12 Rules Sacramento: The Sovereignty of the Individual

[0] Welcome to Season 2, Episode 5 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] My name's Michaela Peterson, and I'm Dr. Peterson's daughter and collaborator.

[2] Today, we're presenting Dad's lecture at the community theater in Sacramento, California, recorded on June 27, 2018.

[3] Dad tries to make each of his lectures different, so we hope there will be something truly new here for old fans, as well as something generally useful for newer listeners.

[4] He talked about the increasing politicization of the public dialogue, the insistence that every topic, whether theological, philosophical, or personal, has to be analyzed first and foremost as a political statement or worse as an expression of power or privilege.

[5] He also talked about the consequences of the rapid transformation of the media landscape and the fact that the new long -form online videos and podcasts increase our attention spans and the sophistication of the information that we can be presented with and.

[6] handle.

[7] Modern audiences are far smarter than the denizens of the old media presume, partly because their bandwidth limitations made everyone they were talking to look and appear less intelligent than they actually were.

[8] The so -called intellectual dark web members have figured out that the people they're talking to can actually handle far more than anyone had suspected.

[9] This accounts in part for their popularity.

[10] He closes with a discussion of the profound Western idea of the sovereignty and responsibility of the individual and the need to act that out in life so that each person is pursuing something profound enough to give their life meaning.

[11] Dad, was there anything particularly compelling about this lecture?

[12] Well, I think that one of the most important things I discussed was the danger of setting yourself in order.

[13] I mean, part of the reason that people, let's say, could be enlightened but aren't, is because if you want to learn things, you have to look where you don't want to look.

[14] You've already looked where you want to look.

[15] You've already looked where it's easy.

[16] And to improve your lot in life, you have to concentrate on what you don't yet know and perhaps also on the mistakes that you've made in the past, which are actually variants of things that you don't know.

[17] And so one of the things I figured out, I discussed that a little bit in this lecture and more in other lectures, is that the idea of recovering your father from the belly of the whale or from the depths or from the underground is actually a consequence of, like it's a symbolic representation of the idea of developing your ancestral self, like the person you could be, by constantly confronting yourself with new challenges and things that you don't know so that you force yourself to learn and to grow.

[18] And so I think that's a particularly compelling part of this lecture.

[19] What happened in your life this week?

[20] Anything you want to update people about?

[21] Well, it's near the end of March.

[22] I think it's March 27th today.

[23] Yeah, well, this week was quite another set of scandals.

[24] I had arranged for a fellowship at Cambridge University, which was partly invited and partly requested.

[25] I wanted to work on my Exodus lectures, which I planned to do in the fall as an extension of my biblical lectures, with some of the experts at the Cambridge Divinity School.

[26] And that had all been arranged, even with a signed contract, I was going to spend October and November there.

[27] And because of a, at least in part, because of a photograph that was taken in New Zealand, one of, I might point out, 30 ,000 photographs that I've taken in the last year, Cambridge decided, and under political pressure, I have no doubt, from the various social justice warrior types at the university, to revoke and rescind my fellowship, and also to publicize it.

[28] quite broadly, which I felt was very unprofessional behavior on their part.

[29] They didn't publicize the fact that I was invited to begin with.

[30] And it seemed that tweeting out the fact that my invitation was rescinded was a bit on the...

[31] Weasel side of things.

[32] Well, yeah, let's say that on the inappropriate virtue signaling side of things.

[33] So that was a big scandal.

[34] It was covered in newspapers all over, well, all over, all over England, all over Australia, Canada.

[35] I wrote a blog post about it and had it published as well in a variety of papers in North America.

[36] A New Zealand bookseller banned my book, although they did reconsider and so it's for sale again.

[37] So I guess that ended up on a good note.

[38] And maybe even all this bad publicity overall serves a positive function by drawing attention to all these crazy things that are going on in universities and corporations all over the world.

[39] So anyways, that was part of my week.

[40] That and launching this podcast with you.

[41] Sounds exciting.

[42] When we return, Dad's 12 Rules for Life Lecture in Sacramento.

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

[44] Man, you people in Sacramento, see, starved for attention.

[45] Oh, thank you.

[46] That was really something.

[47] Hey, it was just Dave's birthday the other day, eh?

[48] 42, so, yeah, he's not looking too beat up for someone who's already burned up his best years.

[49] So, you know, Dave mentioned winning, you know, and that's an interesting concept.

[50] yesterday I was at the Aspen Ideas Festival there's a video I was interviewed by this journalist Barry Weiss and Barry was the New York Times journalist who penned the piece on the intellectual dark web and she's I suppose somewhat maybe a moderate center right in her political philosophy which makes her quite the pariah among the pseudo -intellectual types let's say at the New York Times.

[51] Anyway, she interviewed me and the Aspen Ideas Festival is a pretty liberal festival, so it was kind of a strange place to be.

[52] And after I was interviewed, I talked about, in front of about 300 people, talked about things like the actuality of gender differences, which is something that you wouldn't really think you'd have to talk about, you know?

[53] but we're in this strange situation where the obvious has become radical and so I don't know what to make of it but anyways on to winning some somebody there's a crowd of people that I sat down with afterwards at a bar to have a little chat about what was happening at the ideas festival and there was a political scientist there who was pushing me and I don't know exactly why but he wanted to to push me into declaring my political position, you know.

[54] And I said that I wasn't really that interested in declaring my political position because I wasn't really thinking politically.

[55] I was thinking psychologically.

[56] And he didn't, that didn't seem to register that idea, exactly, that that was possible.

[57] Because one of the things that seems to have happened, and I think it's a very dangerous thing, and I'm not sure why it's happening, is that while the personal has become political, which was sort of a relative, crying cry for the activist types for about three generations, that the personal should be political.

[58] It's like, well, no, actually not.

[59] Some things should be political and something should be philosophical and something should be theological and something should be economic.

[60] Like, there should be some distinction between those things.

[61] Everything shouldn't collapse into the political, but he was quite taken with the idea that everything had to collapse into the political.

[62] So he was trying to push me to clarify my stance on school policy and policy in general.

[63] I kept telling him that my stance on policy was things are very, very complicated.

[64] It's very difficult to formulate the problem properly.

[65] It's very difficult to come up with the proper interventions, the proper set of interventions.

[66] Then it's very difficult to test them.

[67] Then it's very difficult to assess the results of the tests.

[68] And so my stance, in some sense, is you find what the problem is, maybe you do that by consensus.

[69] You generate some problem statements to see if you can clarify and articulate what the problem is.

[70] You generate a variety of hypothetical solutions.

[71] You don't assume they're going to work because they probably won't because you thought them up and you're not very smart and the world's really complicated.

[72] Well, this is the case, man. And if you're a social scientist, an actual scientist, I don't mean an idiologue, one of the first things that you learn is that your stupid intervention is wrong.

[73] And the reason that that's the case is because, well, partly because you don't have the problem conceptualized properly to begin with, or maybe your measurements are out of whack, or you've got some axiomatic presupposition that isn't correct, that it's blinding you to the reality of the situation, or your intervention kicks back in some way you didn't expect, or, like, there's just endless reasons why well -meaning interventions will inevitably fail.

[74] And so my attitude is basically to approach that from a scientific perspective and generate a diverse range of possible solutions.

[75] Don't assume that they're going to work, test them, and if they work, well, then you can implement them more broadly, but you should be very cautious about that.

[76] So, which I think is a scientific take on political problems.

[77] But anyways, he didn't like any of that.

[78] And it's because he was trying to corner me into some proposition that would exist in accordance with his a priori opinion of me. And I didn't really want to play that game.

[79] But the reason I'm telling you this story is because I kept telling him that what I was trying to do or what we're trying to do, because you're all here and doing whatever it is that we're doing.

[80] We're all doing it together here, you know, that as far as I'm concerned, this isn't primarily political.

[81] And it hasn't been from the beginning.

[82] It's primarily psychological.

[83] I said, well, look, as far as I can tell, here's the situation that we're in, is that a lot of complicated things are coming down the pike for us.

[84] And this is going to happen more and more rapidly over the next, who knows?

[85] As long as all of us are alive, things are going to be changing faster and faster.

[86] You can be absolutely sure about that.

[87] You know, there are theorists of artificial intelligence and computer transformation who have written about this.

[88] You know, you guys know about Moore's law, the fact that processor power doubles on about an 18 -month basis and that that's been happening.

[89] God only knows, at least since the invention of the transistor, but you can actually track it way farther back in time than that, by the way.

[90] And hard drive capacity doubles every year.

[91] Like there's doublings going on everywhere, radical doublings in computational power going on everywhere.

[92] And the rate of change is speeding up and speeding up and speeding up.

[93] And so the question is, well, what do we do to move forward?

[94] And the answer is, well, how in the world are we supposed to figure that out?

[95] Because everything's changing so fast that you can't even tell what forward is going to be.

[96] Like, let me give you a specific example, and then I'll return to this.

[97] So I've been trying to figure out what's going on with this polarization process.

[98] You know, we seem to be locked into this process of political polarization.

[99] And I can't figure it out exactly because part of me thinks, and I'm kind of watching you Americans from the outside perspective a little bit because I'm a Canadian.

[100] I lived here for six years, and I know your country reasonably well, but, you know, I still have a bit of detachment from it.

[101] And half of me thinks nothing's going on at all.

[102] You guys voted 50 % Republican and 50 % Democrat for the last four elections.

[103] It's like, you're not any more polarized than you were.

[104] It's exactly the same thing.

[105] you had two insane candidates to vote for and well you did you know you did and that happens sometimes like this the same thing happens in Canada now and then we get a you know just a array of poor choices and we have to muddle through with them you know probably serves us right because you know and in democracy you get the candidates that you deserve just like in a marriage usually so yeah yeah so if you have an unhappy marriage.

[106] That's worth thinking about.

[107] Oh, this is what I deserve.

[108] Isn't that interesting?

[109] Yeah, gloomy thought.

[110] So it isn't clear that the polarization is real.

[111] But then another part of me thinks, no, it's, or I also think, another part of me thinks that it is also not real, but in a different way.

[112] I think, okay, what's really going on here?

[113] why is there this terrible political agitation going on at the moment?

[114] And I think some of it can be laid at the feet of the idiot universities and a substantial amount of it and I'm really appalled by that.

[115] I really do believe that the universities, perhaps not the STEM fields still but other than that I think the universities do more harm than good and that's really an appalling thing.

[116] So that might be a real phenomenon.

[117] But there's something else going on too.

[118] And I think what's going on is that the communication technology is changing so rapidly right now that it's flipping our society around.

[119] And I think you're seeing this manifest itself in the rise of YouTube and podcasts, most primarily.

[120] Because YouTube is basically television, right, for all intents and purposes.

[121] But it's television 2 .0.

[122] And the reason it's television 2 .0 is because YouTube can do everything television can, but television can't do everything.

[123] that YouTube can't.

[124] And one of the things that YouTube can do, the television can't, is make you way smarter than you are.

[125] So I've been thinking that television might have made us look stupider than we actually are.

[126] And the reason that it did that was because it has a very narrow bandwidth.

[127] And I really started thinking about this because of something Sam Harris said when Dave Rubin was interviewing him.

[128] And Harris said, he laid out some statistics.

[129] He said, look, if you go on John Anderson on CNN, if you're a guest, you get to talk for seven minutes and a million people will watch.

