A Dialogue with Tom Amarque

[0] Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] You can support these podcasts by donating the amount of your choice to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, which can be found by searching Jordan Peterson Patreon, or by finding the link in the description.

[2] Dr. Peterson's self -development programs, self -authoring, can be found at self -authoring .com.

[3] This week's episode features Tom Amark, a German philosopher, writer, publisher, and publisher.

[4] podcaster.

[5] With his podcast, lateral conversations, he seeks out new developments and perspectives in philosophy, psychology, and spirituality, trying to overcome the pitfalls of what is known as postmodernity.

[6] You can find him at tom dashamark .de.

[7] Dr. Peterson, thank you very much for joining me in this podcast.

[8] It's a pleasure.

[9] You know, identity politics and gender and and the whole issues about gender pronouns.

[10] There's a heated debate on that here in Europe, in Germany, as well, as I noted in Canada and the United States.

[11] So you posted some videos about your refusal to use this gender pronouns and about the problems of political correctness.

[12] So can you, in short, elaborate a little bit on this?

[13] Yeah, well, I made videos back in September because there was a move afoot in Canada, which is still progressing forward, to make the use of these pronouns derived from postmodern philosophy, like Z and Zer and so on, essentially mandatory if someone requests them under, and the failure to use them, let's say, is punishable by a variety of rather punitive, measures, including potentially jail time if the charges work their way thoroughly through the system.

[14] But at minimum, the possibility for being brought before the Human Rights Commissions in Canada, which have become social justice tribunals, essentially, brought before the Human Rights Tribunal, not the Human Rights Commission.

[15] And these are, I would say, kangaroo courts that have been set out outside the standard traditional legal system to enforce these more radical neo -Marxist policies that are becoming extraordinarily prevalent in the legislative system.

[16] So I made some videos about that and also about the University of Toronto and other large institutions attempts to essentially diagnose their workers using the implicit association test, which is hypothetically a test of unconscious, racial bias and then to re -educate them out of that unconscious racial bias.

[17] So those videos caused a lot of commotion to say the least.

[18] So that was back in September and I've been involved in a, I suppose, philosophical battle that has political implications ever since.

[19] So these are the political aspects, but from more psychological or sociological perspective, What are the main problems of the obligation to use those gender?

[20] Well, there's never been legislation in Canada.

[21] Our legal code is basically derived from English common law, although we also have a province that uses the French civil code, and so there's a bit of a conflict between the legal traditions in Canada.

[22] But basically, it's English common law derived, and there's never been legislation in Canada that compels the use of certain language.

[23] I mean, there are restrictions on free speech, like you can't incite someone to commit a crime, for example, and you can't make a direct threat to someone's safety or life, but there's never been legislation that actually demands use of a certain kind of language, and that's a border.

[24] See, I don't really care so much about the gender pronoun issue.

[25] It just happened to be the, what would you call it, the issue where this sort of, where this sort of of thing came to a point, but I don't believe that the government should be in the business of compelling speech on any issue.

[26] I think it's an unbelievably dangerous line to cross, and I especially object to crossing it in service of a post -modernist ideology about the socio -culture determination of such things as so -called gender identity.

[27] I very much object to having that viewpoint instantiated in the law.

[28] So in the relevant legislation, not only are, is there, is there moves afoot to make certain kind of speech mandatory, but there's a view of human identity that's also been instantiated into the legislation and the surrounding policy.

[29] And that, that view is extraordinarily philosophically paradoxical and, and poorly formulated.

[30] At best, it insists that sexual identity, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity very independently, which they most certainly do not, even though there are exceptions.

[31] And that's being taught as dogma in schools, in secondary schools now.

[32] that idea is invading the secondary schools because of a conscious push on the part of the postmodern ideologues who are pushing this sort of thing.

[33] And they've actually even weakened that to some degree because you can make a coherent case that gender identity, which is a phrase I'm not very fond of, but we'll use it for the time being.

[34] You can make a case that gender identity has sociocultural, that sociocultural phenomena play a role.

[35] in determining gender identity and gender expression, of course, because that's merely fashion.

[36] But the legislation, the way it stands, now the wording of the surrounding policies, insists, A, that there's no biological determination of such things whatsoever.

[37] B, that it is actually more dependent on personal choice and whim even than on sociocultural determination.

[38] So they weren't even able to make a coherent case for pure sociocultural.

[39] determination.

[40] They had to water that down so that such things as gender identity have now become something that you can transform by mere fiat of your own accord at any place or time for any reason, and that everyone is required to go along with that.

[41] Yeah, but where does a notion come that we don't have a biological base for our gender?

[42] Yeah, well, that's, well, apparently, you know, the people who are pushing this, I had a debate with a lecture at the University of Toronto named Nicholas Matt on Canadian Published TV, public TV, and he stated forthrightly that there's no biological differences between men and women and said that that was the scientific consensus of research conducted over the last four decades.

[43] And of course, nothing could be farther from the truth than that.

[44] There are innumerable biological differences between men and women, even though there is substantial overlap, obviously, given that we're the same species.

[45] But there's no admitting that because to admit for sort of biological determination, right?

[46] It's not even biological determination, right?

[47] It's not the right way to think about it.

[48] It's biological influence.

[49] And, I mean, if you put enough cultural pressure on a biological organism, you can transform it in all sorts of different ways.

[50] But you're still transforming it within a set of, you might describe, as universal human attributes.

[51] I mean, a good example of that.

[52] A good analogy is language.

[53] Human beings have an innate proclivity for language, whatever that happens to be, whatever that innate proclivity is, we don't really understand it.

[54] And then, of course, the form that language takes, the specific form, depends on the sociocultural surround.

[55] But the fact that language is created socioculturally doesn't mean that the proclivity for language doesn't have biological roots.

[56] And the idea that there's no biological influence on human behavior is pretty, pretty much the same idea as there's human beings have no body which is of course a completely absurd proposition and we have two eyes that's biologically determined you know we we are hungry we're thirsty where we have sexual desires we have defensive aggression there's all sorts of inbuilt systems way low in the brain that determine and or that shape our behavior so it's a crazy idea and yes I'm sorry but I just had a thought Do you think there is a relation between this denial of the realm of the physical body of those gender theories on the one side and on the other side this crazy aggressiveness which those people exhibit like, I don't know if you have seen this video of the German University in Magdeburg where they're supposed to be a gender conference and the guy was supposed to be having a lecture and there were like these radical leftist students who behaved more or less like Nazis.

[57] And I just remember the idea of William Reich, who observed this relation between suppression of sexuality and of body in a way and this aggressiveness.

[58] So do you see there also a relationship?

[59] Or is that something?

[60] Well, I think there's, that's an interesting question.

[61] I think there's two things happening.

[62] One is that if the facts don't support your ideology, then all you have left is to enforce it is force or legal fiat, and that's what's happening in Canada, certainly, is the reason the postmodernists have taken the legal route is because they've failed on the scientific front.

[63] They've failed dreadfully on the scientific front.

