Christianity, of course...
If you can explain this to young people...
Sorry, go ahead. Oh, well, one of the things that's very great about the work I do, and this has been expanded a lot because of putting my lectures on YouTube, is I get letters from people daily, and like 10 letters a day from people all over the world that say, I've been listening to your lectures about mythology, and they've completely straightened out my life.
It's so fun. And I know it's true, because I can see, even when I'm teaching in my classrooms, you know, I'll say something, I'll put a few pieces together, and some kids' lights will go on.
And I think, ha, you got it.
I tell my students, I'm going to tell you a bunch of things you already know.
And that's exactly what it is, because everybody already knows these stories.
It's just, they just don't know they know them.
And we need to know we know them now.
And the Christian world gave birth to the modern world and the world of science and was the midwife for the scientific revolution and so I guess all children have scant gratitude towards their parents and the modern atheists looking back at the church and seeing only rank superstition are giving scarce credence to the vast amount of energy that the church poured into the development of the scientific method and to the development of the modern world.
Wow, and to the development of the idea that truth is the overarching virtue And the truth and care for your fellow man.
It's like... One of the things I tell my students about Freud is that...
Freud is unfashionable because all that we give him credit for now are his errors.
Everything he said that was brilliant, everybody now takes as self-evident.
Right? Well, there's an unconscious mind.
Well, obviously...
Well, no.
It wasn't so obvious before Freud.
You know, there's trouble in families that have...
With, you know, bonding that's too tight between parents and children.
Well, that's not a lesson that everybody has learned quite as well.
But yeah, that's self-evident.
The idea that childhood trouble could cause psychological problems later in life.
Freud figured all of that out, but we take it for granted now.
So all that's left is the accumulation of his errors.
It's exactly the same with Christianity.
It's like the good parts of Christianity are so deeply embedded in our culture that everybody regards them as entirely self-evident.
When you moved into the realm of politics as a younger man and you dabbled, more than dabbled, I think, but got involved in leftist politics, you have a very powerful moment.
It was partly your own observations of the littleness of the people.
And when you subjugate yourself to an ideology, the greater parts of your power Yeah, And then combined with reading George Orwell and his critiques of the left, I thought was a very powerful moment where you began to doubt the validity of this kind of political approach.
Yeah, well, I had this roommate.
His name was Morgan Abbott.
He's still a good friend of mine.
He was about four years older than me, which is a lot older when you're 16, you know?
And he was a tough, tough guy.
He'd come from a working-class family.
His dad was a longshoreman.
He could curse like you wouldn't believe.
He was a good fighter.
He'd worked in lead smelters.
He'd bounced around. He'd been around.
And he ended up, actually...
Working with some of the most dangerous delinquents in Canada for like years, and he could handle them, you know, because Morgan, if he looked at you and told you to stop doing something, because if you didn't, something bad was going to happen to you, then you would stop, because you knew that if you kept doing it, that something bad would happen to you.
So he didn't have to make threats very often.
And so I admired him quite a lot, and he was quite an independent thinker.
And at one point he told me, When I was involved with the NDP, he sort of paraphrased Shakespeare's line about there being more in heaven and hell than is encapsulated in your philosophy.
And I thought, yeah, yeah, there's no doubt that's true.
There's no doubt. And I didn't know exactly what was wrong with it at that point.
And then I had these experiences going to the NDP political conventions or to marches even, because we'd be marching for something like Oh, I don't know, improvements maybe in daycare standards or for raising the pensions or something that seemed reasonable.
And, you know, the damn Trotskyites would join us halfway through the march and all these weird, radical left-winger types would come out of the woodwork.
And I never had any respect for that at all.
But more...
I had the privilege to spend a reasonable amount of time with some of the leaders of the socialist parties in Canada.
Roy Romanow, I believe, and Ed Broadbent, who was the leader of the Federal Party, and Grant Notley, who was the leader of the Alberta Party, and who's Rachel Notley's father.
I found those people quite admirable.
My sense was that they were genuinely working for the working class.
Now, you could argue about whether they were doing that in the best possible way, but the 50s and 60s socialists, the democratic socialists, did, like the Democrats, attempt to give the voice, which is necessary.
But the party functionaries, well, they're the same sort of people that I object to now that serve as the social justice warriors.
Mostly what they were motivated for wasn't care for the poor or care for anyone.
It was hatred for people who were successful.
And when I read Orwell, that Road to Wigan Pier, which is a staggering book, you know, Orwell was one of those people who never made a straw man out of his opponent's.
