The Main Themes: 12 Rules for Life

[0] Welcome to Season 2, Episode 19 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] I'm Michaela Peterson, dad's daughter, collaborator, and most attractive offspring.

[2] Updates first.

[3] Mum is still stable.

[4] We're actually much more hopeful this week, and things seem to be okay.

[5] She's still in the hospital.

[6] She's incredibly bored, but things seem to be stable.

[7] I actually think everything's going to be okay.

[8] And over the last 10 weeks, there were periods of time, if not the majority of the time, where things really didn't seem like they were going to be okay.

[9] So things are good right now.

[10] Maybe it's because thousands of people were praying for us.

[11] So thank you for that.

[12] Anyway, I'm in a much better mood now.

[13] Everyone seems a lot more stable.

[14] Maybe there will be more humor entwined into this little intro.

[15] Who knows?

[16] Or maybe my mood is good because I'm at 72 hours into a 96 hour fast.

[17] I'm amped guys pumped.

[18] My ketones are at 4 .7.

[19] My noradrenaline is through the roof and I feel like a superhuman right now.

[20] Could hunt me a bear though.

[21] I'm kind of hungry.

[22] I filmed a Q &A for YouTube last night and my extra energy is evident there.

[23] Pretty cool.

[24] I would get on this fasting train if I were you.

[25] It's not too shabby if you keep your electrolytes up.

[26] This week's episode is one of my dad's 12 Rules for Life Lectures recorded in Ottawa, Canada, at Centerpoint Theater on July 23, 28.

[27] When we return, Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life lecture from July 23, 2018.

[28] Please welcome my father, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.

[29] Thank you.

[30] Thank you.

[31] It's very nice to be here.

[32] See all of you here.

[33] And I've been thinking a lot about what I'm going to talk about tonight.

[34] Thinking more today than usual, I would say.

[35] I was, you know, Thinking about the fact that I was in Ottawa, in the center of the political structure in Canada, and I thought what would be the most appropriate topic to address here.

[36] And I thought that I would talk, I thought about it for a good while, and I thought I would talk about the relationship between responsibility and meaning.

[37] Because I think that that's the core idea in 12 Rules for Life, I think, is something like the relationship between responsibility.

[38] and meaning.

[39] And usually what I do in these lectures is pick a rule or two or three or ten and try to go into them a little more deeply than I have with each talk or with my book.

[40] But I think I'm going to do something different tonight.

[41] I think I'm going to go right underneath the book itself and talk about its main themes.

[42] And these are probably the themes that I've been working on for the last 30 years that I developed, first of all, in my book, Maps of Meaning, which, by the way, is out in audio form.

[43] Some of you might be interested in that.

[44] If you found 12 Rules for Life helpful and you'd like to continue to explore the ideas that are in there, you could try Maps of Meaning, which is a much more difficult book.

[45] But hypothetically, might be worth the effort.

[46] That's obviously something you have to decide.

[47] But I think the audio version, which I recorded and released June 12th, makes it more accessible.

[48] Both of those books deal with meaning, maps of meaning, obviously, given that that's the title, but 12 rules for life as well, because meaning is the antidote to chaos, right?

[49] Fundamentally.

[50] And so the question then, at least to some degree, is, is there any such thing as meaning, perhaps, is that, is it a reliable phenomenon and, and what exactly is it, if it has something?

[51] some existence.

[52] So, those are the things we're going to talk about tonight, and I'm going to think about all of this.

[53] So the first thing I thought I would tell you about is a dream I had a long time ago.

[54] And I don't exactly remember the circumstances of the dream, but I'll tell you what the dream, what the image in the dream was.

[55] Now you might ask, well, why would anybody tell you about a dream?

[56] and there's lots of reasons for that.

[57] Like, dreams are the birthplace of thought.

[58] That's a nice statement, you know, it's a nice poetic statement, but it's also true.

[59] Your thoughts don't just spring into your head fully formed.

[60] You know, a thought is a complicated thing.

[61] And, you know, they seem sort of magical.

[62] You're sitting there, and all of a sudden there's words in your head, and where'd they come from?

[63] Well, you don't know, and you kind of think you thought them up, But that might even be true, but it's not much of an explanation.

[64] You know, and it's a tenet of psychoanalytic thinking, especially of the Jungian version, but also with regards to Freud, that articulated thoughts emerge out of a substrate that's basically dreamlike.

[65] So you can think there's the world out there that you don't understand, the world that's deep beyond your comprehension.

[66] And then there's the articulated world that you live in, that consists of the thoughts that you have at hand, many of them verbalized, but not all of them, but many of them.

[67] And then there's an intermediary between what you know and what you don't know, and that intermediary is composed of the dream.

[68] And the dream is actually the dream, but it's also the daydream, and it's also literature and art and mythology and music and ritual and dance and all those things that we participate in that are sort of dreamlike.

[69] And so you have the unknown itself, and then you have the zone of the dream, and then you have articulated thought.

[70] And partly why psychoaniletically minded psychotherapists are interested in the dream, is because, and this is again particularly true of the followers of Carl Jung, I would say.

[71] His investigations into dreams is that a dream is that a dream is, mysterious not because it's trying to be mysterious, but a dream is mysterious because it's trying to solve a really complicated problem, and it's a problem that you can't solve.

[72] You don't understand the solution.

[73] And so what the dream is doing is putting forth the best solution it can manage.

[74] And it's mysterious because it's not fully articulated yet.

[75] It's not a fully fledged thought.

[76] It's half nature and half you, something like that.

[77] But one of the advantages of interpreting dreams is that you can maybe speed the process by which the dream image becomes fully articulated reality by engaging in conscious analysis of the contents.

[78] It's a contentious hypothesis.

[79] Not everyone believes that dreams are meaningful, but why would you have them if they're not good for something?

[80] You spend lots of time at night You spend lots of the time during the day dreaming.

[81] Your imagination can obviously construct up the world, and the imagination is the place of new inspiration.

[82] And the idea that dreams have some functional utility and some significance is not, I think it's the appropriate default hypothesis.

[83] Animals dream.

[84] Dreams are old.

[85] If you are not allowed to dream, you go insane.

[86] Those experiments have been done.

[87] And so dreams are doing something.

[88] You can be sure of that.

[89] And then if it's true that there's some continuity between the dream, say, and mythology and literature, which I think is a very solid hypothesis, then we obviously also believe that it's useful to do such things as study literature and criticize literature and interpret it.

[90] You read a book, and there's something to reading it, That's sort of like a waking and conscious dream that's constructed by more than one person, right?

[91] Because the author has dreamed up the book, and then while you're reading the book, you're dreaming up the book yourself.

[92] So it's a social dream.

[93] But then you might talk about the book, and you might think about it, and you might think about the moral of the story, for example, and the significance of it.

[94] With great book, you might do that for centuries, trying to extract out what the wisdom is that's coded in the book.

[95] And so there's no reason to assume you couldn't do the same thing with dreams.

[96] And it's certainly been the case that in my personal life and in my clinical practice, the analysis of dreams has been unbelievably useful.

[97] So, now, Jung was interested in the analysis of dreams, particularly when people were facing a problem they couldn't solve.

[98] Because his hypothesis was the dream was a problem -solving mechanism.

[99] And it was sort of, in some sense, independent of the dream.

[100] You know, you can't just dream up anything you want, a dream just happens to you.

[101] It's sort of like you're an observer of it.

[102] It's a process of nature that manifests itself within you, and you serve as the observer.

[103] And it was Jung's contention that a dream never lied.

[104] And that's helpful.

[105] It would be really helpful if that was true, if there was something going on inside you that was actually dead, honest, that you could rely on, even if it was mysterious, because sometimes when you're cast adrift and you don't know what to do, then you need something that you can rely on to guide you.

[106] And dreams do perform that function.

[107] And one of Jung's propositions was that dreams shed light precisely on that, which either you don't know or that you're unwilling to know.

[108] And I would say that the neurological evidence, neuropsychological evidence that's been accreted since the time Carl Jung was writing about dreams actually suggests that something quite like that is the case.

[109] So, for example, it does look like your right hemisphere, which seems to be more involved in the dreaming process is, in fact, designed in some sense to deal with things that your left hemisphere, with its more articulated notion of reality, either can't or won't face.

[110] And so I think the things that I'm telling you are on solid ground, insofar as such things can be on solid ground.

[111] So I had this dream when I was working on a complicated problem.

[112] And here was the vision.

[113] You've all seen, I suspect, that Da Vinci drawing, the Vitruvian man. You know, so it's man. Everyone knows this drawing for some reason.

[114] It's not really obvious, why?

[115] So man is stretched out like this.

[116] He's nude, and he's inscribed in a square, and the squares inside a circle.

[117] And it's actually an architectural drawing.

[118] I was looking it up just before tonight, just before this talk, and I found out that Da Vinci might have created it in collaboration with an architect who was interested in the relationship.

[119] relationship between the human body and architectural forms.

[120] And Vitruvius, the person whom the Vitruvian man is named after, was an architect.

[121] And he was very interested, he was also very interested in the relationship between the human form and proportion in architecture.

[122] And I saw one of the drawings that was associated with the Vitruvian man was the was a cathedral, drawing of a cathedral from the top, a view from the top, mapped onto a body.

[123] So a cathedral has the same structure as a and apparently there's a whole set of architectural theories about that relationship.

[124] So, anyways, the Vitruvian man seems to be attractive or compelling because it speaks of the relationship between the human body and the structure of reality itself, created reality, but maybe reality even beyond that.

[125] So the dream I had was sort of like the Vitruvian man, except the man wasn't in a square, he was in a cube.

[126] and so he was nude and he was about two feet off the ground suspended in air in this cube and when he walked forward the cube came along with him and if he stopped the cube stopped and if he walked backwards the cube came along with him backwards and so he was in this cube and wherever he went the cube was with him and then on the front of the cube there was a bunch of little squares about four by four They kind of like wallpaper patterns, or wallpaper patterns look like this phenomenon, which is much more to be the case.

[127] So, in each cube, on the front face of the cube, there were squares, it was made up of squares, and in each square was a circle.

[128] And in the middle of each circle was a little serpent's tail, like a snake's tail.

[129] You could just see the tail.

[130] And so there was this whole array of squares with circles inside them with a little serpent's tail.

[131] There was a serpent's tail there, and the man could reach forward and grab a tail and pull it out of the little square, and the whole snake would come out.

[132] And that was the world.

[133] And I thought, wow, that's a pretty weird image.

[134] It was a very striking image.

[135] I thought, that's a very strange image.