[64] I mean, one of the best examples of that is that there's a very good literature now on personality differences between men and women, personality differences and differences in intrinsic interest.

[65] And so large -scale studies have been carried out using psychometrically valid personality uh personality instruments and they've looked cross culturally at at temperamental and personality differences between men and women and the social constructionist hypothesis would basically be that as a culture moves more towards egalitarian social policies that the personality and interest differences between men and women would decrease but that's actually the opposite of what happened and so There are large -scale population studies showing that the biggest personality differences between men and women in the world are manifested in the Scandinavian countries, and they've been increasing as their policies have become more egalitarian.

[66] And the reason for that is that as you flatten out the sociocultural differences between men and women, the genetic differences maximize, because that's all that's left, the only source of variability that's left is biological.

[67] And so there's reason for them to use increasing, let's call it, political pressure to drive home their point because they can't do it any other way.

[68] And then there's another factor that I think is very interesting.

[69] This is more speculative, but I think it's relevant.

[70] We've been looking at political correctness as a political ideology, trying to understand its psychometric structure, which means we've been examining how the set of ideas whether the set of ideas loosely identified as politically correct actually cohere in a regular manner.

[71] Because if they don't, then there's no such thing as a set of beliefs that you could describe as politically correct.

[72] So it's an empirical question.

[73] We analyzed a set of about 400 questions that were derived from media reports of political correctness and so forth, trying to establish the large network of potential relationships.

[74] And we found that two tight sets of political ideas clumped together.

[75] other so there's actually two forms of political correctness one we described as political correct liberalism and the other as politically correct authoritarianism but both of them are linked by a trait called agreeableness okay now agreeable people are compassionate and polite and women are more agreeable than men and it looks like it's fundamentally the dimension of maternal behavior now the interesting thing about maternal behavior is that if you're operating on the maternal circuit, let's say, have a strong proclivity to treat the world like it's composed of predators and vulnerable infants.

[76] And as far as we can tell, that accounts for the demonization of the opposition among the politically correct, is that any group that's tagged with the vulnerable descriptor, so any group hypothetically that has been oppressed or that is suffering is instant.

[77] cast into the role of innocent infantile victim who can do no harm.

[78] And then anyone who is outside of that protected group is treated as a predator.

[79] And I think that people basically use the snake detection and eradication circuitry that's a deeply evolved part of our psyche to as the underlying metaphor for the predator.

[80] And then the logical response to the presence of a is to eliminate it, essentially, however that might be necessary.

[81] And so you see that manifesting itself.

[82] It's one of the things that manifests itself in these political displays.

[83] The idea that the opposition should just be shut down, terminated, never talked to, just eliminated.

[84] And obviously, that's an unbelievably dangerous oversimplification.

[85] Now, I mean, that the opposition should just be shut down.

[86] out because the opposition actually has something to say that might be relevant.

[87] Partly, all groups that are not thriving are not innocent victims.

[88] That's the first part.

[89] And everyone who's outside of that group is not automatically a predatory demon.

[90] So I think it's common because the very people that deny the biological effect, the effects of biological determination are acting it out in their political action.

[91] so it's black problem exactly so this is one of those performative contradictions of postmodernism I guess so but before we come to this you know when you posted this video where you analyzed a little bit the game structure of the PC game you know and it reminded me a little bit about this old theory by Eric Byrne I don't know if you know him games people play so yeah he had this basic structure you have a proposal for example you identify yourself as a victim this is what you were characterizing and then there's a trick and you can accuse and thread everybody who doesn't behave in the way you want them to so yes so what was it an inspiration for this thing or well i don't i don't think it's hard to say because i read burn a long long time ago it's probably 30 years or something like that now so you never know what influences you're thinking, but it wasn't a conscious influence.

[92] I've been thinking more in terms of political beliefs, especially oversimplified ones, as compression algorithms.

[93] That's a way of thinking about it, because the world is a place that's so complex that it's really beyond human understanding.

[94] And so what we do as a consequence of that is use simplifying heuristics to clump diverse things into homogenous groups so that we can treat them as if they're one thing.

[95] And that's very useful frequently.

[96] Like it's useful to have a category of dog, for example, which is you can think about that as a low resolution representation that averages the difference across all dogs into a single entity.

[97] Now, you know, the category dog is a good category unless you face a mean dog, in which case the category dog needs to be differentiated into nice dogs and mean dogs.

[98] And you don't want to differentiate your categories more than is necessary for functional utility.

[99] But you do need to differentiate them enough so that you're not obscuring relevant differences.

[100] Now, that's a very tricky thing because what's relevant and what isn't is very, very difficult to calculate.

[101] But these political beliefs are hyper -simplifying algorithms that can be applied.

[102] not only to opinion, that's the thing that's interesting, is that the simplifying algorithms actually structure perception itself.

[103] And so, and that's been exaggerated to some degree, I think, by the rise of the Internet.

[104] But if you see the world through your temperament, say, and that hasn't been modified by strenuous logical thought, then you're going to, your unconscious neural mechanisms are automatically going to highlight certain phenomena and suppress others, make them truly make them invisible.

[105] And it has to happen that way because you need to make most of the world invisible because otherwise you can't operate.

[106] But there's a danger in that in that now and then the things that you make invisible are the crucial phenomena.

[107] That's often why people make mistakes.

[108] But the problem is that it's happening at the level of perception.

[109] And so people, imagine that you could present yourself with an unbiased field of facts.

[110] You can't, but you could just imagine that that was possible.

[111] But then when you view the field of facts, your temperament highlights some and filters out others.

[112] And so, and then you might derive your conclusions based on those facts and feel that it's merely a consequence of logical operators, but it's not.

[113] It's the old problem essentially that Kant identified when he, when he structured his critique of pure reason, is that the facts don't array themselves in an unbiased manner because you bring a perceptual structure to your field of apprehension and that a priori structure is how the world manifests itself to you.

[114] Now you can change that but it's hard.

[115] It takes effort and training and thought and all of those things.

[116] So that's very interesting because it leads us to another topic namely postmodernism.

[117] I mean there's no broad consensus about what postmodernism or postmodernity is, but you can argue in a way that this thinking, which is in a way derived from Piaget and a lot of other guys, that this is like a discovery of postmodernism.

[118] You know, like, okay, we are constructing in this way, by our temperament, our own subjective reality.

[119] That doesn't mean the objective reality, but our way, how we perceive it.

[120] Yeah.

[121] So...

[122] No, go ahead.

[123] So, no, and my question was because you are in a way critical about post -modernism.

[124] But in my understanding, you know, post -modernism is a worldview which emerged out of the horrors, so to speak, from modernity.

[125] You know, like feminism and constructivism, all the good things that emerged in that time span of the last hundred years, more or less.

[126] But then something happened.

[127] And Habermost spoke about those performative contradictions, but now what is happening, that those contradictions invade our life in a way which we have never known before.

[128] You know, like constructivism leads to fake news and feminism deconstructing itself.

