Toxic Masculinity - A 12 Rules for Life Lecture

[0] Welcome to episode 52 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] I'm Michaela Peterson, Jordan's daughter.

[2] I hope you enjoy this episode.

[3] It's called Toxic Masculinity, recorded on February 21st, 2019 from Wellington, New Zealand.

[4] We're not splitting the podcast into two anymore, by the way.

[5] So I don't forget to mention, Dad's personality course is on sale right now at 50 % off, indefinitely until this coronavirus crisis is over to give people.

[6] people things to do at home that don't involve scrolling aimlessly through Instagram or, God forbid, TikTok.

[7] I'm actually guilty of being on TikTok.

[8] I may get Dad into it too when he's better.

[9] He'll never do it, but maybe.

[10] But yes, the personality course at Jordanb peterson .com slash personality is on sale now at 50 % off.

[11] If you complete it, tag Jordan or I on Instagram to let us know.

[12] As for the updates, not a lot.

[13] Dad is busy writing his book and is feeling well enough to accomplish that.

[14] We're just taking it easy in the sun and we're lucky enough to be Florida.

[15] I'm particularly lucky to be here instead of being stuck in a one -bedroom condo with no balcony in Toronto.

[16] Hope you out there listening are doing okay.

[17] Try not to worry too much.

[18] I have faith in the world.

[19] Talk to you next week.

[20] Season 2, episode 52, toxic masculinity, a Jordan B. Peterson 12 Rules for Life lecture.

[21] Thank you.

[22] It's nice to see you on your feet getting some exercise.

[23] so I think what I'm going to talk about tonight I always have a problem that I'm trying to address when I come on stage you know and I have to sit backstage and then I have to think about what the problem is it has to be something focused you know that I can kind of get my grip on something useful to know if you ever want to do a presentation or if you want to write something you know your teacher's always told you well you have to have a topic, this is kind of a bland way of putting it.

[24] What you need to have is a problem, and it has to be a problem that, well, that bothers you, because otherwise it's actually not a problem, right?

[25] Sort of the definition of a problem is something that bothers you, and then when you have a problem, which is not that much different than having a life, by the way, then you want to state the problem as clearly as you can, and then you want to move towards solving it.

[26] And one of the things that's really always struck me about the way that we teach people to write in universities is that that's never, it's amazing how often that's not explained to students, you know, like I spent, I have this writing rubric online on my website at Jordan B. Peterson .com.

[27] You can go and download it if you want.

[28] It's only a few pages long, but it tells you how to write.

[29] Not everything about how to write, you know, but more like how to have the right attitude about how to write an essay, let's say.

[30] And if you are going to write anything, but if you're going to write an essay, for example, well, first of all, you need to have a problem, and it needs to be one that bothers you because otherwise, what the hell are you doing?

[31] Like, you haven't picked something that's worthy of your time and attention.

[32] There's no association between your intellectual effort and the conditions of your life.

[33] And so, like, if you've picked a topic, some random topic, students often ask me, well, can you pick a topic?

[34] It's like, well, no, actually, because that's the hard part of doing the whole exercise, is picking the topic.

[35] Why?

[36] Well, because it has to be something that bothers you and that's relevant to you, and that you care.

[37] about because otherwise why in the world would you write the essay?

[38] Well, and maybe it's because you need to write the essay for the class and for the grade and, you know, and that's all expediency as far as I'm concerned.

[39] That's rule seven is do what is meaningful, not what is expedient.

[40] You don't write the essay for the class.

[41] You write the essay because you have a problem.

[42] And then you want to formulate the problem, so you know what the problem is, and what it isn't.

[43] because if you have a problem and it's not precisely formulated, then it sort of bleeds out beyond its boundaries, and then you end up being upset about far more things than you should be upset about instead of being precisely upset about the precise thing that you should be upset about.

[44] And then if you don't specify, you know how that is, if you're in a bad mood and your partner's sort of needling you because of it, and you deserve it roundly, you know, the first thing you'll do is deny that you're in a bad mood at all, usually in a way that indicates clearly that you're in a bad mood.

[45] And then you'll also indicate that you really don't want to talk about it, you know, in another way that indicates that you're in a bad mood.

[46] And then maybe if you get prodded enough by someone who's persistent, then you'll start talking about what maybe your problem is and you'll cover a bunch of territory and guess at some things that might be bothering you.

[47] And as you do that, you kind of zero in on, And you don't really want to, but you zero in on what the problem actually is.

[48] And then it's kind of sharp and painful, but at least it's well formulated and precise, right?

[49] And so now you've got it in your hand.

[50] And that's something, right?

[51] That's a precursor to a solution.

[52] Because, well, if you don't know what the damn problem is, how in the world can you possibly work on a solution?

[53] And then if you're writing an essay, then that's what you're doing.

[54] is you're writing a solution.

[55] Now, you might not come to the solution because sometimes the problem is very complicated, but at least you can survey the territory that the solution might constitute and move your thinking forward, and that's something, assuming that you think thinking is worthwhile.

[56] And another thing that's, I try to lay out in this writing document is, well, you know, first of all, pick a problem that has some heart, because otherwise it's a lie because you're devoting your intellectual energy to something that doesn't matter to you and then if it doesn't matter to you well why do it and if it doesn't matter to you well then what makes you think it'll matter to anyone else you can be certain and it's something I let my students know look man if your essay bores you you just bloody well imagine what it's doing to me you know so it should grip you it should grip you you know and then and then you can start working through it and maybe if you're lucky you can think through it a little bit and then think through something is kind of an interesting phrase you know because it it implies that there's some impediment in front of you that you can move through right so it's not impenetrable it might be difficult but you can think through it and then if you think through it well maybe you can come to a solution and Solution is interesting too because solution implies that there was something there to begin with that was solid that had to dissolve before a solution could be reached and that's an extremely interesting idea and and reflecting on that actually tells you why people don't like to think and apart from the fact that it's difficult but it's almost always the case that if you have a problem and then you have to think through it to come up with a solution what it means is that you had a bunch of old ideas about what the problem was or what the solutions were and they're wrong.