[130] It's like, it's a pretty decent audience, but seven minutes, it's like you're going to take something complex and you're going to distill it down to seven minutes.

[131] You're going to get the stupid version of it because some things just can't be distilled down to seven minutes.

[132] And seven minutes is actually a long time on television, right?

[133] Often what happens is that like a political speech will be distilled down to a 30 -second sound bite.

[134] And so it's sort of like TV treats you like you have advanced Alzheimer's.

[135] You can't remember anything that's longer than seven minutes, even on a good day, and most of the time you're limited to 30 seconds.

[136] And I think one of the things that does has done, because I've noticed that I've been trying to figure out what distinguishes the intellectual dark web types, because they're quite diverse in their opinions, as Dave pointed out, from the mainstream media.

[137] And one of the things that distinguishes them is that the intellectual dark web folks don't think their audience is stupid, right?

[138] Everybody in that group, and I think this is what unites them.

[139] Everybody in that group treats their audience as if they're, well, as intelligent as they are fundamentally, because no one's pulling any punches, right?

[140] It's long -form dialogue, it's high -level dialogue, and it's not edited very much.

[141] And so the assumption is, you're going to understand whatever it is that we're talking about.

[142] But maybe we shouldn't get all moral about that and think, well, we're better people because we don't think our audience is stupid.

[143] Maybe the reason is that the long form that is enabled by the technology automatically allows that to happen, and it's very different than TV.

[144] And so I think that's a real possibility.

[145] And so anyways, that's one of the radical changes that's occurring.

[146] And those sorts of, and that's allied also with the emergence of podcasts, which is also a remarkable thing, a real technological revolution, because podcasts, again, give you that long format, multiple hours.

[147] Rogan is a really good example of that, right?

[148] Three -hour podcasts, like, what the hell's up with that?

[149] Turns out you guys have an attention span.

[150] Who would have guessed it?

[151] You know, when I talked to the audible people the other day, because audiobooks are exploding like mad, and they're starting to experiment with other forms of content delivery that aren't specifically book -related, but are analogous to that.

[152] So an author might deliver some additional audible content that isn't published, because you can divorce the audio content from the publication.

[153] They want minimum of nine -hour content chunks.

[154] so that's interesting it's like oh look nine hours is the is the proper length and then look look what's happening with all you guys with Netflix and and it turns out you don't want a half an hour sitcom you want a 24 hour drama with 50 characters right really really with a complexity level it starts to approach that of great literature and you didn't know you wanted that because there was no way you were going to get it because the bandwidth of your communication technology was too narrow to allow it But as soon as that bandwidth limitation disappeared, it was like, oh, look, you can devour content that's way more complex than anybody would have possibly imagined.

[155] And then there's something else going on, too, which is maybe you can listen better than you can read.

[156] So that's possible, because, you know, most people don't read, or they don't read very much.

[157] And of the people who read hardly any people buy books, but a lot of people are buying audiobooks.

[158] Think, well, why is that?

[159] Well, maybe it's actually somewhat easier to listen than to read.

[160] You know, maybe it's slightly decreases the cognitive complexity, something like that.

[161] It wouldn't surprise me because, like, I noticed when I was reading my books, I read 12 Rules for Life and I read maps of meaning, I found that because I had to do the intonation and I had to build the melody into the speech, which is what you do if you're a good speaker, then that would simplify.

[162] the book, and that was especially true with Maps of Meaning, which is a very complex book.

[163] It was released in audio form, by the way, on June 12th.

[164] So if you like 12 Rules for Life, if you found it useful, light is such a stupid word.

[165] If you found it useful, you know, and engaging with it was productive, then you could consider listening to Maps of Meaning because it's a much deeper dive into the same sort of content, but it's a very difficult book.

[166] But I think the audio version makes it a lot more accessible.

[167] So anyways, we might have, I have this suspicion that we might have multiplied the number of people who can engage in high -level intellectual material by a factor of 10 by shifting to the audio format.

[168] So that's, maybe it's not 10, maybe it's two or maybe it's four, whatever.

[169] But even if it's two, even if it's a factor of two, man, that's a major technological transformation.

[170] Then you add to that the fact that audiobooks give you found, and podcasts give you found times.

[171] time.

[172] That's something.

[173] It's like, you know, lots of people come to me after these talks and they tell me when they're listening to, you know, what they're engaged in, when they're listening to my lectures, say, listening particularly, not watching them, but listening to them.

[174] You know, sometimes they're working class guys who are long -haul truckers or they're driving a forklift or something like that, or maybe they're housewives who are doing the dishes or people who are exercising or whatever.

[175] The point is, that they're doing something else that they have to do anyways, and they're listening.

[176] And so there's lots of things that you do during your day, two hours a day, where you're not fully occupied, but you couldn't read, and you couldn't watch a video because, well, maybe you're driving, for example, but you could listen.

[177] And so then all of a sudden you have two hours a day freed up to get smarter.

[178] And that's a lot, because that's one -eighth of your life, right?

[179] Two hours a day is basically one -eighth of your waking life.

[180] So that's a massive.

[181] massive, massive transformation.

[182] And, well, part of the reason that I'm telling you all this, so there's a couple of reasons.

[183] One is, what the hell are you all doing here?

[184] This is what I'm trying to figure out, right?

[185] It's like, and the same thing, same thing, when I was in Vancouver with Sam Harris recently.

[186] So Sam and I did two back -to -back events.

[187] We've got two more coming, one in Dublin and one in London.

[188] And I think the one in Dublin and the one in London have already sold more than 5 ,000 tickets each.

[189] It's like, yeah, well, what the, right, it's so strange.

[190] So I was sitting there on stage with Sam, and we were both nervous about that because we hadn't met before.

[191] Like, we'd talked and done two podcasts, but we'd never actually met, and we didn't know if we would actually be able to have a productive discussion, you know, or if it would just augur in and be a catastrophe.

[192] And so we were kind of nervous about that, but it was so interesting to watch what happened, because Sam was defending his book, and I was in his position, and I was defending mine.

[193] and there was a certain amount of combativeness about it, but what it really reminded me of, I was trying to figure out what I could compare it to, what it really reminded me of was a PhD defense.

[194] So in a PhD defense, the student has worked for four or five years on their multiple research projects, and in principle they've mastered the relevant literature, and so they come up and they tell you what they think.

[195] And if they're really good students, then you just try to shred them.

[196] And the reason you do that, and it's a friendly thing, because the reason you do that is if they've really mastered their domain, you can throw the hardest questions at them, and they can answer them.

[197] So it gives them an opportunity to really shine, you know?

[198] It's a bad PhD defense if you go easy on the person.

[199] It's like, oh, God, I have to go easy on you.

[200] How appalling you shouldn't get your PhD at all because I should be able to just hammer you about this topic, which you have spent five years developing expertise about, and you should know more about it than me. And so I should be able to go at you as hard as possible, and you should be able to fend off all comers.

[201] And that's really what was happening.

[202] It was like a dual D -U -A -L and D -U -E -L, both at the same time.

[203] PhD defense, it's like, and then I thought, yeah, except that there are 2 ,500 people watching it.

[204] That's a whole different thing.

[205] But what was interesting was that the level of intellectual discourse, essentially matched what I would have seen in the decent PhD defense.

[206] Then I thought, well, isn't it so interesting that there's actually, the whole audience is in on that, the engaged intellectual discourse?

[207] Because Sam and I weren't, I wasn't trying to win, and neither was he.

[208] What we were actually trying to do was to see if we could get smarter as a consequence of the conversation.

[209] And it wasn't, I mean, you know, we'd take pot shots at each other now and then.

[210] Partly that's wet, and some of that's a little bit of fun.

[211] Sometimes you do that when you're tired and maybe you get a bit.

[212] peevish because you're getting cornered in an argument.

[213] But none of that's, the wit part's fine, but the dialogue should always be, well, here's my ideas, and here's why I think they're worthwhile, and I've tried to already knock them to pieces myself, and I can't, so I think they're correct, they're as correct as I can make them.

[214] And then what you do is you open up the opportunity for your opponent to say, no, here's a bunch of ways you're still stupid.

[215] And what you're, and what you want, what the right attitude towards that is, well, thank you very for pointing out where I'm stupid because I'd rather not continue to be stupid.

[216] Thank you very much.

[217] You know, and right.

[218] That's the thing, right?

[219] I'd rather not, I'd rather not continue to be stupid.

[220] And you might say, well, who cares if you continue to be stupid?

[221] And actually, there's a real answer to that.

[222] It's like, if you're stupid, you will get hurt.

[223] And so will the people around you.

[224] And so if you're a little less stupid, then you get to have a little less pain.

[225] And so maybe the price you pay for that is, you know, your stupidity is revealed right here and now, and you have to rectify it.

[226] And of course, that's annoying as hell.

[227] But it's not as bad as walking blindly into a pit, which is the alternative.

[228] And so, so anyway, so Sam and I were going back and forth.

[229] And I really think we actually moved quite a long ways in the discussion.

[230] Like, I think that my thinking about the problem is clearer than it was, and I think he would agree that his thinking about the problem is clearer than it was, too.

[231] And it's a really important problem, because, you know, we were talking about the relationship between facts and values, which is a broader subset of the relationship between science and religion, right?

[232] And it's also the relationship between facts and stories, and it's the relationship between material reality and ethical conduct.

[233] Like, these are hard things to figure out, and it's really necessary to figure them out.

[234] And both of us recognize that it's necessary to figure them out.

[235] So moving a little ahead on that is like that's really a, it's an unbelievably positive thing because it's crucially important to get this right.

[236] And what was so interesting was that everybody in the audience was along for the ride.

[237] And like 100%, you know, I think some people had come perhaps, and this was perhaps a consequence of the marketing, to see one of us defeat the other, you know, because maybe there were people in the audience who tilted more in my direction or tilted more in his, although I think most of the people there were mutual fans.

[238] But we didn't conduct the discussion in that manner.

[239] We were actually trying to have an actual discussion, and the audience was participating in the discussion fully, to the point where our plan was to talk for about an hour and 15 minutes, something like that, which is actually quite a long time for an intense intellectual discussion.

[240] and then to open it up to Q &A.

[241] But when we got to an hour and 15 minutes into it, something like that, we asked the audience, do you want to go to Q &A, or do you want the discussion to continue?

[242] And the overwhelming response from the audience was continue the discussion.

[243] And so the first night we talked for two and a half hours, and then we talked for two and a half hours the next night.

[244] And the audience was completely on board and listening.

[245] So I think, well, interesting.

[246] It's conceivable that we're smarter than we think we are.

[247] I don't mean Sam and I. I mean, us, broadly speaking, we might have more capacity for this sort of thing that we realize.

[248] And there's certainly an unbelievable hunger for it.

[249] I mean, hence, you know, I've done, this is, I think, my 47th talk in this tour series.

[250] And each of them has been to an audience of at least 2 ,000 to 3 ,000 people.

[251] and everywhere, right?

[252] And so it's so interesting.

[253] It's like, well, all this idiot polarization is going on, which is really appalling thing.

[254] At the same time, there's this upswelling in interest in really engaged high -level dialogue.

[255] And so it really makes me feel hopeful.

[256] And so then back to the idea of winning, which is where I started this whole, like, what would you call it, digressive monologue to begin with.

[257] So we're faced with this frontier of ever -expanding, technological transformation, and it's going to speed up on us.

[258] And some of that's really good, because there's tremendous opportunity in the technological revolution.