[129] What is your take on that?

[130] Well, first of all, I mean, I understand what the postmodernists.

[131] The postmodernists got caught up in a very common.

[132] complicated technical problem.

[133] And the technical problem is essentially that there's a very large number of ways to categorize any set of entities, even a small set of entities.

[134] So, for example, if you wanted to categorize a set of six books, there's a virtually unlimited number of ways you could do it.

[135] You could do it by height, thickness, width, date of publication, alphabetically by author alphabetically by name, what topic, number of E's, number of A's, length of the average word, length of the average sentence, length of the average paragraph, etc. You can multiply the number of categorical schemes that you could apply to that set of entities by all the properties of the entities.

[136] There's endless numbers of properties of the entities, especially when you also consider them as elements of a larger set, right?

[137] So there's the problem, and that's back to the problem of the infinite complexity of the world.

[138] Now, to deal with that, you have to impose an interpretive structure.

[139] And so the postmodernists ended up thinking, well, if you have to impose an interpretive structure, who's to say which interpretive structure is correct?

[140] There's an endless number of them.

[141] Well, that's a big problem.

[142] I mean, it's also a problem that's bedeviled artificial intelligence.

[143] So for a long time, the artificial intelligence researchers assumed that perception was a relatively straightforward matter and that the problem that needed to be solved with regards to building, like, say, intelligent robots that could act autonomously was to determine how to act upon the entities that were perceived.

[144] But as they started to build machines that could perceive, they discovered, and this was back in the early 60s that perception was such a complicated problem that it actually looked impossible.

[145] So what's happened, the way that's been solved essentially is that robots, artificial intelligence entities have had to become embodied and instantiated with specific purposes so that the problem of perception could be solved as a consequence of goal -directed action.

[146] So because what happens is that it's goal -directed action that sets the pragmatic frame for perception.

[147] Perception is a tool used to attain certain goals.

[148] It's not a way of observing, dispassionately observing an infinite set of variables.

[149] And so the postmodern has stumbled across that problem.

[150] It's, oh, my God, there's an infinite set of interpretations.

[151] Well, then, for example, how can we be sure that any interpretation of a text is canonically correct?

[152] And if we can't be sure that we're interpreting a text, in any canonically correct manner, how can we be sure that we're interpreting the world in a canonically correct manner?

[153] And the answer to that is, well, that's complicated, but part of the answer is you can't be sure.

[154] But then you can't say, well, just because interpretation is extraordinarily complex, all interpretations are therefore equal, which is the next postmodernist move, or that all interpretations are arbitrary, or that all interpretations are arbitrary, or that all interpretations necessarily only serve political ends, and that's where the postmodernists see.

[155] What happened with postmodernism is that if you take the philosophy to the logical conclusion, you can't act.

[156] Okay, but you can't not act, because then you die.

[157] So that's not an option, and so what's happened is that postmodernism has been remained nested inside the neo -Marxism, out of which it partially emerged.

[158] and with a postmodernist's default to Marxist presuppositions, value structures, whenever they need to act.

[159] And they just cover that over with a wave of the hand.

[160] It's like, well, yeah, everything's an interpretation except the idea that there are oppressed and oppressors.

[161] That's true.

[162] That's a canonical truth.

[163] And now we can use that to guide our action, and we're not going to brook any criticism of that idea because, well, then we would be paralyzed into inaction.

[164] And the fact that that's logically contradictory, we'll just.

[165] just wash that away with the hand -waving movement that claims, well, logic is a tool of the oppressor anyways.

[166] So it's an appallingly contradictory philosophy, but it doesn't matter because the postmodernists do claim that logic, they claim this forthrightly, Derrida in particular, that logic is part of phallogocentrism and that it's just the way that the patriarchal structure justifies its claims to power.

[167] so the postmodern is said that they dispensed with interpretation but they kept a few basic axioms this is also true of foucault it's like well everything's interpretation um except power power's real and and that's derived directly from the underlying marxism it's an appallingly incoherent philosophy and it's extraordinarily dangerous but these people also build themselves little airtight enclaves to keep to keep to keep inconvenient contradictions from themselves or other people hidden and so then they act out their contradictions in the world interesting okay so you you talked a lot about Piaget in your lectures and the stages of development so and I guess he stopped with a formal operational level of adult development so but I was wondering how much your worldview is informed by more differentiated stages models, because there are like models who say, okay, there's like a pluralistic or even more post -conventional, or there are more post -conventional stages up to being construct aware, how we deal with narratives and all that stuff.

[168] How much are you influenced by those?

[169] Well, I'll talk about Piaget a little bit.

[170] So Piaget believed that children basically entered the world with sets of reflexes at hand and that the reflexes were the precursors to a bootstrapping operation that brought the child into being as a fully -fledged entity.

[171] And so in some sense, he viewed the world as a field of information that the child could interact with.

[172] and and absorb the information, model it, imitate it, both in an embodied sense and also then in a conceptual sense, embodiment first, and then conceptualization.

[173] So for Piaget, the fundamental embodiment of a cup would be this, right?

[174] Because that's how you grip a cup, and so a cup is something to grip.

[175] And then once you've got the grip cup relationship, then you can conceptualize the grip relationship, and you can start talking about grip as an abstraction.

[176] But it's basically embodied.

[177] Okay, so now there's a problem with that, and the problem is that Pige didn't give enough credence to the underlying psychophysiological structure of the brain in addition to the reflexes.

[178] He thought about the reflexes as a set of, say, motor tendencies that were built in or even sensory motor tendencies.

[179] But we know a lot more about the underlying biological, substructure of the brain than we did when Piaget was formulating his theories.

[180] And we know now that there are sets of hypothalamic circuits, essentially, but other subcortical circuits that we share with animals going way down the phylogenetic chain, some of them as far back as crustaceans.

[181] So that's 350 million years.

[182] That would be the systems that keep track of dominance relationships, the serotonergic systems, which are extraordinarily ancient.

[183] And so Piaget didn't, understand, I don't think that the child who's constructing his or her world is constructing it within axiomatic games whose rules are already set to some degree.

[184] And one of those would be hunger, for example, inbuilt value structures like hunger or thirst, or temperature discomfort or pain.

[185] Those things are there to begin with.

[186] Those aren't constructed.

[187] Now, those loose, you could call those, them loose, low -resolution categories, like things to potentially eat.

[188] I mean, the child, when the child is putting things in its mouth, which it does, or mouthing things before it can even put things in its mouth, it's basically using an in -built schema to categorize the world.

[189] Things you can put in your mouth and things you can't.

[190] You can think about that as the lowest resolution representation of the world, you know.

[191] So, and then once you get things you can put in your mouth.

[192] mouth you can use your mouth and your tongue to start to differentiate those things into subcategories okay now okay so that's the first thing so piaje's theory suffers from a lack of grounding in these in the in a lack of of consideration of these underlying deep biological structures that act as a priori categorizers of the world and the world is categorized in terms of the thing and its implication for action because that's the basic category structure it's not it's not objective reality there isn't an objective reality for human beings what there is is a pragmatic reality and the pragmatic reality is the functional utility of category structures and it's it's pragmatic because we want to use our category structures to aid our survival and aid our reproduction if you want to think about it from a darwinian perspective it's value -laden right from the beginning.