[57] But you're clinging to them because, well, they orient you and maybe you put a lot of work into them and your ego invested in them and who knows, maybe people you admired thought them or they're part of your ideology or God only knows why you're in love with them but you are, but they're not working because that's why you have the problem.

[58] And so then in order to solve the problem, that has to dissolve.

[59] And so, you know, part of solving a problem, there's always a dissolution.

[60] And it's not pleasant to let what you already have go, even if it's in the service of a higher ideal.

[61] It puts you into the realm of chaos, essentially.

[62] Well, when you admit that you have a problem, you enter the realm of chaos to begin with, especially if it's a serious problem, because the realm of chaos is the realm of problems.

[63] And so, like I always have a moment of distress that lasts a few minutes before coming out to do these talks because I have to think about what the problem is and then I have to let things that I've put together in my mind fall apart.

[64] And then it feels like, God, now this has fallen apart and I don't have a story and it isn't necessarily clear that I'm going to come up with one.

[65] And that's an unpleasant precursor to generating the new order.

[66] And that's a standard pattern, you know.

[67] You have an old order.

[68] It doesn't work.

[69] And then in order to fix that, you don't just go from the new old order to a new and better order.

[70] Because that would be lovely, man. That'd be easy.

[71] It's just like, oh, it's just from better to better.

[72] That's life.

[73] It's like that's not life at all.

[74] It's, you have your current mode of being, and there's something wrong with it.

[75] And then it has to fall apart, decompose.

[76] fall into solution and then that's very uncomfortable because it makes you anxious and frustrated and disappointed and and concerned that perhaps you'll end up staying there permanently and sometimes people do they get depressed and suicidal and nihilistic because things fall apart and they never get out of that and sometimes that kills them you know it's no joke to to let things go but if you go into that place where everything has fallen apart it's a watery chaotic place That's one way of thinking about it poetically, then sometimes you can gather together things that haven't been gathered together before, and then you can reconstitute a new order.

[77] And with any luck, the new order accounts for everything the old order did, plus some additional things, which constitutes progress.

[78] And that's, well, that's the purpose.

[79] That's the purpose of thinking, right?

[80] And the reason that you would think is because, well, if you have a problem and you think it through and you lay out a solution and then you act out a solution, then you don't have to have the problem.

[81] And so that's why you think.

[82] And so that's why you write.

[83] And so when you go to university and you write essays and you learn to write, the reason that you learn to write is so that you can learn to think.

[84] And the reason that you can learn to think is so that your life isn't as wretched and horrible as it might have.

[85] otherwise be and it's really very very useful to know that and so i tell my students it's a very important thing to know and all of you should know this when you're writing or when you're thinking it's like well first of all don't waste time thinking about things that aren't problems because how much time do you have you know and if you're if it's just absolutely what would you call soul deadening dull to do whatever it is that you're doing, then you might notice that you're deadening your soul while you're doing it, and that could be like a clue that you shouldn't be doing it unless you want to have a dead soul.

[86] And so, well, it's worth thinking about, right?

[87] If what you're doing lacks meaning and it's painful, and I'm assuming that you have a bit of discipline, right?

[88] Because, you know, there can be all sorts of excuses for not wanting to do things that are just laziness and lack of discipline.

[89] That isn't what I mean.

[90] It's just that you just have to drag yourself through the exercise and every bit of you is rebelling against having to do it Think, well, maybe there's a reason for that.

[91] Maybe you're not pursuing something that's actually worth pursuing You're not tackling the real problems of your life and like huge parts of you are signaling to that by distracting you and boring you and making you angry and resentful and bitter and and Unable to concentrate and very like to do a poor job and, you know, unable to remember what you read when you're reading about the topic that we're studying in any way about the topic that you're supposed to be studying about all of you's rebelling.

[92] Well, some of that might be because you're undisciplined, and that's really worth thinking out, thinking through, but it also might be that, man, you're just not on the right track.

[93] You're just not solving the right problem because, well, my experience has been that if I'm writing about what I should be writing about or talking about what I should be talking about, then it's unbearably interesting.

[94] And like maybe that's too interesting, you know, unbearably interesting, but it beats the hell out of soul -deaddeningly dull.

[95] That's for sure.

[96] So anyways, I sitting in the back before these talks all the time thinking, okay, and I don't like doing this.

[97] It's always the part I'm resistant to.

[98] It's like, okay, what's the problem?

[99] I think, well, I could just go through the rules and I could just talk about some things I've already talked about.

[100] And I can do that.

[101] Like, I can lay out a talk that way because I've done enough talks, but I know that it's not going to have the centrality of soul that it should have if I've formulated a problem that I don't know the answer to and then try to address that.

[102] And that's the risk, too, right?

[103] Like I could come out here and tell you something that I think I know and I might be wrong because maybe I don't know it but at least I think I know it and there's some comfort in that and that's a lot different than coming out here and telling you something that I don't think I know and that I have to figure out but then you know there's something compelling about sharing the experience of thinking through something with people and I think part of the reason that this lecture series such as it is, and maybe my YouTube videos as well, have been successful insofar as they have been, is because, well, people like to see problems being addressed sort of in real time, because, hey, man, you've got problems, you know?

[104] And so maybe it wouldn't be so bad to see how they might be addressed in real time, to see that that can happen.

[105] And maybe even if it's not a complete success, it's at least a noble attempt.

[106] and so, and it's definitely, it's definitely interesting, partly because it might succeed, that makes it interesting, and then partly because it might fail, which also makes it interesting, and so there's a kind of high wire act about it always in a good lecture as far as I'm concerned, because it isn't obvious that you're going to get to where you want to go.

[107] It's one of the dangers of technologies like PowerPoint, you know, because the thing is, If you use PowerPoint, it's not like I have anything against PowerPoint.

[108] But you cannot fail with PowerPoint because you can just lay out your talk and then you can read it and point to it.

[109] And then people could point to it themselves and also read it themselves.

[110] But you can stand there and you can point to it and read it.

[111] And well, which makes you wonder why you're there.

[112] And also, by the way, makes your audience wonder why you're there.