[259] And we can see that manifesting itself, right, in the rapid improvement in our communication technologies, but in all sorts of other ways, too, because, you know, the world is actually getting better at a macro level in a very large number of ways.

[260] There's been like a dozen books published in the last four years, which are kind of like a new breed of social commentary saying, oh my God, who would have guessed it?

[261] Here's 30 measures of how we're doing, and on every single one of them around the world, we're doing way better than we ever did, and that's getting better, faster and faster and faster.

[262] It's like, how the hell did that happen?

[263] This was supposed to be, we were all supposed to starve to death right now, or to have, you know, wiped everything out into extinction, or blown ourselves up in a nuclear apocalypse or smothered ourselves in carbon dioxide or something like that.

[264] Instead, what seems to be happening is everyone in the planet is getting richer.

[265] And at the same time, as they get richer, proportionally, they're doing less ecological damage because it turns out that the best way to stop people from ruining the planet is to make everyone rich.

[266] Oh, no one saw that coming.

[267] And so, okay, so then the political scientist who's trying to corner me, You know, he's talking about policy, policy, policy.

[268] What's your political stance?

[269] And my point was, I don't have a political stance.

[270] Here's my theory.

[271] Things are changing so fast that we can barely keep up.

[272] And they're changing so fast we can't predict the future.

[273] So what the hell are you supposed to do for policy when you can't predict the future?

[274] And the answer is, make better people.

[275] Because what we need to, yes, that's it.

[276] That's it.

[277] It's like, think.

[278] Things are coming at you, man. They're going to come at you faster and faster.

[279] You better get your act together.

[280] You better get your act together.

[281] You better be less stupid than you were.

[282] You better be sharper than you are, right?

[283] You better be awake and ready.

[284] And if you are, then maybe you'll be able to make good use of all this.

[285] And maybe whatever decision comes your way, and who knows what those decisions will be, you'll be on your toes and you'll be like a boxer and you'll be ready to take it on.

[286] And collectively we'll make the proper decisions so that we can exploit this ever -expanding technology in a way that we'll make things better and better.

[287] And so that's a good policy decision.

[288] And so the reason that I think that it's necessary to go after the individual, let's say, which I think is the proper level of analysis, but I am a psychologist after all.

[289] It's not surprising I think that way.

[290] I think the reason that the fortification of the individual is necessary is because I don't care about the policies.

[291] I care about the people.

[292] Good people will make good policies.

[293] And so it's like I don't have to worry about adjusting the policies.

[294] I'm not that interested in that anyways.

[295] I'd rather adjust the mechanism by which the policies are being generated.

[296] And that's you guys, because, of course, our system, our Western system, increasingly functional systems everywhere around the world are predicated on the idea of the responsible sovereign individual.

[297] And that's the linchpin.

[298] It's like if you're a...

[299] And notice how I phrased that, eh?

[300] I didn't say the sovereign individual with all his or her rights, because at the moment I don't give a damn about rights.

[301] We've had enough conversation about bloody rights, you know, but we haven't had enough conversation about responsibility.

[302] And so if you're the linchpin of the system, and you are, because that's how this system's set up, that's predicate is the notion that sovereignty inheres in the individual, and that's you, then you better get your act together, because if you don't have your act together and you're the lynchpin, then the whole damn thing is going to wobble and fall.

[303] And that's also what I see as the proper pathway out of this political polarization, which is quite dangerous.

[304] It's right, like, you know, because as the, and I think this is mostly driven by subsidized idiocy on the radical left, but, which is something that we need to sort out as a society.

[305] But, you know, as the left gets more radical, the right gets more rigid and then the left gets more radical and the right gets more rigid and that's a positive feedback loop and that's not a good thing positive feedback loops destroy complex systems say well how the hell do you step away from that and to me the answer is something like get your act together make yourself stronger make yourself more awake make yourself less resentful develop a vision for your life accept more responsibility be more careful with what you say like really I really believe it's on you and so then I think the best way out of the polarization is and so the way I've been conceptualizing the political situation right now is think left right that's how we usually look at it and so there's an antipathy between them and maybe there's something in the middle but I do that has its utility that conceptual scheme but I don't think it's correct at the moment what I see happening is collectivism individualism That's the struggle.

[306] And then within the collectivist domain, there's left and right.

[307] There's the radical leftists who are playing identity politics, and there's the radical right -wingers who are playing identity politics.

[308] But they're both in the collectivist sphere, and that's the threat, as far as I'm concerned.

[309] But the way that you manifest resistance to the threat of collectivism is by strengthening yourself as an individual.

[310] You can't enter the identity politics game and play in that realm because then you're in that game.

[311] And if you're in that game, then the people, you know, if you play monopoly and win, you're still playing monopoly, right?

[312] And if the game is rotten, then you don't want to win the game.

[313] You want to play a better game.

[314] And what I'm hoping is being outlined, and what I'm trying to outline, I hope, I pray, let's say, I'm trying to outline a better game.

[315] And the game is, understand that the idea that sovereignty inheres in the individual is the most fundamental idea of functional cultures.

[316] And I believe that's true, and I wouldn't just say functional Western cultures, because I've tracked the idea, the development of the idea of the sovereign individual.

[317] I've tracked that back about 4 ,000 years, something like that.

[318] And most of that's outlined in Maps of Meaning.

[319] That idea came, emerged with great difficulty.

[320] You know, the idea that every individual is sovereign, that's a strange idea, because, of course, what you'd think is, no, only the most powerful, individual is sovereign.

[321] That's how it looks.

[322] If it's a monarchy, the king is sovereign.

[323] Why?

[324] Well, he holds all the power.

[325] Where'd we get this crazy idea that every individual was sovereign?

[326] Well, it is.

[327] It's an absolutely mind -boggling, amazing, miraculous idea.

[328] It really is.

[329] And what's so cool about it is, it actually works.

[330] If you accept that idea, and then you build your personality on it, and you build your family on it, like you treat all your family members, like the are responsible sovereign individuals, then your family thrives.

[331] If you build a society that's predicated on the idea that the people who make up the society are responsible, sovereign individuals, then all of a sudden the society works.

[332] And it's very productive and it's peaceful, you know, reasonably, given that we're also half -insane chimpanzees, reasonably peaceful, and it becomes productive.

[333] And although there's inequality, you know, the absolute level of wealth grows.

[334] and that horrors of privation recede, it's like, this is a very powerful idea.

[335] So if it is the case that the correct idea is that sovereignty inheres in the individual, in the responsible individual, then it's obviously the case that making better individuals is the best thing that you can possibly do.

[336] And I was trying to outline that to this character who was trying to corner me, but this isn't something that is something I've also noticed with the press coverage that I get.

[337] some of which is positive, a lot of which is viciously negative.

[338] And I've been trying to figure out, well, why is it?

[339] Almost no one ever writes about what's actually happening.

[340] Because what's actually happening is that, well, I've gone to about 50 cities now, and in each city I get about 20, as I said, about 2 ,500 people come out, and we have a really intense intellectual discussion about individual responsibility and psychological development and the relationship between that and the general political sphere.

[341] And then everyone goes home reasonably satisfied with the evening.

[342] It's like that doesn't seem to be a story that the politics -obsessed media can even see.

[343] It doesn't fit into whatever the a -priority narrative is.

[344] And so it just gets ignored.

[345] And I think, well, you can ignore it all you want, but it's, as far as I can tell, it's what's happening.

[346] you know and one of the things I've noticed about these events that's been really well surprising there's many surprising things about them one of the things that's really surprising about them is that they're unbelievably positive you know and the the tenor of the crowd to begin with is positive and the content of the lecture I think is positive although you know I'm critical of ideologues but I think they deserve it and and and then I talked to 150 people afterwards, after each event, something like that.

[347] And people tell me two things, generally, when they talk to me, they say, about a third of the people, a quarter maybe, say, you've helped me articulate, find words for things that I always knew were true, but didn't know how to say.

[348] And I think, well, that makes sense, because when you tell archetypal stories, that's exactly what happens, because what an archetypal story does is give image and word to fundamental realities, right?

[349] Truly fundamental realities.

[350] And a knowledge of those realities is built into us insofar as we're even ambulating successfully on the surface of the planet.

[351] You know, if you're not oriented to some degree with relationship to fundamental realities, then you're going to be at least suffering and probably dying.

[352] Like your health, your survival is predicated on a certain degree of embodied wisdom.

[353] And it doesn't mean that you necessarily have a representation of that wisdom or that you can articulate it.

[354] It's still there, though.

[355] It's built into the way that you interact with people.

[356] You know, you can't understand all the ways that you know how to interact with people because you're more complicated than you can map.

[357] But you can provide people, and a psychologist should do this, provide people with the images and the words that are useful to map what they already know.

[358] And that's really useful because then you bring people's behavioral wisdom and you've met people in your life that weren't that educated, they weren't that articulate, but there were really solid characters who were well grounded in the world and who were conducting themselves properly.

[359] And it's not like they could give an elaborated philosophical account of the structure of the ethic that guides them.

[360] They couldn't do that because they're not well -educated, they're not that articulate.

[361] But that doesn't mean they're not living it out.

[362] But the optimal situation is you live it out, so it's embodied in your action, you can represent it, and you can articulate it.

[363] Because then all of the ways that you interact with the world are in alignment.

[364] And so when people say, you've helped me find words to describe what I always knew to be true, then that's what they're describing.

[365] And this is a very old idea too.

[366] You know, one of the things that Socrates claimed, you know, thousands of years ago, when people first started to think about thinking was that he believed that all knowledge, all learning was remembering.

[367] You know, so there was a metaphysical idea that went along with that, was that before you were born, whatever you were, knew everything, and then that was forgotten at birth, at your point of birth, and then as you lived, you remembered what you had once known.

[368] And it's an interesting, it's a really interesting idea, although it sounds foreign to modern ears, it's sort of like, it's more like, well, a lot of your wisdom is built into your biology and it's revealed to you as you stress yourself in life so one of the things we've learned recently this is so cool for example is well you know if you put yourself in a new situation and challenge yourself you obviously learn new things and so you might think well you learn that by incorporating the information that's in the new situation and that is part of what you do but here's something else that you do if I take you out of a situation that you're already adapted to, and I put you in a new situation.

[369] New genes turn on in your brain, and they code for new proteins, and they make new neural structures, and it's so, like, one of the things that's really remarkable about each of us is that there's way more to you than you have manifested right now, but the only way that will reveal itself is if you put yourself at a new situation and stress yourself, and when you stress yourself, you have to go beyond where you are, the stress is an indefinite, that you're not good enough to master the situation, and that will force development, and some of that's incorporation of information, but some of that's the manifestation of who you could yet be that's encoded within you at a biological level.

[370] So that's such a cool idea.

[371] So I can tell you an interesting...

[372] Let me tell you an interesting story about that, about that idea.

[373] So there's this idea, a deep religious idea, that at some point you should go on a pilgrimage in your life, you should go to the Holy City, wherever that is, it's the symbolic center of the world.

[374] Now, you think about what that means.

[375] I imagine this medieval idea, let's say.

[376] So you're some guy who lives in medieval village.

[377] It's like you haven't been more than three miles away from home your whole life, right?

[378] You're pretty parochial and narrow.

[379] You're like a small town kid except on a really small scale.

[380] And then all of a sudden you have to go on a pilgrimage.

[381] So you have to trek across foreign lands.

[382] You have to go a couple of thousand miles away.

