Being a victim

[0] Welcome to Season 2, Episode 35 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's Daughter and Collaborator.

[2] Today's episode is a 12 Rules for Life lecture recorded in Oslo on November 9th, 2018.

[3] This is a lecture on victimization that I really enjoyed.

[4] Just a heads up, we needed to cancel the London event on November 30th.

[5] Dad still needs time to recover, and I couldn't put him through the stress of traveling and performing quite yet.

[6] I really hope this doesn't disrupt people's plans too badly and we're definitely rescheduling it.

[7] We're really sorry for the disruption, but healing comes first.

[8] Then we'll be back at it.

[9] On a completely unrelated note, I've been doing NAD IV transfusions.

[10] I read ads for Elysium, which has a product that increases NAD, so you may have heard about NAD on this podcast.

[11] Joe Rogan also had an episode with a Harvard professor named David Sinclair about NAD.

[12] Anyway, I've had four of the IV infusions and oh my God, I've tried a lot of weird things in the last four years for healing my autoimmune disorder and nothing other than this all meat diet has been as effective as these infusions.

[13] It's as if my entire body's filled with energy.

[14] My mood is more varied, more highs and more lows, but it's better.

[15] Usually I'm just stable like a python or a lion, hence the name the lion diet.

[16] But this is better, I think.

[17] I'll be updating people on it on my YouTube channel, Michaela Peterson on YouTube and on Instagram.

[18] I really think there's something to this.

[19] Dad's going to give it a shot next week.

[20] I hope you enjoy this episode.

[21] Being a victim, a Jordan B. Peterson 12 Rules for Life lecture.

[22] Thank you, everyone.

[23] It's only been a week since I've been here.

[24] Something I've never said before about Oslo.

[25] So, I've had a bit of a conundrum today.

[26] because I've been in Europe for, I think this is the 13th lecture, and there's only 12 rules.

[27] And so, see, when I, I've gone through the rules many ways in the lectures that I've delivered, sometimes one at a time, sometimes mix and match three or four of them, to play them off each other.

[28] And when I came to Europe, this time, I thought I'd go through them backwards.

[29] And I landed on number one last night in two nights ago in Birmingham.

[30] And so I didn't know what to talk about tonight.

[31] So I thought I would do something kind of more universal and more universal in that it's not tied to a specific rule and deeper in that I would like to go into the substructure of what I've, been thinking about.

[32] And so I wrote this book a long time ago called Maps of Meaning.

[33] It was published in 1999, but I'd been writing it since 1985.

[34] And I spent a lot of time on that book for what it's worth.

[35] And it sort of laid the groundwork, I would say, for all the lectures that I put on YouTube.

[36] And then for this 12 Rules book, and it took me 30 years of lecturing and working on those ideas until I became fluent enough in discussing them so that they became accessible, say, in written form to a larger audience.

[37] But 12 rules is still grounded in the same metaphysical substructure that I laid out in maps of meaning.

[38] and I would say, discovered rather than invented, I hope.

[39] The tension between those discovering invention is real, but I think I discovered something, and certainly not by myself.

[40] So I'm going to lay out a few propositions.

[41] I want to talk to you tonight about the idea of victimization.

[42] That's the central theme.

[43] You might not know that for a while, because I'm going to wander around a fairly large territory before we get back to that concept.

[44] But I want to go deep into that idea.

[45] And so, you know, ideas have depth.

[46] Like literature has depth or art has depth.

[47] And it's an interesting metaphor because it isn't obvious what it means that something can be deep or shallow.

[48] But we know what that means.

[49] You know, you can have a shallow conversation with someone.

[50] And then you think, well, it wasn't really about anything.

[51] Then if you have a deep conversation, well, somehow it's about everything.

[52] And so depth has to do with significance and, well, profundity is another way of thinking about, but that's just another way of thinking about depth.

[53] The deeper a conversation is the more it's about every, the more it's about a topic that everything relies on.

[54] So our thinking is hierarchical and each thought depends on, each layer of thought depends on a layer of thought underneath that that's more fundamental and then that depends on the layer of thought under that that's more fundamental and so on all the way down to the bottom whatever the bottom is and it's not easy to find the bottom because we'd have to get to the bottom of ourselves and that's a very long way down the bottom of ourselves and it's not something that we can easily articulate because we're complicated and so we're unfathomable in some sense.

[55] sense.

[56] And so, so I want to talk to you about as far down to the bottom as I've been able to get.

[57] So the first thing, I'm going to talk about this, I'm going to take a stance that's essentially biological.

[58] I think in evolutionary terms, fundamentally, the time span over which I consider human development is, well, it's, it extends over, I would say, millions of years.

[59] because that is how I think about people because I think in an evolutionary sense and I take that very seriously we're very old creatures we have DNA within us that has been around for three and a half billion years and that's a very long time and so that's part of what gives us that depth now as individuals we're rather evanescent you know we don't last that long but there are parts of us that are truly, for all intents and purposes, immortal.

[60] And there are levels of our being that have been shaped.

[61] All of the levels of our being have been shaped over unimaginable spans of time.

[62] And that's made us what we are.

[63] And to understand people properly, you need that deep biological orientation.

[64] So you don't have enough respect for what you're looking at otherwise, unless you have some sense of them, immense spans of time that you're dealing, you know, you, every single one of you people are the descendants of life that has managed to replicate itself without failure for three and a half billion years.

[65] You know how unlikely that is?

[66] It's just, it's impossible that each of you are here.

[67] That's so incredibly unlikely over that extended span of time that there could be that much success that you could actually exist.

[68] It's just a staggering miracle of impossibility, and that's only one of many staggering miracles of impossibility.

[69] Now, you know that human beings have only been looking at the world as if it was a place of objective reality for a short period of time.

[70] Now, you can quibble about how long that's been the case.

[71] You know, if your, my sense is it's about 500 years.

[72] It's about since the time of Francis Bacon and Descartes.

[73] And, and, but you could push it back, you could say, well, we started to conceptualize something approximating an objective reality, perhaps back at the time when philosophical discussion was first put forward as a mode of being, so perhaps you could stretch it all the way back to the Greeks.

[74] That's more rationality, I would say, than objective thinking.

[75] I would say it's, it's, it's, a half millennia is more accurate.

[76] And so you've got to think about what that means is we've only been thinking scientifically because science science is a real method right it's a very formal method and and it's new it's unbelievably powerful but it's unbelievably new we've only been thinking that way for 500 years and most people still don't think that way it's actually very difficult to think scientifically in fact scientists can't even do it which is why you have peer review if you're a scientist because if you're a great scientist you wouldn't need peer review because you just write your paper and it would be properly Objective and properly laid out, but you need peer review because your peers have to find out if you use the method right and if you use the rationale right and And then if you didn't let your biases interfere with your results to two greater a degree So even if you're a scientist and a trained scientist other scientists still have to like hit you continually with a stick to and a fairly thick one to make sure that you stay thinking scientifically and and it takes a long time to be trained to think that way so so the reason I'm saying that is because that isn't the way that we think.

[77] That isn't the way that human beings think.

[78] We think some other way.

[79] And obviously that way works because we made it all the way to 500 years ago with that other mode of thinking, whatever that is.

[80] Now, psychologists have been very interested in part of this mode of thinking, a certain group of psychologists.

[81] They study a form of thinking called social cognition.

[82] And social cognition is thinking thinking about other people.

[83] And I believe that our fundamental cognitive architecture is social cognitive.

[84] Okay, so why?

[85] Well, first of all, you got to think about what the environment...

[86] You know, when you think about the environment, you think about nature, and maybe you've got like, especially if you're sort of romantic, you have like a picture of a French impressionist landscape in your imagination.

[87] It's like, there's nature.

[88] It's like, and that's the environment.

[89] Like, that's not the environment.

[90] The environment's a very strange abstraction.

[91] But the environment is what confronts you most of the time.

[92] And the environment is even more technically what selects for reproduction over long spans of time.

[93] That's really what the environment is.

[94] That's really what nature is.

[95] And for human beings, nature is culture because we're social creatures.

[96] We're not individual creatures.

[97] We are, but we're not isolated individual creatures.

[98] We're not like male grizzly bears that just wander around alone, except for short periods of time.

[99] I mean, look, here you all are, in a big group, you know, and you have your friends and you have your family, and like you're nested in groups of all sorts, so you're deeply social, and you've been deeply social for God only knows how long, millions of years.

[100] You could go back 7 million years, let's say.

[101] That's a fair estimate, although it's an underestimate.

[102] That's approximately when we separated from the ancestor that we shared with chimpanzees.

[103] You can kind of tell how long ago that was if you're a geneticist, because you can mix the DNA of two species together, and they'll half strands.

[104] And the strands will bond.

[105] and the degree to which the, this is an old technology, but it's an easy way to explain it, the closer, the relationship between the species, the tighter, the cross -species DNA will bond, and the more energy it takes in the form of heat to separate the strands.

[106] And so you can get a pretty good estimate of genetic relatedness.

[107] Now, they have better techniques than that, but it doesn't matter.

[108] That was used for a long time.

[109] And then you can calculate, the similarity in the difference, and if you know something about how stable mutation rates are, and we know something about how stable they are, then you can calculate over what span of time mutation rate would have had to occur to produce that much difference, not only mutation, but genetic alteration in general, and then you can estimate how long ago the divergence was.

[110] And so with chimps, it seems to be about 7 million years.

[111] Even chimps are highly social, right?

[112] They exist in structured hierarchies.

[113] They have troops.

[114] You know, they have their mother -child pairings, and they exist in troops inside hierarchies.

[115] And so, and it's the same for most primates.

[116] Most primates are very social creatures, not all of them, but most of them, and the ones that were closely related to, are highly social.

[117] And so there's an idea that the fundamental architecture of our cognitive ability, including our perception, is actually, it actually evolved to conceptualize social relationships.

[118] Because you think, well, what's your environment?

[119] Well, mostly it's other people.

[120] You know, it's other people.

[121] It's not nature, and certainly not nature as an objective storehouse of riches that could be investigated scientifically, because that's a new idea.

[122] You know, and you know that.

[123] too because you've seen the rate of technology just expand exponentially since the dawn of the scientific revolution, right?

[124] So people were able to exploit nature, so to speak, prior to the dawn of the scientific revolution, but we've got way better at it since we developed this new methodology.

[125] But that shouldn't fool you into thinking that that's how we think, because that isn't how we think, and it's certainly not how animals think.

[126] So, and there's plenty of affinity between our basic perceptual structures and the basic perceptual structures of animals.

[127] Now, it's very important if you're a social animal to keep track of what all the other social animals are doing.

[128] So, now imagine this.

[129] So here's another proposition.

[130] So one of the things we know about evolution is that it's a pretty conservative process.

[131] So if evolution manages to cobble something together, let's say, that works, then it tends to stick with it.

[132] So I saw an interesting example of this.

[133] went to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, and they have a collection of mammalian skeletons there.

[134] It's like a skeleton zoo.

[135] And it's really a cool place to see, because what you see is just endless variations on a theme.

[136] You know, like a bat and a human being don't look very much the same when you see like a bat and a human being.

[137] But when you see a bat skeleton and you see a human being skeleton, you think, oh, they're exactly the same.

[138] The bat has longer fingers, but the skeletal structure is exactly the same.

[139] You can even see it in whales, although in whales it's modified a lot, but it's still basically the same skeletal plant.

[140] It's like all this diversity of mammals' same skeletal plant, just extensions.

[141] You can take a human skull and just transform it in terms of its morphology into a chimp skull, without very much problem at all, with only quantitative adjustments.

[142] And so, in fact, a chimpanzee skull, an infant chimpanzee skull, looks almost exactly the same as an adult human skull.

[143] It's very cool.

[144] That's a consequence of an evolutionary phenomenon called neotony, which is the tendency of animals over time to evolve toward their juvenile form.

[145] And so human beings are in some sense chimps that maintain their juvenile nature.

[146] So that's quite interesting, even the morphology.

[147] So in any case, evolution is a conservative process.

[148] And so once you have something that works well enough so that you can reproduce, you keep it, and you tinker with it, that's it, but you keep it.