You know, the first part of that book is about coal miners in the 1930s and how dreadful their lives were and how oppressed they were.
And it's like, Jesus, you read that, you think, these people didn't have any teeth by the time they were 30.
They were worn out and old by 40.
Crawling three miles in three and a half foot high tunnels just to get to work.
Right, exactly. Exactly.
It's like, we can't even imagine one day like that would kill a modern person.
Well, if you ever want to cure existential angst, just go do some physical labor for a while and you'll feel a whole lot better coming out of it.
Yeah, yeah. Well, that's another thing about existential angst, is that leisure is probably a precondition for it.
But, you know, when Orwell wrote that the typical sort of middle-class, tweed-wearing socialist didn't like the poor, they just hated the rich, I thought, oh yes, that's when I sort of discovered that Nietzschean idea of resentment.
And that's been something I've thought about pretty much constantly ever since then, because resentment, it's a terrible emotion.
It's It's very instructive, but it leads to really, really dark places, really bad places.
And when you're resentful, it isn't that you see the tragedy in life and you're responding to it, because if you do that, you see the tragedy in everyone's life.
And you see that tragedy is part of being and that part of your goal and your role is to try to minimize that, to try to work against it.
When you're resentful, you see yourself as the only tragic entity, and that it's somehow unfairly directed right at you and other people's fault.
It's like, there's a way in which that's existentially true, because of course you do suffer at the hands of others.
But Jesus, they're of great benefit to you too, and there's no gratitude in an attitude like that.
It's all, all the terrible things about being are aimed specifically at me.
So there's a narcissism about it, too.
It's like, no, they're not named specifically at you.
Well, we want, as a society, to have genuine sympathy and empathy for those who are genuine victims.
We don't, as a society, want to make victimhood either psychologically, politically, or financially profitable, because then we are creating an industry of helplessness, and that breeds resentment, I think.
The more artificial victimhood is, the more resentment, I think, is breeded from it, because if you're genuinely victimized, you fight back.
We should also probably not speak of victims.
We should speak of people who are hurt.
Lots of people are hurt, and sometimes they're hurt by other people, and sometimes they're hurt by themselves, and sometimes they're hurt by life.
And if you can reduce the amount by which people are hurt, well, that's what you should be doing with your life.
You should be trying to get rid of unnecessary suffering.
Like, I just can't see that there's any argument against that at all.
Suffering is one thing, but unnecessary suffering, it's like we could dispense with that.
We can try to live in a way that would dispense with that.
So let's move to the way forward.
I have for many years publicly now been talking about the malaise of the West, and this is in almost every conceivable dimension from the late Roman decay of moral relativism to an increasingly dependent underclass on state handouts to Well you know I guess I also spent a long time trying to figure out what the Sermon on the Mount meant.
And this was partly while I was reading Jung and partly afterwards.
You know, because I've approached those old stories as if I don't understand them, instead of dispensing with them as if they were stupid superstitions.
Trying to interpret them in their historical context as well.
And trying to get to the underlying meaning.
And some of those stories are so amazing.
Like the story of Cain and Abel is like one paragraph long.
And it is an absolutely mind-blowing story.
You know, it basically says that the first two human beings, because Adam and Eve were made by God, so the first two genuine human beings split.
One was successful and the other wasn't.
The one who wasn't successful, his sacrifices weren't being...
God wasn't appreciating his sacrifices.
That's easy to understand.
Lots of people make sacrifices that don't seem to work.
That makes them angry and resentful.
And then the story says, Adam or Cain complains to God about that.
He says, what kind of stupid world have you made here?
I'm breaking my...
Self and two trying to get things to work and nothing's working for me and that bloody brother of mine Abel just dances through every day and the Sun shines on him and like what's going on here and That's realistic people think that all the time and then God says this is devastating he says something like because I've looked at multiple translations he basically says Sin crouches at your door like a predatory sexually aroused cat and you've invited it in to have its way with you and that unholy dalliance has produced something that you've now allowed to possess you.
It's a vicious, devastating criticism because God basically says, Before you worry about the structure of being, you should clean up your own act, buddy.
And maybe the reason that things aren't going for you so well is because you're playing a secondary game.
And of course, Cain was pissed off when he first came in to have a chat with God.
And when he hears that, it's like, that is the last thing he wanted to hear.
And so he goes and kills Abel.
It's like, that story, man, that thing packs a wallop and it's one paragraph long.
And the danger of truth, the danger of telling people the truth about their victimhood could be an eruption of rage.