[193] Okay, so there's that.

[194] And then, so that's a nice modification of Piage and it's necessary because otherwise it just becomes arbitrary construction.

[195] But Piage was also smart enough to know that the constructivism, the construction project wasn't arbitrary.

[196] And the reason for that was that it was social.

[197] And so, for example, while you two, you and I are having this conversation, we're mutually constructing the category systems that we're using to structure the conversation because otherwise we wouldn't be able to understand each other.

[198] And so you can't just arbitrarily construct the world.

[199] You have, insofar as you're living with other entities, you have to engage in a joint construction strategy because otherwise you're autistic, philosophically.

[200] And if you take the fact of the necessity of joint construction, then that imposes certain limitations on the category structures that are going to be imposed.

[201] And so that's partly a solution to the postmodern dilemma.

[202] It's like, okay, so I read Dostoevsky.

[203] Well, how do I interpret it?

[204] Well, there's an infinite number of ways to interpret it.

[205] Okay, what if I want to interpret it and communicate with other people in a meaningful manner?

[206] Aha.

[207] Well, then all of a sudden, all sorts of limitations on the interpretation start to emerge.

[208] So I have to interpret it in a language we both share to begin with.

[209] And then I have to interpret it in ways that you're going to find relevant.

[210] So I'm not going to talk about the thickness of the pages, even though I could.

[211] You're going to look at me like there's something wrong with me because I've stepped outside of our implicitly shared axiomatic framework.

[212] And I'm off on some tangent that no sane human being would regard as relevant.

[213] The postmodernists don't understand that these shared networks of relevance are deeply biologically grounded and socially instantiated, even though they should understand that, and that puts a very, that puts unbelievably strict constraints on the interpretive framework.

[214] Now, Biaje said one more thing, which was absolutely brilliant, and this is part of the reason I admire his work so much, is that you can consider the construction of one of these shared frames of reference as a game.

[215] Now, the game, and games have certain rules, and one of them is that, for example, that we both have to want to play it.

[216] And the fact that we both have to want to play it means that the net or the space of all possible games is radically limited.

[217] You're going to play, want to play a game that has utility for you, and I'm going to want to play a game that has utility for me. And the intersection of those two desires is where we can play a joint game.

[218] And the space of all joint games is actually quite highly regulated.

[219] As you can tell, even by playing with a child, like there's instant rules that emerge when playing a game.

[220] And one of them is reciprocity.

[221] The other is something like an equal chance to win.

[222] Another is that the one who's more skilled gets to win.

[223] And without having those expectations built into the game, then people will reject the game.

[224] And that's part of how Piaget started to conceptualize the emergence of a genuine morality.

[225] Because a genuinely moral system consists of a set of hierarchically arranged games that everyone is playing voluntarily.

[226] And then he went one stage further, which was absolutely brilliant.

[227] He said, a set of playable games of that sort will beat another set of games that's imposed by force.

[228] Because the set of games that's imposed by force requires extra energy to enforce.

[229] So it's less efficient.

[230] It's like, God, it's brilliant, you know, because it gives you a way of conceptualizing the organization of moral systems as they emerge in a, in a socially interactive space and describes the constraints on the emergence of those systems.

[231] And you can see that echoed in animal behavior, in the construction of animal dominance herkes, especially in complex animals like wolves or chimpanzees.

[232] There's a finite space within which the chimpanzees can organize playable games.

[233] And so Franz de Wall, for example, has documented quite nicely, and so have other primatologists now that brute force on the part of the most dominant chimpanzees, is an unstable dominance hierarchy game.

[234] The brute force chip gets torn apart by his subordinates.

[235] Very much like, you know, tyrants tend to die a painful death.

[236] It's a non -stable game across large -scale spans of time.

[237] It reminds me a little bit there are quite a few post -modern theories and philosophies and what they have in common, like performatism.

[238] performatism and metamodernism and diggy modernism and all that forms is that they are solving that problem of postmodernity what you just laid out so everything is being relative and you have you don't have a frame of reference but the post -modern philosophies say argue well you can you can create some new meaning although you know you can't find any truth you can create some truth together in a way and this is like a similar argument right well they're right well okay so that's that's that's that's part of the issue but but there's a there's a there's a it's lacking the biology that that perspective because the other thing is is that the truth that you the truth that you construct jointly um have to their their practical truths roughly speaking they have to be have to be able to act them out in the world in a manner that produces what they intend and and that intention is going to be grounded in desire and so it isn't merely the idea that you and I have to agree on what the truth say say you and I come up with a plan okay so so we've we've constructed the plan jointly but now we have to go implemented in the world any category scheme is a plan that That's the thing.

[239] Any category scheme is a plan.

[240] It's not a description of the objective entities in the world.

[241] That's a mistake.

[242] And it's a bad mistake because it actually rests, for example, it rests on a misapprehension of human perception from a scientific perspective, but also from a practical perspective.

[243] Okay, so you and I conjure up a plan, and that's a way of viewing the world.

[244] And it's a value structure at the same time, because if it's a plan, it's oriented towards an aim.

[245] And we're always going to be oriented towards a name, because otherwise we're we're not going to be interested in the plan.

[246] And the reason for that, from a neuroscience perspective, is that interest only manifests itself in relationship to a goal, roughly speaking, if it's interest that you're going to act upon because the system that mediates interest is the dopaminergic system, and it's grounded in the hypothalamus, and it's an exploratory circuit.

[247] And so it kicks in when you specify a goal, and then it's the system that produces the positive emotion necessary to move towards the goal.

[248] And it's monitoring the environment to ensure that the category system that you're using to orient yourself towards the goal is functioning properly to move you towards that goal.

[249] So then we take the shared truth that we generated and we act it out in the world.

[250] And if the action in the world invalidates the theory, then we have to return to the drawing board.

[251] So it doesn't have to be correct the theory because it isn't going to be.

[252] It's never going to be 100 % correct.

[253] It just has to be good enough to get you to where you're going.

[254] Sure.

[255] So for example, if you have a map of the world, which is what your category scheme is, it's not a representation of the objective world.

[256] It's not finely differentiated enough to be that.

[257] If it was, the map would be the same size as the territory.

[258] And then it would be unwieldy because the map wouldn't provide a functional simplification of the territory.

[259] So you might say, well, is the map that you have of the territory correct or is it interpretation?

[260] And the answer is, well, it's interpretation because you're leaving all sorts of things out.

[261] But it's correct insofar as if you use the map, you get to where you're going.

[262] That's what the, see, that's what the North American pragmatists realized at the end of the 19th century.

[263] They were brilliant.

[264] And they knew that Darwinian theory was partly the key to the problem that the postmodernists were trying to solve.