[149] And so once we developed the perceptual architecture to understand the social world, we built our understanding of the world beyond the social world on top of that so so what that means now you kind of know this already you know think about this as a strange this is a strange fact when you when you read stories to your kids your little kids you know it's very common that all the things in the picture books this is for really little kids are animated right cars have faces trains have faces The moon has a face, the sun has a face, like the tree has a face.

[150] Everything manifests itself in animated form.

[151] That's a good way of thinking about it.

[152] And it's not exactly like the world is personified for a child, because that implies that the child sees the world and then imposes this personification on top of it.

[153] But that isn't what happens.

[154] What happens is the child sees the world as if it's personified, and only with great difficulty separates out the idea that, well, there's an objective reality that doesn't have a personality.

[155] So the perception of the world as personality is primary.

[156] Now, that's really worth knowing, because one of the things that's kind of mysterious about to modern people is what were all the ancients thinking about when they were thinking about gods?

[157] It's like, because we, even if some of us have the remnants of religious belief, it's usually a monotheism isn't like there's a god of the bedroom and a god of the you know the altar and like there was in rome there was a god for everything everything had this personified form you think well the romans personified everything it's no no they didn't they saw the world as if it was a collection of personalities that was their mode of cognition and they had no other way of doing it and and it took us forever to even start to hypothesize that there was a kind of a dead that material world that didn't have an animating spirit.

[158] You know, and we're still not sure that that's true.

[159] But treating it that way has turned out to be an extraordinarily powerful technology.

[160] Might kill us all still.

[161] Well, it might.

[162] You know, that's also something to think about.

[163] I mean, the scientific mode of thinking is unbelievably powerful, but, you know, you want to be careful with what's unbelievably powerful.

[164] So we've already created a fair number of things that could do us in quite handily.

[165] So it might have been better if we would have just stuck with the personification and left the technology behind.

[166] But I'm not saying that, I'm not saying I believe that, but you can make a case for it.

[167] You know, deviating from that age -old mode of apprehension is something that certainly has its dangers.

[168] Okay, so we perceive the world in a personified manner and only with difficulty detached from that so that we can be trained as scientists.

[169] And even then, we have to do that collectively because it's so difficult.

[170] So then the question is, well, two questions.

[171] The first would be, well, what is the nature of the personified world that we perceive?

[172] And the second is, why does it work?

[173] Like, if the world isn't personified, then why does our ability to see it that way work?

[174] Well, I think the reason it works is because most of, what we interact with really is other people.

[175] You know, and so if you tend to see things as personified, that works, because 95 % of what you do is with yourself, with your partner, with other people.

[176] And so, and, you know, even if you conceptualize the state, you know, people will go look at the Queen of England.

[177] And you think, well, why?

[178] Well, she embodies the state.

[179] So it's really easy for people to personify the state, and they see the queen, and I mean, the queen is just a person.

[180] But she's the queen at the same time, and so she's just a person, and she's something else at the same time.

[181] And when you go to look at the queen, you don't really go to look at the person.

[182] You can just go across the street and look at a person.

[183] You go look at the queen, and you actually see the queen, which is a strange thing, because the queen is just a person.

[184] And what you see is the personification of the state.

[185] And this is very deep perception.

[186] So, you know, Queen Elizabeth, for example, in England is getting quite old, and at some point she'll pass away.

[187] And the entire nation will grieve for that.

[188] And that's an indication of how powerful that proclivity to perceive personification actually is.

[189] And, you know, if we talk about a state or a country, we often talk about it as if it's an individual.

[190] And no one finds that strange, you know, you say that you treat the collective as if it's an individual with all of the attributes of an individual.

[191] And that's also partly why states can get angry at each other so quickly, because the same relationship that might obtain between two individuals can easily be used to represent the relationship between two states.

[192] And so, and you know, that makes a certain amount of sense because a state isn't.

[193] a collective of people, but then by the same token, it doesn't make any sense at all, because the state is something that's quite different from an individual.

[194] It doesn't matter.

[195] What matters is that's how we see the world.

[196] I think that's part of the reason why we develop the idea of a monotheistic God.

[197] And this isn't a metaphysical statement, by the way, and it's not a religious statement.

[198] Okay, I'm just speaking as a biologist here, an evolutionary biologist.

[199] We leave the metaphysics out of this for the time being.

[200] What's a good way of representing the collective other.

[201] Well, judgmental father.

[202] That's pretty damn good.

[203] Why?

[204] Well, you know that you extend across time, and then you face a collective, that's all the people that you know, and they track your reputation across time, that collective, and they do a damn good job of it.

[205] People are unbelievably good at remembering ethical transgressions.

[206] destroy your reputation very rapidly.

[207] In fact, there are evolutionary psychologists who think we have a specific cognitive module just to remember getting screwed over, and we don't forget.

[208] And so you might imagine that you need to conduct yourself as if there's a great being, which would be the personification of the collective, watching you all the time, and writing down everything you do in a great book, in the sky, because that is essentially the relationship that you have with other people across time.

[209] You know, so I figured this out.

[210] I wrote about this a bit in 12 rules.

[211] When I was thinking about hunting, it's like if you're a hunter, let's say a Stone Age hunter, you might say, well, what's the purpose of hunting?

[212] An answer is, well, to obtain food, right?

[213] So the greatest hunter is someone who is the most effective at obtaining food.

[214] It's like, okay, so maybe that's the strongest spear thrower or the bravest person who can stand up against a mammoth with a spear.

[215] That's a brave person, right?

[216] You're just an Arctic monkey, and you're after a mammoth with a stick, man. There's some courage in that.

[217] And like that's mammoth for today and mammoth for next week, but you still stuck with the problem of next month.

[218] And so then you might say, well, what's the greatest way to be a great hunter?

[219] And the answer might be, well, not only to be able to hunt, but to be able to share.

[220] So you bring something down and it's more than you need and then you distribute it among the people that you're around.

[221] And then you distribute that.

[222] You trade the food itself for a moral obligation in the form of promises from others.

[223] And so if you're effective at what you do and you share, then you can store the excess in the form of promises from others.

[224] And so basically what you're doing is trading, you're trading for your reputation.

[225] And so then you might say that it's actually even better, it's better to have the reputation of being a great and generous hunter than it is just to be good at taking down an animal.

[226] And that's really worth thinking about because what it means is that even to be a hunter, In the truest sense, across a long span of time, means that you're bargaining in some sense with the future.

[227] You have to treat the other people around you in your tribe properly in order to store any excess value across any reasonable amount of time.

[228] Well, and if you think about that in some sense as a contract with a patriarchal God, if that's the way that that you imagine that relationship, then it's going to work.

[229] it's your you don't sully your reputation if you want to if you want to eat forever and that can easily be abstracted up into an ethical principle that goes beyond the mere provision of food because as as it has been said man does not live by bread alone and so it could easily be that the greatest hunter is someone who pursues the most ethical aim right who aims at the most ethical target and so well that's That's a bit of a casual, quick outline of how the notion of monotheism could emerge from a biological perspective.

[230] It's a projection of the collective personality of future society into one entity and the establishment of a relationship with that.

[231] You know, and maybe the father's a good metaphor for that because fathers can be rather judgmental.

[232] And so if you can use the image of the father to represent the judgmental crowd, then you have a bridge between what you've already experienced as a child and this more abstract ethical relationship that you have to establish with the collective.

[233] So anyways, my point is, well, there's more to it too, because it also justifies the idea of sacrifice in some sense, because to sacrifice is also to ensure the future, to let go of something in the present that's of value so that you can obtain something of value in the future.

[234] And who do you sacrifice to?

[235] Well, you know, if I work now and you pay me and I put my money in the bank, then what I've done is sacrificed my immediate gratification to the promise of the future.

[236] Well, we figured that out religiously to begin with, with the idea of sacrifice.

[237] And so, and there's a deep idea there, which is that you can in fact forego what's pleasurable in the present to ensure the stability of the future.

[238] And you do that by establishing a certain kind of relationship with a personification of the collective.

[239] Straight biological rationale.

[240] And I'm not saying that that accounts for monotheism in its totality, because I don't believe it does.

[241] But as a straight biological rationale, it's not a bad start.

[242] But it also shows you how that kind of thinking can actually be practically useful.

[243] It could be evolutionarily significant.

[244] Lots of biologists, many of them, are enlightenment types, evolutionary biologists.

[245] You actually can't be an enlightenment type and an evolutionary biologist because if you're an enlightenment type, you think over spans of like 200 or 300 years.

[246] And if you're an evolutionary biologist, you think over spans of like 100 million years or longer.

[247] And so the conclusions you draw aren't the same.

[248] Um, it's certainly plausible.

[249] See, the Enlightenment types like to think of the religious impulse as something that's rather shallow, secondary consequence of higher order human cognition.

[250] And I think that's just, that's just a non -starter.

[251] It's just seriously wrong.

[252] It's exactly backwards is that higher order human cognition, to the degree that we have that capacity for abstract rationality, it's embedded in something far, far, far more ancient and deeper.

[253] that has this personified structure and that has something approximating a religious grammar.

[254] And so they've got the cart before the horse.

[255] And then some people like Nietzsche knew that.

[256] Dostoevsky as well, pretty much puzzled that out by the latter part of the 1800s.

[257] Nietzsche in particular.

[258] So anyways, that's the way I look at things.

[259] And so I think that, you know, we live in a conceptual structure that's personified and what comes out of that are the stories of the interactions between these personified entities and then what what sits on top of that is our abstract moral our abstract practical and moral reasoning and even nested within that is our scientific enterprise so that's the hierarchy of cognitive structure as far as i can tell and i think the evidence for that is very strong.

[260] Certainly some of the evidence for that is our overwhelming love of stories and the self -evident proposition that we're so deeply, we're so deep in our relationship with stories that we can, we can absorb information that way through pure enjoyment, right?

[261] I mean, if you go to listen to a very difficult lecture, for example, on a very abstract topic, you may really have to concentrate.

[262] You read a scientific paper the same thing.

[263] It doesn't just pull you in, but if you go see a well -crafted movie or you read a well -crafted piece of fiction, it's like not only is it, in some sense, effortless, it's also unbelievably enjoyable.

[264] And what that shows you is that there's an affinity between the biology of your attentional structures and the form itself.

[265] And that shows you how old that form of knowledge provision really is.

[266] It's also grounded in imitation.

[267] One of the things that's very interesting about human beings that's underestimated in terms of what differentiates us from animals is we're unbelievably imitative.

[268] You know, you hear monkey see, monkey do, right?

[269] It's like, no, wrong.

[270] Even higher order primates, even chimpanzees, transmit virtually nothing through imitation.

[271] They cannot copy one another.

[272] Whereas us, man, we're so good at that.

[273] It's just absolutely unbelievable.

[274] Like we can mimic each other's posture.

[275] You know, a good comic can mimic voice, intonation, character.

[276] Like, we can run other people as a representation on the computational platform of our body in a miraculous manner.

[277] And so we're unbelievably good at moving information from one person to another, merely through imitation.

[278] That's obviously in large part how children learn.

[279] And then we can even do that abstractly because when we tell a story or lay out a movie or a play or something like that, what we're doing is we're actually copying multiple people to make the character in the drama because you don't want to just see, you don't want to go see a play where it's exactly what you did with your family at breakfast.

[280] It's like no one wants to see that.

[281] What you want to see is like a meta -character, so it would be a character composed of many characters or a set of characters, composed of many characters, acting out something deep.

[282] And so, you know, if you watch a, I don't know, was Breaking Bad popular in Norway?

[283] Okay, so there's some pretty good bad guys in Breaking Bad.

[284] It's like they're not your ordinary bad guys, they're sort of super bad guys.

[285] They're the essence of evil, right?

[286] Not just the common sort of boring second -rate evil that you run across in day -to -day life.

[287] It's sort of purified.

[288] And that makes it much more interesting and much more sense.

[289] salutary, much more powerful.

[290] You see that in great literature, too.

[291] In Dostoevsky's books, for example, the characters are bigger than life, right?