[136] And I thought about that image probably ever since I had the dream, which is like 25 years ago.

[137] There's part of me that's been thinking about that image ever since.

[138] because it was a revelation of the structure of being.

[139] And so, what does that mean?

[140] Well, you know, we kind of have this idea as materialists, because we're basically materialists, that were sort of driven along like clockwork, you know, that were deterministic creatures, and we're driven by physical, chemical processes unfolding in a deterministic manner.

[141] And it's a good theory.

[142] It's got us a long way.

[143] We are kind of like clocks.

[144] We are kind of like computational machines.

[145] But it's an incomplete theory, I would say, for two reasons.

[146] One is, we're not obviously deterministic because you can't predict our behavior.

[147] You certainly can't even predict the behavior of animals, even simple animals.

[148] So if we're deterministic, it's really, really complicated.

[149] And so it's not self -evident that we're deterministic.

[150] I actually don't think we are in the final analysis.

[151] But it's not self -evident that we are even if you're a determinist.

[152] And the second piece of evidence that sort of runs contrary to the deterministic theory is that at the bottom of reality, if you go all the way down to the subatomic level, things are not deterministic.

[153] So the deterministic model doesn't hold at every single level of analysis.

[154] Now, what that exactly means for determinism, I don't know, and I don't want to make some, you know, loose assessment.

[155] The association between quantum indeterminism and free will and consciousness.

[156] That's explaining one mysterious thing by making reference to its potential relationship with a bunch of other mysterious things.

[157] Isn't all that helpful.

[158] I'm just pointing out that the deterministic model doesn't hold at every level, and so it's not a final model.

[159] And then the final issue with regards to determinism, I think, is a more pragmatic one.

[160] Maybe it's a weaker argument, but I don't think so.

[161] We don't treat each other like we're deterministic.

[162] And in fact, if you treat yourself like you're deterministic, that doesn't work very well.

[163] You don't have a good relationship with yourself.

[164] If you don't treat yourself like you're a creature possessed of a certain amount of free will, with a certain amount of choice, and the attendant responsibility.

[165] And I think you naturally treat yourself that way, insofar as you have guilt, for example, when you don't live up to your obligations, and when you feel that you can take responsibility and that you have responsibility, you have a moral obligation of some sort.

[166] And we feel the sense of having choice, and we hold each other responsible for our choices.

[167] Like, you don't want to be around someone who treats you like a clock, like a deterministic clock.

[168] You don't treat your children that way.

[169] So you don't treat yourself that way.

[170] You don't treat your family members that way.

[171] And we don't structure our society on that presupposition.

[172] Our society is actually structured.

[173] The basis of our society is the presupposition that people do, in fact, have, that are not deterministic, that we have free will, that we are responsible for our actions.

[174] Now, that's obviously bounded to some degree because you're not responsible for everything.

[175] I mean, you have a certain struggle.

[176] You're not responsible for your intelligence, although you might be responsible for what you do with it and whether or not you damage it.

[177] You're not really responsible for your height.

[178] Like, there are things about you that are structured that are beyond your control, but it's within that structure that you seem to have this capacity for free will.

[179] And that's what this dream was referring to, is that there's all these possibilities that lay themselves out in front of us, and we can choose to interact with them.

[180] You might say, well, why would there be a snake tail there?

[181] Why, why that specific image?

[182] And I've thought about that for a long time, too, and I think, I hope I can explain this relatively briefly.

[183] I think that the circuit that we use, so, okay, I'll do something else first, and then go back to that.

[184] So, here's how it looks to me. Here's how I think that things look to us.

[185] I think that what happens when you wake up in the morning is you're not driven like a clock to move forward in the world you wake up and what you apprehend is a set of possibilities you know and maybe that makes you anxious it probably does in fact because well there's lots of possibilities out there and maybe there's more than you can handle it's certainly the case if you're overstressed but what you see is a range of possibilities that array themselves in front of you You know, and that might appear to you in the sense of, well, what do I need to do today, or what should I do today, or what do I have to do today, or what would I like to do today, or how would it be best to spend my time?

[186] All those questions are, they're variants of the same mystery, which is, well, there's a lot of possibilities that arrayed themselves in front of me, and I need to figure out how to interact with them.

[187] And I think you're doing that all the time.

[188] I'm picking the morning because, at least for me, I guess that's when it's sort of most evident.

[189] You wake up and you think, well, how am I going to spend my day?

[190] Now, you know, you've probably routinized your day and ritualized it, so a fair bit of that runs automatically, but it's still the case.

[191] And when you're thinking and contemplating, what you seem to see is a set of possibilities in front of you with the option of interacting with them in various ways.

[192] Well, that's what the dream image represented.

[193] Now, so you have a, you have potential that manifests itself in front of you.

[194] And I think that's actually how we think of the world.

[195] We're not driven by the material structure of the present so much as we are engaged in the potential structure of the future.

[196] And that's a different thing, is that in the future, what manifests itself in front of us looks like an array of potential futures, and then we can interact with that array of potential futures and actualize them.

[197] We turn them into reality.

[198] And I really think that's what we do.

[199] And so what we confront is something like chaotic potential.

[200] And through our decisions, whatever they are, our moral choices, because to make a moral choice is to choose one thing over another, that's the definition of a moral choice.

[201] What happens is that we transform that potential into actuality as a consequence of our moral choices.

[202] That's how it looks to me. Now, why would that potential be represented symbolically in serpent form?

[203] I think the reason for that is that neurobiologically is that the circuit that we use to deal with potential chaos, what might be, is the same circuit that we've always used throughout the entire course of evolution to interact with that which lies beyond us.

[204] So imagine the circle of the campfire and the forest that's around that.

[205] the forest is populated by terrible things, things of potential, but also terrible things.

[206] And the circuit we use to protect ourselves against the terrible things of the unknown is grounded in the same circuit that we used to detect and protect ourselves against predatory reptiles for a 60 million year period, something like that.

[207] So, and that's partly why, as far as I can tell, that our great myths, the great hero myths, for example, which are very, very old narrative structures, virtually always involved some variation of the hero confronting some serpentine creature, a dragon most frequently.

[208] Dragon, I read a great book on dragons a while back.

[209] A man was trying, I can't remember the name of it, it'll come to me, but he was trying to account for the fact of the distribution of dragon symbolism everywhere in the world.

[210] He thought that a dragon was a tree cat snake bird.

[211] and so when we were primates the things that when we were tree dwelling primates the fundamental things that preyed on us were snakes predatory cats and predatory birds and so he thought and then you could probably add fire to the mix you know because things we lived in burnt down a lot and many of us died as a consequence and so a tree cat snake bird especially one that spouts fire is predator right It's the image of Predator itself.

[212] And so one of the things you have to contend with is Predator and the predator lurks in the unknown and the circuit that you use to deal with the unknown even in Abstract form has its biological roots in the Predator Detection Circuit and and that seems that's solid science as far as I can tell I mean the symbolic element to it is the Symbolic element of it is something that most mainstream Neuroscientists wouldn't accept but that's usually because they don't know anything at all about symbolism so It's not part of their purview, and so the fact that they don't see the relationship.

[213] And I talked to some pretty good neuroscientists who are on board with the symbolic idea as well.

[214] So, okay, so, so, so that's really what we're, that's what we're like and what the world's like.

[215] The world isn't a material structure driving us forward like clocks.

[216] It's a field of potential that we all confront all the time.

[217] and that we transform into reality as a consequence of our moral decisions.

[218] And it seems to me that that's how we experience reality.

[219] That's how it manifests itself to us.

[220] It seems like we upgrade ourselves when we don't do that properly, too.

[221] And you could think about it a slightly different way, too, is that there's a potential that manifests itself in front of you that you can interact with in various ways, and then there's a potential within you that can react to that potential to master it.

[222] And we also know that because we'll say to ourselves and to people we love, you're not living up to your potential.

[223] And then you hang your head and you think, yeah, well, I know, I'm really not living up to my potential.

[224] And, you know, you wake up in the middle of the night because your life isn't constituted the way that you know it should be and you're guilty about it and you're sweating and you think, God, I'm really not living up to my potential.

[225] I'm wasting my potential.

[226] It's like, what the hell are you talking about exactly?

[227] It's serious, this potential that you're not using.

[228] what is it?

[229] Well, it isn't anything that is yet, right?

[230] Which is a strange thing to be concerned about.

[231] It's only something that could be.

[232] You're not manifesting properly something that could be.

[233] Well, but I do believe that is how we experience the world.

[234] And I think it's worth taking seriously that.

[235] And then here's a reason why I think it's worth taking seriously.

[236] There's a bunch of reasons.

[237] But here's a reason.

[238] It's kind of a strange reason.

[239] But I've I've been spending a lot of time, some of you may know this.

[240] I did a bunch of series, a series of lectures last year on Genesis, about 15 lectures, and I've really spent a lot of time thinking about the psychological meaning of the stories in Genesis.

[241] Because they're very, very old stories, and we remember them for a reason, at least because they're adapted to our memory, right?

[242] So we would remember them for thousands of years otherwise.

[243] they stick somehow.

[244] And so my suspicions are they stick for a reason.

[245] And I think they're kind of dream -like We don't really understand them, but we can't forget them and that might mean they contain information that we don't yet understand and that certainly seems to be the case And so there's a strange proposition in the opening in the in the first chapter of Genesis Where God creates the world and The the account is an articulated account, and then it's a narrative account, and it's a written account, but it's the distillation of accounts that were orally transmitted, for God only knows how long before they were written down, and we really don't know how long.

[246] Maybe as long as people have been using language, which would be about at least 150 ,000 years.

[247] So they're old, those stories, and they have echoes of themes in them that are far older than that.

[248] And so what do you see?

[249] What's the landscape of the first chapter in general?

[250] Genesis.

[251] Well, it's remarkably similar to this image that I just described in the way that I laid it out.

[252] So what you have, it's a proposition about the structure of reality.

[253] And the proposition is something like, well, there's something that it's given the name God that that exists.

[254] And there's some chaotic potential that that thing is contending with.

[255] And that's the void, that Tohuva Bohu, which means the way that and void.

[256] But it means more than that.

[257] It means something like chaotic potential.

[258] So, and it's also interesting too, because it's a psychologization, let's say, an abstraction of a deeper idea.

[259] There's older stories even where the force or factor that serves as God actually carves up a serpentile being to create the world.

[260] By the time the Genesis account is written, that's kind of a sort of.