[383] You might even die along the way, which is certain.

[384] going to have all sorts of crazy adventures.

[385] That's for sure.

[386] That's your quest, let's say.

[387] And so as you travel to the Holy City, you have all sorts of experiences.

[388] And those experiences mature you and make you wiser.

[389] And so the journey itself to a symbolic place, which would be the Holy City, let's say, is also a practical revelation of who you are.

[390] And when you make it to the Holy City and you make it back.

[391] You're not the same person you were when you left.

[392] You're seriously not the same person.

[393] And so you actually have made a spiritual journey, even though it was also a physical journey.

[394] So now, here's one of the things that happened with cathedral design in the medieval period.

[395] This is so, it's so ridiculously cool that this actually occurred.

[396] So imagine that one of the things that happens when you go on a pilgrimage is you get tougher.

[397] Well, you could imagine that, right?

[398] You get more resilient.

[399] Of course, you know that, because one of the ways that you're going to get more resilient is to get the hell out of your mother's house.

[400] Right?

[401] So if you're just hiding out in your mother's house, or your father's house, for that matter, then you're not going to be resilient because you haven't stressed yourself.

[402] And then if you do go out and you get stressed, then it's going to really hurt you.

[403] And naive people are more likely to develop post -traumatic stress disorder.

[404] And we know already that even with animals, this has been well documented in the animal experimental literature, If you want to make a robust, resilient animal, you handle it a lot when it's young.

[405] You stress it, not too much, right?

[406] Because if you stress it too much, you damage it, but you push it right to the limit of its tolerance.

[407] And then it gets tougher and tougher and tougher.

[408] And then as an adult, its reaction to stress is much mitigated.

[409] So anyways, you get the hell out of your house, and you go out there and you toughen yourself up against the world.

[410] And so there's a lot more to you.

[411] And it's because you got wiser because you incorporated the information that you acquired while you were traveling, let's say, having your adventure.

[412] But it's also because by putting yourself in places that push you beyond who you already are, all sorts of parts of you that weren't on, turn on.

[413] And so that really opens up a question, man. It's like, what would you be like if you turned everything in you that you could turn on, on?

[414] What would you be like?

[415] Well, you'd be a lot.

[416] You have some sense of that because you already know that when you've taken a challenge on in your life, you've developed, right, in relationship to the challenge.

[417] The simplest example of that is just to go to the gym and work out with weights.

[418] You know, you start with relatively light weights, and you be careful, and then you progress, you lift heavier and heavier and heavier weights.

[419] And what happens?

[420] Well, you get stronger and leaner and more confident.

[421] Your posture improves.

[422] You get more coordinated, right?

[423] You get more dominant, but in the confident sort of way.

[424] And who knows what the upper limit to that is, you see that in superb athletes, right there.

[425] And it's not a place that everybody can go because it takes so much dedication, but you can push yourself a long ways along that axis, and obviously it works.

[426] You can end up physiologically and psychologically radically different than you were, and you think, well, that's just musculature.

[427] It's like, no, it's not.

[428] So one of the things that happens to people is your cognitive power declines quite radically from the age of 25 onward.

[429] If you look at the graphs, it's pretty damn dismal.

[430] You know, you're just getting stupider all the time.

[431] You're not exactly because you acquire wisdom along the way, but your processing speed tends to decline.

[432] The best way to stave that off is not to do cognitive exercises like lumosity.

[433] It's not to keep yourself cognitively engaged, even though that's helpful.

[434] The best way to stave that off is to exercise.

[435] It doesn't matter whether it's weightlifting or cardiovascular exercise.

[436] If you're 50, you can restore your cognitive function to what it was when you were 30.

[437] if you undertake a rigorous program of cardiovascular exercise and weightlifting.

[438] And it's because your brain is unbelievably demanding as a cardiovascular organ.

[439] It needs oxygen, and it's very oxygen -hungary.

[440] And so if your cardiovascular system is compromised, then you get stupid.

[441] So if you go work out, then you get smarter.

[442] Like, who would have guessed that?

[443] But, I mean, it's exactly the opposite of the stereotype, right?

[444] So, okay, so you can see, you push yourself, and there's a good example, not only do you develop physiologically, but you develop psychologically and cognitively, and you do that by pushing yourself to your limit, carefully, not so much that you get hurt, but carefully.

[445] Okay, so here's what happened in the Middle Ages when people were designing cathedrals.

[446] It's already said that if you push yourself, you get able to bear catastrophe in a more resilient manner.

[447] You get tougher.

[448] You might think, well, how tough can you get?

[449] It's like, well, you better get pretty tough because you've got a lot of catastrophe to contend with.

[450] You've got your own mortality to contend with, right?

[451] You've got the mortality of the people that you love to contend with.

[452] And more than that, you also have the malevolence of yourself and the world to contend with.

[453] So you've got a challenge there.

[454] So you better get yourself damn tough.

[455] And so, and we don't know the upper limit to that.

[456] Maybe you can get tough enough to contend with the tragedy of the world.

[457] That's what you hope when you raise children, for example, that they don't have to hide from the fact that life has a terrible, tragic, dark side, but they can confront that directly with their eyes open, and they can withstand it.

[458] Like, one of the things I often tell my students is, here's a goal.

[459] You want to be the strongest person at your father's funeral.

[460] You know, you think, well, what should you do with your life?

[461] Well, you should be happy.

[462] It's like, look, if you've got some time to be happy and it comes your way, it's like, enjoy it, man. it's great.

[463] It's a grace of God.

[464] Like if it's being bestowed upon you, enjoy it.

[465] But as a goal for life, it's like, that's just, how's that going to work out when you're at your father's funeral?

[466] And I'm happy.

[467] It's like, no, you're not.

[468] And no wonder.

[469] And there's going to be plenty of times in your life where it's the tragedy that's most manifest, right?

[470] That'll happen to you over and over.

[471] You have kids, you know, they get sick or they fail or, you know, you have to undergo the illness of your life.

[472] partner or yourself, there's all sorts of things you're going to have to put up with.

[473] It's like you want to be ready for that and able to bear it, right, and to bear it positively.

[474] So the funeral example is a good one.

[475] It's like, well, what are you going to do?

[476] Is you going to hide out in a corner and feel sorry for yourself?

[477] You have every reason to.

[478] Your father just died.

[479] It's like maybe you can't even live.

[480] You know, you could make a case that it might not even be worth living when someone that you love so intently passes.

[481] It's an absolute catastrophe.

[482] It's like, well, you want to be the person who's helping everyone else in a situation like that?

[483] That might be a good goal.

[484] So you're the person who can act nobly in the face of tragedy.

[485] That's the goal.

[486] Well, that's a good goal.

[487] It's like, why wouldn't you want that?

[488] The tragedy is coming, and then you can help everyone else through it and yourself as well.

[489] And at least you can think, well, I didn't take that horrible situation and make it worse than it had to be.

[490] I did everything I could to lighten the catastrophe.

[491] That's a good goal for your life.

[492] That's a good epitaph.

[493] I did everything I could to lighten the catastrophe.

[494] That would be, well, really, man, that would be a good thing, you know?

[495] Okay, so back to cathedral design, and this is associated with the idea of the pilgrimage.

[496] Well, let's say, you can't afford a pilgrimage, but you still need to go on one.

[497] Well, maybe you can go on one psychologically.

[498] Okay, so here's this idea behind the construction of a cathedral.

[499] Okay, so if you look at a cathedral from the top, It's a cross.

[500] Okay, now you can imagine why it's a cross.

[501] A cathedral is a Christian building, right?

[502] So it's built in the shape of cross.

[503] Now, the place where the central ceremony of transformation takes place is right at the center of the cross.

[504] So that's sort of where you are.

[505] You're at the center.

[506] Okay, and the center is the place of maximal suffering.

[507] Okay, so that's what the cathedral symbolically represents.

[508] and you eat the host at the center, and that's supposed to ally you with the dying and resurrecting savior.

[509] That's the idea.

[510] And the idea for that is that that's the medication that helps you contend with the catastrophe of life, this ability to die and be reborn, something like that.

[511] Okay, so that's the idea.

[512] It's an absolutely overwhelming idea.

[513] But here's a way that it played out.

[514] It's so cool this idea.

[515] I read this, Carl Jung outlined this, so in the Shark Cathedral, for example, at the midpoint of the cathedral, so at the crux of the cross, the point of maximal suffering, there's a maze.

[516] So it's this big maze, it's a circle, and it's divided into four parts, kind of like, you know, those things you see on maps that orient you, northwest, south, and east, north, southeast, and west, Sorry about that.

[517] And so what you do is you enter the maze in one of the quadrants, and then you walk the quadrant.

[518] The whole thing, you cover every square foot of the quadrant, and then it takes you into the next quadrant, and you cover every square foot of that quadrant, and then that takes you to the next one, and then finally you get to the fourth quadrant, and after you've gone all the way through the fourth quadrant, you get to the center, and it's symbolized by something that looks like, a stone flower.

[519] And that's right in the center of the cathedral.

[520] What's the idea?

[521] You have to go everywhere to prepare yourself to bear the load of maximal suffering.

[522] God, it's such an unbelievable idea.

[523] And you think about, you think, well, that's quite the idea.

[524] It's like, no, no, you've got to really think about this.

[525] Like those cathedrals, they were like the moonshot of the medieval people, right?

[526] Those bloody things were expensive.

[527] Those things took like 300 years to build.

[528] And they're the weirdest buildings there are these stone buildings that are full of light.

[529] They stacked up stone in some insane stone doesn't stay up in the air by itself, right?

[530] It's really hard to make a 10 -story building out of stone, especially one that has this open forest -like, what would you say, this open forest -like aesthetic, because that's what a cathedral is too.

[531] It's trees of stone with the light shining through the leaves, right?

[532] So it sort of harkens back to our deep ancestral past.

[533] Anyways, and it's beauty and light and music and all of those things.

[534] It's place to meditate on the fundamental realities of being.

[535] But then it's also a place to act out this process of transformation.

[536] And the process of transformation is that which turns you into the being that can properly bear the burden of existence.

[537] And you walk the maze to get to the center and the idea is you have to go everywhere to be who you could be.

[538] It's like, God, that's such Well, that's an idea worth spending 300 years to encapsulate in stone.

[539] And that's what happened.

[540] Like, that's exact, it's not as exactly as if the people who were building these buildings knew everything that they were doing any more than we know what the hell we're doing while we're doing all the things we're doing now.

[541] We're building these amazing constructions.

[542] We only have a dim sense in some sense of the totality of what we're up to, but that's part of what they were up to.

[543] And that relates back to the idea that I had at the beginning.

[544] You say, well, what am I trying to do?

[545] With all of you, I hope, what are we trying to do?

[546] Well, what I'm hoping that we're trying to do.

[547] And this is what psychologists do.

[548] This is what educators do, if they're worth their salt, is they try to make more resilient, wiser, more informed, more put together, more confidence, stronger, more intelligent, more courageous individuals, right?

[549] Then you think, well, what does that mean exactly?

[550] It's like, okay, so here's another gloss on it in some sense.

[551] So, you know, 12 rules for life and maps of meaning for that matter are in some ways very harsh books.

[552] I wouldn't say, like they have a deep pessimism about them.

[553] Now, Carl Jung said something once that's really stuck in my mind in his writings on alchemy, which I studied for about two years.

[554] three years, maybe something like that.

[555] Very difficult writings.