[292] And they have to be because they wouldn't capture your attention.

[293] And so they're abstractions of personality away from normality.

[294] They're condensations.

[295] That's another way of thinking about it.

[296] So it's more, see, I think of fiction not as the opposite of fact, but as hyper -reality.

[297] It's more real than real.

[298] It's super -reality.

[299] And that's partly why fiction is so useful for us.

[300] It's a form of abstraction, and abstraction can be very real.

[301] Numbers are abstract, and they're very, very real.

[302] You know something about numbers.

[303] It makes you very powerful and allows you to get a grip on the world.

[304] And the abstractions that we produce in fiction have the same power.

[305] And the ultimate abstractions of fiction are religious representations.

[306] That's another way of thinking about it.

[307] So, anyways, you might ask yourself, well, what are these fundamental personifications?

[308] This I figured out mostly from reading the psychoanalysts, especially Carl Jung, Freud a fair bit, and also another person named Eric Neumann, who should be way better known than he is.

[309] It would be much better for Western civilization if the literary departments, especially at Yale, had turned to Eric Neumann to flesh out their literary criticism instead of Derradan Foucault.

[310] Because Newman got it right, and that was back in the 1950s, and Camille Pallia has just written.

[311] She wrote an essay about that about 20 years ago saying the same thing about Eric Neumann.

[312] He wrote a great book called The Origins and History of Consciousness.

[313] It's a very hard book.

[314] It's on my reading list on my website.

[315] I'd highly recommend it.

[316] It's a great book.

[317] It's the book that Carl Jung wrote forward to and said that he wished he would have written, which is a hell of a thing to say.

[318] And Neumann was one of his students.

[319] And he also wrote another book called The Great Mother, which is also a great book.

[320] It's an analysis of the fundamental cognitive category, cognitive perceptual category of the feminine.

[321] It's brilliant.

[322] It's a brilliant book.

[323] And it outlines the positive feminine and the negative feminine, and in a very thorough and compelling and somewhat terrifying manner.

[324] And so it's a great book.

[325] And it's great because it describes the perceptual architecture of the human psyche, but it also gives you a template that you can use to investigate the structure of literature and ideology.

[326] And so what I would say about ideal people, one of the things I've tried to do for years is to inoculate my students against ideology.

[327] And sometimes I receive the criticism is, well, how do you know that your inoculation isn't just another ideology, which is a perfectly reasonable potential criticism, although it happens in this case to be, seriously wrong.

[328] And I'll try to outline my case for that.

[329] So part of the reason that I believe that the system that I derived in part from the psychoanalytic thinkers that I just described who were responding, by the way, to Nietzsche's challenge about the death of God.

[330] That's the intellectual pathway.

[331] Nietzsche in the late 1800s announced the death of God, right?

[332] The collapse of our, of the Western straightforward belief in the Judeo -Christian substructure of our culture, right?

[333] And perhaps as a consequence of the developing tension between science, rationality, and traditional belief.

[334] And nature was not celebrating that when he announced the death of God.

[335] He knew it would be an absolute bloody catastrophe that what it would produce was, on the one hand, an absolutely soul -devouring nihilism, and on the other, incredible proclivity for possession by totalitarian ideology.

[336] And he laid that all out by about 1850, and an amazing feat of precognition.

[337] And Nietzsche's solution to that was that we would have to become like gods ourselves, that we would have to create our own values.

[338] And Jung, for example, Carl Jung, was a very astute student of Nietzsche, at least as much as a student of Freud.

[339] He certainly took from Freud the idea of the act of unconscious, which was a very crucial, crucial discovery.

[340] But Jung, for example, did a seminar on Thus Spake Zarathustra, which is one of Nietzsche's most famous but also most impenetrable books and certainly not the one I would recommend that beginners to Nietzsche start with.

[341] It's like the last book of his you should read.

[342] Jung did a seminar on Nietzsche that, if I remember correctly, It was 2 ,700 pages long, and it only covered the first third of the book.

[343] So, yeah, so that's quite something.

[344] Now, so see, what Freud determined, this is the interesting thing about Freud, and modern psychologists, especially the cognitive types, have not taken this seriously enough.

[345] Freud figured out that the sub -components of your psyche are personalities.

[346] They're alive.

[347] So you're a unity, but you're a diverse.

[348] and you're a diverse, you're a unity that's composed of a diverse plurality.

[349] And the plural things that you're made of are best conceptualized as active personalities, not as drives and not as deterministic mechanisms, but as things that have their own imagination and their own thoughts and their own rationale, and in Nietzsche's terminology, even their own philosophy, Nietzsche, and quote, every drive attempts to philosophize in its spirit.

[350] And you all know that.

[351] You all know that perfectly well because that accounts in some sense for that sense of profound disunity that you often experience in your own life.

[352] You know, maybe you're overwhelmingly attracted erotically to someone and you make a complete bloody fool out of yourself and you can't stop.

[353] You tell yourself you're making a complete fool of yourself and counterproductively as well.

[354] It's not like it's even working, but oh no, you can't stop yourself, man. And that thing has you, right?

[355] That eros, that's a personality.

[356] That's an old one.

[357] It's a transcendent and divine personality, and it inhabits you, and now and then you come under its sway, and good luck regulating that.

[358] And so the same thing happens when you fall under the sway of rage.

[359] You get angry, right?

[360] And some of you are more prone to that than others, and have it less integrated than others.

[361] And God only knows what you might do when you're angry, depends on how disintegrated you are, you might kill someone and then regret that for the rest of your life.

[362] At least you might say terrible things to people that you love because in the heat of that rage, all you can see about them is every way that they're wrong in all the ways that they should be defeated and all the ways that you're right.

[363] And then you wake up out of that afterwards and you think, what the hell was I thinking?

[364] It's like, no, something was thinking in you and it's not well integrated into you.

[365] then it gets control.

[366] And so that's a Freudian observation.

[367] It's brilliant.

[368] And I know that rationalist, cognitive psychologist types who like to think of the brain as something like an information processing machine, think of us like computers.

[369] They've just never come to terms with the psychoanalytic reality that you're the habitation place of multiple spirits.

[370] And perhaps you can, what would you say, meld those together into a functioning unity with a fair bit of moral effort and difficulty, but it's no trivial thing, and you better have help to do it.

[371] And you can see this in little kids, especially in two -year -olds, you know, who are very behaviorally disregulated.

[372] First they're angry, then they're crying, then they're laughing, then they're hungry, then they're hot, then they're cold, then they're tired.

[373] Then they're running around enthusiastic beyond belief.

[374] And like, all of that can happen in 10 minutes.

[375] And so it's just one motivational state after the other.

[376] And then they're curious and exploring, and then they're playing.

[377] And so it's all these underlying spirits that are deeply, deeply rooted in our biology, all coming to manifest themselves sequentially.

[378] And what you're doing when you socialize your children is you're trying to help meld all those sub -components into a functioning psychological and social unity.

[379] and that's the emergence of a higher order.

[380] That's why you have the whole top part of your brain is to manage that.

[381] You can't get by on two -year -old impulsivity.

[382] Even though each of those circuits, each of those sub -personalities, have their limited utility, they have to be melded together into something that can operate iteratively over a long period of time in a social collective.

[383] And that's the necessity for socialization, but also the reason for the existence of the more complex parts of your brain.

[384] So, okay, so you're a collection of sub -personalities, and you look at the world as if it's composed of personality.

[385] So I'm going to tell you what the personalities of the world must be, as far as I can tell, in order for you to see things sufficiently clearly, to have sketched out the mythological landscape, so that you can orient yourself properly in the world.

[386] So I'll tell you a little story, first of all, to give you a sense of this.

[387] So most of you have seen the Disney movie Sleeping Beauty.

[388] Yes, how many have seen that?

[389] Okay, so great, great.

[390] So I'm going to tell you a bit of the first part of the story.

[391] So there's a king and a queen, and it's a good king and a good queen.

[392] All right, so those are two characters.

[393] Good king and good queen.

[394] Positive masculine, positive feminine.

[395] Now they're a little desperate to have a child, which is what you'd expect the positive and masculine, feminine and masculine to get at producing, and they eventually manage it.

[396] And so they have a daughter a little late.

[397] Her name is Aurora, and they're all thrilled to death about the fact that she's popped into existence.

[398] And so they decide to have a christening, and they invite the whole kingdom except for one guest.

[399] they don't invite the evil queen Maleficent Interesting name because it partly means malicious and it partly means malevolent but there's a bit of beneficent in there too and so it's a very well -chosen name and Maleficent is a negative feminine she's the terrible representation of nature itself in all its brutality and well no wonder they don't want to invite her to the christening, it's like, what do you want to do?

[400] You invite the evil queen to the birthday party, to the christening?

[401] Well, of course not.

[402] You protect your daughter from the terrible aspect of the natural world that say it is something that you do as a parent, right?

[403] You put a wall around your children and you don't expose, you don't, you likely don't take a four -year -old to a, to a catastrophic funeral, and maybe not to a funeral at all.

[404] Now, maybe you do, and I'm not saying that you shouldn't, and if you did, I'm not saying that's wrong, but that's something that parents often.

[405] and choose to shield their children from it's just too bloody brutal right you think that four -year -old just can't handle death and so you keep that at bay and fair enough man but you keep too much at bay you weaken your child and so that's what happens in sleeping beauty they don't invite the evil queen to the party and so the princess who's overvalued in some sense and whose purity and innocence is overvalued, doesn't get to encounter the negative aspect of reality with sufficient intensity.

[406] And that makes her weak and dooms her to unconsciousness.

[407] And that's part of what that story is about.

[408] You have to take the evil queen into account.

[409] And even more importantly, you have to invite her to the party.

[410] And maybe even more importantly, you have to invite her to your children's party.

[411] And why?

[412] Well, because you show by doing that that you can handle her and so can the child.

[413] And that's one of the ways of awakening some courage.

[414] And so you forget about the evil queen at your extreme peril.

[415] And if you remember, when that story unfolds completely, the evil queen has the hero of the story, the prince, trapped in a dungeon, and she's going to keep him there till he's old, and she's laughing at him madly.

[416] And when he finally does escape, she turns into the great dragon of chaos itself, and it's a scene basically from hell.

[417] as very, very intelligently crafted fairy tale and a very intelligently crafted film and dead, bloody, accurate, that's for sure.

[418] And so, well, so what have we got for characters?

[419] Well, we've got good king, we've got good queen, we've got evil queen, that's three.

[420] Well, here's some more.

[421] Hero, that's a good one, that'd be the prince, adversary.

[422] that's another one that's at the individual level of analysis what's the best way to conceptualize if you're going to conceptualize individuals and you need a scheme to do that you have a good guy and bad guy and you have the hero and the anti -hero you have the hostile brothers right you have Loki and Thor you have Batman and the Joker you have Superman and Lex Luthor you have Christ and Satan you have this what's what speaks most positively out of the human soul allied with this terrible, malevolent, destructive force.

[423] That's the individual.

[424] And if you think that individuals are good and you don't know about the adversary, well, good luck to you, because one day you'll meet someone who's fundamentally possessed by the adversarial spirit, and they will take you out in precise proportion to your naivety.

[425] And that happens to people all the time.

[426] And it's a reality.

[427] Like, I've dealt with people who have post -traumatic stress disorder, and it's almost always the case that they develop it because they encountered something truly malevolent and sometimes it was another person but sometimes it was a part of themselves that often happens to soldiers in wartime for example so you need to know that you know good as you could conceivably be and reasonable and heroic as part of you no doubt is that's allied with something that is as dark as the light parts of you are light and you better keep an eye on it Because otherwise it can get the upper hand.

[428] And if you're trying to explain phenomena like Nazi Germany or the Gulag camps or what happened in the Soviet Union, what happened in Maoist China, or what's happening now in Venezuela, or any of the terrible episodes of absolutely appalling barbarism that characterized much of human history and certainly the last century, if you don't know about the adversary, then you have a very weak grasp on precisely what has.

[429] happened.

[430] So you have the individual, you've got these two characters, hero and adversary.