[261] of turned into an abstraction instead of the serpentine being its chaotic potential and that's the same relationship that I just described to you between the unknown and and the predator and you see echoes of this in Genesis because God is actually described at times as having overcome a great a great beast of some sort to create the world the Leviathan for example or the or the or the Bayamoth both of those are are strange deep creatures that get mentioned from time to time in Genesis.

[262] They're sort of echoes of a previous, more primordial conceptualization of the structure of the world.

[263] And so there's this element of contending with the terrible, dangerous unknown that serves as the sub -story of the creation story in the first chapter in Genesis.

[264] Now, that seems appropriate to me. The story has been interpreted in Christian terms, in the following manner.

[265] So you have God, the thing that does the confronting, let's say.

[266] And then you have the action of confrontation.

[267] That's the second entity.

[268] That's described as the logos in Christian terms.

[269] And that's a very, very, very, very, very complicated idea.

[270] But partly what it means is the capacity for truthful communicative speech.

[271] and that's the word of God.

[272] So it's God uses the word, the logos, which is the capacity for communicative, truthful speech, to interact with the chaotic potential and to give it form.

[273] That's how the world comes into being.

[274] And that seems right.

[275] It seems right in that, well, you need something to apprehend, and you need something to act, and you need something to act on.

[276] And so that's the fundamental constituent elements of reality as laid out in that chapter.

[277] And there's some interesting details that go along with that.

[278] So the proposition is there's a chaotic potential, and whatever God is, uses the logos to generate habitable order out of that.

[279] And then one of the things that happens in that first chapter continually is that after God does that, he says, and it was good.

[280] And it's repeated.

[281] And the fact that it's repeated is important because you don't repeat something that you don't forget without there being a reason for the repetition.

[282] And so I think the idea is something like this.

[283] This is an absolutely amazing idea as far as I'm concerned.

[284] It might be like the most amazing idea there is.

[285] The proposition is that the habitable order that is created as a consequence of truthful speech is good.

[286] So there's an ethical element that's entered right into that.

[287] And that's really something.

[288] It's like, because there's lots of things about the world that don't seem so good.

[289] The world's a harsh place and there's plenty of malevolence in it.

[290] And so we all doubt its utility and validity, at least at some points in our life.

[291] And we might even wonder how things got so terribly, how things went so terribly astray in our own lives or in our person lives or in our own lives or in our personal lives or in our life.

[292] collective lives.

[293] But there's a hypothesis in that first chapter that if it's been brought into being as a consequence of truthful speech, then it's good.

[294] And I think that's an incredibly useful moral guideline because it's a proposition, eh?

[295] The proposition is because how do you know if what you do is good or not?

[296] Like you can sort of guess, but you don't know the full consequences of your actions, right?

[297] So if you do A rather than B, well, you're going to produce a lot of consequences because you did A, but you produce a lot of other consequences if you did B, and you can't calculate all those consequences.

[298] It's just impossible.

[299] In fact, it isn't even clear how you ever decide to act, because you can't calculate all the consequences of your action.

[300] So we don't know when the calculations stop.

[301] We actually don't know how you decide to act.

[302] And there are people, by the way, who have neurological conditions that make it impossible for them to stop computing before they act.

[303] They often have prefrontal cortical damage, and they can't do things like decide which restaurant to go to, because it's actually impossible, because there's 100 ,000 reasons why you might pick one restaurant over another, and there isn't just two restaurants.

[304] There's like 50 restaurants, and then you get to the restaurant, how the hell do you decide what you're going to eat?

[305] Well, you do, but we don't know how.

[306] We don't know how you manage it, but you do manage it.

[307] So you're not managing the complex job of computing your movement through the world.

[308] by sheer brute force computation, because it's not possible.

[309] And you make judgment about what you should do in some manner.

[310] And the rule for making that judgment as is laid out in Genesis is that you can just make the assumption that if it emerges as a consequence of truth, then it's good.

[311] And it's a very interesting way to conduct your life.

[312] It's actually the hallmark of faith, as far as I can tell.

[313] Existential faith in some sense is like you don't calculate all the consequences you just tell the truth and then you just assume that whatever happens is the best thing that could happen Regardless of what happens and so you know it's a daring way of interacting with the world It's an adventurous way of interacting with the world because you're not really in some sense you're not in control of the outcome You have to take your chances with the truth, but then you think too is like well do you believe it or not?

[314] Well, let's take the opposite perspective The best possible world is going to be brought into being by you lying all the time.

[315] It's like no one believes that.

[316] You know, you might lie to get out of something, which is usually why people lie, you know, to avoid a responsibility or to, well, that's it, to avoid a responsibility, or to maybe try to live in a wish, which I wouldn't recommend, by the way.

[317] So you'll lie, but no one really ever thinks deeply and says, oh, definitely lying about things all the time.

[318] that's how you make the world a better place.

[319] Like, no one thinks that.

[320] A psychopath might think, well, if I lie all the time, I can make the world better right now for me, but that's not the same thing at all.

[321] That's just expediency.

[322] And that's not a great guide to, well, it's not a great guide to life.

[323] Even if you're a psychopath, even if you're successful, you have to move from place to place because people figure you out right away.

[324] And there are very few people who are psychopathic who are genuinely successful.

[325] You know, they get some expedient pleasure on a now and then, but it's not a great strategy.

[326] So, if you don't believe that truth is the best guide, you certainly at least know that falsehood isn't a good guide.

[327] And so I would say you probably have a moral intuition that the world that's brought into being through truth is the proper world.

[328] Well, then you think what happens after the opening chapters in Genesis?

[329] Well, the next thing that happens fundamentally is that God creates human beings, men and women.

[330] And then there's a strange line, which is that, and they're made in the image of God.

[331] You think, well, what in the world does that possibly mean?

[332] I suppose that's part of the reason that we derive the oft -derided sense that God is an old man with a beard in the sky.

[333] You know, not that we're all old men with beards, but at least human.

[334] Right?

[335] Well, we're made in God's image.

[336] It's like, well, so the the straightforward concretization of that is something like God in human form, which is obviously insufficient in some ways, because if God exists, in whatever form he exists, it's certainly not in a form that's the same as in any simple way as you and I. But there's a deeper idea there as far as I can tell, and it's this idea of the manner in which the deeper idea is in something like the basic structure like if you're the thing that confronts potential and acts to make reality out of potential and that's what God was doing at the beginning of time then that's the equivalence of image it's the same thing you're kind of doing it on a smaller scale you're not generating whole planets but you're generating part of the planet you know, and maybe it's a particularly hellish part of the planet, because you're not doing a very good job of it.

[337] And that could certainly be the case, and that happens all the time.

[338] But, you know, now and then you make a good decision, and you act in a manner that you would regard as appropriate, and you bring something into being that's worth, that's worthy of being brought into being.

[339] And then maybe you're sort of satisfied with yourself, and you could say that it was good.

[340] You know, and then you can sleep with a clear conscience, having participated properly in the ongoing creation of the world.

[341] And it seems to me that that is, in fact, not only what we're called upon to do, but actually what we do.

[342] And so that's a daunting thought.

[343] And I think that's partly why people don't like to think it, you know, because one of the things I've thought about for a long time is, well, people are often complained that life has no meaning, which is actually not the case, because life certainly hurts.

[344] Even if you're nihilistic and hopeless, Life has a meaning and that's suffering.

[345] So you're not getting away from that with your nihilism, man. You're stuck with the suffering.

[346] So the idea that life is meaningless, that's just wrong.

[347] You can get rid of the positive meaning by being cynical and by avoiding your responsibility, but you're not going to get rid of the suffering.

[348] And the suffering is definitely meaningful.

[349] There's not a person out here anywhere who can talk themselves out of their pain.

[350] So, people talk about life lacking meaning.

[351] It isn't what they mean.

[352] They mean that their life lacks positive and sustaining meaning, and it's important to be precise about these things.

[353] And then they're upset about that.

[354] My life has no positive and sustaining meaning, and then they feel oppressed about that and unhappy.

[355] And it's not surprising because life is suffering and twist it up a bit with malevolence just to make the suffering worse.

[356] If you don't have any sustaining meaning, then you get tortured by the suffering, and obviously that's extraordinarily unpleasant.

[357] And so it's not surprising that people complain.

[358] And you might think, well, they would escape from that state of meaninglessness if they could.

[359] But they can't, perhaps, and they've argued themselves into it, or they're, they've argued themselves into a state of meaninglessness.

[360] It's a consequence of the rational critique of the structure of being or something like that.

[361] But I think there's darker things at work there.

[362] Because one of the things I've asked myself repeatedly over the years is, well, maybe everybody has a choice.

[363] The choice is something like this.

[364] Because I'm all, because I'm psychoanalytically minded, when people say something for one reason, I always think, well, there's a shadow reason that we need to explore too.

[365] There's, there's, you say, well, you're doing this because you're good, you're a good person.

[366] The communists posited the utopian future state.

[367] That was good.

[368] Except for all the millions of corpses.

[369] That was the dark side.

[370] And so you could flip that and think, well, no, there was no utopian vision to be, not really.

[371] There was just justification for the millions of corpses.

[372] And it was the production of those corpses.

[373] That was the reason.

[374] And the utopian vision, just a secondary justification.

[375] And if you think, well, no, definitely not, then, well, that's fine.

[376] Then you can account for the corpses with some other theory and see how far you get with that.

[377] There's a dark side to decisions, and so let's say that you're enrapped, you're wrapped up in a nihilistic viewpoint and you're suffering because of that.

[378] You think, God, I really wish my life was meaningful.

[379] I wish there was such a thing as meaning.

[380] And then you think, okay, well, here's your choice.

[381] It's fairly stark.

[382] On this side, there's meaninglessness, right?

[383] You're just, as you suspect with your rational critique of being, you're nothing but a dust speck.

[384] Among seven billion other people, dust specs, on a no -account planet, rotating a no -account star among trillions of stars, among hundreds of billions of galaxies in a meaningless universe.

[385] We think, God, that's dismal.

[386] It's like, well, no, it's not that dismal, because if it's all meaningless, you don't have any responsibility.

[387] And you can do whatever the hell you want.

[388] And there's some attraction to being able to do whatever you want without responsibility.

[389] Well, it's easy, first of all, I mean, except for the suffering part, but it's easy.

[390] It doesn't require any commitment, doesn't require any sacrifice, it doesn't require any vision, doesn't require any diligence.

[391] It's easy.

[392] You can do whatever you want, whenever you want.

[393] And so a cynic might say, well, you just dreamed up the whole nihilism to justify the fact that you're utterly useless.