[265] is that category schemes are subordinate to goal -directed action.

[266] And so they're constrained.

[267] My category schemes are constrained by the necessity of formulating them in a shared social space with you.

[268] But then, for example, one of the things that we will figure out post -hawk, both you and I, is whether the category scheme that we applied to this conversation not only served the function of our conversation, but when released into the world, finds an audience.

[269] And if it doesn't find an audience or people find it incomprehensible, then that's evidence that the category scheme that we use to structure our conversation was insufficient.

[270] Sure.

[271] And there's no escaping from that because you can't step outside motivated frames.

[272] You can to some degree if you apply scientific methodology because you're kind of averaging across motivated frames.

[273] then.

[274] But even then, you know, scientists don't spend time looking for, generally speaking, looking for useless facts.

[275] They're generally motivated.

[276] So science allows you to go out, to jump outside of it to some degree.

[277] But, but, and this is something that I've been arguing about, say, with Sam Harris, who's one of the, one of the people who've made atheism, you know, a kind of, what, intellectually hot topic again in America.

[278] Even scientific truth.

[279] is bounded by Darwinian considerations in some complex manner.

[280] I mean, Sam argues for the existence of objective facts, and I buy that.

[281] This was an interesting conversation.

[282] Your point basically was you can't derive an art for menis, and he said, well, you can.

[283] This was amazing.

[284] Well, the reason you can't is because there's too many ises.

[285] Exactly, but his argument was that you can.

[286] Yeah, but he never says how.

[287] That's the problem.

[288] This is something we never got to in the conversation, because Sam says, for example, well, we should work to increase the well -being of human beings.

[289] It's like, okay, Sam, no problem.

[290] I agree.

[291] Try measuring it.

[292] See how far you get.

[293] Because I know the measurement literature on well -being, and it's appalling.

[294] It's unbelievably oversimplified.

[295] It basically boils down to extroversion minus neuroticism, which is to say that happy people who aren't sad are happy.

[296] It's like, yeah, no kidding, but that's not useful.

[297] And so the well -being problem becomes unbelievably difficult technically, Because here's the set of problems.

[298] Okay, good for you.

[299] All right.

[300] Good for you when today, like this minute, this hour, today, this week, this month, those are not the same issues because cocaine is really good for you right now.

[301] But it's probably not good for you over a five -year period.

[302] And, you know, the thing about impulsive pleasure is that impulsive pleasures put before you the problem of time frame.

[303] Okay, so Piaget would say something like that.

[304] If it's good, it has to be good across the set of timeframes.

[305] So it has to be good for you now in a way that's good for you in an hour, in a way that's good for you for a day, et cetera, up to the limit of conceivable timeframes.

[306] So that puts stringent restrictions on what constitutes good.

[307] And then we might also say, well, it has to be good for you now in a way that's good for you tomorrow and in a week and in a month.

[308] but that's also good for your family, in a way that's good for the community, in a way that's good for the polity, and then out from that.

[309] And so then what you get is a stacking of ethical requirements.

[310] And once you stack up those ethical requirements, the number of games that you can play to meet those ethical requirements becomes extraordinarily limited.

[311] And it's my contention that it's the solutions to that set of stacked ethical games that's expressed in religious mythology.

[312] that's evolved across millennia, millennia.

[313] So one example would be for, and this is something the ancient Mesopotamians figured out when they were trying to figure out who should be, which deity should rule.

[314] Imagine that a bunch of tribes come together and they all have gods, and the gods are representations of their moral structure.

[315] They're more than that, but we'll call them that for now.

[316] Then the question becomes, whose God will rule, but even more practically, which God should rule.

[317] And so, see, this idea emerged in Mesopotamian mythology, which actually describes the battle of the gods for supremacy and the emergence of the metagod.

[318] And their metagod, the name of their metagod was Marduk.

[319] And Marduk had eyes all the way around his head.

[320] So the Mesopotamians realized that visual attention was one of the highest virtues.

[321] And he could speak magic words.

[322] And so the Mesopotamians realized that, The capacity for voluntary speech associated with the ability to pay attention was in the realm of the highest virtues.

[323] And then Marduk was also the god who would go out and fight the dragon of chaos.

[324] That was Taimat, who was one of the ancient gods, who was one of the two primal forces that created the world.

[325] She's actually the goddess of chaos.

[326] Her husband, Absu, was the god of order.

[327] So there's order in chaos that produce everything.

[328] And then chaos sometimes re -emerges to pull everything back down.

[329] Okay, so Marduk goes out to confront chaos voluntarily.

[330] And he cuts Tiamat into pieces and makes the world.

[331] And that's a constructivist idea.

[332] So the idea is that the highest God should be the capacity to pay attention, the ability to speak voluntarily, and the willingness to confront chaos and generate order.

[333] That idea is implicitly, that idea becomes implicit in general.

[334] Genesis, because the opening lines of Genesis where Yahweh creates the world.

[335] He creates it out of something called Tohu, Wabohu, or Teom.

[336] And that's derived from the word Tiamat.

[337] And so there's the idea in the Old Testament that it's the word of God that extracts order from chaos.

[338] And that's the highest deity.

[339] Do you think we're facing now like a chaotic time?

[340] I mean, when you look at the world, you have like a crazy person in the White House, you have nationalistic populist movements everywhere, basically.

[341] You have no great narratives, how to describe our social reality.

[342] So, and everything, everybody tries to figure out what is going on.

[343] So do you think this is like the beginning of the end, of postmodernism, the chaos reigns, and, and, okay, where, I think that's, I think that's exactly right.

[344] I mean, you see this in this strange idea that's become current in in in among the among people obsessed within the internet that that that current God is Kek k -E -K Egyptian God of chaos who is a frog the frog the frog is something that doesn't fit into categories right because it it transmutes as it grows because it starts as a tadpole but it's half in the water and half on the land and so yeah we're in it we're in a time of extreme chaos and we're trying to sort out whether we're going to to degenerate further into chaos, whether we're going to, what would you call it, devolve into a state of strict order, that's the call from the right, I would say.

[345] Or in my estimation, whether or not we're going to follow the pathway of Logos, which is the pathway that's laid forward in the ideas that I just described.

[346] Individuals have to confront the chaos with their own character and parsed it back into habitable order.

[347] But that's a matter of individual characterological development in my estimation, and that's the alternative to the radical left -wing post -modernist chaos and the call to a return to, you know, restrictive nationalistic identities that's characteristic of the call from the right.

[348] But yes, it's a very dangerous time.

[349] Yes, I mean the danger which may lie ahead may be tremendous.

[350] You know, it's like a time where a whole world view collapses in a way, and all the good things that post -modernity started with.

[351] You know, I mentioned this, this are now tumbling down, and you said this in your book, okay, the culture is always describable with these two archetypes, the good king and the bioter tyrant.

[352] Now when I see postmodernism, it's like, okay, feminism is eating its children now.

[353] Yeah, well, Tiamat has come back.

[354] Tiamat's a female god, right, in the Mesopotamian creation myth, and she decides to eat her children.