[113] they think why didn't you just give us the PowerPoint and we could have gone to work but you won't fail because you'll be able to read what's there and you'll get through it and it'll be okay but you know okay I don't know if okay is good enough to get you out of bed and it's probably not good enough to make you excited about your let's call it your presentation you know it's better to have a problem.

[114] And so what's the problem?

[115] Well tonight I thought I'd talk about toxic masculinity, since everyone seems to be talking about toxic masculinity.

[116] And so, you know, I want to give the devil as due, because they always want to do that, you know, if there's something up in the air, let's say, you've got to assume there's a reason for it, and it's not like there's any shortage of Well, it's the kind of phrase that really annoys me that toxic masculinity.

[117] There's some self -righteousness to it.

[118] And I think the essential self -righteousness isn't the toxic part or that it's the masculinity part.

[119] It's that it's toxic masculinity in combination without any indication that it's toxic humanity.

[120] That's really the problem.

[121] And so there's this one -sided element is toxic masculinity.

[122] It's like, well, that's the whole story, really, is it?

[123] It's half of the human race is the problem.

[124] And they're just toxic, that's all.

[125] And, well, what about what they do that isn't toxic?

[126] Well, there's damn little of that, I can tell you.

[127] And then, well, what about femininity?

[128] It's like, well, that's not, if that's toxic, well, why don't we talk about that?

[129] Is there toxic femininity?

[130] I don't know.

[131] We don't seem to talk about it.

[132] There is, by the way.

[133] There's, let's say, just as good gender, let's call ourselves, good gender egalitarians.

[134] How about we do that?

[135] Then there's just as much toxic femininity.

[136] Now maybe that's the part of the toxic, maybe that's the fault of the toxic males, you know, females being intrinsically perfect and only corrupted by masculine society.

[137] Well, there are theories of that sort, right, Rousseau's theory, that's not precisely of that sort, is that human beings are basically good, and that we're corrupted by society, and then if society is fundamentally a patriarchy and an oppressive one at that, then it's easy to derive the conclusion that the reason that we're corrupt, men and women is because of the corruption of male -dominated society, and that theory, there's a technical word for a theory like that.

[138] I think it's stupid, I think, is the technical word.

[139] for that.

[140] It's either that or just wrong.

[141] But I mean, you have to be naive and frightened in a particular way, naive, willfully blind and frightened in a particular way to actually believe that the problems that human beings have are a consequence of society.

[142] Now, you can be convinced that some of the problems that human beings have are a consequence of society.

[143] That's a perfectly reasonable thing to believe.

[144] But like there are other problems that people have, like, well, we have problems with nature, for example, which doesn't seem to be associated with society, it's just nature, and it's trying to kill us all the time.

[145] It's trying to make us sick, it's mentally and physically, and it does, and it's trying to make us old, which it manages, and then it's trying to put us in our grave, which it does with 100 % certainty.

[146] always has to everyone.

[147] Well, at least that's the theory.

[148] And so that's a problem, which seems to be somewhat independent of society.

[149] Now, you might say, well, if we got ourselves together and society was everything it could be, then nature wouldn't be quite as terrible as it is.

[150] But I would say we've actually not done too bad a job of that now compared to say 100 years ago or 500 years ago or 2 ,000 years ago or virtually everywhere else in the world, we've done a pretty good job of that, and it's not as good as it could be, but, you know, I'm not all that thrilled with the idea of going back 150 years when there was raw sewage running in the streets, and, you know, the probability that your children were going to die before they were one years old was extraordinarily high, and that, you know, you were pretty damn old and blind by the time you were 40, et cetera, et cetera.

[151] It's like, if you want to go live like that, well, you can.

[152] You can just go back in the bush and live like that.

[153] But people don't.

[154] They flock to the terrible cities where the terrible patriarchy rules because it's actually a lot better there than most other places.

[155] And so, well, back to toxic masculinity, I thought I would tell you this story about a friend of mine.

[156] And I haven't told this story.

[157] it in my book a little bit.

[158] In Maps of Meaning, I told a little bit about his story and then in 12 rules, but I've never discussed it in one of these lectures, and I've never really figured out how.

[159] And I'm going to call my friend Chris, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about him, because he was possessed by the idea of toxic masculinity.

[160] You might say, taking a page from the feminists, that, you know how you can internalize your misogyny?

[161] You've heard that, that term.

[162] So then you're a self -hating woman.

[163] Well, he was someone who had internalized his misandry or maybe misanthropy even in that he hated human beings, not only men.

[164] And it didn't do him a lot of good.

[165] And it doesn't do people in general a lot of good.

[166] And I'll tell you a little bit about that.

[167] And I want to explain why those ideas come up in the deepest way I can.

[168] I can get to that, but so I met this gentleman that I'll call Chris when I was in grade eight and I wasn't very happy in grade eight, not that that's like particularly unique.

[169] You know, older people remember back when they were young, 13, 14, and they think those were the best days of our life and I remember hearing adults say that when I was that old and then I remember looking at my friends and I was thinking...

[170] Two things.

[171] God, if this is as good as it gets, man, this is not good.

[172] And second, I am never going to forget what my friends are actually feeling like right now.

[173] So that when I'm 56, which is how old I am now, I'm not going to say, oh, it was so wonderful back when we were 13 and 14.

[174] It's like, no. 11's pretty good age, you know?

[175] 11, 7, that's a nice age if you have good parents.

[176] like that whole time from about 4 till about 11, that can be really nice.

[177] 12 even's not so bad.

[178] 13, hmm, not so good.

[179] And 14, it's definitely a low point.

[180] And so I met Chris when he was 14.

[181] And I lived in this small town, and I was a rather intellectually interested kid, which made me somewhat unique.

[182] It made me unique in a couple of ways because I was an intellectually interested kid but I wasn't particularly obedient and so the teachers didn't know what the hell to do with me because most of the kids who were intellectually interested were obedient and they were really easy to deal with because while they were intellectually interested they would do their homework and so forth and they were obedient.