[394] And then you could reverse it, you could say, okay, well, forget about that choice.

[395] Here's another choice.

[396] Everything you do is meaningful.

[397] It actually matters.

[398] You think, well, that's great because there's all that meaning.

[399] It's like, yeah, sure.

[400] There's a lot of responsibility that goes along with that because maybe it is the case.

[401] And I do believe this.

[402] I do believe that this is the case.

[403] I do believe that the most accurate way of representing you is the way that you're represented in that first chapter in Genesis.

[404] And that whatever it is, you are is something like an embodied logos.

[405] Constrained, you know, but confronting the chaos of potential and determining the course of creation by your moral choices.

[406] And that you can choose to make things better, and you can choose to make things worse, and if you choose to make them better, then they get better.

[407] And if you choose to make them worse, then they get worse.

[408] And so I would say, you have...

[409] You have the possibility of heaven beckoning on the one hand and the possibility of hell beckoning on the other, and you're choosing between those two every single choice you make.

[410] And that's actually meaningful, and it's real.

[411] And you think, well, do you believe that?

[412] It's like, well, let's reverse that.

[413] Say, well, are you so sure you don't believe that?

[414] You know, because you don't know what the hell you believe, because you can't really account for yourself fully, right?

[415] People are really, we're complicated.

[416] Each of us is the most complicated thing there is.

[417] So we're not transparent to ourselves.

[418] It's not obvious to each of us what it is that we believe or how we construe the world.

[419] And so often when I'm trying to figure out what someone believes, I sort of look at how they act.

[420] That's an existential attitude.

[421] It's something I also learned to some degree from Carl Jung.

[422] If you can't understand the motivation, look at the outcome of the action and infer the motivation.

[423] I like that a lot.

[424] You think, well, what do people believe?

[425] Well, how do they act?

[426] And my sense of people, after spending 25 ,000 hours, counseling people through all sorts of things, and thinking about these things for many more hours than that, is that you have a guilty conscience if you're not participating in the proper creation of being.

[427] It weighs on you.

[428] And not just a bit, either.

[429] Like, it'll take you out.

[430] It'll make you suicidal.

[431] It'll ruin your life.

[432] You'll contemplate the catastrophe of your foolish choices and the waste that you've laid to your own potential and the absence that you've been for your family and your community, and you will not escape from that, not a bit.

[433] And so it seems to me that, regardless of people's conscious accounting for themselves, at a more implicit level, a more unconscious level, you're holding yourself accountable as if you're responsible all the time, and that you will torture yourself to death if you do it wrong.

[434] So, well, and if it wasn't the case, then why would you ever, it's not like you guys don't feel guilty.

[435] You know, I mean, that's a common state of mind for people, and I know that guilt can go too far.

[436] I know sometimes that people feel guilty more than would be productive.

[437] But it's not like you don't feel guilty or ashamed or that you haven't lived up to your potential.

[438] All of those things.

[439] Man, that's the sort of thing that torments you at 3 o 'clock in the morning.

[440] The idea of lost opportunity, you know, and the sense of falling, I suppose, in some sense that you have, if you haven't done what you could with what you've been granted.

[441] So you hold yourself ethically accountable.

[442] and then you hold the people, you love ethically accountable too.

[443] The last thing you want for your children, I would say the last thing, if you love them, to some degree, at least, is that they live up to their potential, right?

[444] And you try to provide for them an environment that increases the probability that they will live up to their potential.

[445] And if you're sensible, you discipline your children when they're not living up to their potential, and you reward them when they are, and you're thrilled when they are, right?

[446] It's literally, if you love your children, you're thrilled when they do something that's a real revelation of their potential.

[447] You know, and if you, with your husband or your wife, it's the same thing.

[448] You know, if, again, to the degree that you're not locked in a malevolent struggle, and, you know, people are complicated, and we don't have untrammeled relationships with the people that we're intimate with, but by and large, what you're hoping is that that person you love, especially if you love someone, The act of loving them is actually the embodiment of the hope that the potential you see in them would fully manifest itself.

[449] I think that's actually what happens.

[450] Like, you know how, look, everybody has a soft spot for kids, I would say.

[451] But you have a particular soft spot for your own kid.

[452] And that's probably a good thing because there you are and there's like a billion kids and you're not going to take care of all of them.

[453] So it might be okay if you took care of one or two.

[454] you did a real good job of that, and then if everyone else did that, then they'd all be cared for.

[455] So the fact that you're focusing on your own child is reasonable, given your constraints.

[456] And so people are pretty in love with their children, and you might think, well, that's a kind of blindness, because why should it be from a rational perspective that your child is any more important than any other child, or that your child's suffering takes precedent over any other child's suffering?

[457] And, well, I think part of the answer is, well, you have limited resources, so you're going to have to focus somewhere.

[458] But another answer is the reason that your child takes precedence over other children is because if you love your child, then that's the only child you actually see.

[459] Because I have a sneaking suspicion that if you love someone, then you see them.

[460] And the rest of the people that you don't love, you don't really see.

[461] You just see your imagination of them or an image of them.

[462] You know, you walk into...

[463] There's actually evidence.

[464] for this.

[465] There's this funny experiment I'll tell you about.

[466] So it's an experiment about change blindness.

[467] So here's the experiment.

[468] So you're the victim of the experiment.

[469] You walk into a store and you're interacting with the person behind the counter and then the person behind the counter ducks down and then another person pops up and continues to interact with you.

[470] And the question is do you notice?

[471] And the answer is in 50 % of the cases, no. And so there's another famous experiment, a variant of the same thing.

[472] So it was done at Harvard.

[473] Tourist walks into the Harvard campus.

[474] Undergraduate comes up with a map, starts asking the tourist for directions.

[475] A couple of guys over here holding a door.

[476] And they walk between the tourist and the student, blocking the student from the tourist momentarily.

[477] The student grabs the door, keeps walking, and one of the people holding the door, Takes the map and starts talking to the tourist and the tourist 60 % of the time doesn't notice that The person has been switched That even works if they have quite markedly different clothing and so you're blind to most people and You have to be because you just be overwhelmed if you weren't blind You'd be overwhelmed if you weren't mostly blind to everything You're blind to most people, but I don't think you're blind to the people that you love and I think that's why you love them I think that what happens is that when you fall in love with someone or when you love someone There's a biochemical transformation.

[478] We know some of them.

[479] We know how some of this works chemically and You might think well that deludes you and so you're in love with this person because you're deluded and you know you might Actually wonder that sometimes after you fall in love with someone, but But a more a less cynical Interpretation of that would be no all of a sudden the scales fall from your eyes and you can see not only only who that person is, but who they could be.

[480] And it's that thing that you see that is what is and what could be that makes you fall in love.

[481] And then to the degree that you're in love, you try to foster the emergence of that.

[482] If you can stand it, like, it's hard because, you know, if you and I have a very tight relationship and you're doing extremely well and, you know, you start to manifest your potential, it's scary to me because to the degree that you have done that, then you're both an ideal and a judge.

[483] And I'm feel ashamed as a consequence and then work to bring you down.

[484] And you see that in relationships all the time, even between parents and children.

[485] Less so there, but certainly it's not by no, it's by competition of that sort is by no means non -existent.

[486] And so, well, so you're trying to call your children forward to adopt responsibility.

[487] And so, well, so the next thing that happens in the biblical stuff, stories.

[488] And this is, I haven't got this worked out, so it's completely coherent yet.

[489] But what happens is that, see if that's the right place to go with this argument, there's an awakening.

[490] So God makes, God puts Adam and Eve into this garden.

[491] And the garden has a snake in it.

[492] And that snake is the same thing that I've been talking about.

[493] It's partly this potential that exists in the world.

[494] It's more than that.

[495] However, the snake wakes everyone up, wakes Adam and Eve up.

[496] And the first thing, the scales fall from their eyes.

[497] And they notice that they're naked.

[498] And that's a very, that's, that's, that's the next thing of tremendous significance that occurs in that narrative.

[499] Tempted by the snake.

[500] Something like tempted by the possibilities of the world.

[501] It's a hard thing to completely comprehend.

[502] Eve wakes up and realizes that she's naked and then she wakes Adam up.

[503] And that realization of nakedness, that's the dawning of suffering in the world it's something like that because to realize that you're naked is to is to realize your vulnerability and that's something that's very specific to human beings that we fully realize our vulnerability and our capacity to suffer like it's partly because we can see we can we can we can we can propagate that out into the future that makes us unlike animals like an animal suffers but now you suffer even now even if you're not suffering because you know that you're going to suffer in the future And so you have this sense of your finitude that no other creature has.

[504] And that disrupts the structure of being.

[505] That's how the story goes.

[506] And I think that's right.

[507] I think that that discovery did disrupt the structure of being, the discovery of our vulnerability and the equivalent discovery of the future.

[508] It made us different creatures.

[509] And because we're so complex and because our consciousness in some sense plays a role in being itself, that truly is a disruption of the fabric of reality.

[510] And then God chases Adam and Eve out of paradise and tells them that they're going to have to work And of course that makes perfect sense too because we are in some sense the only creatures that have to work And the reason we work is because well, you're doing fine right now, but What about five years from now?

[511] It's like you're going to sacrifice the present to the future And that's where the idea of sacrifice comes in That took me about 20 years to figure out exactly what that sacrificial motif meant in Genesis.

[512] But what it meant was it was indistinguished.

[513] I outlined that in 12 Rules for Life.

[514] It was indistinguishable from the discovery of the future.

[515] Because as soon as you discover the future, then you have to sacrifice the present to it.

[516] Otherwise, you're just doing whatever it is that you want to do in the present.

[517] It's kind of how an animal lives.

[518] And, you know, animals have pretty rough lives, although it doesn't appear that they dwell on it much.

[519] Whereas, well, and that, there's something to be said for that.

[520] But, you know, whereas we worry about everything you can possibly worry about, and generally we don't get eaten by predatory things, and we live a long time.

[521] So the advantage to our chronic worry and our ability to sacrifice the present to the future is that we actually do pretty good, stretched across time, even though there's a tremendous amount of concern that's associated with that, the weight of work, let's say, and driven, I would say, by the knowledge of death.

[522] And that's really how that story lays itself out, which is quite interesting.

[523] So responsibility.

[524] This is where the transition gets tricky.

[525] I'll just come about it from a different perspective.

[526] So here's something that I've noticed that's really been fascinating to me as I've been talking to audiences around the world now.

[527] I've spoken at gatherings like this, now about 100 times, probably, to about, I don't know how many people.

[528] Three hundred thousand people?