[355] That's what happens.

[356] She's tired of all the noise they're making.

[357] So it's like a feminist critique of the patriarchy fundamentally.

[358] That's what's acted out in the Anumae Lish.

[359] But the problem is, is that chaos is just as destructive a force as order.

[360] And the balance has to be struck between them.

[361] And I believe that, well, that the classic story, when chaos reigns is that the hero goes to the underworld to rescue his father.

[362] And what that means is that you go back into your culture and you find the values that have been lying dormant and you revivify them.

[363] And the value that's lying dormant in our culture is the logos, essentially.

[364] Because the idea that logos was the ultimate deity was criticized out of existence by the scientific revolution, roughly speaking.

[365] Because the scientists confused, and so did the religious people.

[366] The scientists and the religious people, confused the idea of logos with a scientific description of a set of facts.

[367] And it's not.

[368] Look, one of the things that Piaget said was that when you look at the history of facts, you find that facts dissolve and change as time transforms.

[369] Now, it's kind of a view that Thomas Coon shared.

[370] Now, that's not exactly true because some facts are more robust across time than others.

[371] Like the idea that things are made of protons is a pretty damn robust fact, and it's true across almost all possible frames of reference.

[372] So Piaget was wrong, and so was Coon, I think, because they failed to take into account that some sets of propositions are more robust to transformation than others.

[373] But be that as it may, there is still the case that sets of facts tend to transform, and so it's difficult to say what fact is permanent.

[374] But Piaget, performed a sleight of hand in respect to that and he said okay the facts themselves might not be able to be regarded as permanent but the process by which we derive the facts is permanent okay that's and he thought of that as this exploratory tendency that that that underlied the constructivist act there's something in you that's constructing okay well that thing that's in you is a permanent fact that's the logos and The question is whether or not the fundamental question, and this is something Christianity has been putting forward as the cardinal question for thousands and thousands of years in imagistic and implicit form, are you going to identify with the Logos?

[375] That's the key to salvation.

[376] And the Logos is the thing that uses communication to balance order and chaos.

[377] So, for example, in the classic Dragon Slayer type Logos myths, the hero is the person who goes out.

[378] beyond the confines of the community, comes into contact with the dangerous unknown, often given predatory form, because that's the circuit we use to conceptualize the unknown, and receive something of great value, which is then distributed to the community.

[379] Okay, that's, that's the oldest, that's one of the oldest stories of mankind.

[380] You can, you can think about that as the central story of mankind.

[381] It's the, it's the expression in narrative of our, of our evolved being.

[382] And then there's an adjunct to that story, which is, well, sometimes the hero goes out and confronts chaos and generates order.

[383] But sometimes the hero goes out and confronts a too rigid order, demolishes it, and recasts it.

[384] And so, like the Mesopotamian hero, for example, that's Marduk, is basically a St. George dragon slayer type.

[385] But Christ is more of a social reformer.

[386] Even though Yawa in the Old Testament is more like Marduk, he's a, he's the force, the logos force that creates order out of chaos using the divine word.

[387] But when Christ emerges on the mythological scene, let's say, he opposes the tyrannical state and poses the notion that it's adherence to truth and to and to spoken, it's adherence to spoken truth and orientation towards the highest good that's actually superordinate to the state.

[388] And that makes the state subordinate to the individual, to the logos element of the individual.

[389] And that's the fundamental proposition upon which Western culture base, rests.

[390] If you confront radical leftists and you want to confront the problems of postmodernity and all we have spoken about, so what is your solution to be that hero, to enact that logos and speak the truth?

[391] Yeah, that's exactly it.

[392] Well, and I could say to the postmodernists and the identity politics people, too, you can say you can just take their argument, push it to its logical conclusion.

[393] It's like you fractionate group identities until you come down to the level of the individual.

[394] See, the problem with the group identity idea is that the group identities, that's identity politics, is predicated on the idea that a group of people is a homogenous unit.

[395] But that's incorrect because you can take your homogenous unit.

[396] Let's say black people.

[397] Okay, black people, a homogenous unit.

[398] Well, it's a racist proposition to begin with that that constitutes a homogeneous unit.

[399] It's actually the key element in racism is to treat a group of individuals as if they're isomorphic using a single category structure.

[400] It's the definition of racism.

[401] But anyways, forget about that for a moment.

[402] Okay, black people.

[403] All right, fine.

[404] Well, what about women and men?

[405] Okay, black women and men.

[406] Okay, well, what about middle class versus lower class?

[407] Okay, lower class black women and lower class black men and upper class black men.

[408] It's like, well, okay, what about people with health problems?

[409] Okay, well, how many health problems?

[410] Okay, well, let's say there's 40 serious health problems.

[411] Okay, so now we fractionated that.

[412] Okay, what about attractiveness?

[413] Okay, what about age?

[414] What about physical prowess?

[415] What about intelligence?

[416] What about temperament?

[417] It's like, like yeah those are all relevant okay where do we stop that's easy we stop at the level of the individual because you can't fractionate past that and so if I'm going to take your identity seriously I take all of the differentiation that characterizes you and treat that all as relevant okay how do I do that I meet you as an individual we meet logos to logos right right and so and so I don't see any way out of that from a logical perspective unless you're willing to say, no, there are certain categories that are canonical.

[418] Well, what are those?

[419] Race.

[420] Okay, you want to say race is canonical, do you?

[421] Well, welcome to the world of white suprematism.

[422] Because that's an inevitable consequence of that perspective.

[423] And you can see that playing itself out right now.

[424] If there are black people, there are white people.

[425] Sure.

[426] And first of all, you know, people aren't black and white.

[427] They're actually brown and tan.

[428] Really, I mean, you think about that.

[429] You think about that.

[430] That's, I know that's, that seems, it seems only, yeah, Jung wrote kind of a good deal about that, no?

[431] Yeah, yeah, I mean, the representation of the uses of the word black and what.

[432] Yeah, absolutely.

[433] I mean, I mean, obviously, it's an insane oversimplification.

[434] And so it's not like there isn't utility from time to time in considering people's ethnic origin.

[435] Sometimes you have to do that even if you're looking at the effects of, drugs on biological systems.

[436] So there's places, you know, there are situations where one categorical scheme is more appropriate than the other.

[437] But to you, to privilege, to use the postmodernist phrase, to privilege race above all other distinctions, is to fall prey to the precise error that the postmodernists were complaining about.

[438] Okay, privilege race.

[439] What does that mean?

[440] Oh, you're not privileging a bunch of other things.

[441] Well, what if they're relevant?

[442] It's like, yeah, what if they are?

[443] Because they are.

[444] So it's a crazy game.

[445] And part of the reason that the radicals are playing it is because it enables them to divide the world up into people they can hate and blame.

[446] And that means that they don't have to take responsibility for their own lives.

[447] They don't ever view themselves as, okay, you're a perpetrator.

[448] It's like, okay, that means I'm not.