[431] That's Canaan Abel.

[432] It's the oldest human story we have, Canaan Abel, right?

[433] Hero, virtuous, God -fearing, beneficial to everyone, taken out by his jealous brother, right?

[434] For no other reason than for his brother's failure to live up to the ideal.

[435] That's why that story sits at the very core of the biblical corpus.

[436] It's a warning, and it's a smart one.

[437] And so, well, that's, you have the individual in its bifurcated, in its bifurcated, what would you say, with its bifurcated essence.

[438] And then surrounding the individual, well, you have society.

[439] We already talked about the fact that we're deeply embedded in society, and, you know, what's society?

[440] Well, it's definitely the evil king.

[441] I mean, we hear that all the time, right?

[442] That's the patriarchal tyranny.

[443] And what we've got at the moment in our public discourse is the domination of that discourse by a single mythological personification, the evil king.

[444] It's like, fair enough, societies can turn tyrannical, hierarchies can become corrupt, organizations of human beings can become dominated by power.

[445] They can oppress people at the bottom of the distribution, and they can misuse resources and lie and cheat and deceive and destroy.

[446] Clearly.

[447] And to some degree, that characterizes even our highly functional modern Western societies, because nothing's perfect, and we need to be awake to make sure that the evil king is not the predominant force.

[448] But that's allied, in a comprehensive mythological view, with the wise king.

[449] And I see very little appreciation, especially in modern academic discourse for even the idea that the wise king might hypothetically exist.

[450] And to me, that smacks of an ingratitude and ignorance that's so deep that it's a miracle of sorts.

[451] I mean, you think about country like you people have, this amazing country that's fundamentally peaceful, there's want is fundamentally a thing of the past, you're all free, you can pursue your destinies, you're still oppressed by the catastrophic limitations.

[452] of your own being, but, you know, no one knows how to transcend that, and to consider, well, no one does, and to consider what you have best characterized as the evil king, the totalitarian patriarchy, is so blind that it can only be characterized as an ideology, which is precisely what it is, and a motivated one at best.

[453] And it's even worse, because the evil king, you think, well, the evil king is a social characterization, but it's paired with a characterization of the individual.

[454] If there's only an evil king, there's no hero, there's just an adversary because it's the adversarial action of the individual that produces the evil king.

[455] And part of the reason that I believe that there's a hunger for encouragement, let's say, and for enticement into responsibility among young men and even men who aren't so young, is because the implicit notion that they're best characterized as the adversary who serves the evil king has become, if not the dominant cultural narrative, I would say, the most centrally powerful intellectual cultural narrative.

[456] And it's pathological to its core.

[457] So, hero, adversary, wise king, evil king.

[458] Great.

[459] You need to know all those things.

[460] What's left?

[461] good queen.

[462] Well we don't debate the existence of the good queen I wouldn't say because I would say all things considered the positive aspect of femininity is on the ascendance and people recognize it and that would be associated with the with the emancipation of women over the last century but we say very little about the evil queen and that's a big mistake because that has to be taken into account as well and so we don't know what female to totalitarianism might look like, but my suspicions are we're going to get a pretty decent taste of it over the next 30 years unless we're careful.

[463] And if you think, if you're foolish enough to think that if you take a patriarchal structure, I use those words like with resistance, and you fill it with women, and that's somehow going to make it better, then you have another thing coming.

[464] It's going to pure in their essence in a manner that men aren't, then the mere reconstruction of society with women filling the roles is not going to bring in the desired utopia.

[465] It's going to produce positive consequences and it's going to produce negative consequences.

[466] And some of the negative consequences that it's already producing is the insistence by a very strident minority of radical leftist types, many of whom are feminists, that our culture is best characterized as a tyrannical patriarchy, and that the activity of men is essentially adversarial.

[467] And there's no excuse for that.

[468] It's not true.

[469] It's malicious.

[470] It's not helpful, and it's outright destructive.

[471] All characteristics of the evil queen who wants to keep the hero locked in the dungeon until he's too damn old to do anything of any utility.

[472] It's very important to get these mythological categories right.

[473] And so that's the categories.

[474] And my sense is, and you can think about this, something you can think about for a very long time.

[475] A story that contains all those characters is not an ideology.

[476] This is partly why it's been so difficult to get rid of Freud.

[477] You know, why?

[478] Ego, that's the individual.

[479] Positive aspect of the ego, negative aspect of the ego.

[480] It's very, very explicit in Freud.

[481] Super ego.

[482] That's the societal structure.

[483] Well, Freud knew that you needed a strong super ego to keep your impulses in check.

[484] That was the civilizing force, but that the super ego could easily become hyperdominant and totalitarian.

[485] So we had the balance right there.

[486] And then with regards to the id, well, that's nature.

[487] And the id, well, that's the force that vitalizes you.

[488] That's your primordial instincts.

[489] But it's also the home of the horrors of nature itself.

[490] And so Freud sketched out an almost completely, an almost complete metaphysical world.

[491] actually a reconstruction of the landscape of ancient mythology.

[492] And in doing so, did a good job of mapping the human psyche.

[493] And that's partly why Freud is so difficult to get rid of that and the fact that he did understand very deeply that you're composed of sub -personalities and that those things are alive.

[494] And the Jungians, well, they did a better job of mapping out the landscape as far as I'm concerned because they made it more explicit and I tried to continue that in maps of meaning.

[495] Okay, so you can think about all that.

[496] When anyone is ever telling you a story about the way the world works, you think, well, what's missing here?

[497] People are evil, and they're destroying the planet, and culture is nothing but the rape of nature.

[498] It's like, fair enough, man. People are kind of evil, and culture does have a destructive element.

[499] But there's something missing there.

[500] And poor nature, poor nature, all victim.

[501] It's like, no, nature is trying to kill us just as hard as, we're trying to take her out.

[502] That's for sure.

[503] And we have our reasons, right?

[504] And those reasons mostly are rooted in the necessity for survival.

[505] Now, even a smart bird doesn't follow its own nest, you know?

[506] And I'm not saying that we should be careless, but we have a real struggle for existence on our hands.

[507] And nature might be beautiful and beneficial in its fundamental essence, but it's also the primary murderous force.

[508] And of course, you Norwegians know that because you have winter, just like we do in Canada.

[509] And it's trying even harder in Canada most of the time to kill you all the time.

[510] And so, to the degree that our environmental depredations are merely a consequence of our attempts to protect ourselves against the evil queen, they're justified, at least in some part, and should be viewed with a certain amount of sympathy instead of this anti -human dogma that seems to permeate, for example, so much environmental discussion, where human beings are often characterized as a cancer on the planet or some species that the planet would be better off without.

[511] It's like if you can't hear the evil king or the evil queen lurking behind utterances like that, your ears aren't open because it's certainly there.

[512] So that's the that's the antidote to ideology.

[513] And so, and I want to continue that a little bit with a discussion about victimization, because, and this is a bit of a sideways move, and all of this in some sense was a prodroma for it, one of the things that I'm most appalled by with regards to modern intellectual discourse, and I fundamentally blame the sociologists, although there's a variety of other people you could blame, but we can start with them, is that human beings are best characterized by their group identities.

[514] Okay, so first of all, I don't find that an acceptable scheme because I think one of the things we learned in the West a long time ago was that human beings are best categorized as individuals.

[515] And the reason for that is that we're the nexus of multiple group identities and to take all those identities into account simultaneously is in fact to treat people as if they're individuals.

[516] And our entire societies are predicated on the idea that the sovereign individual is the cornerstone of the state, the family and the state.

[517] And I believe that to be practically true insofar as society.

[518] that adopt that principle work delightfully well compared to societies that don't, and metaphysically true, because I think that the cosmos is constructed so that each of us in some sense is a center point of reality.

[519] That consciousness itself is a center point of reality, and that we have a certain divinity that goes along with that conscious status and a terrible responsibility that accompanies that.

[520] So I think it's practically true and true in a literary sense, but also metaphysically true.

[521] And then I think that any attempt to insist that each of us is no more than an avatar of whatever group identity is to be regarded as paramount at the moment is a reversion to an extraordinarily dangerous form of tribalism.

[522] So now, along with that idea, the group idea, is the idea that not only should we be characterized as group members, sex, ethnicity, race, gender, sexual proclivity, a very long list of potential group identities, which is one of the problems with the group identity theory, the idea that those are paramount, first of all, runs contrary to the notion of the sovereign individual and also, well, reduces us to each of us to our group.

[523] So, but that's not, that's not the bottom of what's wrong with that.

[524] It's not only that it exists in contradistinction to our most fundamental axiomatic assumption, which is that the individual is the fundamental locus of value.

[525] It's that it produces a kind of narrative about the structure of the world, which is an ideology and a dangerous one.

[526] And the ideology is, well, we're all members of groups.

[527] Some groups oppress other groups.

[528] Some groups are victims, and some groups are victimizers.

[529] Now, you know, we want to go into that.

[530] idea a bit.

[531] And that's why I want to talk about being a victim.

[532] The first thing I would like to say is the reason that the victim narrative is so attractive is that it's true.

[533] It's not true in the ideological sense that it's been put forth, but it's true.

[534] I mean, think about your situation.

[535] You know, you're full of inadequacies that are characterized by your peculiarities, whatever they happen to be, your multiple group identities.

[536] You're not everything you should be.

[537] You're going to be judged harshly and put outside the social ideal as a child and as an adult.

[538] It happens to everyone, right?

[539] You know, most kids are bullied when they grow up, and some kids, I know perfectly well, far more bullied than others, but childhood is often no picnic for children.

[540] I mean, even if you're a really together six -year -old, there's some malevolent eight -year -old that'll be perfectly willing to push you around.

[541] And so there's that, you're subject to that arbitrary element of socialization.

[542] And then there's also the fact that, you know, you were kind of a delightful and idiosyncratic child, full of potential and uniqueness, and you were sort of crushed and molded into what you are now.

[543] And some of that's great because, you know, here you can sit peacefully and civilly among all these other people.

[544] But there's a tremendous amount of destruction in the wake of that as well as some benefit.

[545] Victim of the evil king, beneficiary of the wise king.

[546] That characterizes all of us.

[547] And so there's a victim element to that.

[548] I mean, society is a harsh judge, and you're wrong in its eyes.

[549] Now, it's not only a harsh judge, but that's there.

[550] And so, you know, that's part of the essential tragedy of life.

[551] So characterizing people as victims at the sociological level rings true to some degree.

[552] Because, well, because it's true to some degree.

[553] And then with regards to nature, let's say, well, God, you know, you're not as good looking as you might be.

[554] And there's lots of people that are smarter than you.

[555] And, you know, there's people who are going to live longer than you.

[556] and you're going to have a lot of pain and suffering in your life in a very unfair way, and you're going to have a fair bit of bad luck.

[557] And, you know, there's this arbitrary subjugation to the random catastrophes of nature that characterizes everyone.

[558] I mean, everyone gets sick.

[559] Everyone dies.

[560] Everyone loses everything.

[561] And so to think of us as victims is like, well, for sure.

[562] And then, of course, it's also the case that at any given time, some people seem to be much more victims than others.

[563] and for arbitrary reasons as well.

[564] The problem is that it's not that helpful as a characterization.

[565] And it's dangerous, especially dangerous, when you start to play it out at the level of group.

[566] So I've been trying to puzzle this out.

[567] I wrote the forward to Alexander Sojanitzin's, the 50th anniversary version of Alexander Sojanitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, And for its historical inaccuracies and its faults, which are obvious, let's say, 50 years later, but certainly weren't then, it was the first book to completely tear the mask off Soviet, the absolute catastrophic depths of decades, of absolute Soviet barbarism.

[568] And it dealt the death blow to the, what appeared to be the death blow, to the reprehensible ideology that had given rise to all that.

[569] And when I, I've read that book in its entirety, the three volumes set a couple of times, and then the abridged version again more recently while I was writing the forward.

[570] And I was trying to figure out exactly what had happened, because, you know, the apologists for the Stalinists, for the Soviets, basically said, look, the whole Soviet Marxist enterprise was fundamentally good in its initial presuppositions, proletariat against bourgeoisie, victimizer against victim.