[529] A lot of people.

[530] And so I've been watching the audiences, because I always watch everyone who comes, you know, everyone I can see in the audience.

[531] I don't watch the audience.

[532] I watch individual people.

[533] And I'm talking to individual people, despite the fact that it's an audience.

[534] But I'm listening to what's going on as well.

[535] And one of the things I've learned as a lecturer who's paid a lot of attention to his audiences is that if you're saying something particularly meaningful, then everything is silent.

[536] right?

[537] So it's quite remarkable.

[538] You can get 3 ,000 people in a room or more, and it'll be dead silent.

[539] And you know that if it's dead silent, then you're on the right path.

[540] And everyone's with you, because otherwise they'd be shuffling around, noticing that they're hot or noticing that they're uncomfortable or thinking about something or playing with their phone.

[541] You know, they get instantly distracted.

[542] And so if people aren't being distracted by something else, it means their attention is focused on what's going on.

[543] And if 3 ,000 people are focusing their attention on what's going on, then you can be reasonably certain that something is going on.

[544] And so if you're a lecturer and you pay attention to your audience, then you always try to make sure that something is going on, and that keeps the audience still and quiet.

[545] And that's an indication that something's going on.

[546] And it's something that you can use to orient yourself, in a sense, to a place of maximal meaning.

[547] And that's what you want to do, and especially in a spontaneous lecture, You want the lecture to be meaningful, because otherwise, like, what the hell are you doing there?

[548] And if it's meaningful, then everyone's gripped by it.

[549] And if they're gripped, then they're silent.

[550] And so you can tell that.

[551] And so when you lose your audience, they start to make noise.

[552] And that's very disconcerting.

[553] So it's very unpleasant.

[554] And so I don't like it when that happens, and I try to make sure that it doesn't.

[555] Okay, so the question is, what topics, silence, and audience?

[556] now.

[557] And there's two.

[558] One is any talk about responsibility.

[559] And that's really interesting.

[560] You know, I noticed this last year when I did the biblical lectures I mentioned.

[561] Most of the people who came to those, strangely enough, were young men who are notorious for their refusal to come to any sort of lecture that involves anything like that.

[562] But that was the audience.

[563] And when I talked to them about responsibility, they were dead quiet.

[564] And they were particularly quiet if there was an association between the idea of responsibility and meaning.

[565] And so I've been thinking about that, exactly why that's happening.

[566] And this is what I've come up with.

[567] And it's related to all the stories that I told you already, and I'm hoping I can make the connection perfectly clear.

[568] That's what I'm trying to do in this lecture.

[569] So it's definitely the case.

[570] this is what's laid out in the story of Adam and Eve, that if you wake up, you notice you're naked, and you notice that life is suffering.

[571] And that's very disturbing.

[572] Maybe in some sense, you never recover from that.

[573] Human beings have never recovered from discovering the future, unsurprisingly.

[574] And it produces an existential problem, and one is, what the hell do you do about the fact that the future is likely to be rife with suffering?

[575] That's just a practical issue.

[576] But then there's a philosophical issue, too, which is, what do you do about the fact that the future is going to be rife with suffering?

[577] So there's the practical issue.

[578] Build yourself a house so that you don't die in the winter.

[579] But there's the existential issue, which is, what the hell should you do about the fact that life is suffering?

[580] And then you can make that even more complicated, or it's made more complicated, because it's not just that life is suffering.

[581] It's life is suffering of the type that your stupid irresponsibility will definitely.

[582] make worse.

[583] Right.

[584] So it's suffering contaminated by ignorance and malevolence.

[585] And malevolence is the worst of the duo of ignorance and malevolence.

[586] Not only will you make things worse because you're ignorant, you will make things worse because you try to make them worse.

[587] And so that's a hell of a thing to contend with too.

[588] And the question is, well, that can undo you.

[589] It can unglue you.

[590] It can make you nihilistic.

[591] It can make you hopeless.

[592] It can make you depressed.

[593] It can do far worse things than that.

[594] You know, because if the full weight of the world's suffering and malevolence is sort of laden onto you without your acquiescence, then, well, that makes you unhappy, and then that makes you bitter, and then that makes you resentful, and then that makes you cruel, and then that makes you vengeful, and then that makes you murderous.

[595] And there's places past that.

[596] then that makes you genocidal, right?

[597] And so, the fact that they're suffering in malevolence is not only enough to produce a kind of nihilism, but it's enough to produce a nihilism that degenerates into something far worse than mere nihilism.

[598] In fact, I don't think nihilism is sustainable.

[599] I think it inevitably degenerates into something approximating the desire for hell.

[600] It's something like that.

[601] Well, the question is, well, what do you do about that?

[602] Well, I think the first thing you notice is that it actually bothers you that there's suffering and malevolence.

[603] You know, it wouldn't drive you crazy if it didn't bother you, but We'll just make that an independent issue for a minute.

[604] It does bother you You know, bothers you enough so that you might even question the utility of your existence because of it or you might go the whole way and question the utility of existence itself and Everyone does that at different times in their life.

[605] You know if you're especially if you're faced with the intractable suffering of someone close to you, child particularly, but not necessarily just a child.

[606] You can throw up your hands in despair and think none of this should ever be.

[607] This is so terrible that it would be better that nothing existed at all.

[608] And that's what you do when you ask in some sort of cosmic sense what the point is.

[609] And fair enough.

[610] But I think you have an answer to that because you're not pleased, at some deep level about the fact of unrequitted suffering and unopposed malevolence.

[611] It weighs on you.

[612] So then what should you do about that?

[613] Or could you do something about that?

[614] And I would say, not only could you, but if you did, then that would, in some strange manner, be the cure for the problem.

[615] So there's this idea that clinicians have come up with sort of on mass over the last hundred years.

[616] And the idea is if you want to get over a fear and you want to move forward effectively in the world, then what you do is voluntarily confront that fear no matter what it is.

[617] And that works.

[618] Turns out.

[619] And virtually every school of psychotherapy has discovered this more or less independently.

[620] So the psychoanalysts figured out that if you confronted things that you hadn't dealt with in your past, that that would straighten you out.

[621] And then the behavior is figured out if you were afraid of something and you exposed yourself to that thing you were afraid of in small doses, then you'd get more and more courageous and you'd be able to get over your fear.

[622] And it doesn't really matter how terrible the thing is.

[623] So Edna Foa, who's a great clinical experimentalist, tried it out with women who had post -traumatic stress disorder.

[624] Post -traumatic stress disorder is rough, man. And they had it because they were violently raped by strangers.

[625] Right, and so what was the curative process this occurred.

[626] You can't do this without a delay, by the way So she made sure that her clients the experience was in the past more than 18 months in the past seems to be about the rule of thumb She had them relive the experience in as much detail as possible in as full imagination as possible Voluntarily and hooked them up to psychophysiological recording devices to check their emotional reactivity and then show that that the women who had the worst time emotionally, while they were reliving the experiences, got better faster, and stayed better longer.

[627] And so what's so interesting is that it, in some sense, the magnitude of what you face doesn't matter.

[628] If you face it, you can overcome it.

[629] And so then you think, well, how true is that?

[630] Do you think, well, look, you know, people work in emergency wards.

[631] That's pretty damn rough.

[632] I mean, it's an emergency ward, right?

[633] There's nothing there but emergencies.

[634] And so that, by definition, that's about as rough as it gets, and yet people can do that, and they have lives.

[635] I mean, it's stressful, but they go to work every day, and they do that, and people work in morgues, you know, and there are coroners, and their first responders, you know, the paramedic types and all of that, and there are people who work in palliative care awards, that's pretty damn rough, because you, you know, you're caring for someone and you form a relationship with them or you're not a very good palliative care nurse, and definitely they die, and usually within a couple of weeks, But yet, my sister -in -law is a palliative care nurse, and she just keeps on cruising.

[636] She's good to her kids.

[637] She's good to her husband.

[638] She's a good person.

[639] You know, weirdly, it's produced more appreciation for life in her.

[640] And I wouldn't say that's necessarily inevitable, because those jobs can be very stressful.

[641] But there she goes to work every day.

[642] So that's quite something that she's so damn tough that she can face it dead on voluntarily.

[643] And so then there's that.

[644] possibility, which I think is an actuality, that despite the fact that there's this suffering and malevolence at the bottom of the world, which is enough to corrupt you because of its existence, if you turn around paradoxically, paradoxically, and you decide that you're going to accept the challenge of confronting that, then all of a sudden you find out that you're the sort of creature that can do that.

[645] And I don't really think that's any different than confronting that chaotic potential.

[646] I think it's the fullest manifestation of that.

[647] And then here's something else that's really interesting.

[648] And I think I'll close with this.

[649] I'll tell you two interesting stories.

[650] One is about a cathedral, the Shart Cathedral.

[651] In the cathedral, there's a maze, a labyrinth, and it's a circle, and it's divided into four, northwest, east, and south.

[652] So it's made out of quadrants, and it's quite big.

[653] I think it's 52 feet across.

[654] It's a symbolic pilgrimage to the holy city or to the center of the world.

[655] And you do that if you can't go on a real pilgrimage.

[656] And see, you go in a pilgrimage and you go places you haven't been, right?

[657] That's the whole point of going in a pilgrimage, especially if you're from a medieval village and you've never been to anywhere.

[658] You go out of your village, you go out into the world, you go to Jerusalem.

[659] By the time you come back, like Bilbo Baggins, you're not the same creature, right?

[660] You've had your big adventure, and you're not the same creature anymore.

[661] So the fact that you've gone out in that adventure and pushed yourself up against the world means you're informed in ways you wouldn't have been and you're transformed.

[662] And so that's the purpose of the pilgrimage.

[663] And that transformation is what takes you to the heavenly city.

[664] You might be doing it geographically, but you're doing it metaphysically and psychologically at the same time.

[665] But maybe you can't do that because you can't afford a pilgrimage and so you have to walk the labyrinth.

[666] And so this labyrinth is constructed as the central feature of this great cathedral and you enter it on one side and then you walk.

[667] through it, but you don't just walk right to the center, right?

[668] Because you don't get to the center by walking straight to the center.

[669] Partly because you don't know where the center is.

[670] And maybe that's because the center moves, and it's something you have to discover in the confines of your own life.

[671] And so how do you get to the center?

[672] The answer is by going everywhere you possibly can.

[673] And so you walk the labyrinth, and you walk every quadrant, you walk every square inch of every quadrant, and by the time you're done, you're in the center.

[674] and that's the center of the world.