[556] So difficult, I can't really even lecture about them because I barely understand them well enough to understand what I wrote when I wrote about them.

[557] It really pushed me to the limits of my ability, so I can't do it free form.

[558] But one of the things he identified was the central dictum of alchemy, which was this weird mishmash of conceptions out of which science emerged.

[559] So a profound, a profound.

[560] It was, for Jung, alchemy was the dream of material trance.

[561] transformation out of which science emerged.

[562] It's like we dreamed as a species, we dreamed that the investigation of the material world could free us from death and privation.

[563] That was the dream first.

[564] That's the idea of the philosopher's stone, the material substance that would confer upon you wealth and health and infinite life.

[565] It's like we had an idea that that could be found in the analysis of the material world.

[566] And it was that dream which lasted about a thousand years that gave us the motivational impetus to develop science.

[567] So that's the Jungian idea.

[568] And it's a staggeringly brilliant idea and very rarely understood.

[569] There's an alchemical dictum, which is a very interesting one.

[570] It's insterquilinus invinatur, which is a Latin phrase, that means that which you most want will be found where you least want to look.

[571] It's like, it's such, it's so useful to know that.

[572] You think, well, what's the barrier to enlightenment?

[573] Hypothetically, people can become enlightened.

[574] Well, that's the theory, because we have records of enlightened people.

[575] And, you know, among your compatriots, you know that some of them seem more enlightened than others, and maybe you have days where you're a little more enlightened than you are other days.

[576] You know, so you can see that there's a continuum.

[577] You might think, well, if you could be enlightened, why wouldn't you be?

[578] It seems to be, to be, what, enveloped in light seems to be better than being shrouded in darkness.

[579] And so why wouldn't you choose to be enveloped in light?

[580] And the answer might be because what you most need will be found where you least want to look.

[581] And that's a great thing.

[582] And I do believe that it's true.

[583] I really do believe it's true.

[584] Partly because you've already looked where you want it to look and you're not everything you could be.

[585] So obviously you should go look and where you didn't look.

[586] And there's some dark places where you didn't look.

[587] That's for sure.

[588] And so anyways, in maps of meaning and in 12 Rules for life.

[589] The books are very dark, and I think they're dark partly because when I wrote the first book in particular, I was looking at the darkest things I could look at.

[590] And so what I was trying to do was, I'll tell you a little story.

[591] And so it's a story that I read about something that happened in Auschwitz, which is a pretty dark place.

[592] And so imagine that you go to the darkest place, let's call that Auschwitz, and then you look for the darkest thing that happened there.

[593] And then you might think, well, that's the darkest place.

[594] And so one of the darkest things that happened at Auschwitz, and perhaps not the darkest, but it doesn't matter.

[595] It's a good exemplar of the category of terrible things.

[596] So, you know, the Nazis would pack all the people they were putting in concentration camps into cattle cars, essentially, railway cars.

[597] Summer or winter, it didn't matter.

[598] They packed the cars right full, so people would be standing there like this, and they'd be transported for hours, and lots of them just died in the cars.

[599] The old people died, the kids died, they died because the ones on the outside of the cattle cars froze to death, right?

[600] And they died in the summer, in the middle, because the people in the middle got so hot, they just died.

[601] But that was okay because they're all being shipped to die anyway.

[602] So that was just more or less convenient.

[603] Plus, it was terrible and brutal and caused a lot of suffering, so that was all the better.

[604] And so then you took these people, and they were pretty much as hurt as you could make a person, you'd think, because they'd been separated from their country, and they'd been separated from their family, then they'd been treated with absolute brutality, and then maybe they had family members die along the way, and they were terrorized as much as you could be terrorized, and then you got them to the camp, right?

[605] And then the guards used to play a game with them, because everything that had happened wasn't enough.

[606] Makes you think, well, what would be enough?

[607] And so one of the things that the camp guards used to do, so these were big camps, right?

[608] They weren't camps, they weren't the size of this room, They were cities of like 25 ,000 people.

[609] They were big places.

[610] And so they would have the prisoners, once they got off the cattle cars, and they dispensed with a bunch of them who were near death anyways, and they were the ones that would be gassed right away.

[611] They would have the people who could still stumble forward, let's say, pick up 100 pounds sacks of salt, and then carry them across the compound.

[612] And you think, well, that's not so bad.

[613] Maybe you needed to move the salt.

[614] maybe there's some purpose to it you know work will make you free that was the motto on the outside of the entrance carved in in steel arbeck make free work will set you free there's a little joke because there were people in the Nazis would tell jokes about the concentration camps right work will make you free the freedom was death and it wasn't work either it was a parody of work And so the evil in Auschwitz was a parody of work that killed you, which was the worst thing you could do to a human being, because work should ennoble you, right?

[615] Because perhaps you're working towards the betterment of being.

[616] You can turn that into a parody of work that's only devoted towards your death.

[617] So the work actually kills you instead of helping you survive.

[618] And that's what that little sign meant.

[619] And someone thought that was a joke.

[620] And one of the things you might ask yourself is just exactly what is it that thought that was a joke.

[621] And that's bloody well worth thinking about, I can tell you that.

[622] And so, anyways, the guards would get the inmates to pick up the 100 -pound sacks of salt and carry, and that's a lot to 100 pounds, in case you hadn't thought that through, and you'd have to carry it to the other side of the compound and back.

[623] And that's the thing.

[624] That was the thing that got me. It wasn't the cattle car, bad as that was.

[625] it wasn't the camp, bad as that was, it wasn't even carrying the damn salt across the camp.

[626] It was carrying it across and back.

[627] And it wasn't even the fact that the inmates had to do that.

[628] It was the fact that someone wanted them to do that.

[629] It's like, that's as dark as it gets, to want that.

[630] And then I thought, you know, I had this client once who was extraordinarily naive, and she had been knocked into a state of almost like epilepsy.

[631] She had seizures every night for three hours a night.

[632] She was conscious, but they were like seizures, and she didn't sleep, and this lasted for like three years.

[633] And when I took it apart, it turned out that she had been assaulted by her boyfriend.

[634] And not successfully, because she actually managed to fight him off, but he looked at her with a look of malevolence.

[635] He actually wanted to hurt her, and she was an unbelievably naive person.

[636] So naive, you wouldn't even believe it if I could outline how naive she was.

[637] Her parents had actually taught her when she was a kid that adults were angels.

[638] Literally, that's what they taught her.

[639] And she believed that, even though when I saw her, she was like a 28 -year -old woman and had been to university.

[640] I thought, didn't you read any history?

[641] It's like, well, yeah, but I just, I put it in a compartment and I didn't really think about it.

[642] Well, she...

[643] So one of the things I did with her to kind of break her out of her naivity was to, I had to read this book called Ordinary Men, and that's a hell of a book, man. So it's a story about how a bunch of policemen from Germany moved into Poland during World War II, and they were just ordinary policemen, you know, bourgeois, middle -class guys who had been socialized before the rise of the Nazis, by the way, and it detailed their transformation from ordinary, you know, middle -class husbands and fathers into people who were taking naked, pregnant women out into the middle of fields and shooting them in the back of the head.

[644] And you don't get from, one of those places to the other without a very lengthy and painful transformation.

[645] It was hell for these men.

[646] You know, they were physically ill. They had nightmares.

[647] Like, you just think of, see, to read that properly, you have to read that as if it's happening to you.

[648] And you're not the person who's being hauled out into the field, by the way.

[649] You're the person who's got the pistol.

[650] And the problem is you are that person.

[651] That's the problem.

[652] And that's the proper way to read history.

[653] It's like, well, you can read it as a victim.

[654] You can read it as a bystander, which is usually what people do.

[655] Or you can read it as a victim, but it's a lot more interesting to read it as a perpetrator, and it's a lot more revealing.

[656] And so, when I was reading about these terrible things, I was also trying to imagine what I would have to be like to actually do that.

[657] And that's a very hard thing to do to imagine that.

[658] But the thing is, you can imagine it.

[659] That's the thing.

[660] And imagining it, that turns on the lights like, you wouldn't believe.

[661] It starts to think, oh, so that's what I'm like.

[662] I have that kind of capacity on that terrible end of the continuum.

[663] I have that capacity.

[664] And if you don't think that you have that capacity, well, maybe you don't.

[665] Like, it isn't obvious to me that everyone has that capacity.

[666] I would suspect that they do, because one of the things that characterized Nazi Germany and the horrors of the Soviet era, for example, is that even the people who didn't participate directly, shut the hell up when they should have said something.

[667] And it isn't clear to me that that complicit going along with the horror is actually less of a sin than actually perpetrating the acts.

[668] Now, you know, we could argue about that, and I might be wrong, but they're variants of evil.

[669] You know, one might be more extreme than the other, but both of them are on the pretty dismal side of the spectrum.

[670] So anyways, you know, I was walking through this.

[671] trying to imagine, okay, so I'm that guard, right, and I'm assigning that task, and I'm enjoying it.

[672] So just exactly what state of mind am I in?

[673] And that state of mind, for me, that's the state of mind that characterizes people who occupy hell and who not only occupy it, but are doing everything they possibly can to bring it about for themselves and for everyone else.

[674] And I would say, the act of producing that is a deeper hell than the hell that's being produced by the actions.

[675] You know what I mean?

[676] It's like, it's generating evil is even worse than the evil that's generated.

[677] It's the act that's worse.

[678] It's the moral, it's this, it's the immorality that's the worst.

[679] And so that was very useful to me. And you know, Solzhenitsin said something very interesting about the, about the Nazi era.

[680] You know, after World War II, the Nuremberg trials took place, right?

[681] And Solzhen, who wrote the Gulag Archipelago, by the way, which documented all the catastrophes of the Soviet Union, not all of them, but a random subset of them, let's say.

[682] He thought the Nuremberg trials were the most important event of the 20th century.

[683] And the reason that he believed that, I think he was right, the reason he believed that was because the Nuremberg trials established that there were some things that were so horrible that you didn't get to do no matter who you were and no matter what your excuse was.

[684] So you couldn't say, well, I was just following orders or that's what my culture thought.

[685] It was like the Nuremberg trial said, no, you have a moral culpability as an individual that you cannot sidestep by making reference to the norms of your culture.

[686] So that's like a universal ethic.

[687] There are acts of absolute evil.

[688] That's what the Nuremberg trials, established.

[689] Now, you might not agree with that, but then you have to think about what it means to not agree with that.

[690] It means you can't make the case that what the Auschwitz Camp Guard did in the situation that I described was wrong.

[691] And that's fine.

[692] If you want to make that supposition and live in a world where that supposition is true, go, have your fun, but you'll pay a price for it.

[693] Now, you'll pay a price for the other supposition, too, but I would say it's a better price.

[694] So, why was that useful to me?

[695] Well, it gave me a foundation.

[696] You know, maybe you're trying to figure out if there's something good in life.

[697] And that's the question that bothers everyone.

[698] Is there actually something good in life?

[699] You know, and especially bothers you when there doesn't seem to be that much good in your life.

[700] And maybe it's because of your own mistakes, but maybe it's because you're just getting laid low by chance and misfortune, because that happens to people.

[701] We think this is a veil of tears that should have never been.

[702] You know, and everyone in their life at some point is so desperate that that's what they think.

[703] And maybe it's the case.

[704] It's like, is there anything good in this life?

[705] It's like, well, who knows, man?

[706] That's not an easy nut to crack, let's say.

[707] But I discovered that there was something that was bad in this life.