[571] That was the underlying narrative.

[572] That was really true.

[573] It was an accurate way of viewing history.

[574] The utopia that was promised was a universalist utopia and worth making a certain amount of sacrifices for.

[575] And it all went wrong because no one implemented it properly.

[576] It's like, well, no. It went wrong fast.

[577] Like, you know, it wasn't that it started out all what?

[578] snowflakes and roses and then got murderous over a couple of decades.

[579] That isn't what happened.

[580] It got murderous right away.

[581] And so I've been trying to puzzle out why that was, because, you know, if you're going to give the devil as due, you might say, well, back in 1914 with the tremendous amount of inequality that existed, might be perfectly reasonable if you were a compassionate person to feel that a bit of inversion of authority and power might be in order to bring the peasantry up and to bring the aristocracy down and to give everyone a fight.

[582] fighting chance and to deal with inequality once and for all, you might have been forgiven for being naive enough to assume that you could manage that with rational social planning and radical revolutionary change.

[583] Although people had warned against that, like Dostoevsky and like Nietzsche, and said it would be a complete bloody catastrophe, which it was, but still, but now it's like, no, sorry, we ran the experiment, we ran it in the Soviet Union, we ran it in China, we ran it everywhere.

[584] And it didn't work.

[585] And it's because it, well, it's for a variety of reasons, but it's bloody, solid evidence that it didn't work because it was replicated in many different circumstances with people from very different cultures and always the same terrible consequence emerged.

[586] And if you don't think that's evidence, then you don't think what evidence is is the same thing than what I think evidence is.

[587] So, and I would say, you also suffer from the unforgivable delusion that you in your purity and perfection actually understand Marxism the proper way and if the tools of power were just given to you you would have brought about the utopia that Mao and Stalin failed to produce and if you don't see that arrogance lurking in that kind of interpretation then you really haven't come to terms with the adversarial part of the individual personality so that wasn't real Marxism it's like yeah like your version would be any better and I'll tell you no it's worse in that, because if it does happen to be that you're St. Francis of Assisi and your utopian implementation of the communist ideal would have, in fact, brought the utopia forward, you would have been among the first to be annihilated by the executioners who took over the Russian revolution, pretty much the second it manifested itself.

[588] So it wouldn't have made a bloody bit of difference to begin with.

[589] So what happened?

[590] What happened?

[591] Here's what happened, as far as I can tell.

[592] And this is the problem, part of the problem with the group identity idea, and part of the problem with the victim, victimizer narrative.

[593] We've already decided, yeah, yeah, you're a victim.

[594] And we should also decide at the same time, and this is a critical thing, that you're also a victimizer.

[595] That's your unearned privilege, right?

[596] And that's the fact that you happen to be born in Norway, you know, instead of some bloody hellhole somewhere else in the world, like Venezuela, for example.

[597] So you have that privilege, and it's arbitrary, you know.

[598] And you have to contend with your arbitrary privilege is just like your arbitrary disadvantages.

[599] And you have to atone for them, I would say, with some responsibility.

[600] There is that arbitrariness.

[601] So here's the problem.

[602] So we already decided that, well, you could be a member of a group, and we could characterize you that way.

[603] Well, then the question is, well, are you a victim or a victimizer?

[604] And then we might say, well, it depends on the group, and it would also depend on how that group was being construed at this moment, right?

[605] But that's only part of the problem.

[606] because you're not just the member of one group.

[607] You're the member of a bunch of groups, as the intersectional theorists have insisted, right, even within their own domain of knowledge.

[608] We can't only characterize you with one group.

[609] Maybe we have to, to come to terms with your unique status as victimizer or victim, we have to do a multidimensional analysis of your group identities.

[610] Well, here's the problem with that.

[611] Well, let's say it's more unforgivable to be a victimizer than it's.

[612] is, if you're a victimizer, let's get this right.

[613] If you're a victim, you're worthy of compassion.

[614] But if you're a victimizer, you're worthy of punishment.

[615] And you're more worthy of punishment as a victimizer than you are worthy of compassion as a victim.

[616] Let's start with that.

[617] That goes along nicely if you have a particularly malevolent attitude towards your fellow human being.

[618] Let's say, Nietzsche said to beware of those in whom the desired to punish is strong.

[619] And we should also point out that you don't want to underestimate the power of hate and resentment and revenge.

[620] Like maybe you can put that up against love and love will win, but that means that what you were manifesting would have to be love.

[621] And that's not so easy to manage.

[622] And it's fairly easy to manage resentment and hatred and the desire for a certain amount of mayhem.

[623] You can do that with virtually no effort whatsoever on your part.

[624] And so whereas love and kindness and compassion in their true sense, Those are effortful achievements.

[625] They're not something that come to people without discipline and care and vision and all of those things, self -sacrifice, and it's rare.

[626] And maybe you've developed some of that in you and good for you, but don't be thinking that that's something that you're just gifted with easily.

[627] So what happened in the Russian Revolution?

[628] Well, it turned out that you could take everyone and you could fractionate them into five different group memberships.

[629] And then it turned out that, as long as you were a victimizer along one of those axes, it was perfectly reasonable to do away with you.

[630] And that seems to me to be exactly why it went wrong.

[631] And the reason that that's the problem is because, well, it's true.

[632] You know, every single one of us is the undeserving beneficiary of a certain amount of privilege in respect to history.

[633] The existentialists in the 1950s, the existentialist psychoanalysts called that Throneous.

[634] It was after Heidegger, right?

[635] And Throneous was this arbitrary element to the world.

[636] It's like you're born with a certain amount of intelligence, right?

[637] Well, you didn't deserve that.

[638] That's a big deal to be born with a certain amount of intelligence.

[639] It's actually better, by the time you're 40, it's better to be born at the 95th percentile for intelligence than the 95th percentile for wealth.

[640] And it's a genetic lottery.

[641] You know, like your parents can suppress your intelligence.

[642] but it's very difficult to augment it.

[643] That's something that seems to be more or less gifted to you.

[644] You know, and it makes a huge difference in terms of the probabilities of your life outcome.

[645] Intelligence IQ is the best predictor of long -term socioeconomic success, the best.

[646] And there's a huge genetic component to that.

[647] So some are born smart, and some of them, some aren't born so smart.

[648] And, you know, it's so arbitrary.

[649] Here's a terrible statistic.

[650] The United States government, the military, decided a decade or so ago, maybe a little longer than that, that it was illegal to induct anybody with an IQ of less than 83 into the armed forces.

[651] Okay, why?

[652] Because despite the American military being absolutely desperate for warm bodies in wartime and in peacetime, well, you need soldiers, peacetime, well, you can use the military as a means of moving people from the underclass up into the more educated strata of society.

[653] You can use it as a tool of social policy.

[654] And they're chronically short of manpower.

[655] Well, they decided that if you have an IQ of less than 83, there wasn't a thing they could possibly train you to do no matter how much effort it took to do anything at all that wasn't positively counterproductive.

[656] Right.

[657] It's terrible.

[658] It's terrible.

[659] The thing is, the military were early adopters of IQ tests and did a lot of the research that was designed to validate them because they wanted to screen people quickly for aptitude to develop an officer corps during wartime.

[660] So they had their reasons, and they developed very powerful IQ tests.

[661] And the terrible thing about that is that's 10 % of the population.

[662] Right, so you just think about that.

[663] So pure genetic lottery, fundamentally.

[664] There's some environmental effects, but they're not very strong.

[665] Genetic lottery dooms 10 % of the population to counterproductive existence in any society that's approximately as complex as the U .S. military, which is certainly the society that you've produced.

[666] And so the fact that you happen to be sitting there and you're fairly intelligent, it's like, well, there's some privilege for you.

[667] It's hard to tell how much you should be punished for that.

[668] And you can be sure, you know, here's another thing.

[669] You hear people making a case all the time about the 1%, something became very popular in the United States.

[670] Do you know, to be in the...

[671] So the question is, well, where do you draw the boundaries exactly?

[672] You part of the 1 %?

[673] Well, no, there's many people that are richer than me. It's like, yeah, but there's probably about 6 ,999 million, etc., etc., that are poorer than you.

[674] So you need an income of $32 ,000 a year to be in the top 1 % worldwide.

[675] So I don't know what the average GDP is in Norway, but it's a hell of a lot higher than that.

[676] It's probably triple that.

[677] So you're not just in the 1%, you're in the upper third of the 1%.

[678] You might say, well, that's not fair because we want to draw the boundaries around Norway, but that's convenient for you, that's all.

[679] There's no reason you should do that canonically.

[680] And so, well, so what's the point of all this?

[681] Well, the whole victim, victimizer thing, the whole group identity narrative is predicated on a very narrow and I would say malicious view of the world.

[682] You're victim.

[683] You're victimized by your own malevolence.

[684] You're victimized by the tyranny of your culture.

[685] And you're victimized by the catastrophe of nature.

[686] And that's built into the structure of the world.

[687] And you can draw distinctions between different levels of victimization, I suppose.

[688] And you can do that on the basis of group identity.

[689] But it doesn't solve the fundamental problem, and it creates other problems that are far worse.

[690] What's the alternative?

[691] Well, this is an alternative that I think we did a very good job of articulate.

[692] in the West.

[693] And it's the first element of that is to insist upon the fundamental sovereignty of the individual.

[694] And not with regards to rights.

[695] That's something we've got wrong over the last 50 years, right?

[696] Sovereign individual, the most important element of that sovereignty is not what you have coming to you from others in the form of your rights.

[697] The most important part of the sovereign individuality is what you can deliver in terms of your responsibility, because it's that upon which your own stability relies, the stability of your family, and the integrity of the state.

[698] And so, and what you do, instead of claiming your status as victim, which is self -evident, yes, victim, obviously, life is fundamentally suffering, and it's contaminated by malevolence, and that's a permanent reality.

[699] Instead of characterizing yourself as a hapless victim, differentially affected by that, and then looking for whose fault it is, you do something radical, and you think, maybe it's not my fault.

[700] Maybe it's my responsibility to do something about that.

[701] There's plenty of suffering in the world that you could do something about.

[702] You could start with your own, for that matter.

[703] You could treat yourself half decently.

[704] That's rule too, right?

[705] Treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping.

[706] You could try that.

[707] It actually works quite nicely.

[708] And if you can manage that, well, maybe you could do the same thing for your family.

[709] That would be a nice extension of grace, let's say.

[710] And maybe if you get good at that, well, you could try doing it for the whole community.

[711] You could take on the load of that suffering, that load of that victimization, let's say.

[712] You could take that on not only as an unavoidable existential reality, but as a challenge to the deepest part of yourself.

[713] And I'll tell you, one of the things that we've also learned from deep narrative and from clinical lore is, well, what's the fundamental narrative?

[714] You've got your characters, your evil queen and your good queen, and your evil king and your good king, and the hero and the adversary.

[715] What's the fundamental narrative?

[716] Stand up against tyranny.

[717] Confront the catastrophe of nature.

[718] Act out the mythology of the hero.

[719] Gain the treasure the dragon stores.

[720] It's the fundamental narrative of mankind.

[721] And that's the willingness to take on the responsibility that goes along with the entire catastrophe of being.

[722] And that's much preferable alternative to deciding who's to blame and going after them.

[723] Thank you very much.

[724] Norwegian, eh?

[725] Known for their extroverted enthusiasm.

[726] All right.

[727] So here's what we're going to do.

[728] I want to go through some of the big questions that I've come up with during the last five or six months on the road with you, which have just been an incredible, truly life -changing time for me. And then we're going to end with Oslo's best question.

[729] You got 45 minutes in you?

[730] We'll see.

[731] All right.

[732] So first off, so first off, every single night you are different.

[733] And I think tonight, perhaps different, more different than any night so far.

[734] How the hell do you do it?

[735] I honestly don't know.

[736] I usually go back in the green room with you for a little bit before, and about 10 minutes before showtime, I walk out of there and you say you need to think for a little bit, and then you somehow do an hour and a half summing up everything you think in a different way on any given night.