[675] And you're fully informed because you've been everywhere, because you've taken on all the responsibility there is to take on, and that's made you way more than you were.

[676] You think, well, some of that's just a matter of learning, right?

[677] And you know that, the more skills you acquire.

[678] I've never acquired a skill that didn't turn out to be worthwhile, even if it didn't produce the consequence that I had attended.

[679] Right?

[680] To push myself up against some limitation, and to try to transcend that has produced a transformation that I regard as, that I've come to regard, inevitably as useful.

[681] And sometimes it's because I have to leave parts of myself that aren't useful anymore behind, which is also a form of sacrifice, right, to let go of what you shouldn't be and leave it behind.

[682] Well, so you get informed by interacting with the world, and the more you determine that you're going to take on the burden of the world voluntarily, the more informed you become, and the better you become at being able to take on the burden of the world, And the better you are at acting in a manner that reduces the suffering and constricts the malevolence, thus solving the original problem.

[683] But there's even more to it, and this is something that's only been discovered in very recent times.

[684] So it turns out that if you put yourself in a new situation, first of all, if I stress you involuntarily, you tend to react with defensiveness and fear, and you produce a lot of stress hormones, and it's hard on you.

[685] But if you take the same challenge on voluntarily, your psychophysiological response is completely different, right?

[686] So you don't produce stress hormones in levels that will damage you.

[687] So even though the objective burden is the same, the subjective consequence, even manifested materially, isn't the same.

[688] So it's different to hoist a load voluntarily than it is to have it thrust upon you.

[689] And so the question then might be, well, what size load should you bear?

[690] And I think the answer to that is the biggest one you can possibly carry because that will ensure that you know that you have something meaningful to do In any case, if you put yourself in a new situation This is what happens to you neurologically.

[691] This is so cool New genes turn on and code for proteins that hadn't been coded before So it's like you have a tremendous biological potential Locked in your genetic code, but it won't manifest itself unless you you push it.

[692] You're not going to unlock those boxes of potential, let's say.

[693] And God knows what you'd be like if you unlocked all of that.

[694] Those things will not unlock without the demand.

[695] And the demand won't occur unless you put yourself beyond where you already are.

[696] And so you say, well, there's suffering in the world and there's malevolence and that's your problem.

[697] And you know it's your problem because if you're not doing a good job of ameliorating the suffering and constraining the malevolence, then you're going to torture yourself to death with guilt and shame.

[698] That's definitely your problem.

[699] And so you want to do something about that because the alternative is not so good.

[700] So you decide to do that voluntarily, and you think, well, that's impossible given the burden of suffering and the degree of malevolence in the world.

[701] And it is impossible, but God only knows what you are in your fundamental essence, and God only knows what you could be if you were completely turned on, let's say.

[702] And the way you find out is by deciding that you're going to do that which is impossible.

[703] And you don't have a choice anyways, because you're confronted with mortality, with suffering and mortality and malevolence in your life anyways.

[704] And you're all in, man. Like, you've staked yourself on this, right?

[705] This is life or death situation for you, just like it is for everybody else.

[706] And so the question is, well, what would you be like if you played that to the full?

[707] And so I think what's been making the audience is quiet And this is, I think, something that's extraordinarily useful to know is that Well, you need a meaning in life to sustain you through the catastrophe of life Because otherwise life is just stupid suffering And that produces degeneration, it's not a good thing It's not a static thing It goes from bad to worse You need a meaning in life to sustain you through that And the meaning is to be found in Not in impulse of pleasure And not in your rights and not even in your freedom But in your responsibility And so You can think about this, you know it too Because if you know, if you think about those times When you're actually okay with yourself And maybe you're even pleased with yourself, let's say You know at minimum there's some things that you've done At minimum you've taken care of yourself, right?

[708] You're not a burden to someone else.

[709] That's at least something.

[710] So you've taken on enough responsibility.

[711] So you account for yourself, and then maybe you've gone a bit above and beyond the call of duty, and you're also taking care of your family.

[712] And maybe if you're really pushing the boundaries, you're taking care of yourself and your family in a way that's actually beneficial to the community.

[713] And so when you wake up at 3 in the morning, you can think, well, God, at least I did that.

[714] It's like, well, that's something.

[715] and then you think about the people that you admire, you admire people who take on responsibility.

[716] That happens spontaneously, right?

[717] It's not something you necessarily choose.

[718] If you look out in the world and you're reasonably mature, you know, you look at people and you think, well, that person is barren up under the strictures of their existence quite admirably.

[719] And you feel an impulsion, you feel impelled to copy that, to imitate that.

[720] And that's the compulsion towards the manifestation.

[721] of a higher moral being.

[722] So that seems to be part of...

[723] That idea seems to be part of what...

[724] Well, what has attracted people to my online lectures because that idea runs through them.

[725] It's something like, well, you have to have the meaning in life.

[726] And the meaning is a real thing.

[727] It's a real thing.

[728] And it manifests itself when you take responsibility for the inadequacies of being.

[729] And it's that willing to take responsibility, for the inadequacies of being that should inform the manner in which you interact with that potential.

[730] That's the moral choices that you're making as you see this chaotic potential that manifests itself in front of you and what do you want to do with that?

[731] You want to make things better.

[732] That's the meaning, right?

[733] And that is, I think, our participation in creation.

[734] And I think it is the manifestation of the image of God.

[735] I think that's right.

[736] And I think we need to understand that and that we could set things right.

[737] We could set them as right as we could set them if we understood that.

[738] And I think it would be in everyone's interest to understand that.

[739] And most importantly, I think it's just true that that's the case.

[740] And I think that everyone knows it.

[741] Thank you.

[742] Well, this is Ottawa, so I might as well start with this.

[743] What are your thoughts on Justin Trudeau?

[744] Okay, so, when Mr. Trudeau first appeared on the scene and was contemplating a high -level public office, I had my misgivings, and there was a reason for that.

[745] I felt that it was inappropriate, it is inappropriate to capitalize on your unearned fame, when you're competing for a position of responsibility.

[746] And I felt that, because Pierre was perhaps the most famous Canadian politician of the last 75 years, that Justin had to establish his own independent credibility before he had license to the name.

[747] And he didn't, and he ran anyways.

[748] And I thought that that was sign of immaturity and narcissism.

[749] And I still believe that.

[750] So those were the first thoughts.

[751] He's charming, and he's good -looking, and he knows how to behave in public.

[752] And those are non -trivial advantages.

[753] But I don't see any evidence that he has the depth of character necessary.

[754] to occupy the position that he's chosen to occupy.

[755] And I think one of the manifestations of that, there's a couple further pieces of evidence.

[756] One is his proclivity to make policy as a consequence of conformity with well -meaning and trendy ideology.

[757] And I saw that manifest itself most appallingly in the manner in which he chose to constitute his cabinet.

[758] Because his first, one of his first decisions was to choose his cabinet on the basis of their genitalia.

[759] And I do not think that's forgivable.

[760] See, his responsibility was to go through the people that were elected along with him and subject them to the appropriate acid test and to pick the most qualified people regardless of any of their non -relevant characteristics.

[761] And that's actually the critical issue when you're selecting for an important role in a non -prejudiced manner.

[762] The definition of selecting in a non -prejudiced manner is that you ignore all attributes that aren't germane to the task at hand.

[763] And sex is not one of them.

[764] And so I believe that he gerrymandered his cabinet selection so that he could manifest his allegiance with a with the with the with the with the with the ideology that drives identity politics instead of making the incredibly hard personal decisions that would have been necessary to pick the most qualified people and so I also know that he mentioned gender 385 times in the budget document, and that isn't the biggest problem that we have.

[765] So I think that he, that's what I think so far.

[766] I'm a 25 -year -old ambitious woman with no parents and no siblings.

[767] I feel lost, lonely, and scared, even though I'm professionally successful.

[768] Well, that's not surprising.

[769] I mean, you explained why instantly in this question.

[770] You know, you have no parents and no siblings.

[771] So you're alone.

[772] It's no wonder you feel lonely.

[773] I mean, you are alone.

[774] And that's a very precarious position.

[775] You know, I've had clients in my clinical practice who were very isolated, who had no family, you know, or maybe the one person that comes to mind had a daughter, but they had no one else.

[776] And, you know, her and her daughter, well, kind of clung to each other, and perhaps in a somewhat counterproductive manner.

[777] But unsurprisingly, you know, know, the world's a pretty rough place.

[778] And even if you're doing quite well, you can be taken out by a prolonged bout with misfortune.

[779] And partly what you need to do is buffer yourself with a social community.

[780] And hopefully you're fortunate enough so that that consists of some parents and some siblings and maybe a bit of an extended family for better or worse and a good friendship network and an intimate relationship.

[781] Like, you need lots of structures of support to surround you.

[782] And a job.

[783] is one but it's only one and it's one of seven things that you need you know what things do you need well you need to figure out how to educate yourself and you need to figure out how to take care of yourself your mental and physical health and you need a career and you need to figure out how to cope with temptations like drug and alcohol abuse and you need to figure out how to make productive use of your time outside work and you need an intimate relationship and you need a family.

[784] And if you don't have, if you're lacking, if something isn't working on one of those dimensions, there's other dimensions, but that's a pretty good initial summary, then of course you're going to feel lost, lonely, and scared.

[785] And the reason for that is that you are in fact exposed on multiple fronts.

[786] Your life isn't buttressed nearly as well as it needs to be.

[787] And so what you need to do is you need to, you need to spend some real time developing a network of friends and you need to find a relationship and you need to have a family because that's what it is to be a human being and the idea that you know you say even though I'm professionally successful it's really interesting question I'm a 25 year old ambitious woman okay so there's an implicit presumption there that ambition is sufficient in some sense because otherwise it wouldn't be highlighted as the what would you say as the only descriptor.

[788] And it means in some sense, I'm reading a lot into this, but I'm going to do that for the purposes of illustration.

[789] It means that in some sense you've bought into the idea that ambition in the career domain is sufficient to set you up in the world.

[790] And it's not.

[791] That's just complete nonsense.

[792] Most people don't have careers.

[793] They have jobs.

[794] And a job is generally something that you're paid to do because you wouldn't do it otherwise.

[795] And even if you have a career, the probability that you have a career that's so great that the logical thing for you to do is to sacrifice the probability of having a family to it is virtually zero.

[796] Like I've known many people who've had outstanding careers, many of them women.

[797] And it isn't, and some of those women decided to sacrifice the possibility of children to their career.

[798] And I would say, that's a minority taste, I'll tell you.