[183] Maybe they weren't even intellectually interested maybe they were just obedient but at least they did their damn homework you know but I was mouthy and and I kind of hung around with the delinquent kids and there was quite a lot of them in this little town and but I was definitely intellectually interested and there weren't that many other people around in my little town like that you know there was like 30 people in my grade eight class and I think we had two classes like that so maybe there was 50 in total and you know there's a wide range of kids but there weren't that many that were interested in well you know interested in reading for that matter.

[184] And his kid walked in one day.

[185] I was about 4 '9, I think, when I was 14, which, and I was one year behind my classmates because I had skipped a grade.

[186] And that wasn't that helpful being 4 '9 when you're 14, you know.

[187] And there were a lot of big farm kids in my town, and they used to like play catch with me on the stairs and things.

[188] And so, especially because I was also mouthy and probably deserved it.

[189] And this kid wandered in one day, and he was like six foot seven, and really thin.

[190] And he's dressed in this kind of ratty jean jacket, and he sat down, and he looked, you know, like out of place, like you would look out of place if you were 14 and coming into a new class, of course.

[191] And he'd moved a lot, and he sat down in front of me. And I thought he was kind of an interesting -looking character.

[192] And you know how in junior high everybody sizes up the new kid and you decide pretty quickly whether he's an acceptable person or going to be shunned along with the other people that are shunned.

[193] He's going to fit somewhere in the hierarchy of shunned to popular and it doesn't take very, he usually starts out shunned and then sort of moves up the popularity hierarchy until he hits his pinnacle and then that's it.

[194] And so I know that's kind of brutal, but bloody well, that's what happens.

[195] junior high, so brutal or not, that's how it works.

[196] And I started to get to know him, and it turned out that he's actually kind of a bright guy, which was nice.

[197] He's interested in engineering.

[198] He had some engineering kits of old kind that used to be able to buy where you could make radios and that sort of thing by wiring different things together.

[199] And I got to know him a little bit, and I went out to his place to stay at one point, which was really the first time I got to know him.

[200] Um, we, we got along pretty good.

[201] We were, we had a 22 rifle and we were out shooting the 22 rifle and, um, doing the sorts of things you do out on a farm on the prairie.

[202] And, uh, then we had to scrap about something.

[203] I don't remember what the hell it was about, but he really turned dark, you know, and I ended up sitting on top of this greenery.

[204] Um, well, he was wandering around being dark and, um, wondering what the hell I was doing there, because I was, you know, several miles from my home, and I didn't really know what to do about that.

[205] And anyways, he climbed up on the greenery and apologized.

[206] And, you know, the way we went, and we were friends for a very long time, years and years, as it turned out.

[207] And so I kind of saw both of him.

[208] I saw this smart kid, really liked him.

[209] Charming, could be a real charming kid.

[210] You know, a little awkward because he was so tall.

[211] Six foot seven at 14, you know, that's kind of awkward.

[212] But it wasn't much worse than 4 '4 .9.

[213] I can tell you that.

[214] He hit his head more often on things that I did, but that was about the only positive advantage that I could see to being small.

[215] And, you know, we spend a fair bit of time talking about the books we were reading, mostly science fiction books and that sort of thing.

[216] But there was that darkness that was sort of about him.

[217] And well, he goes to the darkness.

[218] a truck when he was...

[219] Okay, so now let's see if I can get this part of the story, right?

[220] There was something wrong with his relationship with his father.

[221] And this was actually something that characterized a lot of my friends.

[222] I lived in a working class community, hey?

[223] And my father was, especially when I was in junior high, he was kind of a rough guy.

[224] He had a bit of a proclivity towards depression, and I wouldn't call him the sort of person that would easily forgive you.

[225] You know, if you made a mistake, then he let you know that you'd made a mistake for perhaps somewhat longer than it was actually necessary to let you know that you'd made a mistake.

[226] But you definitely knew that you made one, and you definitely remembered.

[227] And he had high standards, and I often thought the standards were unfair.

[228] You know, I'd come home from school with some grade, 85%, or something, which I was reasonably happy about, thinking at that point that 85 % was a good grade, which really isn't.

[229] he would say, well, what about the other 15 %?

[230] And I'd think, God, you know, like, yeah, yeah, but the 85 % is not bad.

[231] And in comparison to what the other boys my age are doing, I was doing just fine.

[232] So that used to annoy me, you know, to some degree.

[233] But my father, you see, this is something that made him different, is that first of all he was a good guy fundamentally you know like he's a respectable person and by that I meant he was competent in many things he was a gunsmith so he could make guns from nothing which was quite a well not nothing he needed metal you know couldn't just conjure them out of air but and he carved canoe paddles and he was pretty good at painting and he was a good carpenter's, his place where he did carpentry was an absolute bloody mess, and it was always hell to go down there when he asked me to find a tool, because it was like there was 3 ,000 tools spread on this table, and he knew where they were, they were, but I had no idea where they were, so I never liked to do that.

[234] But in any case, he was a competent guy, and he did a lot of things with me, He taught me a fair bit about carpentry, and we used to build birdhouses together and that sort of thing, and work in the yard.

[235] And like, he cared about me. And that was really evident when I was a little kid, because one of the things that he did was, and I can remember this very fondly, and I think it's, of course, crucial, a couple of things of crucial importance.

[236] I've been reading about the effects of fatherlessness.

[237] You know, we have this idea in our culture, because we're really not very bright, that all families are the same.

[238] And that's complete, bloody, blind nonsense.

[239] And all the psychological evidence suggests that, that fatherlessness, for example, is a complete bloody catastrophe.

[240] And if you want to doom children to a bad outcome, That's a really effective way of doing it.

[241] But we like to smooth that over.

[242] You know, we like to smooth that over because we don't want to make judgments.

[243] And, you know, it's not like there aren't single mothers, for example, desperately striving in every possible way with their ridiculous 40 -hour work weeks at work, often underpaid, and then another 30 hours at home trying to take care of their kids, doing everything they can to provide properly for their children.

[244] I'm certainly not saying that, but, you know, like, it's a two -person job to have kids, and that's that.

[245] And it's definitely the case that fatherless children do far worse.

[246] And so I've thought a lot about why that might be, you know, apart from the fact that it's difficult to raise children.