[737] Well, there's some, I'll answer that technically.

[738] You know, the first thing is, is that something I tell my students, you know, if you want to write an essay, you need a problem because the essay is an attempt to solve a problem.

[739] So first of all, you need a problem, and then second, if you're going to devote time to the problem, then it should be, like it should be a problem that is your problem, at least a piece of it should be.

[740] You know, I have students all the time, they come up to me and they say, tell me what I should write my essay about, and they're often very annoyed that I haven't, you know.

[741] You didn't give us a topic.

[742] It's like, yes, that's because the topic is the difficult part of the assignment, right?

[743] To specify the problem, that's the difficult part of the assignment.

[744] In fact, when you're trying to address a complex, let's say, domain of suffering, the diagnosis, which is the problem formulation, is the crucial cognitive step.

[745] So if you want to write, you need a problem.

[746] And if you want to write truthfully, then you need to write truthfully, then you need to a problem that's yours.

[747] And if you want to write in a focused and aimed manner, then you unite your thinking around the problem.

[748] And so one thing I always do before, when I sit backstage, is I think, okay, what's the problem for tonight?

[749] You know, and the problem for tonight was victim.

[750] So it was one statement, it's like, okay, let's explore the concept of victim.

[751] And go down as far as we possibly can.

[752] Okay, so then, well, then I would say I have my knowledge organized in an idiosyncratic manner.

[753] And that's a consequence of having spent, when I wrote my first book, which was Maps of Meaning, I wrote every day for three hours for 15 years.

[754] And I vowed when I started that I was going to make that what would you say the highest duty that I had nothing was going to come before that and there's a certain amount of cruelty in that because it meant that if my wife came into my office then I would bark at her and if my kids came into my office like a junkyard dog surrounded by barbed wires because you can always not write it's not that important that day and there might be more pressing concerns and they're probably, including people who would just like to have something to do with you for a while or do something nice or have a problem fixed.

[755] It's like, no, go away.

[756] I've got three hours.

[757] And so I was a thief and I took that from my life.

[758] And so I spent a very long time writing and thinking about the hardest problem that I could conceptualize.

[759] And that was the relationship between the individual and the atrocity committed in the service of totalitarian possession.

[760] It was the worst problem I could think of.

[761] How?

[762] So I looked to see what the worst thing people could do under the worst circumstances was and tried to figure out why that happened.

[763] That was step one.

[764] And step two was having come to some determination about how it might happen, then and having learned something that I had suspected all along, which was that that capacity was part of the individual, right, me, as well as everyone else, to determine if there was a mode of acting in the world that would restrict that possibility so that it would no longer manifest itself.

[765] And so I spent however many hours, 45 ,000 hours thinking about that.

[766] And that's not right, because that's how much time I spent writing about it.

[767] Most of that time, because I have a very obsessive mind in some sense.

[768] If I lock on a problem, I can't let it go, or it can't let me go.

[769] I don't know which way to think about it.

[770] And so it wasn't only that I was writing for three hours a day.

[771] I was thinking about it all the time, right from the time I woke up until the time I went to sleep.

[772] and I was reading about it obsessively.

[773] I read a tremendous amount when I was in graduate school.

[774] And so the reason I'm telling you all of that is to answer this question is like, then I spent 30 years lecturing about it.

[775] And, you know, I started out with my lectures fairly structured because I was still wrestling with the ideas, but I tried over the years to reduce the amount of scaffolding, safety wire, netting that was underneath me while I was lecturing until I got to the point where I didn't need to do anything other than sit for 10 minutes and think, okay, what's the problem?

[776] Where am I going?

[777] I'm exploring a solution.

[778] I'm not necessarily putting forward a pre -constructed solution.

[779] Like it'll be in the universe of solutions I've considered, but I'd like to get it sharper and clearer.

[780] So I got to the point where I could go from the problem through the story, using all these things that I had already talked about and new, and so then I can sequence them.

[781] think the closest analogy I can think of is jazz improvisation.

[782] It's something like that.

[783] You know, an expert musician has a tremendous number of habits deeply ingrained, like an athlete.

[784] Same thing.

[785] That are part and parcel built into him or her.

[786] And so I have that.

[787] And so then I can come out and think, okay, well, a little of this and a little of that.

[788] And that's new.

[789] It's like each of these ideas is a personality.

[790] of sorts, and you can let them have a dialogue in real time and see where it goes.

[791] And that's a story, right?

[792] That's what a great author does when he writes a book, is he puts out some characters, and then he lets the characters do whatever they would do, and that reveals the story.

[793] And so I kind of do that.

[794] I let the ideas do what they're going to do, and see how they fight and compete with one another.

[795] And then that's – see, what people want in a lecture is, assuming that this is a lecture, and it probably isn't.

[796] it's probably more like a strange sort of dialogue with the audience.

[797] What people want in a forum like this is they want to see thought in action.

[798] They don't want to see something that's already crystallized and dead, which is why I did read the last time I was here, although I do that rarely.

[799] They want to see something, they want to see, well, what they want to see, technically speaking, is something, if you thought about metaphysically, is they want to see the logos in action.

[800] That's really what people always want to see.

[801] And I mean that philosophically.

[802] And so the real -time part of it, the fact that it's not a contrived performance is actually crucial to its success.

[803] And also what keeps me engaged, like I don't know how these damn lectures are going to go when I come out here.

[804] I think, okay, victim, man, that's a big problem.

[805] Okay, well, we could address it with this, and then we could use this, and I can play those together, and we can see how that goes, and then perhaps I'll be able to draw a rousing conclusion, because it's hard to bring that to the point at the end, you know, successfully, which is something I've got better at over the tour, which is quite fun.

[806] But I never don't know if it's going to work, and so I'm on edge when I come out on stage.

[807] I think, oh, my God, I've got a big problem here, and I've got a...

[808] sorted out in 70 minutes and there's all these people here so and and and and that makes it really tense for me in an exciting way it's an exhilarating you know it's an exhilarating challenge but that also makes it alive because I could easily fail so well so that's how it's lots of practice and and then the final thing is I don't talk about problems that don't matter to me they matter this victim thing that matters it's important it's fundamental and so every night I come out and I think okay well what's the fundamental problem for tonight and it's a problem that affects me as far as deep down as as I can go you know and so yeah do you know the point in life when you became a serious person and I mean that I mean that in the best sense of it because when people ask me what it's like to be on tour with you yeah I always say well he takes life seriously.

[809] And it's making me take life more seriously.

[810] And I think it's making these people take life more seriously.

[811] Do you remember the moment that that happened?

[812] Yes.

[813] Can you tell me that moment?

[814] Yes, I can.

[815] Yeah.

[816] So it was in, I think, 1983.

[817] And this is a strange story.

[818] I came home from a party, university party, and I wasn't in the best mood.

[819] I've always had a certain proclivity towards depression, which I've recently discovered is probably an autoimmune problem.

[820] In any case, I'd gone to this party, and I'd had a lot to drink, because I'd like to drink, and I don't know, I wasn't happy with something that happened at the party.

[821] It wasn't happy with the way I behaved.

[822] I mean, that's not uncommon, right?

[823] If you like to drink, then you're not happy with the way you behave.

[824] Those things just go together.

[825] But it was deeper than that.

[826] It wasn't just that I was unhappy with the way the party had gone, but I was deeply dissatisfied with how I was oriented in life.

[827] Like I felt that there was a, it was a nihilism, I suppose, that was gnawing at me. This was not long after I'd stopped, I'd worked for a socialist party in Canada for a, a while when I was a kid.

[828] And this wasn't long after I stopped doing that.

[829] And so I kind of lost my moorings and, you know, the Christianity that my mother practiced in particular.

[830] I'd abandoned that when I was like 13.

[831] And so I didn't have any structured orient me at all.

[832] And so I was experimenting a little bit with artistic production at this point, not a lot, but a bit.

[833] And so I took out this canvas from my closet.

[834] And I said, I sat down and I sketched out this picture and I just let my imagination roam and what came out was it was a crucifixion and there was a, I drew a picture of Christ on the on the crucifixion, but it with a very judgmental face, very angry face and with a snake wrapped around his waist and it was really harsh picture.

[835] It was like an expressionist picture.

[836] Not that I have the talent of an expressionist but but that's what it was and I thought and I mean I wasn't thinking, I didn't think that I was thinking in religious terms at that point at all.

[837] And, you know, I was an absolutely sporadic churchgoer, and I was absolutely shocked by this picture.

[838] I thought, what, where the hell did this come from?

[839] What did that possibly mean?

[840] You know, it took me years to figure out what it meant.

[841] I mean, really, one thing, so I'll tell you part of what it meant.

[842] So, Carl Jung said something very interesting.

[843] about the structure of the New Testament, he said that the gospel Christ is fundamentally, although not entirely, fundamentally a figure of compassion.

[844] But the ideal is not only compassion.

[845] The ideal is also a judge because an ideal is a judge.

[846] You know, let's say you have an ideal.

[847] Well, it's a judge because you don't live up to it.

[848] And so your ideal is always looking at you like you're not what you should be.

[849] And the higher the ideal, the more judgment, judgmental the judge.

[850] Well, that's why he thought the book of revelation.

[851] First of all, emerged as an unconscious revelation, which, because Christ comes back at the end of time, so the story goes, as the ultimate judge, and virtually no one is judged acceptable.

[852] Well, why?

[853] Well, because by the highest possible, see, speaking psychologically, even biologically for that matter, the idea of Christ is the instantiation of the ideal as such.

[854] That's what it is.

[855] Now, it might be more than that, but that's what it is.

[856] It's whatever a human being would be if a human being was perfect.

[857] And it's an effort of our collective imagination to represent that symbolically, which we do with cathedrals, for example, when we paint the image of Christ against the dome that represents eternity itself.

[858] That's the ideal.

[859] Now, you might say, well, I don't believe it.

[860] in the ideal.

[861] It's like, you're missing the point.

[862] You're missing the point.

[863] And so that ideal is a judge.

[864] And the farther you are away from that ideal, the harsher the judge.

[865] And so the snake was part of that.

[866] Because the thing is, is that if you're low enough and the ideal is high enough, the ideal itself is so judgmental and so detached for you that it starts to look to you like your enemy.

[867] And so that was the painting.

[868] And it was like, and I was asking a question, that was the thing, I was asking the question.

[869] I was asking, like, what would I have to do to set this, what would I have to do to set the situation that I'm in right?

[870] And so then I drew this picture, and the picture had the answer.

[871] I mean, artistic production always has the answer.

[872] That's where the answers come from, you know, and so that was a manifestation of imagination.

[873] It was part of me attempting in its symbolic mode of personified thinking, to deliver a message.

[874] And so I swore that night that I was going to do whatever it took to set myself right, period, whatever.

[875] And I was dead serious about that.

[876] And so that was the moment.

[877] And then I don't know what I did with that picture.

[878] I hid it in my closet because I was so freaked out by.

[879] I thought, what the hell is this?

[880] It's like some schizophrenic nightmare.

[881] It's like underneath the covers with that thing.

[882] But that was the...

[883] And that was, it wasn't long after that, that I wrote the first essay that eventually turned into this Maps of Meaning book.

[884] It was a poem to begin with, actually.

[885] That was how it came about first.

[886] So that's when I decided to be, to straighten myself out, regardless of, to straighten myself out, that's what I was going to do.

[887] So.

[888] So I think this is our 13th show in Europe.

[889] We've got a couple more over the next couple days.

[890] and now it sounds like we're extending for another 30 or 40, probably in the spring.

[891] I mean, this thing has just grown and grown and grown.

[892] Are you shocked at the amount of people that live in Western societies here in Norway, especially when we were in Sweden a couple days ago, but all the countries that we've been in, that live in free societies yet are completely afraid to say what they think?

[893] Is it absolutely shocking to you?

[894] I think the most, I think what I think, I've been most shocked about in all of that is what's happened in the UK with the police starting to prosecute people for crimes of offensiveness.

[895] That's just, and I think that's probably partly because I'm, and I mean I see that as broadly reflective of something that's happening in the West in general, but it's particularly shocking and appalling to me as a Western Canadian, you know, because obviously Canada was part of the British Empire.