[708] And that's something, right?

[709] Because if you can establish that there's something that's evil, and I think there were endless examples of things in the 20th century and throughout the course of human history but the 20th century really brought things up to in a stark manner I would say because it was the bloodiest century that there ever was if you can identify something that you regard as evil well then you've all of a sudden found good because whatever good is is the opposite of that now you might not know what the opposite of it is like what's the opposite of what that Auschwitz camp guard did when he took someone who was already completely deprived and made them do something pointless to produce excess suffering on the way to death?

[710] Well, I don't know what the opposite of that is exactly, but I know that that exists and that there is its opposite.

[711] And so all of a sudden, well, you have a landscape of evil and good, and then you have something to work for.

[712] And so that was Jung's notion, essentially, because Jung was a very deep guy.

[713] And when he said, that which you most need will be found where you least want to look, he meant really where you least want to look.

[714] And so that would be in the darkest possible place.

[715] The light shines in the darkest possible place.

[716] I would say you actually already know that, because here's something you do that you don't even know that you do, and most of you do it, you have a Christmas tree, right?

[717] You put a Christmas tree in your house, and you put lights on the tree.

[718] And when do you do that?

[719] well you do it at the darkest time of the year because part of the old story is that at the darkest time of at the darkest time the lights appear and so that's what you're doing with the Christmas well what the hell are you doing with the Christmas tree you tell me well everyone does it it's like yeah okay that's not a very deep answer you know what's what's the reason where did that come from where does that idea have its roots has its roots in many places it's a very very complex ancient idea but part of it is to act out the proposition that at the darkest point the light reappears, and that we should celebrate that, and that we should celebrate that as if it's the birth of the Redeemer.

[720] That's what you're doing.

[721] It's like you don't even know it.

[722] Well, it's time to know it.

[723] That's the thing.

[724] It's time to know it.

[725] Because it's better to know it consciously.

[726] It's better to take that responsibility on yourself consciously.

[727] And what are you trying to do?

[728] You're trying to turn yourself into the sort of person who can act nobly and properly in the face of the church.

[729] tragedy and malevolence of life.

[730] And you do that, you do that.

[731] And this is the other thing that I've been trying to make clear.

[732] And it's partly a consequence of trying to delineate out what the opposite path was from the path that led to Auschwitz, let's say.

[733] It's like, it's a path of responsibility.

[734] And why is that?

[735] Well, life is brutal, and it is tainted by malevolence.

[736] And that's the essential theme of maps of meaning and 12 rules for life.

[737] It's the essential reality.

[738] Life is suffering.

[739] right it's an essential religious dictum it's the prime it's the first principle of buddhism it's obviously encapsulated as a principle in the great stories of judaism and well in christianity well the crucifix is the central symbol so like the notion that life is suffering is it's an axiomatic truth it's suffering tainted by malevolence what do you need as an antidote to that well it's not happiness it's something like meaning.

[740] And the meaning seems to be derived in the pursuit of the good.

[741] And the good isn't something trivial.

[742] The good is what keeps you away from hell.

[743] In any, I don't care what sense you want to interpret that in.

[744] And so it's a non -trivial thing.

[745] But the thing is the pursuit of that good.

[746] Well, that's what lends meaning to life.

[747] And it lends the meaning to life that enables you to stand up under the load of life and maybe to push back against the malevolence that would otherwise corrupt you and your family and your community, right?

[748] Because you have to find within yourself the capability to withstand the catastrophe of life.

[749] And you find that through meaning.

[750] And you find the meaning through responsibility.

[751] This is something that we've done a very bad job of communicating, I think, is that, you know, you think, well, why would you adopt responsibility?

[752] It's such a terrible load.

[753] It's like you can be the grasshopper in the story of the grasshopper and the ant.

[754] You can party like there's no tomorrow.

[755] You can live impulsively, right?

[756] and you can pursue short -term pleasure and you can make a demonstration of your rights and your privileges that other people should grant you.

[757] It's like there's no depth in that and everyone knows it.

[758] Where's the depth?

[759] The depth is in responsibility and you also know that because you know on those rare occasions when you're at peace with yourself and you think well maybe I'm justifying my miserable existence and your conscience isn't bothering you you think well I did I finally did something right and what does that mean?

[760] Well, you took responsibility for yourself properly or took responsibility for a friend or you took responsibility for your family maybe not as much as you could have but at least some you took some responsibility for your community you have a little respect for yourself because because you managed that and then you look at the people you admire and it's the same thing it's the people you admire spontaneously are the people who take responsibility and and who do that well and and who are not only responsible for themselves so they take care of themselves so they're not a to others as a minimal ethical prerequisite, but they have excess capacity.

[761] They don't just take care of themselves.

[762] They take care of their family, and they take care of their community.

[763] And you spontaneously admire people like that.

[764] And so that imprint of that admiration is written in your soul.

[765] You can't escape it.

[766] You think, well, the meaning that you need to ally yourself within life is associated with the voluntary acceptance of responsibility.

[767] That's a hell of a thing.

[768] And then you might think, well, great, that's the secret.

[769] The meaning that redeems life is to be found in responsibility.

[770] How much responsibility should you adopt?

[771] An answer to that is, as much as you can possibly manage.

[772] And all there is in that is a constant process of ennobling yourself and developing yourself and making yourself stronger and making everything around you better.

[773] It's like, why in the world would you do anything other than that?

[774] Well, I didn't have the opportunity to make this lengthy case in the discussion that I had at Aspen with the political scientist who wanted to push me on my attitude towards policy.

[775] It's like, well, that's my attitude towards policy.

[776] It's like, get your act together.

[777] We've got things to do, man. Well, thank you very much.

[778] Jordan Peterson, everybody.

[779] Man, I kid you not, and I think you guys could see it tonight.

[780] I mean, every single night that we've done these, he's different.

[781] Can you imagine if he had laid that answer on that guy?

[782] That would have been something.

[783] It's more fun with you.

[784] Okay, so we're going to do a Q &A.

[785] You guys submitted a couple hundred questions here.

[786] We'll try to get to as many as possible.

[787] And actually, you know, Jordan and I have become quite close during this this tour and I actually have the password to his computer he's logged into Twitter right now I could end this whole fucking thing we could make Roseanne Barr look pretty good you know what I'm saying all right people give it up for Jordan Peterson everybody man for real you were on it tonight I mean that last 10 minutes I feel like that that sums up the whole damn thing and now to the questions okay which movie that you've seen in the past 10 years did the best job of telling an archetypal story?

[788] Groundhog Day.

[789] Yeah, Groundhog Groundhog Day is actually a perfect movie.

[790] If you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, apart from the fact, you know, including the fact that it has what's his name Bill Murray, yeah, it's like I thought Douglas Murray.

[791] It's like, no, it's not Douglas Murray.

[792] Yeah, because well he just, how many times does he die?

[793] It's like, and And it's all of the stupidity in him has to die.

[794] And it's like 300 suicide attempts until he finally wises up, right?

[795] He just has to be hit and hit and hit and hit and hit.

[796] And it's quite interesting, too, because the reason he is willing to subject himself to the hits is because he falls in love with someone, right?

[797] So he values something.

[798] He finally values something.

[799] And then he finds that the thing that he values rejects him.

[800] It serves him as a judge.

[801] and then that motivates his desire to allow all the parts of him that are unworthy to die.

[802] And what happens is that he isn't successful until he gets the day right.

[803] Sufficient unto the day are the, what's the word?

[804] Sufficient unto the day are the problems thereof, right?

[805] That's the central theme in the Sermon on the Mount.

[806] And the Sermon on the Mount is predicated on the idea that you should aim at the highest possible good that you can conceive and really aim at it with all of your soul to aim at that and that's to aim away from that abyss that I described and then to concentrate on getting the day right and that's encapsulated in that brilliant movie that brilliant comic movie and so it has a perfect archetypal structure so I bet you didn't expect it was that movie on to the next question which movie that you've seen in the past 10 years did the best job telling an archetypalist, they're good, they're good.

[807] Yeah.

[808] How would you work with a narcissistic mother who is at the top of the authority hierarchy in the family?

[809] What's the best way to approach an individual like this?

[810] Or I got a couple of questions about Kermit the Frog here, if you want to do that instead.

[811] Well, the image, you know, sometimes when I have been engaged in my psychotherapeutic practice, It's something I learned from a variety of therapists, was to watch what your imagination does when people are talking to you.

[812] If people are talking to you, you'll think up words, or words will manifest themselves in your imagination, which is actually a better process than thinking them up.

[813] Thinking them up usually means you're trying to direct your thoughts towards some predetermined end, but just allowing the thoughts to emerge, it frees you in some sense from the limitations of your own bias and that enables kind of wisdom to reveal itself but that can also happen with images like so I would listen to my clients as if they knew something it's rule nine assume that the person you're listening to knows something you don't I always assumed that with my clients because they knew all sorts of things that I didn't and then I would listen to them and sometimes little images would come to mind then I'd just have them what the images were and then we'd take that apart and the images are kind of like a fragment of a dream you know and so it would provide a broader context within which what they were saying could be interpreted and when you asked that question I had all the images from sleeping from sleeping beauty come into my mind and so what happens is the evil mother in sleeping beauty the evil mother turns into the dragon of chaos and then the hero to avoid being trapped in a dungeon until he's old which you should be able to figure out what that means, right?

[814] That's the high school shooter who lives in his mother's basement.

[815] That's really what that is.

[816] To avoid being trapped like that, you have to take on that force.

[817] I'd say that narcissistic, overwhelming, what would you say, too close, eternal, maternal presence.

[818] That's the pathology of the maternal.

[819] You take it on with courage and truth.

[820] That's the armament in that story.

[821] And then you can forgive women, too, because that's what happens at the end of Sleeping Beauty, right?

[822] He kills the terrible mother, the dragon of chaos.

[823] All the thorns that stop him from finding love disappear, and he finds the way to actually have a relationship with a woman.

[824] That's what that story means.

[825] It's a very deep story.

[826] Truth and courage, that's good.

[827] I would say, that's your best bet.

[828] I would also not underrate the utility of getting the hell away from there.

[829] No, because you need to go, you need to get away, and maybe you're made to feel guilty because you need to get away, because that's a great trick.

[830] It's like, because your impulse is to move out towards life and to respond to the call to adventure and to flee the coop, right, and to fly away from the nest and all of that.

[831] and that's a desire that should be facilitated by a mother that cares for you because as the psychoanalyst pointed out at the beginning of the 20th century, the good mother always fails, right?

[832] Because she stops being a mother.

[833] And if your mother won't stop being a mother, then you need to go away because she has no right to not stop being a mother, because you're not her child.

[834] And if she still thinks that you're her child, then then she's infantilizing you and tempting you to remain an infant so that you don't have to take on any responsibility.

[835] And so if truth and courage won't suffice, then departure is mandated.

[836] And if the price that you pay for that is a guilt trip, then don't answer the phone.

[837] Look, and I can tell you something else, too, about your poor old mother, who you're abandoning and leaving to her own devices, is that if you leave and you develop your own auto -taught, then you might be able to take care of her when she's actually old and frail and there'll be a part of her that's quite happy that you escape from her trap and that's the part that you could potentially redeem by your escape so there's nothing in it but good even though you'll you'll pay the price in guilt it's like it's a price you shouldn't be required to pay to begin with no she doesn't have that right to put that burden on you when her job is to facilitate facilitate your competence departure.