[247] And it might be particularly that it's bad for boys, but it's also bad for girls.

[248] You know that girls that don't have fathers hit puberty earlier.

[249] So isn't that something, eh?

[250] I mean, the effect of fatherlessness is so profound that it has a neurohormonal effect.

[251] And, you know, maybe that's because evolutionarily we've decided as a species that if there isn't a father around, there probably aren't enough people, because otherwise, why wouldn't there be a man there?

[252] And maybe we could use some more people, and so the girls get hit puberty earlier so that we can have some more people.

[253] Maybe it's an adaptation to wartime.

[254] I don't know what the hell it is.

[255] It's not a bad theory, but it's definitely the case that young women without fathers hit puberty earlier and the experiment with sexuality earlier.

[256] And it's also the case, by the way, that early experimentation with sexuality turns out to be a bad thing.

[257] It's associated with childhood conduct disorder, antisocial personality, and criminal conduct.

[258] And I'm not saying that it's because early sexual experimentation is criminal conduct.

[259] That's not my point.

[260] My point is that in that mix of things that perhaps you shouldn't be up to when you're 12, early sexual experimentation is one of them.

[261] And perhaps it indicates lack of, well, maybe it indicates desperation for attention.

[262] How would that be?

[263] I think you could certainly make that the case for very young women who are experimenting sexually, who are 12 and 13, is desperate for attention.

[264] and maybe it indicates insufficient supervision.

[265] That might be another, or confusion about sexual morality.

[266] I don't know, but those are all possibilities, but still, that's how the literature lays itself out.

[267] So anyways, when I was a kid, my father and I got along extremely well when I was a kid, even though he was rather harsh taskmaster at that point too.

[268] And I'm not complaining about that, you know, because it isn't obvious exactly how harsh, so to speak, someone should be.

[269] Because, you know, if someone sets standards for you, then they're kind of harsh.

[270] You know, there's this old idea that God rules the world with two hands, mercy and justice.

[271] And he couldn't just use mercy, because if it was mercy, it's like, hey, man, whatever you do is fine.

[272] You know, and it's like, well, that's kind of easy.

[273] It's like, whatever you do is fine.

[274] But it's not that great because, really?

[275] Whatever you do is fine?

[276] I mean, first of all, you know it isn't.

[277] And second of all, if whatever you do is fine, then why do anything?

[278] Because whatever you do is fine.

[279] So you might as well just sit there and do nothing because that's fine.

[280] And to be let off the hook that easily so that that's that all -encompassing mercy isn't an indication of care.

[281] Like if you care for someone, you think, get the hell up and get at it.

[282] straighten up for Christ's sake.

[283] You've got some discipline to develop.

[284] You've got some responsibilities to undertake.

[285] You've got an important place to take in the world.

[286] It's like straighten the hell up.

[287] And how about no excuses or the minimal necessary?

[288] And maybe, you know, if you don't manage it, you deserve a bit of a tap.

[289] It says, clue the hell in.

[290] And it's a lighter tap than the world will give you.

[291] And so the fact that someone sets high standards is not.

[292] necessarily an indication that they're cruel it's an indication that maybe they actually care for who you could be and that's another thing if someone loves you you got to ask yourself like do they care for who you are or do they care for who you could be and I would say and maybe this is a sexist thing to say but I think it's true that women tend to tilt towards caring for you for who you are and now that's lovely especially when you're a young child and that men tilt to caring for you for who you could be.

[293] And that's actually not a bad division of labor.

[294] And you might disagree with that, and I'm sure there are situations where that's reversed, you know.

[295] It's not like this is a universal truth, but I'm struggling with hypotheses and general tendencies, and I'm going to lay out what I think to be the case.

[296] Anyways, when I was about three or four, my father used to come home from work, and he'd lay with me and read.

[297] and he was a teacher and he had made this little book of phonics which is by the way how you teach children to read you don't use whole word learning unless you're absolutely bloody clueless and you think that like the invention of the alphabet was just irrelevant in some sense which it wasn't it was as big an invention as the wheel let's say anyways you can teach children to read very effectively with phonics and he sat down with me for half an hour an hour every night reading and and taught me to read when I was very young.

[298] And I remember I had a subscription to Dr. Seuss books, and one would arrive every two weeks or so.

[299] And I was pretty damn thrilled about that.

[300] First of all, that got some mail coming to me, and that it was this book, and Dr. Seuss books were fun, and we'd spend this time together reading.

[301] And that was a big deal to me. more as I thought about a lot in recent years the memories have become more clear of that time for probably because I've been thinking about the things that I'm talking to you about but I was always very excited for him to come home so that we could spend this time together and see the reason this is making me emotional is because of the friends I had who didn't have this and what the consequence was for them.

[302] So it's really something for you to, when you're a child, to have time marked out by a parent, particularly one that you respect for you, right?

[303] Because it indicates that either who you are or who you might become is of sufficient value so that someone who has things to do, you know, like adult things to do, people to take care of, who would take time out of that schedule and devote it to you.

[304] So, well, that happened a lot, and I learned to read when I was very young, and I got very good at it, and, you know, that's made a huge difference to me. And so, and then my father, too, he was always doing things with me. We would go canoeing and hunting.

[305] I wasn't much into hunting because I'm too tender -hearted, really to be a good hunter.

[306] I don't have that kind of, I don't have that hunting spirit, I suppose, because I'm fairly high in compassion, which, by the way, is a feminine trait.

[307] I'm fairly high in compassion.

[308] And hunting was hard on me, although I did go with him.

[309] I enjoyed being out in the woods, and he liked.

[310] that a lot and fishing was fine and canoeing was good and we went camping a lot and you know we did things together and trapping we also did that together and and cross -country skiing a lot of individual things together and so that also indicated that he presumed that I was worth spending time with now my friend most of them were very angry with their fathers they almost all had fathers though at this time because the divorce rate was still fairly low they almost all had fathers but and this was more in junior high but they weren't very happy with their fathers most of the time they were fighting with them I had one friend who had a terrible fight with his father when he was about 14 I remember seeing him it was at noon was walking home from high school and they were having a fist fight and they were yelling and like mad and and he my friend basically got kicked out of the house permanently and he was a pretty good guy actually I liked him he was a fundamentally okay kid you know fairly mature pretty solid didn't deserve what was coming to him he ended up living with another friend of mind their family took him in and my friend across the street had a father and he was all right guy when he was sober but he wasn't sober that much he was a bad alcoholic and when he was was an alcoholic.