Oh, the last thing you want to hear if you're suffering is why it's your fault.
God, that's horrible.
Then you have to have the suffering and you have to have, then it's also your fault.
But people don't understand the liberation of responsibility.
Okay, so if you're suffering and it's your fault, that's the bad news is it's your fault.
The good news is, hey, now you can do something about it.
Do something about it, yes, as long as the weight hasn't become crushing.
Yes, I agree with that.
Well, the Sermon on the Mount, I mean, one of the most difficult parts of that is the lilies in the field line where Christ tells his followers that You know, the lilies of the field are arrayed like they will never be, like no cane will ever be, and yet they don't work or toil.
And it sounds like, you know, Jesus Christ pot-smoking hippie from 1966.
It's like, just wander around like a flower and...
Don't be a wage slave, man!
Right, right.
But you have to read the damn thing.
And basically what he says is, look, look, instead of being concerned for the day-to-day things that you think you need, What you need to do is orient yourself to the highest good that you can possibly conceive of, and then do something like speak and live in the truth.
And if you do that, then all the other things will be taken care of.
It's like, I believe that.
I think that's so sophisticated.
It isn't an answer to the question, what should I wear today?
It's an answer to the question, how shall I clothe myself and my family for the rest of my life?
Act properly. How?
Aim at the good.
Okay, what's the good? Well, we don't know exactly, but I can tell you one thing.
It isn't. It isn't pointless suffering.
So you could at least start by wandering around and trying to get rid of some of the pointless suffering.
That'd be a good start.
And you could try doing it truthfully.
And act In accordance with what you say.
It's like, yeah, that's what you should do.
And you know, if you tell people that, or my experience has been, if you can explain that to people clearly, they think, oh, of course, that's right.
That is what I should be doing.
And it's because people sort of already know this.
But that isn't enough anymore, because it's time people have to become conscious now in a way that they weren't in the past.
And the West has to become, it has to wake up.
It has to go rescue its father from the belly of the whale and put itself back together.
And it does that by aiming at the good, telling the truth, and adopting responsibility.
That's the pathway to a meaningful life.
Right. And along with that, to me, it's very powerfully put, along with that to me comes...
A breaking of the addiction to the idea that legal structures and the redistribution of wealth and some state program or state power is going to be the path to a virtuous society.
Virtually it's in the individual.
The idea that we can outsource our conscience to some bureaucracy to me has become a very toxic idea in the West.
It's because half the archetype is missing for the left ideology.
It's like Well, the state is good.
It's like, yeah, sure, it is, but it's also tyrannical.
And so then the lefties say, yeah, but if I was in charge of it, it wouldn't be tyrannical.
The proper response to that is, no, if the person in charge thinks that they wouldn't be a tyrant, then for sure they're going to be a tyrant.
And that's part of this lack, part of the externalization of responsibility for evil is It's like, well, you know, you hear someone say, well, real communism was never tried.
And what they mean by that is, well, with my specialized knowledge of Marx and my impeccable moral character, if I would have been in this position, utopia would have been generated in a decade.
And it's so naive because let's assume that they are a good person and that they were put in power.
All that would have meant was that one of Stalin's psychopaths would have slit their throat in the middle of the night.
I don't think we can reasonably risk another 100 million deaths to try this experiment one more time.
I think that that experiment has been tried so many times and in so many different cultures and countries and has resulted in the same human disassembly machine dictatorship every single time.
We simply don't have any.
Unless people are going to be willing to spend their own damn lives or the lives of their own children, we don't have enough human beings and never will to try that experiment even one more time, even tentatively.
If you could point to one exception, if you could point to one society that was made better by the...
All we have is this evidence, as you said, from multiple cultures and multiple times that as soon as you implement this, the same thing happens, and it's always us.
Really unimaginably awful.
Not just awful, but awful beyond your capacity to understand.
That's pretty awful.
So, yeah, I mean, you can't shake the suspicion that someone who says, that the dark part of someone who says, we should try it again, is rubbing their hands at the thought of another 10 million corpses.
Sadism is a very underappreciated devil in society.
Again, last question I have.
Is something I don't obviously have any answers to, so I really, really look forward to your feedback, but I think it's a poll that we all have to navigate.
We know now enough about childhood and the influence of environment and abuse on childhood that those who grow up bad, let's say, criminals and so on.
Not everyone who's abused becomes a criminal, but just about everyone who becomes a criminal was at some point abused.
Where do you sit in terms of free will and moral responsibility against, you know, the thorny quicksands of early childhood influence?