[449] Well, that's a problem because I'm a perpetrator too.

[450] All these Western postmodernists who are complaining about the unfair division of resources, they're already in the top 1%.

[451] Right?

[452] Because they live in North America.

[453] They live in Europe.

[454] So then they say, well, what about the 1 % that's above me?

[455] It's like, yeah, well, why don't you clean up your own house first?

[456] That's true.

[457] One last question I had, the Maps of Meaning videos, were they already that popular before you started the professor against political correctness?

[458] No, no, there's been, no, there's been an absolute skyrocketing of their popularity since I released these.

[459] Well, I think what happens is that people, people, look, I've been accused of over -exaggerating the importance of the pronoun issue.

[460] Okay, well, fundamentally, the pronoun issue is a tiny sideshow in a very massive game.

[461] I think the reason that it attracted attention when I opposed it was because I actually said there was something I wasn't going to do no matter what.

[462] I wasn't going to use this language that the postmodernist created.

[463] And so I took something universal and large and made it concrete and specific.

[464] And that made it real.

[465] And it made it dramatic.

[466] I mean, I didn't intend that.

[467] What I intended was to clarify my thoughts on the matter, but also to state that there was no way I was going to use that language.

[468] and to make it public, partly to clarify my own thinking, but also to indicate that there was some opposition to this idea, and I thought it was reprehensible.

[469] Well, obviously that struck a nerve because, I don't know, maybe 20 million people have watched on YouTube some derivation of the consequences of that, perhaps more.

[470] All right, and so then people have come to my website to figure, out what what who they you know what's going on and then they watch something else that I'm doing and they think oh I see there's more to the story than meets the eye which is of course the case and everyone knows it because if it was just a matter of preferred pronouns this would have been a 15 minute flurry of activity and yeah I think so because the philosopher Cheechak he posted a similar five minute video about the totalitarian character of political reckons and it doesn't create that a stir you know so yeah Well, I thought for a long time about why it caused such a stir.

[471] And I do believe that, you see, I made an archetypal statement, but an archetypal statement has no meaning unless it's confined to a particular time and space.

[472] I can give you an example of that.

[473] This is a very strange example.

[474] But see, there's an archetypal reason why Christ was a carpenter in the Middle East.

[475] and the archetypal reason is because the logos is a transcendent reality but it's so abstract that unless you embody it it has it doesn't have sufficient meaning because it's not localized and you could say that you can say that on the grandest of all possible scales the logos is meaningless without embodiment right and so that's a that's a key to the secret of being itself so each of us is an embodiment of the logos and that's what makes it real it's the logos is something of infinite power, but it has no reality until it's limited.

[476] Strangely enough, it's like a genie.

[477] Okay.

[478] You know, a genie has to live inside that little lamp.

[479] Genie is the same word as genius.

[480] Sure.

[481] And that's another manifestation of the idea of the logos.

[482] Well, I took a universal problem, which is, let's say, this postmodern chaos, that's one way of thinking about it, and I made it concrete.

[483] I said, here is something I will not do.

[484] And that turned the political, philosophical issue into a human drama.

[485] Exactly.

[486] This is what I was thinking.

[487] And it's kind of a personal question you don't have to answer it.

[488] But when I was thinking about this, it seems to me that the attraction stems from the fact that this is like a representation of an internal fight.

[489] You know, the hero against that bad tyrant and that everybody recognizes that fight because it's like so deep.

[490] grounded and that you in a way embody that archetype would you well without that without you can be sure that when something receives wide attention that there's an archetypal story at the bottom of it because otherwise it's archetypal archetypal stories are always the stories that receive wide attention by their nature I mean you can see that go ahead did you choose that knowingly or was it something that happened it's hard to know what you know and what you you don't know okay you know big well and I'm not I so I can tell you what the phenomenology was sure like I could feel and I have felt for several years this bubbling up of of intense opposition to what's been happening in the political landscape so for for example I just finished a book and in one of the chat one of the chapters deals with the chapter is called don't bother children when they're skateboarding okay and it's actually a discussion of, of, I would say, to some degree, the repression of exploratory masculinity.

[491] And so I was thinking hard about that for several months.

[492] And so that, but that's also an extension of things that I've been thinking about for decades.

[493] And so that, that, I've been working on this underlying set of ideas intensely for, for 30 years, for longer than 30 years.

[494] And so part of the reason that I was feeling so intensely opposed to what was happening, politically was because of what I had done philosophically.

[495] Now, the way that manifested itself was as an inarticulate frustration.

[496] And so I decided to make these videos.

[497] I thought, well, this is really bugging me. I better say what I have to say so that I can figure out what I have to say.

[498] And I thought from a, let's call it, marketing perspective, you know, that was more exploration.

[499] I have this, had this YouTube channel.

[500] By September, it had attracted a about a million views and that was nearly from what I had posted from my classes and you know that was also bubbling around in the back of my mind because I thought wow that you know that's if I sold a million books I'd be doing the the same dance that football players do when they score a touchdown you know it's like that's a big deal and now my lectures have been watched by a million or they have been watched a million times perhaps not by a million people I thought wow that that YouTube that's a whole new phenomenon that's a good revolution because now the spoken word has as much reach as the written word never happened before in human history so that was bubbling around in the back of my mind too and so i thought all these things came together in this sense of frustration and i thought well i'll make these videos i got something to say i'll throw them on youtube and see what happens and so then you say well did i know what i was doing well i would say 70 % yes and 30 % no okay and then you know i lost you know i lost a product or maybe I put a note in a bottle and I launched it out onto an ocean and I thought, well, see what happens.

[501] And of course, my supposition was very little will happen.

[502] People will watch it.

[503] They'll agree with me or not agree with me. But at least I'll have said my piece and I'll know more about that actually has two meanings to say.

[504] And then all and then that will move me to whatever will be next.

[505] Well, you know.

[506] Sure, and then everybody reacted to this.

[507] Yeah, it's absolutely crazy.

[508] It's crazy what's happened.

[509] But that also indicates that something deeper has been stirred.

[510] That's the, you know, and one of the things that's so interesting about this, that one of the things that I can really, it's really been difficult for me to wrap my head around.

[511] And I've been, there's a political party Congress that's going to occur in Canada in, a couple of months where the second major party in Canada, which is the Conservative Party, is going to elect a new leader.

[512] And I've been talking to a number of the people who are running for the leadership about observations that I've made.

[513] So this is something that's really cool.

[514] So about 90 % of the people who watch my YouTube videos are men.

[515] And that was true even before the political issue hit.

[516] It tilted a little harder to men after the political issue hit.

[517] But even before, it was about 85 % men.

[518] And that's interesting because most psychology classes are radically female dominated.

[519] So the fact that it was men between the ages of 18 and 40 that were watching, I was watching that and thinking, hmm, that's really interesting.

[520] I don't know what's going exactly.

[521] But then I've been talking to more and more groups of people, and most of the people who come out and see me are men.

[522] So I thought, that's interesting.

[523] There's something going on there.