[896] And when I grew up, like, there was a pretty tight affinity still in Western Canada with the British Empire.

[897] I mean, our maps were the dominion of Canada.

[898] It was still pink.

[899] You know, it was still part of the British Empire.

[900] We sang God save the Queen constantly at public gatherings.

[901] That's gone by the wayside.

[902] And so, and, you know, I've always regarded British common law and the British parliamentary tradition as, well, one of, perhaps the highest achievement of Western civilization.

[903] I mean, you could argue about that, but it's in the top ten, let's say.

[904] And then to see the Brits who also have this phenomenal sense of humor, this ability to say anything, no matter how outrageous about anyone, and to include themselves in the joke, right?

[905] Which is such an elegant way of expressing comedic freedom.

[906] To see them going down this road is just It just, it's, it's, what is it exactly?

[907] Well, it's deeply saddening, that's for sure.

[908] And, and what's horrifying, and that's not exactly the right word.

[909] I don't know what the word for it is.

[910] There's certainly sorrow that's associated with a disbelief.

[911] It's also that, at watching that happen in what I still think is like the central core of the idea of individual sovereignty and freedom as expressed.

[912] across the Western world and so and then there's similar manifestations of that everywhere else but the police prosecuting people for you know asking people to turn in their neighbors if they say something offensive and that's happening in in the UK yeah literally well we saw that that you know somebody sent me posters pictures of posters in the in the Scottish subway in the in the metro in the tube you know saying inviting people to inform on their neighbors for being offensive.

[913] It's like, what the hell?

[914] What's, I knew this was coming because, because I knew.

[915] We brought our first hate speech laws in Canada back in the 1980s.

[916] We were after this character named Ernst Zundle, who is a particularly despicable piece of work, hard hat wearing, right wing, anti -Semit, Holocaust denier.

[917] You know, he had it all, that guy.

[918] And, you know, it was his shenanigans, careless, malevolent shenanigans that enticed Canadians into producing hate speech legislation.

[919] I thought, no, that's not good.

[920] It's not good.

[921] You're making a big mistake.

[922] We're going to pay for this.

[923] It's going to unfold over a long time.

[924] Who defines hate?

[925] The crucial issue.

[926] It's not like it's a scientific.

[927] category, it's a judgment, and the answer is those whom you least want to have the power to define it, because they're the ones that will take that power to themselves.

[928] And if you think that isn't going to affect what you get to say, well, you've got another thing coming.

[929] So I think it's, I think it's, we're going to pay for it.

[930] And hopefully, hopefully we'll wake up and push back before we have to pay too high a price.

[931] We're going to pay for it.

[932] So, Yeah.

[933] And we're going to deserve to pay for it, too.

[934] He's talking to you.

[935] Well, you know, last night, I was on this British show called Question Time, which is a very famous British show.

[936] And there was a woman parliamentarian there from Ireland who was pretty bright.

[937] I liked listening to her.

[938] But the host asked me about this character named Count Dankula.

[939] I don't know if you know about him.

[940] His girlfriend, he's a comedian.

[941] Well, he thinks he's a comedian.

[942] And, well, but, you know, there are lots of comedians who think they're comedians that aren't funny.

[943] And I'm not saying he's not funny, because other people think that he's a comedian too, but he presents himself as a comedian.

[944] Count Dankula.

[945] I mean, that's actually a joke, that name.

[946] And his girlfriend had a pug, and I liked Count Dankula because he hated that pug.

[947] and I'm not very fond of pugs.

[948] I think they're hideous little creatures.

[949] And, and, you know, I don't really hate them.

[950] If a pug comes along, then I'll pet it and everything.

[951] But it's just sort of like this little rat -like dog with these bug.

[952] You know, if you hit a pug on the back of the head, the eyes will pop out.

[953] And so, because they've been so genetically mishandled.

[954] And so, I don't know, man, it's just...

[955] You do realize we're playing.

[956] putting this on YouTube and you're just on you're unleashing a whole new world of hate from the pug people I know I know I know but whatever whatever so you can have your pug and you can love it my dad had this dog that was so damn hideous and useless that it was just a miracle and he loved it to death and so and you know that's fine that's fine but and there's kind of an ironic attitude in in the dismissal of pugs and dangula didn't like his girlfriend's pug and so he thought he'd play a mean trick and or a mean slash funny trick and teach it to do a hail Hitler salute, which I actually thought was quite funny.

[957] It's like, I don't, look, I don't see that as glorifying Hitler.

[958] It's a pug for God's sake.

[959] It wasn't a, it wasn't, what do you call those, Doberman, you know, it was a pug.

[960] It's like teaching a rat to do a Hail Hitler salute.

[961] I love how this has come down to the breed of dog with you.

[962] Well, these things matter in terms of of the way they're represented, you know, and then, you know, he taught it to, it's so horrible, and I'm going to be so killed for this, he taught it to do its little salute when he said, gas the Jews, which is not funny, you know, except it's horribly funny, you know, that's the thing.

[963] Well, look, and so yeah, you laugh, that's right, because you're all horrible, and you know perfectly well that it's horribly funny.

[964] And you know, we need to be able to be horribly funny, because life is horrible, and we need to be able to find, we need to be able to allow people the freedom to find the ability to transcend that horror with comedy.

[965] And a mark of a free society is that comedians can be just exactly what they are, which they're people who push the edge of what's acceptable.

[966] If you're a brilliant comedian, you get right to the edge, right, and you dance there.

[967] And the audience is thinking, oh, Sarah Silverman's a good example of that, you know, because you can just see her, she's got all politically correct recently, but when she was in her heyday, you could just see Sarah, she's so smart, you'd see her sitting there, and she'd think of something just spectacularly evil and horrible, and she'd think, oh, and then she'd say it, you know, and everyone would just crack up, because, like, the darkest part of their soul had once thought something like that, and she dared to utter it, and by uttering it, she also simultaneously transcended it, you know, and that's the beauty of comedy.

[968] And, and, and, well, so anyways, they, they went after Dankula and nailed him legally.

[969] And I thought that, and that's in Great Britain as well.

[970] And last night, so they brought this up on, on question time.

[971] And, you know, the Irish woman, um, who said, she went off on a talk about how terrible Kristallnacht was and what an awful thing, Auschwitz and the Holocaust was.

[972] It's like, well, You're not that morally virtuous to notice that.

[973] You know what I mean?

[974] It's like, and it didn't have anything to do with the topic at hand.

[975] It's like, you wouldn't say that you noticed that unless you were implying that there are people around you, including this countencula, who didn't notice that.

[976] Okay, it had nothing to do with whether he should have been prosecuted for his stupid joke.

[977] And you can say, well, you could say it was a stupid joke, which it certainly was.

[978] you could say that it was a hateful joke, which I don't agree with, by the way, but you could say that, and I think you could make a credible case for that, but then to say that because you think that the Holocaust was bad, he should be criminally prosecuted.

[979] It's like, no, sorry, man, you've crossed the line, and there's no excuse for it.

[980] And so that's part of what's worrisome about the state of discourse in the free West.

[981] That same thing.

[982] comedians won't go to university campuses the same thing you don't get to be funny so if you can't be funny then you're not free you know the gesture in the king's courts the only person who gets to tell the truth and if the king is such a tyrant that he kills his jester then you know that the evil king is in charge and so when we can't tolerate our comedians it's like well there you go there are the canaries in the coal mine as far as i'm concerned so you know i promised my wife that I wouldn't hit any hornets nest with sticks for like a day.

[983] And now I just hit a big hornet's nest with a stick.

[984] Sorry, Tammy.

[985] She's here somewhere.

[986] Give it up for Jordan's wife, by the way.

[987] She's been on this entire tour.

[988] All right, so let's...

[989] David's fault.

[990] Let's shift gears a little bit.

[991] What has been the best part of this adventure of this tour?

[992] For you, personally.

[993] Oh, well, the best part happens all the time.

[994] the best part I think I told this story tonight though I'm not sure because I talked to a bunch of journalists today so I can't remember when I told this story but this guy came up to me last night he was a kind of a pierced guy rough -looking guy and about he's probably in his late 20s maybe early 30s he said I've been smoke and drug -free for nine months and I said hey good work man because he looked pretty pleased about that I said, well, you know, hopefully that's a lot better.

[995] And he said, it's a lot better.

[996] I said, well, good for you for sticking it out.

[997] And I hope you can continue it.

[998] And I meant that because I did mean good for you and I hope you can stick it out.

[999] And he knew I meant that because he wouldn't have bloody well told me that to begin with if he didn't think that that was going to be the response.

[1000] And then he said, I got nine of my mates to do the same thing.

[1001] Yeah, I thought right on, man, that's great.

[1002] And then, you know, I was in Birmingham two nights ago and I walked out of the hotel, and this kid, working -class kid, came up to me, you know, just out of the blue, and he said, thank you very much for elevating my vision.

[1003] I thought, hey, look, it's really a good thing to be able to go around the world and to have people stop you on the street and say things like that to you.

[1004] It's like, that's as good as it gets, you know, and people are telling me stories like that all the time.

[1005] They come up and they say, well, you've watched this.

[1006] It happens all the time.

[1007] People come up and they tell me some way that their house was out of order, you know, they're hopeless and nihilistic and and drinking too much and watching too much pornography and procrastinating too much and being not serious with their relationship and not getting along with their parents and you know not formulating a vision and not growing up and well you know there's just endless ways that you can descend into a kind of what would you call it a kind of grungy filthy carpet infested hell and and and And so, and then they say, look, I've been watching your lectures, and I developed a plan for my life, and I've been trying to be more responsible, and I've been really trying to tell the truth, and I amended my relationship with my father, and I got married to my girlfriend, and now I have a flat, and I quit doing drugs, and I've just tripled my salary in the last year, and I didn't commit suicide like I was going to six months ago.

[1008] I think I have, I don't know, out of the 150 people that I talk to each night, I would say probably over the course of the lecture series, there's probably ten people like that a night who tell me that.

[1009] And so, see, because I believe what I said tonight, I believe that the individual is sovereign and that individual sovereignty is the cornerstone of reality itself, and it's the cornerstone of the state, and it's the cornerstone of reality itself.

[1010] I truly believe that to be the case, that every time I hear someone, and say, look, I've got my act together, I think, that's one more weight on, you know, if the scales are always tilting towards good or towards evil, then every time someone decides to straighten themselves up, they take a major weight off the evil side, and they put it on the good side, and it's not trivial, and I believe that that's what the redemption of the world depends on.

[1011] It's not political.

[1012] It happens at the level of the individual, just like the dissent into totalitarian catastrophe occurs when people abandon their sovereign responsibility, which I think is the most accurate way of diagnosing what happened in the 20th century.

[1013] So whenever someone comes up to me and says, I was not doing so well and here's, you know, three ways where I've really put my life together, we have a little 15 -second party and we both know why.

[1014] And so that's that's as good as it gets.

[1015] And so that's happening constantly.

[1016] And I feel generally speaking that these events are like their celebrations of that.

[1017] And so interesting to watch the media miss this completely.

[1018] It's like they don't have the conceptual, what would you say?

[1019] They don't have the conceptual tools to understand that something might be happening that's worthy of note outside the purely conventional confines of, you know, the stultifying and dull political discourse.

[1020] But it doesn't mean, matter.

[1021] It might be nice if it didn't happen.

[1022] It doesn't fundamentally matter because I'm a psychologist.

[1023] I decided a long time ago that the individual was the right level of analysis.

[1024] And so it's an absolute, it's not a pleasure.

[1025] It's not the right way of thinking about it.

[1026] What's rule seven, do what is meaningful, not what is expedient.

[1027] This is the most deeply meaningful thing that I can envision doing.

[1028] So that's true.

[1029] great it's great it's hard great is hard when something great happens that's hard right it's not it's not something trivial but it doesn't matter because because it's great and so every time someone says to me I'm better I'm getting along with my father I've married my girlfriend we're going to have a child we weren't going to have children now we're going to have children I think that's one more so That's great, man. Tell the audience a little bit about Jordan Peterson having fun.