[838] Are there any games you play, video games, chess, monopoly, et cetera?

[839] Prisoners of Settlers of Catan.

[840] Yeah, I like that game.

[841] I liked Risk, eh?

[842] I like to play Risk.

[843] But Risk, you always won if you took Australia, and that just annoyed me. So, but I think Settlers of Catan is a better game, and so it's quite fun.

[844] then there's whatever game I'm playing right now that game which seems to be quite engaging so I like to yeah I play with that with my kids and my wife quite a bit and so that's that's quite fun in the past you've said that you identify as being a Christian do you believe that Jesus I don't think I actually said that right out I might have I might have it's possible okay so maybe I did Be careful with your language, Peterson.

[845] Good one, good one.

[846] All right, well, putting that aside for a sec. The second part is the important part.

[847] Do you believe that Jesus Christ died and physically resurrected from the dead three days later?

[848] This seems to come up a lot.

[849] It does.

[850] It does come up a lot.

[851] I'm going to use the same answer that I usually use for that question, which is, I don't understand enough about the doctrine to address the question.

[852] You know, like, I'm making my way through the biblical stories.

[853] I did a 15 lecture series last year on Genesis, and I'm going to start up again in November with the stories in Exodus.

[854] See, and I don't, you think, well, that's a question.

[855] You should just be able to answer that question.

[856] It's like, no, that's not right, because that's a really, really complicated question.

[857] See, there's an idea that's nested inside Christianity that whatever is divine is outside of time and space.

[858] It's truly outside of time and space.

[859] And that makes any discussions of what occurs within that symbolic framework dependent on a series of presumptions about the nature of time and space.

[860] And I don't understand the context within which that story manifested itself well enough to address.

[861] us the question.

[862] And you might think, well, I'm just waffling.

[863] It's like, and could he possibly believe in the physical resurrection of the body?

[864] It's like, well, first of all, the world is a very weird place.

[865] And so, and it's much weirder than we think.

[866] And so, I can't answer that question because I don't know enough.

[867] I don't know enough to answer it properly.

[868] Because I also don't understand exactly what the doctrine is.

[869] You know, it's not like there's a singular agreement on the resurrection story, even in the biblical narratives.

[870] There's four different accounts to begin with.

[871] And I don't know enough about the accounts.

[872] Now, you know, you might think, well, why would you even give any credence to the question?

[873] Because it seems so preposterous.

[874] It's like, fair enough, man, that's a good question.

[875] But here's part of the answer to that.

[876] I spent a lot of time studying religious texts.

[877] and mostly the biblical texts, but not only the biblical texts.

[878] And I've studied them in a strange way because I've studied the text themselves, but then I've studied other domains of knowledge, and I've interpreted those stories through those other domains of knowledge.

[879] And the way I've done that is that I try to only rely on an interpretation that works in relationship to the story and in relation to this story relationship to all those other domains of knowledge simultaneously.

[880] So it has to work as part of the biblical narrative, but it has to work biologically, and it has to work philosophically.

[881] It has to work all of those levels at, and it has to be practically applicable.

[882] And so you think about how you decide whether something is real by using your senses, right?

[883] Well, if you see something, is it real?

[884] Well, usually, but not always.

[885] Well, what if you see it and hear it?

[886] Well, then that's probably more real.

[887] If you see it and hear it and touch it and smell it, well, there aren't very many things that aren't real that pass that test.

[888] The reality manifests itself across multiple levels of analysis simultaneously.

[889] And so that's the strategy that I've been using to extract out an interpretation of the biblical stories, which is actually my response to Sam Harris's objection, because Harris says, well, how do you know that your interpretation of the text is valid?

[890] You're not just reading into it.

[891] It's like, well, Sam, how do you know that your attempt to derive the world of values from the facts isn't just arbitrary?

[892] It's the same objection.

[893] So he's hoist on the same pittard with his theory.

[894] But I have an answer to it, which is, I'm only willing to accept interpretations that work at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously.

[895] Now, one of the things I've found as a consequence of doing that is that the deeper I go into a religious text, the more truth reveals itself.

[896] And that isn't something I necessarily expected.

[897] And it's happened to me lots of times in my life.

[898] First of all, I didn't really believe that there was anything of valuable value in the religious texts to begin with.

[899] And that was when I was a young man, say, but I learned that as I got deeper into the reality of good and evil, that religious language became necessary.

[900] You know, and I partly learned that from reading Dostoevsky.

[901] But I learned it, I also learned it in psychotherapy.

[902] When I was talking to my clients about truly terrible things that had been happening to them, like murderous things that unfolded over decades, like in the most pathological circumstances, a framework that didn't involve a discussion of good and evil, didn't even touch the problem.

[903] And more than that, I've noticed with people who have post -traumatic stress disorder that unless they develop a philosophy of, which is often in some sense self -inflicted, because sometimes, especially soldiers who develop post -traumatic stress disorder, develop it because they see themselves do something they can't believe they did.

[904] And then they can't shake it.

[905] It's blown their world into fragments.

[906] And they can't put it back together.

[907] And the only way they can put it together is to develop a sophisticated philosophy of good and evil.

[908] No, and I mean, there's plenty of clinical evidence that describes post -traumatic stress disorder as this kind of fractionating, this fracturing.

[909] But I've had many, many soldiers come and talk to me. This happened latest, this happened in Iceland.

[910] June 8, this guy from Idaho came to Iceland to see me because I was talking there.

[911] And he was in tears when he saw me and he'd been a serviceman.

[912] He had post -traumatic stress disorder.

[913] And he told me that my lectures on good and evil had helped him recover from it.

[914] And so I also learned that there's levels of reality that only religious language can lay out.

[915] That's what the religious language is for, actually.

[916] That's why it developed.

[917] And so the deeper I got into the stories, the more meaning revealed itself, and it seemed bottomless.

[918] And so I've certainly seen that with the opening stories of Genesis.

[919] But then I also rediscovered it last year when I was going through the Abrahamic stories.

[920] The deeper I went, the deeper they got.

[921] And the deeper I went, the deeper they got.

[922] There was no bottom.

[923] And so I'm very loath to throw away the baby with the bathwater, let's say, or even the bathwater, for that matter.

[924] It's like there's something to the idea of the dying and resurrecting hero.

[925] There's something to that idea.

[926] And I don't know how deep that idea goes.

[927] I can treat it just symbolically, which is basically what I usually do.

[928] It's like I can take a union approach, which is kind of like the approach of Joseph Campbell, and say, it's a deep idea that the hero is that which sacrifices himself or part of himself or herself, for that matter, in the pursuit of the good.

[929] That's the dragon combat story.

[930] And look, I could give you an example of that.

[931] Okay.

[932] Most of you, many of you, probably watched the second Harry Potter movie, right?

[933] And there's a magical castle, which you all accept, without blinking an eye, by the way.

[934] And it's full of magical children, which you also accept.

[935] That's okay.

[936] No problem, we can watch that.

[937] And underneath the magical castle, there's like an immense ancient system of pipes and sewers, and inside that lives a gigantic snake.

[938] That's the basilisk, right?

[939] And that echoes the Garden of Eden, by the way, with its snake.

[940] It's the same structure.

[941] Although you probably didn't think that when you watched the movie, but it doesn't matter.

[942] It's still there.

[943] And then when you see the snake, when you see the snake, it turns you to stone.

[944] And you accept that.

[945] It's like, yeah, well, of course.

[946] When you look at a giant snake, it turns you to stone.

[947] Everyone knows that.

[948] It's like, well, it's because if you're a prey animal and you see a predator, then you freeze.

[949] That's why you know that.

[950] It's like you know it all right.

[951] You've known it for 60 million years.

[952] Like you seriously know it.

[953] It's built into you.

[954] Anyways, so the snake ends up capturing the Virgin.

[955] That's the St. George story.

[956] Geneva, right?

[957] That's a variant of Virginia, which is obviously a variant of virgin.

[958] In case you didn't notice that.

[959] And so the snake takes the virgin because that's what snakes do, and everyone knows that.

[960] And then what Harry has to do is go down into the depths to confront what he would least want to confront and have a great battle with this subterranean serpent.

[961] And he does that, and the serpent bites him, which is the encounter with evil, right?

[962] That's what causes post -traumatic stress disorder.

[963] And what cures him are the tears of a phoenix.

[964] Yeah, see, you guys know that.

[965] Of course, what cures if you're bitten by a giant snake?

[966] Well, obviously, it's phoenix tears that fix you.

[967] Everyone knows that.

[968] while the phoenix is a dying and resurrecting soul it's a bird it's an aerial spirit and when it ages it bursts into flame and then it's reborn and so the story that you watched was the story that that which dies and is eternally reborn is eternal medication for the poisonous bite of the ultimate serpent so that's the story man it's like so so you see you see in that story there's built in the idea of death and resurrection.

[969] And actually the entire Harry Potter series, which is the battle against evil in case you didn't notice, I mean, that's Voldemort, right?

[970] He's Satan for all intents and purposes, which makes the fundamentalist Christian assault on Harry Potter pretty comical in my estimation.

[971] But in order for Harry to finally defeat Voldemort, he has to die and be reborn.

[972] That's how the book ends.

[973] It's like, and you know, I don't know, most of you bought that book for your kids, right, seven, 600 -page volumes to outline this story.

[974] And you went to the movies, and you buy it.

[975] You think, oh, yeah, well, that's a great movie.

[976] It makes great enough so that tens of millions of people spent billions of dollars on it.

[977] It's like that's behavioral indication that something is going on, and 10 -year -old kids were reading 500 -page books.

[978] It's like, why were they so engrossed by it?

[979] Well, you can figure that out.

[980] It's like, what the hell is going on?

[981] It's like there's some massive cultural phenomena, phenomenon happening there.

[982] It's like, well, she's telling a story that everyone knows, but no one knows they know it.

[983] And so there is something to this idea of the dying and resurrecting hero.

[984] And the question is, well, what is there to it?

[985] And the answer is, the more you look, the more there is to it.

[986] And so I'm not willing to just, well, do you believe in the physical resurrection of Christ?

[987] It's like, I know why that question is being asked.

[988] It's like, but it's a trap that question.

[989] Either way you answer it, it's a trap.

[990] It's like, sorry, it's a deep problem.

[991] It's way deeper than we know.

[992] And so I'm not going to answer it casually.

[993] Well, on that note, boxers or briefs?

[994] No, sorry.

[995] Not going to answer that casually.

[996] Me either.

[997] He's freeball.

[998] That's the takeaway tonight, people.

[999] Yeah, that's right.

[1000] It's commando for me, man, on stage.

[1001] Any chance that Trump will nominate you for the Supreme Court?

[1002] Very funny, very funny.

[1003] How much worse do you think it's going to get with the left before it gets better?

[1004] I guess we're going to find out, aren't we?

[1005] Well, I would say that's on you.

[1006] You know, like you all have your circles of influence.

[1007] So, you know, when people are feeling hopeless about their lives, and maybe they're suicidal, they think, well, life is a horror show, and it can be unbearable, and what does it matter anyways?

[1008] Because that's the pathway to suicide, those sorts of thoughts, that, and I'm a burden to other people, or there's a variety of things you can think if you're suicidal, but the hopelessness of existence is certainly core to that.

[1009] And one strand of that thinking is how insignificant you are out here on this tiny dust mode of a planet among hundreds of billions of not only stars but galaxies in this near infinite universe that has this immense time frame.