[524] And then I've been talking to them about responsibility, not right, right?

[525] The opposite of rights, responsibility.

[526] And what's really cool is that their eyes light up.

[527] And you can see that if you're lecturing to an audience, when you make a point, people make a little, like it's a little flash of recognition and you can see it.

[528] It's like a surprise or it's a moment of insight.

[529] You can see it registering on people's faces.

[530] And the more I talk about responsibility to these groups of people the more excited they get the more focused they get and so and so and so so one of the things that I've learned is that we've talked about rights and freedom for so long that there's a counter requirement emerging and the counter requirement is going to look for two things it's either going to look for order or it's going to look for responsibility if it looks for order we're in trouble.

[531] That means the rise of the state.

[532] But if it looks for responsibility, then that's great, because responsibility produces flexible and benevolent order.

[533] And so I've been agitating.

[534] Thoreau writes a great deal about those things.

[535] I'm just reading something from slavery in Massachusetts and some essays of them.

[536] It's exactly this, you know, take responsibility and an act from that logos.

[537] Yeah, well, the thing about responsibility is people, okay, so let's say the fundamental question in life is how to regulate suffering.

[538] Suffering of others and your own suffering, because your own suffering can make you nihilistic, suicidal, resentful, genocidal, murderous, all those terrible things.

[539] And you feel you have justification for it because of the suffering.

[540] of yourself and other people.

[541] Because you can say, well, the suffering of the world is an indication that the world should not exist.

[542] And that's a very powerful argument.

[543] It's actually the argument that Mephistophles makes to Goethe, to Faust in Goethe's Faust.

[544] It's like Satan is the spirit that eternally says, being is so corrupt, it should not exist.

[545] And that's a very powerful argument.

[546] That's why he's the eternal adversary.

[547] So the question is.

[548] Yeah, absolutely.

[549] And worse, the nihilism, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, nailism is only the first step.

[550] The next step is the destruction of things, including yourself.

[551] That's why the school shooters who are nihilistic, go out and kill people and then shoot themselves.

[552] Like, they've taken the nihilistic doctrine to its logical conclusion.

[553] And so, and so, well, so what's the, what's the antidote to suffering?

[554] Well, non -being is one antidote.

[555] But another antidote is the voluntary acceptance of suffering.

[556] That's what it means.

[557] That's what the Christian, symbol of raising the cross means.

[558] It's like, accept it, accept it.

[559] See what happens if you accept it.

[560] And that's the same as accepting responsibility.

[561] Because accepting responsibility is the same as accepting responsibility for the alleviation of suffering.

[562] There's no difference.

[563] Sorry, that's the same argument from Jung.

[564] He said, okay, psychology is not there to make you happy, but to be able to deal with stress and conflict and suffering.

[565] So this is the phone.

[566] Right, well, psychological integration is there to prepare you for the dragon fight or to the fight against the tyrant.

[567] And the tyrant can be, the dragon can be outside or inside.

[568] It's both.

[569] And the tyrant is outside and inside.

[570] It's both.

[571] But the purpose of psychological integration is to strengthen you for that battle, not to eliminate the battle, because there's no eliminating the battle.

[572] And so paradoxically, the meaning in life that will help you overcome the suffering in is to be found in adopting voluntary responsibility for the suffering that being entails.

[573] And that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, it's, it's, it's it, it's implicit because the story had to be formulated and acted out long before we could understand it, uh, explicitly, right?

[574] But we need to understand it explicitly.

[575] That's partly what Jung was trying to do.

[576] He was trying to make the story explicit.

[577] What does the story mean?

[578] The story means you need to voluntarily adopt responsibility for the suffering of being.

[579] And in that, you'll find sufficient meaning in life so that that will justify life.

[580] And that's true.

[581] I believe that to be true.

[582] But it is only possible on a specific stage of development that you can integrate that and that you can anticipate that dragon in any place in your life, you know, and not to run away, but to, you know, to embrace that.

[583] to know that object which hinders you is the way to go.

[584] Yeah, well, it's very difficult to get to a point where you can formulate that abstractly and then use that abstract formulation as a guideline to your action.

[585] But people do that, they do that performatively, right?

[586] I mean, admirable people do that performatively.

[587] What do you mean?

[588] Performatively?

[589] Well, they acted out.

[590] Okay.

[591] And so you see kids, there are kids who, there are kids who are kids who are admired by other kids.

[592] And if you ask the kids why they're admired, they don't really tell you, they say, well, he's cool or, you know, I really like the way he acts.

[593] It's very low resolution representation.

[594] But those kids are usually courageous and forthright and brave and tough.

[595] And so there's an affinity, there's an affinity for the next stage of development that underlies admiration, right?

[596] That's hero worship, roughly speaking.

[597] And that, that can occur mimetically, which is, of course, one of Piaget's ideas as well, is that you act out things before you understand them.

[598] And of course people do.

[599] For millions of years, we had no language.

[600] Obviously, we're acting things out before we understood them, obviously, just like animals do.

[601] So now we need to understand as well, because we're passing.

[602] How you did it with the videos you You said that, you acted that out to see what it's all about.

[603] So it's quite interesting.

[604] Well, and we're all, we're engaged in a process of self -regulation.

[605] Obviously, there's far more to us than we can understand.

[606] Otherwise, we wouldn't need a psychology or a sociology or any of the human sciences.

[607] So we're always trying to figure out what we're up to.

[608] So, Dr. Peterson, what are your upcoming things?

[609] I have heard that you will publish a book.

[610] Yes, I have a book coming out in 2018 called 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos.

[611] Okay.

[612] And it's actually an elaboration of some maxims that I put forth on a website called Quora in response to a kid who asked, what are the most valuable things that people should know?

[613] Okay.

[614] I made a list of about 40, and then I thought I would write an essay on each of them, but that would have turned into not a book but a library so I honed it down to 12 and that's in the process of being edited and all of that now I'm done writing it except for maybe yeah except for maybe a polish and I'm going to Harvard in a week to talk there and I'm going to Oxford in June and and I'm going back on the Joe Rogan podcast in May and so fantastic this was the best podcast I've ever heard this Joe Rogan Yeah, we had a really good conversation.

[615] It was good.

[616] So I'm looking forward to the second one.

[617] Oh, this one went pretty well.

[618] Thank you.

[619] Okay.

[620] Yeah, I think so too.

[621] Yeah, I think we got a long ways with it.

[622] So that's really cool.

[623] Sure, sure.

[624] So.

[625] Dr. Peterson, thank you very much for taking the time.

[626] I know you are, you have a full schedule.

[627] So I wish you all the best in your archetypal fight and in your endeavors.

[628] Yeah.

[629] thank you for helping me push it forward, you know.

[630] It was a good conversation.

[631] And so I think it'll be helpful to people and was helpful to me because I got to clarify things a little bit more.

[632] Thank you for listening to episode 14 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[633] This was a conversation with Tom Mark.

[634] Dr. Peterson's self -development programs can be found at self -authoring .com.