[799] And it isn't obvious to me that, for most of them that was a good decision.

[800] Now that's something you tend to discover only when it's too late.

[801] So you don't feel lost, lonely, and scared.

[802] You are lost, lonely, and scared.

[803] And that's a big difference, you know, because sometimes people come to me in my clinical practice and, you know, they say that they're depressed.

[804] And then they tell me about their lives, and their lives are absolutely terrible.

[805] And I think, you're not depressed.

[806] You have a terrible life.

[807] Right.

[808] Look, this is different.

[809] Here's what it's like to be depressed.

[810] You come to me and you say, geez, I don't know what's wrong.

[811] I have some kids and I love them and I've got a husband or a wife and that's working out as well as you could expect.

[812] And I have a job and it's a pretty good job.

[813] I can't imagine doing something that would be better and I'm pretty healthy and yet, God, I just feel terrible all the time.

[814] I'm gloomy and I worry about everything and I wake up in the middle of the night and I can't sleep properly and you're depressed.

[815] but if you come and say Jesus you know I've been unemployed for two years and I have a really serious health problem and my child is deathly ill and my wife is an alcoholic and my father has Alzheimer's disease and we're going to get kicked out of our house next week and I don't know what the hell to do it's like you're not depressed you might be depressed too but but it's no wonder it's like no wonder you feel terrible that's terrible and so and you actually do different things if you're a clinician under those circumstances, like for me, if I see someone who's depressed, but their life is in order, one of the first things I suggest to them is you should try an antidepressant because something's gone wrong, and you could try an antidepressant for a month, and there's a bit of risk, but not as much risk as there is in being depressed, and you might find that it actually just fixes it up, and that happens to people quite frequently.

[816] Now, it's very difficult, generally, to entice people or convince them to take an antidepressant, because, especially if they're conscientious because they think, oh, you know, that's a cop out and I should do this myself, and, you know, it's just a chemical treatment and so on and so forth, and fair enough.

[817] But, you know, people get sick, and one of the ways they get sick is that their mood gets dysregulated, and if you take an antidepressant and it works, then you won't jump off a bridge, and that's really quite a good thing, because once you jump off a bridge, there's no coming back, and it's a real risk with depression.

[818] And then if you just have a terrible life, it's like, well, you do something completely different therapeutically, you still might recommend an antidepressant because maybe it'll take a bit of the edge off, but then you start helping the person put their life together to the degree that that's possible.

[819] And so, I would say to this 25 -year -old ambitious woman, you're too alone in the world, far too alone.

[820] You need some friends.

[821] You need a network at work.

[822] You need to develop your social network.

[823] you need an intimate relationship, and in all likelihood you need a family.

[824] Because, like, what the hell else are you going to do once you're 50 and onward?

[825] That's another thing that young people don't think about.

[826] It's like, you know, I just had a grandchild last year.

[827] My kids are getting married, and we're looking forward to more grandchildren.

[828] And one of the things you notice as you get older, I mean, I've had a great career.

[829] You know, I'm one of those people who have been very fortunate.

[830] I've actually had a career, and it's been incredibly meaningful.

[831] And even so, as I get older, what becomes?

[832] increasingly important to me are my wife, my kids, my parents, like my family, that just that the importance of that grows rather than decreases across time.

[833] And, you know, I'm hoping when I'm 70 that I'll have grandkids and I'll be surrounded by people that I love and that that's one of the places that you find the deep sustaining meaning in life.

[834] So career ambition is not sufficient, not by any stretch of the imagination and we should stop lying to young women about the structure of the world, because we certainly do that, and it's really too bad.

[835] So, all right, what do you think about people putting you on a pedestal and agreeing with everything you say?

[836] Well, I wouldn't say that people agree with everything I say.

[837] That's the first thing.

[838] It's a good, you know, I mean, because I've certainly been, what would you say, exposed to plenty of resistance to what I've said, or what I've said?

[839] more accurately what people think I've said when they don't pay any attention to what I've actually said.

[840] But there's a serious, even though the question is, what would you call it, it's in cautious in its formulation, there's something real about the question.

[841] There's a real danger in that sort of thing, being regarded as an authority, let's say.

[842] So what do I think about that?

[843] It's more like, what do I do about it?

[844] And what I do about it is pay attention.

[845] I watch the YouTube comments.

[846] I watch the Twitter comments.

[847] I keep an eye on social media.

[848] I look at the memes that people are generating of me. And there's lots of them.

[849] And the memes are actually really useful because they're pretty...

[850] They're the activity of the court jester, right?

[851] Because the meme makers are acting comedically.

[852] And so they're satirizing me. me in various ways.

[853] And the memes in general are good -hearted.

[854] And so my sense is if the court gesture isn't vicious, then you're probably not too stupid.

[855] And so I'm watching that to see that the satire stays light -hearted because that means that I haven't made any particular egregious mistakes.

[856] And then I've also been very careful with what I say and continue to be very careful with what I say because there's great danger in a misstep.

[857] There has been for a long time, and I suppose the more people that are listening to what I'm saying, the more danger of the misstep for better or worse.

[858] And then I've surrounded myself with people who are attentive and clear -headed.

[859] And I talk to them all the time about what's going on around me so that I can stay oriented and I listen to what they say.

[860] So my wife is one of those people.

[861] She travels around with me, and she's a tough -minded, sensible person who's been through her own trials by fire, and she watches what's happening and gives me a slap whenever that's necessary, which is probably minor slap two or three times a day, at a major slap about once a week.

[862] And my kids keep an eye on me, and they do the same thing, and I have a couple of friends who've been watching everything that's been happening since the beginning and they have no compunctions whatsoever about sharing their opinion and so and I'm paying attention to all that because I'm hoping that this will be good it is good and that it will continue to be good and so and then I'm also not 20 and and like this isn't this isn't going to my head the way it might if I wasn't 55 56 I've already done lots of things in my life and shepherded through people through incredibly difficult circumstances.

[863] And so I think I'm fundamentally a sensible person, and although prone to my own certain kinds of errors, and since I'm fundamentally sensible and I've surrounded myself with people who are awake and critical, then I'm hoping that this will continue to unfold properly.

[864] So, and so far, that seems to be the case.

[865] One example of that is these lectures, these discussions, because they're insanely positive.

[866] So, and that's a good thing.

[867] And my sense is that most of the people who are coming to hear me talk are doing it.

[868] The political reasons are radically secondary, and that most people who are coming to hear me talk are coming because they're trying to put their lives together as individuals.

[869] And I don't see in that anything but good.

[870] And that's what people tell me when I meet them afterwards.

[871] So I'm going to meet about 150 of you afterwards.

[872] And everybody tells me something to say to me, and it's usually something like I've been trying to put my life together, and it's working, and that's really good.

[873] So I'm pleased about that, and thank you.

[874] And so that's a great thing for people to say.

[875] And as long as that keeps happening, then I'm going to assume that this is all good.

[876] So Anonymous, do you have any advice for a young woman who's smart, beautiful, and successful, but who can't find a man. The thing I want the most is a husband and four kids.

[877] Sure.

[878] Go online.

[879] I have this future authoring program that John made reference to.

[880] Write out exactly what you want in a partner.

[881] And write it out for you, so that you're telling the truth to yourself, write out exactly what you're looking for.

[882] Then set up a dating program.

[883] file and say exactly that.

[884] You know, you can edit it for privacy, but just say exactly what you want and see what happens.

[885] So, because you'll probably get what you want.

[886] It'll take some work and there'll be some frogs to kiss along the way, let's say.

[887] But I think if you just laid out your argument, truthfully.

[888] See, and here's the thing to think about too is the more truthfully you lay out what you want, the more, the higher the probability that the right person will read it respond.

[889] So I think you can get what you want, but you have to specify it and you have to communicate it and I actually think that's true in life in general is that I think you can get what you need and want, but you have to specify it, and then you have to sacrifice everything necessary to attain it.

[890] And so I think that's how the world works.

[891] I mean, and I know that there's an element of luck.

[892] I know that people can get cut off at the knees, but it's still your best bet.

[893] So, which books have you?

[894] you read on Jung exactly.

[895] I've read everything he published except for what's been released in the last 10 years.

[896] So that's about 30 volumes, something like that.

[897] Is diversity really a strength?

[898] How can it be?

[899] Well, it depends on what you mean by diversity.

[900] Randomly selecting people on the basis of their race, gender and ethnicity for participation in intellectual endeavors.

[901] That's not diversity.

[902] That's But there's lots of forms of diversity that are a strength, you know, because people bring different talents and abilities to the table, and you can match those talents and abilities to the situation.

[903] I mean, I can give you an example of diversity as strength.

[904] It's a good political example.

[905] So we've learned over the last 30 years that what the fundamental elements of human temperament are looks like we're kind of five -dimensional people differ in extroversion which is assertiveness and enthusiasm they differ in neuroticism which is withdrawal sort of fear and volatility defense of aggression they differ in agreeableness that's compassion and politeness they differ in conscientiousness that's industriousness and orderliness and they differ in openness to experience which is basically creativity and interest in ideas and if you want to find out what you're like, by the way, sort of objectively.

[906] You can go online.

[907] I have this personality test at a site called understand myself .com, and it'll give you your position on the five basic factors and then the ten aspects that I also laid out.

[908] And it's useful and interesting.

[909] You might want to even do that.

[910] If you have older kids, it's useful to do that with them because you'll find out things about your kids that you didn't know.

[911] I had my kids do this test several times when I was developing it, and I kept learning things about them.

[912] I thought I knew them really well.

[913] And I suppose I did, but I was still surprised by elements of their personality that I hadn't seen.

[914] So, one of the things we've learned as a consequence of laying out the structure of temperament is that there's a relationship between temperament and political belief.

[915] And so it turns out that you kind of vote your temperament.

[916] But it's even deeper than that.

[917] Because the way you think you think about the world is that you look at the facts that are out there and then you dispassionately assess them.

[918] generate your political opinions.

[919] But you do that a little bit, but not very much, not unless you're really educated politically, and almost no one is, including me. What you do instead is your temperament filters the set of facts for you, and you derive your conclusions from that set of filtered facts.

[920] And so liberal left -leading types tend to be high in openness, so that's creativity and interest in ideas, and low in conscientiousness, and that's industriousness and orderliness.

[921] particularly low in orderliness, not so much in industriousness.

[922] And so they're the creative types.

[923] And then the right wing types, the conservative types, are low in openness to experience and high in conscientiousness.

[924] And so what does that mean?