[1010] And there you are in some isolated suburb of the galaxy, spinning around the sun pointlessly, suffering away until you die and vanish.

[1011] One dust moat among seven billion.

[1012] Something like that.

[1013] Good night, everybody.

[1014] Just, yeah, I was just trying to cheer you up a bit here before you go home.

[1015] But, you know, it's, and so who cares if you live or die?

[1016] Well, it's, it, there's any number of things about that way of looking at the world that just aren't right.

[1017] First of all, you're not one dust mode among 7 billion.

[1018] You're networked.

[1019] And you can demonstrate that arithmetically, very rapidly.

[1020] Each of you is connected, on average, one to one, with about 1 ,000 people.

[1021] And that's an underestimate, especially if you go across your lifespan.

[1022] You know, maybe you'll influence 10 ,000 people in your life.

[1023] Some of you, many more, and some of you less.

[1024] But let's say on average it's 1 ,000.

[1025] And I mean to have a pretty profound influence, you know, for better or for worse.

[1026] you might not be the cardinal experience of their life.

[1027] That you, you know, that's only true for a small number of the people that you interact with, but you can have an influence on a lot of people.

[1028] And so that's a thousand people, and each of those people know a thousand people, so that's a million, and then each of those know a thousand, and that's a billion.

[1029] So you're two people away from a billion people.

[1030] And so you're a center of influence, the magnitude of which you don't want to underestimate.

[1031] I mean, that's part of the idea that you're a...

[1032] sovereign individual of of divine value.

[1033] It's like you're a center of consciousness, you're, and the ripples of your ethical or unethical activity produce a larger consequence than you might ever want to imagine.

[1034] And if you want to act so that things don't destabilize, you know, you have to want that first, right?

[1035] And that means to some degree being willing to stretch out your hand to your enemy, because of you're not having a conflict with the people that agree with you.

[1036] You're having a conflict with the people who don't agree with you.

[1037] And you need to figure out how to not make that bloody unless that's what you want.

[1038] And hopefully that isn't what you want.

[1039] And I think the way to sanity is through, well, it is precisely through that.

[1040] It's through the development of your individual character so that you can be the sort of person that can listen to someone who's pushed themselves into a position that's too extreme and entice them back to the to the consensual to the consensual center something like that so that you can continue to live in peace and you know your great country you've set up a society where where you've managed that for for for a couple of hundred years you know through bad times and good and and and to the great benefit of everyone in the world to the great and continuing benefit of everyone in the world and I would say well that would be good to continue that but you have to want that you have to want peace and not victory you know and that goes again to the statement about winning at the beginning of the lecture it's like if you if you're smart you fight for peace you do that with your wife for example it's like you want to you want to win when you have an argument with your wife well first of all good luck with that well because you have to wake up beside her the next day and if you win then she loses and then she's a loser and that's who you wake up with and And maybe you want to wake up with a loser Because you want to be a martyr or you want to be the winner It's like that's fine But you know, you play that game for five or six years And you'll be in your own particular brand of hell And that's for sure And you'll deserve it too Because you produced it And so, you know, you have to live with your neighbors Crazy as they are They might not be any crazier than you are You know, and it's highly probable When I was on Bill Mars show about a month ago, it was pretty liberal -leaning panel, four or five people on it other than me, New York Times journalist, Atlantic Monthly Journalist, governor of Washington, I think.

[1041] There was one other person who's, well, there's Bill Maher, obviously, but they were all talking away about, you know, how reprehensible the Trump types were, and they were being all self -satisfied about listing off Trump's faults, which, like, doesn't really require, what would you call it, the inspiration of genius to manage.

[1042] And, you know, I was sitting there listening, kind of detached, because I'm a Canadian, and so I'm a little bit detached from the situation.

[1043] And I thought, okay, I'm going to ask a question that goes underneath the discussion.

[1044] It's like, so I waited for a pause, and I said, what do you plan to do with all those people that voted for him?

[1045] It's like 50 % of your population.

[1046] It's like, it's half the people who live on your, your street.

[1047] Hey, it might be your brother, right?

[1048] It's going to be some of your family members.

[1049] It's like, they're all reprehensible, they're all contemptible, they're all stupid.

[1050] That's your plan for peace, is it?

[1051] That's your plan for peace.

[1052] It's like, it's not a good plan.

[1053] So, well, maybe you don't want peace.

[1054] Maybe you want victory.

[1055] It's like, decide what you mean by victory, because peace is victory, man. And I don't mean the peace that comes as a consequence of capitulation, because that's not peace.

[1056] Peace is the consequence of consensus and negotiation and it beats hell.

[1057] It beats hell and it beats slavery and consensus and negotiation is the pathway forward and that's why you need to continue the dialogue because the dialogue is everything.

[1058] The dialogue is how you maintain peace and so hopefully you make yourself articulate and thoughtful so that you can conduct the dialogue properly because after all your sovereign individuals with the responsibility of the state resting on your And if you take that lightly, then the state will shake and its walls will fall on you and everyone you love.

[1059] And unless that's what you want, then don't aim at it, aim away from it.

[1060] And that's what I'm hoping we'll do.

[1061] You know, I have faith in this.

[1062] I think that we can get our act together and that we can make things better and that we can avoid taking this polarization to its logical conclusion, even though there are people who would be happy if that's what happened, because they would like to dance in the burning runes and say, I told you so.

[1063] But hopefully you don't want to be one of those people, or maybe you don't want to allow the part of you that would want that to gain ascendancy.

[1064] Because maybe you don't want to dance in the burning runes.

[1065] So, well...

[1066] All right, we've got time for one more.

[1067] This feels like a fitting ending.

[1068] What do you want to be when you grow up, Jordan Peterson?

[1069] Well, I'm having a pretty good time of it right now.

[1070] I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, I think.

[1071] Hopefully I can figure out how to do it better as I keep practicing.

[1072] Part of the great privilege, let's say, of being able to address audiences night after night is that I get to keep practicing, talking to people.

[1073] And I can watch and listen and see what's working and what's working in the way that I would like it to work.

[1074] You know, right now, you know, people, I had a friend who just wrote an article about me and then went on television to talk about me, and he was a good friend of mine, and he came out, and he said that he thought that I had become a dangerous person, which was somewhat shocking to me, because I had known him for a long time, and he was someone I liked, and still like, for that matter.

[1075] and you know when someone says something like that and they've been on your side and they're fundamentally a thoughtful person then you should listen but you know in my own defense I have been listening there's lots of people who are watching what I'm doing my family is watching what I'm doing I have friends who are very very smart and tough and mean and they're watching what I'm doing and if I make a mistake they bloody well tell me and they don't pull any punches, and I listen.

[1076] And so I've been listening, but I was listening to my friend as well.

[1077] And I was thinking, well, okay, what's the evidence that he's right?

[1078] Well, and the evidence that he's right is, I suppose, that my sphere of influence, if you want to think of it that way, has grown in a manner that's surreal and incomprehensible.

[1079] And so there's definitely danger associated with that.

[1080] Any reasonable person would understand that.

[1081] But then, you know, there's this idea that you get the fans that you deserve, the fans.

[1082] I don't like that word, but we'll use it for now.

[1083] I watched this documentary once about this guy named Jeremy.

[1084] I don't remember his name.

[1085] Pornstar.

[1086] They called him the Hedgehog.

[1087] Ron Jeremy, yeah.

[1088] He said...

[1089] Boy, you all got that one.

[1090] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1091] Yeah, that figures, yeah, yeah.

[1092] So, yeah, so, yeah.

[1093] So, one of the funniest things that Ron Jeremy almost said in that documentary was that he was that he ended up being the hero.

[1094] He ended up being hero to people who thought that Ron Jeremy was a hero.

[1095] So I thought that was so funny.

[1096] It's like, that's a kind of hell to fall into, man. So he was in that hell.

[1097] And so, and then I, so then I'm thinking, well, how are people?

[1098] reacting when I meet them, because maybe that's a bit of a barometer that I can use to measure the consequences of these discussions and what I've been writing about and so forth.

[1099] And so here's the situation that I'm in.

[1100] Wherever I go now, people come and talk to me, and it's always the same.

[1101] you know, they approach and they're very polite and hesitant, you know, which is good because if you're going to approach someone you don't know, you should be, that would be the optimal way to do it is to be polite and hesitant, you know, because maybe you're bothering them and who knows what they're thinking about and all of that.

[1102] But regardless, that is what people do.

[1103] They're always polite and hesitant, and then they're very happy to see me. That's a good thing.

[1104] that's a good thing.

[1105] If you're going around the world and there are strangers approaching you and they're happy to see you, that's a good thing.

[1106] And then, you know, they tell me one of the two things that I told you that people tell me at the beginning of this talk.

[1107] They either say, thank you very much.

[1108] You've helped me find words to express and defend what I've always known to be true.

[1109] And so I'm thrilled to hear that.

[1110] It's like, great.

[1111] It's great to have someone tell you that, you know?

[1112] It's not just good.

[1113] It's great.

[1114] And then the other thing that people say is, I was in a dark place, you know, I was anxious, depressed, nihilistic, drinking too much, taking too many drugs, wasn't getting along with my family, didn't have any, you know, they're in some local minima of hell, and they said, well, I've been listening to your lectures and reading your book, and I've been trying to develop a vision for my life, and I've been trying to take on responsibility.

[1115] I've been cleaning my room and it's working.

[1116] It's working.

[1117] Things are way better.

[1118] And, you know, sometimes they're with their father and he's all thrilled about the fact that their relationship is better.

[1119] Sometimes it's somebody with their mother or it's two friends or, and they're smiling away, telling me and sometimes they have tears that their things are way better.

[1120] And so that's what's happening.

[1121] It's wherever I go in the world, people come up to me and they say, things are way better because I've been listening to what you've been saying and so I don't think that's dangerous I think that's good and so what would I like to be when I grow up I would like to have more of that happen I'd like to have that happen everywhere that was a pretty good Kathy Newman accent she's joining us on the road after this well I don't know that we can ended any better way than that.

[1122] So I'm going to get out of the way.

[1123] Give it up for Jordan Peterson, everybody.

[1124] Consider picking up dad's latest book, 12 rules for life, an antidote to chaos, or his first book, Maps of Meaning, the Architecture of Belief.

[1125] Available in text, e -book, and audiobook format wherever you buy books.

[1126] Next week, you'll hear my lecture from the Civic Arts Plaza in Thousand Oaks, California.

[1127] I had Greg Hurwitz, an old friend of mine, and a very popular novelist and comic book writer opened for me, as Dave Rubin was unavailable.

[1128] So that was interesting and new.

[1129] I discussed the necessity of thinking as simulation of action, of thinking as the ability to produce new avatars of possible use, to try them out in the real world, to save and use those ones that prove themselves functional, at least in imagination, and to let the ones that fail dismally fade away and die.

[1130] I talked about the necessity of imagining thinking as tool of production and use, as something deeply pragmatic, and tried to make the case that clarity of thought and precision of speech therefore prepares people properly for a less sorrow -filled and mistake -ridden life in the real world, as well as aiding meaning and engagement and productivity, and individual and collective responsibility.

[1131] 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 .b. Peterson.

[1132] Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books, can be found on my website, jordanb peterson .com.

[1133] My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their pasts, understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future, can be found at self -authoring .com.

[1134] That's self -authoring .com.

[1135] From the Westwood One podcast network.