[311] When he was drinking, it was good to avoid him.

[312] And that's not surprising, because generally if someone drinks too much, especially if they've been doing it for a long time, it's best to avoid them.

[313] And so that was sort of my friend's experience.

[314] And he actually started to drink very early, as we all did, and became an alcoholic at a very young age, which was a trap that many, many people around me fell into, small, isolated northern community, you know, not a lot to do.

[315] Very, very, very, very, very long winters, you know, six months, eight months, cold like you can hardly bloody about.

[316] How cold does it get here?

[317] What's the coldest it ever gets?

[318] Oh, God.

[319] See, cold.

[320] Cold is when you go outside and then ten minutes later you die.

[321] That's cold.

[322] I'm not kidding.

[323] Like, we didn't have town drunks.

[324] And the reason for that was that we'd have them for a while, but then they'd drink until two in the morning, and then they'd walk home, and then they'd, you know, pass out, and then that was that, because two hours later they were frozen solid, and then someone else would be next year's down drunk.

[325] And so, anyways, it was very cold there, and the winters were long and dark, and so there was a lot of drinking to be done.

[326] and many of my friends were well on the road to alcoholism by the time they were 16 or 17.

[327] Anyways, my, and you know, this gave, this dis -equilibration with their fathers gave my friends a kind of cynicism, I would say, about masculinity.

[328] Like, I can remember it manifesting itself in a lot of ways, and I think this was, I don't know if this was particularly characteristic, the 1970s because what the hell do I know I was a teenager in the 1970s and I don't know what it was like in other decades but I know this is what it was like in the 70s you know we had Cub scouts and scouts and cadets air cadets and you know there were things that the community had tried to arrange for young people to do but we were really cynical about those sorts of things especially if we were cool and we were trying to be cool and so by the time you were 11 12 being a scout that wasn't cool anymore.

[329] So you pretty much stopped doing that.

[330] And a couple of us tried air cadets for a while, and there was a lot of shoe polishing and a lot of marching around.

[331] And, you know, it was early 70s then, and the anti -war movement was still fairly popular, and the whole thing, the whole cadet idea seemed to be somehow too much associated with the man. And so we didn't really stick to that very well either.

[332] and some of us played sports in school and that was good for a set number of us but most of the time we didn't do much of anything and part of the organized and part of the reason for that was that doing anything that was organized wasn't cool and I think that was part of that 60s you know ethos tune in turn on drop out and what I saw was a hell of a lot of dropping out and not a lot of tuning in And so, because the tuning -in part turned out to be difficult, whereas the dropping -out part turned out to be very easy.

[333] And so that was kind of the problem with Timothy Leary's idea.

[334] Enlightenment in a pill.

[335] It's like, I'm afraid, it's somewhat more complicated than that.

[336] But so my friends had problems with their fathers for variety of reasons, generally because they weren't attended to enough by them, or because their fathers had problems.

[337] one sort or another.

[338] But then there was a more generic problem, sort of with a cynicism about society at large, and it made it very difficult for us to participate avidly in the sorts of social endeavors that might have provided a certain amount of, well, activity and also a certain amount of community.

[339] And like, I don't know, maybe in the 1950s people were just as bloody cynical about Boy Scouts as they were in the 1970s, although I doubt it.

[340] But, But it's possible.

[341] It's possible because what do I know?

[342] But they certainly were that cynical by the time I was that age.

[343] And so a lot of the time we spent wandering around stealing cigarettes from the local convenience stores and finding alcohol if we could find it and sitting behind the fences of our neighbors drinking it and driving out on dark country roads at night trying to escape from the police, which was fairly straightforward because where I lived was laid out and it was a huge prairie, you know, it just went for literally like 3 ,000 miles, you know, and it was all laid out in a grid, a road every mile, and a road every two miles, everywhere, that whole area.

[344] And so you could just go out in the country and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and drink and drive, and that's basically what we did.

[345] And some of us died, but not as many.

[346] as you'd think, although we definitely had our fair share of car accidents, and near -deaths, and the near -deaths would usually occur when you would drive off the road into a ditch because it was icy, and you were drunk, and then you were in the ditch, and it was full of snow, and you couldn't get your car out, and it was like 40 below, and so that's not good, because things freeze when they're 40 below, and so you don't want to be there for too long, But fewer of my friends died than deserved to, I would say, given what they were up to.

[347] My friend Chris had this truck that his father bought for him, and he didn't get along with his father either.

[348] And I thought his father was all right.

[349] He was a bit passive, but he had a good job.

[350] He was a manager in the school system, and he was a good job.

[351] And he seemed like a kind man. There wasn't a lot of spirit to him, and he was older, and it turned out that he had a vitamin B -12 deficiency, quite a chronic one, and that wasn't so good for him, and so he was kind of unwell, and that can complicate things, but whatever, it didn't matter.

[352] There was something had gone wrong between my friend Rob and his father, and also, or my friend Chris, and, and, and, it's Chris, and his father, and he was very resentful about his father, and very angry, angry about him.

[353] And I think it was because his father was too merciful, as far as I could tell, that that, and that that destroyed my friend Chris's respect for him.

[354] And the reason I kind of figured this out was because Chris got a lot of things purchased for him, like he had a dirt bike, which is a cool thing to have when you're 14.

[355] And he had this, his father bought him this van one year to go around to different fairgrounds and so forth.

[356] forth and sell ice cream, you know, to make some money.

[357] It had a freezer in it.

[358] And of course, that wasn't cool either.

[359] Well, it was because it was a freezer, but it wasn't cool, you know, in the social sort of sense.

[360] And so we used to drive around in that van, but we never turned the freezer on it.

[361] We never stalked it with any, you know, things that people might buy because, well, then we would have had to, like, go earn some money or do something like that.