[1030] We did serious Jordan Peterson.

[1031] What's Peterson doing for fun?

[1032] I stumped him, actually.

[1033] Well, it's not like I don't, it's like most of what I've always done for fun in my life has been to play, you know, and so when I had little kids, I played with them all the time, and my kids are grown up, and I play with them all the time.

[1034] And my daughter is so playful, despite her rather catastrophic life up to this point, she's much better, but is that every single thing she says, you know, when she's not delivering, like when she's not focused on talking to people about a serious topic, everything she says is a joke.

[1035] You know, and my son is ridiculously cheesy and playful.

[1036] and so that's fun and when they were little kids we just played all the time and so I really like that and most of the people who've been my close friends have been people like that they play with their speech all the time which is why I think I get along with comedians you know it's like it's partly why we travel well together and John my tour manager who's a great guy and very very useful he's also a comedian and Rogan's a comedian and so many of the people that I got along with are comedians and the best interviews I've had have been with comedians because there's that element of play, so I really like that.

[1037] On this tour, there's not a lot of fun, I wouldn't say.

[1038] We had a good time when we went to the comedy club in Salt Lake City.

[1039] That was fun.

[1040] That was 45 minutes of fun.

[1041] And I had some fun at Cambridge.

[1042] I had some fun.

[1043] Just to be clear, I brought Jordan up as the surprise guest.

[1044] I did about an hour of stand -up, and then I brought Jordan up, and we did, we sort of did stand -up together.

[1045] We just kind of rifted for about 45 minutes, and people were, they were thrilled.

[1046] And they loved seeing you laugh.

[1047] Yeah, well, I did.

[1048] I was at the Cambridge Union just a couple of days ago, and I was in a fairly high -spirited mood, and I had a fair bit of fun with the students there.

[1049] It was still serious, but, you know, what I really like, the times in my life that I've had the best time is when I'm sitting around with a variety of people who are very amusing, and all they're trying to do is to outwit each other with something absurd and funny.

[1050] And it was really a part of, I don't know if it's a part of Scandinavian culture or not, but in the West, where I grew up, which is a working class culture, I mean, most of what my friends and I did with regards to conversation was like half -witted upmanship, I guess that's what it is.

[1051] Your goal was to say something funnier than the person just before you said.

[1052] And so it was competitive humor, and I really, really like that a lot.

[1053] And so when I'm able, that's great relief.

[1054] But this tour, like, it's very tightly scheduled, crazily tightly scheduled.

[1055] And Tammy and I decided at the beginning that, because it was such an absurd opportunity, that it was a working tour, you know, and that we were going to subordinate everything to making sure that these shows went as well as they possibly could and that we would take whatever refuge and amusement we could where we could steal it and we've had some of that I mean the last time we're in Oslo we walked up to the sculpture gardens and so that was really cool and we walked down the boulevard and we only had about an hour and a half to take a look around the city but it was a nice hour and a half you know the sun was out and we enjoyed ourselves and so that's Rule 12 right pedicat on the street when when you see one, when you encounter one, and you take your joy where you can get it, and you don't complain if it's not happening perhaps as often as it should, especially when you're given, like we have been, this absolutely improbable adventure, and we'll have time, hopefully, God willing, knock on wood with some luck for some more fun in the future.

[1056] Well, that's actually quite a segue to my next question, which is, because you talk about stories so much and the importance of stories, does the Jordan Peterson story have a happy ending?

[1057] And does that even matter?

[1058] Or what do you think the ending of the Jordan Peterson story is?

[1059] I don't have any idea.

[1060] You know, when I was, from the time I was about 20, I kind of had a sense of what would happen to me. I had some sense of it.

[1061] But only, it really only extended until I was about my age, 50, something like that.

[1062] And I didn't know what would, I didn't have a vision for after that.

[1063] And see, I thought, when I wrote maps of meaning, I remember telling one of my peers, I said, I think everyone will think the way that I think in this book in 50 years.

[1064] And he said, well, that's a pretty grandiose claim, I guess that was it.

[1065] Something like, well, fair enough, you know.

[1066] But by the same token, I wasn't taking credit for the ideas.

[1067] Like, I was taking some credit for clarifying them.

[1068] The ideas were already there.

[1069] They're everywhere, those ideas.

[1070] But clarifying them is something.

[1071] and so I knew that what I was working on in Maps of Meaning was at the center of things in some sense and that manifested itself in my teaching career because, well, I taught at Harvard for six years and the course there, which was based on my book, was very, very popular and students regarded it as life -changing and the same thing happened at the University of Toronto and so I knew that that power was in those ideas But I don't see my future very clearly from here on in.

[1072] You know, over the next year, I'm going to do more of what I'm doing.

[1073] I want to return to Exodus.

[1074] I like doing those biblical lectures.

[1075] I thought that was useful and important.

[1076] So I want to do that.

[1077] But my vision kind of runs out in December of 2019.

[1078] And I don't know what, because all of this is so unlikely, you know, I've thought, for the last two years, every single day, I've thought, well, this has got to come to an end, like this is ridiculous, and this is ridiculous, it can't continue, but it is continuing.

[1079] And so I have no idea, how do you predict something like that?

[1080] I mean, for the longest time, I thought that as this wave grew, the probability that I would end up like a surfer smashed on the beach was the highest probability outcome.

[1081] And I still probably think that that's the highest probability outcome.

[1082] But I'm not as apprehensive about that now as I was, because in some sense, assuming I don't do anything spectacularly stupid, like defend Count Dankula on Dave Rubin.

[1083] The people who would like to have taken me out have thrown the worst that they could throw at me as far as I can tell.

[1084] I mean, my cardinal day in terms of vilification, and it's quite a contest, by the way, because there were many days like that, was a day where I was simultaneously accused by an alt -right magazine of being a Jewish shill and accused by a Jewish magazine of being tantamount to Hitler himself.

[1085] I thought, well, that pretty much does it.

[1086] It's like, the Nazis hate me because I'm a Jewish shill, and well, this particular Jewish publication compared me to Hitler, and I thought, well, that's it.

[1087] Where else do you go after that?

[1088] We're going to call me Mao?

[1089] It's like, it's still already.

[1090] That's just not that much past, Hitler.

[1091] And so, you know, and so I'm, not that concerned that in the absence of some fatal stupidity on my part, which certainly could still happen, because we have that proclivity for fatal stupidity within all of us.

[1092] I'm not too concerned that I'm going to be taken out by my ideological opponents, but by the same token, this is a pretty unwieldy and unprecedented situation to be in, and so I'm not under any allusions about its stability or safety.

[1093] So who knows, man?

[1094] Well, I'll stick with you as long as you'll keep me. So there you go.

[1095] So far so good.

[1096] All right, so I promised to you guys that I was going to take what I thought was the best question from you guys, and there were hundreds of them.

[1097] I was reading through them during the lecture, but I thought this was the best we got out of Oslo.

[1098] Will you move to Oslo and run for Prime Minister of Norway?

[1099] Well, first, probably want someone who can speak Norwegian and second more seriously throughout my life I've considered a political career and certainly when I was young very seriously that was my ambition till I was about 18 but yeah it started but I ran for an executive position in the Socialist Party and my home province when I was 14.

[1100] And so that was the first large -scale public speech I gave to about 700 people.

[1101] Wait, can everyone pause for one second?

[1102] Try to picture a 14 -year -old socialist Jordan Peterson.

[1103] That's an incredible image to me. What was that kid like?

[1104] Like me. It's kind of, you know, I could speak to a crowd then.

[1105] Speech was very successful.

[1106] I lost the positioned by 13 votes out of 700, something like that.

[1107] And, you know, I had the audience under, I had the audience, you know.

[1108] So, you know, there's certain things about you that remain constant.

[1109] Hopefully I know more than I did then.

[1110] You know, that's to be devoutly hoped for.

[1111] I stopped actively pursuing a political career when I was 18.

[1112] and the reason for that was because I became more interested in something else, which is what I was talking about tonight.

[1113] Because it turned out that the political problems that I was interested in were deep enough, arguably, not to be political.

[1114] Because they were really...

[1115] For some reason, I was very interested in totalitarianism right from the time I was like an adolescent.

[1116] I don't know why exactly.

[1117] Who the hell knows why you get interested in what you're interested in?

[1118] Some problem.

[1119] You know, this is a thing that's useful to know about life.

[1120] You know, all of you have problems that bother you.

[1121] And you think, well, I don't want to have a problem.

[1122] And fair enough.

[1123] But like, there's a whole lot of problems you could have that could bother you.

[1124] Because there's lots of things wrong with the world.

[1125] And you could be obsessed by like a million problems, right?

[1126] because there's just problems everywhere, but you're not.

[1127] Some problems grab you.

[1128] Why?

[1129] It's a mystery.

[1130] It's the mystery of the autonomy of being in some sense.

[1131] The problem grabs you, and it won't let you go.

[1132] It's like there's suffering in that.

[1133] That's your problem.

[1134] And, you know, in that problem might be your destiny.

[1135] I think that's right.

[1136] The problems that grip you are the portal to your destiny.

[1137] And so, well, then you can accept them.

[1138] It's like, what are you going to have?

[1139] No problems?

[1140] Good luck with that.

[1141] So you've got your problems.

[1142] One of the things you learn as a therapist is you don't interfere with people's problems.

[1143] And what I mean by that is this.

[1144] Let's say you come to me and, you know, we have a discussion about what's going wrong in your life.

[1145] And I listen because I want you to explain what the problems are?

[1146] Because what do I know about your life?

[1147] It's like, I need to listen so that I can.

[1148] here what your problem is and not rush to a conclusion.

[1149] And then I want to listen while you generate a solution.

[1150] Now, I'm going to help by asking questions and help you explore.

[1151] But if I, let's say you lay out your problem and I think, hey, I know what would fix that?

[1152] And then I just say to you, well, you know, here's a solution.

[1153] Well, first of all, you're going to be very annoyed about that because I just took your problem.

[1154] And it was up to you to wrestle with that.

[1155] problem and come up with a solution and then to have a little self -congratulatory burst of pleasure at your own intuitive genius that you could solve your problem and then then you're motivated because you've come up with a solution maybe you go implement it right and so well so my problem became something that wasn't political and so I pursued that and so I'm not going to pursue a political career and I've also decided too I didn't know this but I don't have the temperament for it I couldn't do it I find the adversarial interviews that I'm in for example it takes me three days to recover from one of those well it does because I don't like that mode of discourse and if you're political you're in that mode of discourse all the time and I'm not cut out for it like I'm not a particularly combative person by nature I'm a person who's terrified about leaving monsters under the rug ignored.

[1156] But that is not the same thing.

[1157] And it's not like I enjoy the process of calling them out and hashing them through.

[1158] But I think, well, better get at them while they're small.

[1159] So no, I'm not coming to Norway.

[1160] That's the answer to that question.

[1161] All right, well, on that note, I've said this to you privately before but I may as well say it publicly since we're putting this up on the YouTube.

[1162] This, what we're doing here, this started as a professional joy for me, but it has become a personal joy that I can't explain.

[1163] I am better than when we started.

[1164] I know what it's like to be these people taking these ideas in and changing and I'm better and it's because of the work that you've put into your life that you've helped give to all of us.

[1165] So I want to thank you for that.

[1166] And on that note, I've never ended a show like this before, but I'm going to get out of the way, and I need you guys to go bananas for Dr. Jordan Peterson.

[1167] Thank you guys.

[1168] If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up dad's books, maps of meaning, the architecture of belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 rules for life and antidote to chaos.

[1169] Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan v. Peterson podcast.

[1170] See jordanb peterson .com for audio, e -book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

[1171] I really hope you enjoyed this podcast.

[1172] If you did, please leave a rating at Apple Podcasts, a comment, review, or share this episode with a friend.

[1173] Thanks for tuning in and talk to you next week.

[1174] 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.

[1175] 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, jordan b peterson .com.

[1176] 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.

[1177] That's self -authoring .com.

[1178] From the Westwood One podcast network.