[925] Well, the conscientious types do pretty well, because conscientiousness is a really good predictor of long -term life success in more conservative occupations.

[926] So managerial and administrative occupations, for example, And academia, for that matter, your success is well predicted by how conscientious you are.

[927] And so conscientious people are industrious and dutiful.

[928] They do what they say they're going to do.

[929] If you have a task to do and everyone knows how to do it, you want to find a conscientious person and they'll do it.

[930] And so conscientious people are really good at running things.

[931] But they're damn poor at inventing them.

[932] now the liberal types by by comparison tend to be you find the creative artist types among the liberal left leaning types and that includes the entrepreneurs because entrepreneurs are more like artists than they are like managers and administrators and so this is really cool as far as I'm concerned because what it means is that we need the liberal left leaning types to generate businesses but they need the conservatives to run them and that's a good example of diversity and you see that in your own organization is that you're going to need people who are diligent, industrious, reliable, rule -following algorithm executors, managers and administrators.

[933] And they're the people to rely on if you know what the hell you're doing and you need it done efficiently.

[934] But you're going to have to sprinkle in there creative -disruptive types because now and then your company is going to go off the rails if you only do what you're doing when the environment shifts around and you need people to think laterally.

[935] And it's the case in the economy in general.

[936] We need the radical thinkers to produce transformations when they're necessary, but we need the conservative types to implement sensible solutions.

[937] And then the purpose of the political dialogue and the reason for the necessity of free speech is so that these two temperamental types can communicate to keep everything in the proper center.

[938] Like the center moves around, eh, where you're supposed to be.

[939] Sometimes you need more conservative approaches, and sometimes you need more radical approaches and you don't know when which of those solutions is correct and so the way you figure that out is by talking that's why free speech is the fund one of the reasons why free speech is fundamentally axiomatic you can't have a successful polity without free speech because you need the different temperamental types to communicate to solve the current problems of the day and so that's a really good example of why diversity is necessary you know it's horrible because, you know, the liberal left -leaning types, they view the conservatives with suspicion because the conservatives are always hemming them in and boxing them in and keeping the borders tight and making everything organized and drives the liberal types crazy.

[940] And then, of course, the conservative types can't stand the liberals because they're always breaking down boundaries and violating barriers and arguing for the free flow of everything and murking everything up and coming up with all sorts of cockamaney ideas.

[941] But, well, this is the thing about creativity.

[942] Like, first of all, if you're creative, you're probably poor.

[943] Right?

[944] Because it is viciously difficult to monetize creativity.

[945] And look, here, let me give you an example.

[946] So let's say your city, you've got a city, and part of it's falling apart.

[947] And, you know, it's sort of a ratty neighborhood, but it's got a not too bad architectural bones, and there's some things about it.

[948] They're a little bit cool.

[949] And so what happens?

[950] Well, all the artists move there.

[951] Right?

[952] And they open galleries, and they show their strange.

[953] work and they start to make it a little cool and then the coffee shop people come in and they're like the next tier of creative and they think oh this is cool we better open a coffee shop so we can hang out with all the artists and then you know then the trendy chains move in and then the real estate prices start to go up and a bunch of people get rich but it's not the artists they don't make any money at all they're still starving to death in their garrets and so they have to wander off to some other uninhabited part of the city and start again and you don't make any, you can't make any money as a creative visual artist, you can't make any money as a musician, you can't make any money as a sculptor or a dancer or an actor, like you're going to be poor and really poor and probably miserable, except for a tiny fraction of people who will become fantastically successful.

[954] And so creativity is a high risk, high return game.

[955] And the probability that you'll fail is almost certain, but now and then you'll succeed spectacularly in what you do change the whole world.

[956] And so, well, and so part of the reason that the conservatives are skeptical of the creative types is because they think, yeah, well, most of those ideas are stupid and dangerous, and that's absolutely true.

[957] Stupid, dangerous, and counterproductive, except for the tiny minority that are absolutely crucial and vital.

[958] And that's the problem that we have in adapting to the world in general, right, is that we've got some things that are working.

[959] So the managers and the administrators, the conservative types are beadling away, making those things work but the whole environment shifts on us and then we think oh oh we need a radically new idea to adjust our society so then we have to generate like a thousand radical ideas most of which are just absolutely catastrophic but one or two of which which are are absolutely vital and then we have to do the terribly difficult process of sifting through all that chaff to pull out the wheat and that's what we do in our honest political dialogue at least in part and so and there's no solving that problem.

[960] It's a permanent problem, which is why we have to be alert and awake, and we have to talk freely, because that's how we solve that emergent problem.

[961] And so that's, that's diversity.

[962] So, can a capable but extremely shy person overcome their social limitations to do well in the workplace on their own, or do they need professional help?

[963] What kind?

[964] Well, you know, first of all, I would say that you're already 80 % of the way to solving your problem because this is a truism for for therapy you can't if you already know you have a problem and you want to overcome it then you're like three -quarters cured and then it's a good time to go see a therapist now why would you see a therapist well you have a problem you say you you're obviously know that you have some social limitations and and that's interfering with the full manifestation of your capability and so I would say, find a behavioral psychologist, find one who's trained at an American Psychological Association approved school, who has a PhD with a research background, because that person will, at minimum, be intelligent.

[965] And the reason for that, well, there's a reason for that.

[966] The reason is that they went to a clinical program, like a clinical psychology program, and they're damn hard to get into.

[967] Like, you have to have a grade point average that's A plus, and you have to have done very well on a standardized test.

[968] And so that means at minimum that you're smart.

[969] So that's a good place to start.

[970] So find someone like that, go talk to them, see if you can talk to them, if you can, and if they'll listen, that's good.

[971] And then you can make a plan for expanding your social ability.

[972] And it's complicated.

[973] So if you're shy, you're probably not very extroverted, and you might be a little higher than average.

[974] in neuroticism that would make so you're you're not outgoing and assertive and you're afraid of people that would that's the real double -barrel shyness and so then you could go talk to someone and make a plan and if it's interfering with your professional development especially if you're really capable then yeah you can overcome it like introverted people can become very socially skilled but they have to do it consciously and they have to do it programmatically and you could do it on your own like you could decide that you were going to take someone out for lunch once a week or twice a week and you could make a really concerted effort to expand your social network.

[975] But I would say it'd be easier to go talk to someone about it and not to talk to them because you have a psychological problem, which is why I'd see a behavioral psychologist because they're very good at strategic planning, that it's a practical problem, is that you're not social enough to make full use of your talents.

[976] So fix it.

[977] And it'll take like two or three years probably to get really good at it.

[978] I had a client who was extremely shy.

[979] She couldn't, even though she was seeing me in this therapeutic relationship, when we first met, she wouldn't go and have coffee with me at the little coffee shop downstairs, because that was like an exposure exercise.

[980] Let's just go sit and have coffee.

[981] It's like, no way she wasn't going to do that.

[982] And she ended up doing, she did stand -up comedy.

[983] Yeah, so that's a hell of a transformation, man. And so you can get a long way, you can get an awful long way with diligent effort and incremental improvement.

[984] So I would say, do, do, go, go talk to, what have you got to lose, man?

[985] A couple hours, a bit of trouble.

[986] You could go talk to someone and formulate a plan to develop your social ability, and you, and it would work.

[987] If you, if you practice it, you'll get good at it.

[988] And you'll never become extroverted and people will probably always wear you out to some degree because that's one of the things you know if you're introverted if you go out to a group of people and you get worn out because if you're extroverted you just get more and more excited about the fact that there are people around you but if you're introverted it's like oh god i got to go and recover that's that's introversion yeah one more okay so this is kind of this is kind of similar here oh no it just disappeared Please elaborate on your comment regarding enforced monogamy.

[989] Jesus.

[990] There seems to be a lot of confusion and controversy with regards to it.

[991] Yeah, well, the confusion and controversy was built into the article.

[992] The woman that interviewed me knew exactly what I bloody well meant by enforced monogamy.

[993] She wasn't stupid.

[994] She had a graduate degree from Columbia.

[995] And I talked to her about enforced monogamy for like two minutes out of the two days I spent with her.

[996] So, the fact that that even was highlighted in the article was, I think, a cheap trick on her part, and she knew it.

[997] What did it mean?

[998] It meant what anthropologists have known for 100 years, and that isn't even vaguely controversial.

[999] Societies all over the world tend towards the enforcement of monogamous social norms.

[1000] And the reason for that is that it's the best structure for kids.

[1001] That's the fundamental reason, because it's better that kids have...

[1002] two parents and that the research data on that is perfectly clear and that doesn't mean that every single parent is doing a bad job but overall having two parents is associated with much better outcomes on virtually every measure that's been assessed and that's because having kids is really hard it takes 18 years it's like it's too much for one person so and then monogamous societies tend to be a lot more peaceful than polygamous societies And so that's another reason.

[1003] And then another reason is that it seems better for women, especially if they want to have children, to have a stable, monogamous partner.

[1004] And so all I was pointing out was that there are valid reasons for the social enforcement of monogamous norms.

[1005] It's like, oh, enforced monogamy.

[1006] Oh my God, you know.

[1007] He wants to take women at gunpoint and distribute them to useless men.

[1008] It's like, well, it's so stupid.

[1009] It's so.

[1010] stupid.

[1011] You know, for, I mean, here's why.

[1012] Here's why.

[1013] No one wants to do that.

[1014] No one.

[1015] There isn't a human being who wants to do that.

[1016] So if you're going to go after someone to pillory them, you should at least accuse them of holding a view that someone actually holds.

[1017] So, anyways, most of that's died off.

[1018] It was so, it was so ridiculous.

[1019] I just couldn't believe it so but there's been lots of ridiculous things that have happened and that's that was definitely one of them so um all right that's probably good thank you very much everyone it was a pleasure to see you and thank you very much for coming out good night if you found this conversation meaningful you might think about picking up dad's books, maps of meaning, the architecture of belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 Rules for Life and Antidote to Chaos.

[1020] Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1021] See jordanb peterson .com for audio, e -book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

[1022] I really hope you enjoyed this podcast.

[1023] If you did, please leave a rating at Apple Podcasts, a comment, a review, or share this episode with a friend.

[1024] If you didn't enjoy it, please do not leave a rating.

[1025] Next week's podcast is going to be a conversation between dad and Stephen Pinker.

[1026] Dr. Stephen Pinker is the Johnstone family professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and is also taught at Stanford and MIT.

[1027] He's an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations.

[1028] Stay tuned for that next week and more updates.

[1029] Hope everyone's week is wonderful.

[1030] Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram at Jordan