Well, I mean, whenever you're interacting with other people, because I always like to make these things specific, you know, rather than discuss them in the general.
We assume by default that every other person has approximately the same amount of free will that we do.
But then we adjust that pretty rapidly on the fly.
You know, so like if you're on a bus and the bus is really crowded and somebody steps on your foot and bumps you and then it happens again.
You turn around, you're angry.
But then if you see that the person has Down syndrome, you think, okay, diminished responsibility.
If you have any sense at all, you adjust your expectations of free will to fit the situation.
You do that with children.
You do that with older people.
Free will is a funny thing because it's not unbounded.
You have free will within the cards that you're dealt.
It's like a poker game.
You can play your cards, but you can't pick the cards.
Okay, so we're good at delimiting our expectations of free will.
According to the situation, we do the same thing with our legal system.
We don't assume absolute free will.
We have a discussion about it.
Someone says, well, I was horribly damaged.
I was thrown against the wall ten times by my father, and each time I had a concussion.
It's like, okay, we should probably take that into account.
We try to take things into account.
Okay, so there's that.
So we're sophisticated about our notions of free will.
So then the next thing is...
The most functional societies that humanity has ever constructed operate on the presumption that people have free will.
And so, I've traced that idea back to Mesopotamia and to Egypt.
The Egyptians, for example, had a god they knew as Horus.
And Horus is the famous Egyptian eye.
And the eye is the thing that pays attention.
And Horus was the son of the king.
Actually, he was the son of the king that was overthrown by his corrupt uncle.
And that's really what every person is.
Every person is the child of a society that's more corrupt than it should be.
Okay? Egyptians worshiped Horus' eye.
It was because Horus' eye could see and then take steps to improve.
And so the Egyptians had figured out, embedded in their mythology, that there was a dynamic between the individual and the state.
The state was the corrupt father of the individual, but still the father, a necessary thing.
And that the awake individual was...
For the corrupt state.
It's bloody brilliant.
It took them like 5,000 years to think that up.
It's staggeringly brilliant.
And that idea is built into Christianity.
Christ is definitely, you might say, the next step in the evolution of Horus.
Well, those old stories treat people like they have the divine capacity to face chaos and generate order.
To me, that's more like how we think about each other.
Are you driven by the past?
Or are you the thing that consistently faces a very large multitude of potential futures?
Right in front of you.
The potential of the future.
And chooses the path that you take.
We treat each other like that's what we're like.
And I think our phenomenological experience is like that.
It's like, here's a bunch of things that could be.
Well, where do those things exist?
Well, they exist in potential.
Whatever that is. The potential that we're always facing.
And we decide which element of that potential we're going to bring into being.
And that's what it looks like to me.
And we treat each other that way.
And more telling than that, if someone doesn't act that way, you get mad at them.
You say, look, what the hell's wrong with you?
Why aren't you living up to your potential?
And everyone knows what that means.
And everybody thinks, well, you should be mad at that person because they're not living up to their potential.
They're not grappling with the future like a responsive wake consciousness.
And, you know, the atheist types, the radical materialist types are always trying to get rid of consciousness to reduce it to some manifestation of like a kind of a primordial dead matter.
And it's not successful.
You know, Dennett's book, Explaining Consciousness, his critics said, no, I'm explaining consciousness away.
And I read that book, and I understood it too, and I thought the same thing.
It's like, I'm perfect to see consciousness as a mystery that faces another mystery.
Consciousness is the mystery that faces the mystery of potential and transforms that into actuality.
And I believe we do that with every single choice we make, that our choices determine the destiny of the world.
I truly believe that. It looks like that to me, and I can see the manifestations of that in my own life.
You get nailed if you make a stupid decision, man.
Because you're altering the structure of reality, and then it'll snap back and take you out.
Right, right. Well, it's a fantastic point to end.
I hope we get to chat again.
A very, very enjoyable conversation, rich and deep.
And listen, people, you're out there, you're listening to this, go to jordanbpeterson.com.
Go to YouTube slash user slash Jordan Peterson videos.
Watch the lecture series, Maps the Meanings.
Jordan is a fantastic storyteller.
It's a highly underrated virtue in a moralist and in somebody trying to help the world.
Being a great storyteller, given a man, you have so much respect for storytelling.
Being a great storyteller, as you are, is a very great virtue in the spread of virtue.
Thank you so much for your time.
It was everything I'd hoped for and more.
I hope we get to talk again soon and have yourself a great, great day.
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