[362] And I don't know, maybe that was part of toxic masculinity, right?

[363] Having a bit of financial ambition, that was, that was like playing into the system and no one cool would do that so we drove around with like two dollars worth of gas in the tank because that's all we could afford and never really clued into the fact that you know we were driving around in a machine that would actually make money if we had the wherewithal to manage it which we didn't but and then he he was also he oh i think he crashed that van because he crashed a lot of vehicles man like like i don't know how many accidents Chris had, but I would say probably a hundred, maybe not.

[364] It's okay, it wasn't a hundred, it wasn't two, I can tell you that, and it was certainly more than 50, so it was a lot.

[365] And so he had this truck, which we all laughed about, but drove around in all the time, listening to Led Zeppelin, and over and over.

[366] And it had dents everywhere, absolutely everywhere there could be a dent.

[367] In that truck, there was a dent.

[368] There were dents inside the truck.

[369] And the reason there were dents inside the truck because he'd hit the ditch or something else, and then the person inside the truck would make a dent in the truck.

[370] And so it was just every quarter panel had a dent.

[371] It was like having a contest to see if he could put a dent on every square inch of the truck.

[372] And he did.

[373] And he had this bumper sticker on his truck that said, be alert, which I just loved.

[374] The world needs more alerts.

[375] And it was, it was like, you just could not have possibly come up with a more surrealistically, um, inappropriate bumper sticker for that truck because it was just a mobile manifestation of someone who was not being alert, you know?

[376] And so, and he knew that.

[377] And that's part of the reason the bumper sticker was on there.

[378] And so there was this dark joke about it.

[379] It was really quite funny in a really not funny way.

[380] And about the same time that he had this truck, I started working as a kid, and I started working in restaurants, you know, when I was about 13 or 14, something like that, I started working as a dishwasher.

[381] And the first dishwashing job I had was with this old German chef, and he was a harsh guy too, man. It was like, well, he was used to tremendous turnover in restaurants, because there is tremendous turnover.

[382] So he didn't care much for you when you first came into work, because he thought, yeah, yeah, you'll be gone in a week, so I'm not going to spend any attention on you.

[383] Or maybe we'll put you through the gears a bit and see if there's anything to you, and if there is, well, then I'll spend a little bit of time paying attention to you.

[384] Which is something that men do to each other, which is not all bad by any stretch of the imagination.

[385] because maybe you should test someone a little bit before you put some time into them because, you know, how much time do you have?

[386] And anyways, I was trying to wash these damn dishes and there were a lot of them, big pots and, you know, plates.

[387] And you know what dishes are?

[388] You've seen them, most of you've seen them.

[389] Some of you've washed them.

[390] And Christ, I was working like I'd go to work after school, 5 o 'clock or whatever.

[391] And then I was there to like 3 in the morning trying to wash all these damn dishes.

[392] I thought, well, this is impossible.

[393] It was only supposed to be, I think, a five -hour shift or something like that.

[394] I was like in there, three in the morning scrubbing pots thinking there's a huge stack of dishes, thinking, well, this is impossible.

[395] How can anyone do this job?

[396] And that was rather disheartening because you'd think dishwashing is actually rather low on the job status hierarchy.

[397] And if you're not good at that, you kind of wonder about yourself.

[398] you know, a little bit.

[399] And so I remember coming home and talking to my dad and him saying, I said, Dad, I don't know if I can do this, man. I'm in there, like scrubbing stuff like mad, and I'm way behind.

[400] It's so, I don't know.

[401] But I stuck it out for like three weeks or so, torturing myself with these bloody dishes.

[402] I didn't even know how clean they should be, you know, because old pots in restaurants, they're all covered with kind of varnish, you know, because they've been used forever.

[403] And so I'd get this dirty pot, and I'd think, well, how clean should this be?

[404] Is it supposed to be like gleaming silver, or is it supposed to be somewhat hygienic?

[405] I had no idea what clean meant, and so I had to learn that.

[406] It was somewhat hygienic, by the way, was the rule.

[407] And that was good enough.

[408] And so, anyways, after about two and a half weeks or three weeks, this old German chef, who was probably like 20 years younger than I am now decided and his wife decided that I was probably going to stick around and then they showed me how to do the job and actually you actually had to think a bit to do the job so when all the plates came in you stacked up all the plates by size you know and you stacked up all the bowls by size and you put the pots aside and then you rinsed all the plates while they were standing there so most of the food came off and you did the same with the bowls and the smaller plates and then you had a tray and you filled that all with the same kind of plate then you ran it through the dishwasher and when you took it out you could stack them all up and put them where they belonged instead of having like one of every kind of dish on each tray and running around like a confused weasel in the kitchen consistently and so he showed me how to do that and he said you put the pots aside and then when you have a bit of time you just go and do them and i thought oh that's how you do it It's good, you know.

[409] So I had some guidance, right?

[410] And so that was good.

[411] And then all of a sudden, hey, it was, I wouldn't say it was an easy job because it was hot and wet and dirty.

[412] And kitchen is a fast place.

[413] And, but man, I could do it in half the time that I had to work, you know.

[414] And so the rest of the time I could go cause trouble with the chefs, which was quite fun because we had food fights and did all the sorts of things that you'd do in a kitchen when you have some extra time.

[415] And then they taught me how to cook.

[416] So I became a short, order cook.

[417] And so that was a good thing.

[418] It was a really good thing.

[419] And my friends, the same friends I'm telling you about ones that had various problems with their fathers, also generally came to work as dishwashers because there was a chronic shortage of them.

[420] And they all lasted like three days and then they'd leave.

[421] And so, you know, that was embarrassing for me and also not very good for them.

[422] But there was something different, and I don't know exactly what it was, but that I stuck it out and I worked in restaurants for like five years and had all sorts of jobs when I was a kid for lengthy periods of time and when I went to college and I always stuck with them.

[423] And that was partly because, you know, there was an ethos in my family that I would say came both from my mother and my father.

[424] Probably my father more harshly, but my mother could be a pretty vicious judge of useless foolishness as well.

[425] And so we weren't very much rewarded for giving up easily.

[426] And so, well, so then I was employed, and that was good.

[427] It kept me out of trouble, and I had some money, and I learned some useful things.

[428] And I got to be treated like an adult, which I really, really liked, because it wasn't the case at school, that's for sure, where you still had to put your hand up to go to the bathroom.

[429] But once I could work at these restaurants and was useful, because that's something else I learned, if you don't want to be fired, I learned that you had to be at least more useful than the next least useful person.

[430] You're always safe then, right?

[431] Because someone had to be cut.

[432] It wasn't going to be you.

[433] And that was a joke.

[434] But, you know, I did learn to be useful.

[435] And then I got treated like an adult, which I loved.

[436] I really, really, really loved that.

[437] That was a great thing.

[438] And so, anyways, one day I was off to my job as a short order cook.

[439] Six in the morning, winter, because it was always bloody winter there.

[440] And it was dark, if I remember, just starting to get light.

[441] I was off to downtown to this.

[442] hotel called the Grand, which is on the main street.

[443] And I was going to work my shift as a short order cook.

[444] And I looked up the street about four blocks, very wide streets in the town that I grew up.

[445] And it was a western town.

[446] And the streets were like, oh God, six lanes wide.

[447] God only knows why.

[448] There were like 2 ,000 people in our town.

[449] You could have put all the cars in the town on the street.

[450] But they were very wide.

[451] And now and then kids, including my friends, would go out on Main Street and whipped donuts in their trucks, which you could do when you had rear -wheel -drive vehicles because you could get the wheels spinning and then the truck would zip around like this, and that was really quite entertaining.

[452] It would make you a little dizzy, and so it was the possibility of running into something, but, you know, it was fun, but it also taught you how to control the damn vehicle if it ever went into a spin, and they often did on icy roads, and so learning how to handle your vehicle when it was spinning, was actually useful despite the fact that maybe practicing it on like Main Street wasn't the world's most intelligent strategy.

[453] Parking lots were a better idea.

[454] Or lakes.

[455] We used to do it on frozen lakes as well, which could be quite fun unless you fell through.

[456] Which you usually didn't because they were frozen like eight feet deep.

[457] So anyways, I looked up the street and there was a convenience store up the street.

[458] And there was a big tarp out in the front of the convenience store, and it was covering half a truck.

[459] And it was a white truck, and it had a lot of dents on it.

[460] And I thought, oh, Jesus, my friend, Chris, he was out last night, spinning donuts on Main Street, and he crashed into the convenience store.

[461] And I went to work, and then later that's what I found out, happened.

[462] He phoned the police from inside the convenience store, which was convenient, and said what had happened.

[463] And so, and I think that was pretty much the end of that truck, although I'm not absolutely certain.

[464] Because one of the problems was that whenever Rob crashed his truck, his dad was just fix it, and then he'd have the truck again.

[465] And, you know, it's kind of nice because, well, then your dad likes you enough to give you a truck.

[466] but then on the other hand if you've had 50 accidents with it your dad might be thinking Jesus you know maybe you're trying to kill yourself and buying you another truck or fixing it is possibly possibly not in your best interest and you know that's a good indication of Freudian dynamics in a household you know like modern people don't like Freud much they make fun of them in all sorts of ways, and that's because everything wise that Freud figured out we now take for granted, and all that's left is what he didn't get right, and so we blame him for that.

[467] We're not very, what would you call it, grateful.

[468] Everyone believes in the unconscious, you know, everybody believes in unconscious motivations.

[469] We all believe that we're ruled internally by forces that we can't completely understand or control.

[470] You know, that's all, not all of it, but a huge part of that's due to Freud.

[471] And you can see these very complex motivations, emerge in families, and so on the one hand, you have this merciful gesture, which is, whatever you want, son, it's yours.

[472] And on the other hand, you have, well, it doesn't matter how you treat it, I'm just going to replace it, even if what you do with it constantly is nearly fatal.

[473] And, you know, a lot of these accidents weren't, they weren't jokes, they were accidents, and it was amazing that people weren't killed, including, let's say, putting your car through a convenience store at 3 in the morning.

[474] And that probably doesn't really call for forgiveness.

[475] You know, like compassion, the virtue that seems to have overtaken everything.

[476] It's like, is that your response when your kid drives his 50 dent truck through a convenience store at 3 in the morning?

[477] It's like, oh, it's okay, kid.

[478] Like, no problem.

[479] You're good the way you are.

[480] It's like, how about no, you bloody idiot?

[481] You damn near killed yourself.

[482] It's like, what the hell's wrong with you, you know?

[483] Like, you might not care if you're alive, but we actually happen to.

[484] and you're only 16 and like how about you don't get a truck for like three months and and here's some other hard things to deal with because you need obviously you're not smart enough to bloody well take care of your own life you know and and to care for yourself properly you need a bit of scaffolding and that's when something that's that's a firm hand might be just what you're bloody well praying for you know deep inside you know and at the same time my friend had this dream and I was interesting in dreams at a very early age and had a pretty good knack for interpreting them this although this one wasn't particularly difficult to interpret it my friend chris was deteriorating i would say and it was really worrying me at about the same time he was starting to smoke pot and pot is okay for some people i had another friend who worked on the oil rigs he was a rough guy um physically rough guy and he had rough brothers and they kind of a poor family and i liked him he was smart and he was witty and but he was a tough kid and you didn't mess with him and he started smoking pot and he was way better everybody it was just way easier to get along with when he smoked pot he mellowed right out you know didn't seem to hurt him a bit but um there were other kids in town they started to smoke pot and for a lot of them it was a disaster they just there's a syndrome that goes along with marijuana smoking the name of which i don't remember but it it brings about a kind of uh passivity you know and a lot of the people I saw starting to smoke pot fell down that pathway.

[485] They just became sort of detached from reality and weren't engaged anymore.

[486] And it wasn't good for them.

[487] They dulled them.

[488] And I would say that was maybe true for about 10 % of the kids who smoked pot.

[489] And then there was another small percentage that it really wasn't good for.

[490] And there's evidence for that too.

[491] Maybe we have a bit of a tendency towards psychosis.

[492] marijuana might not be all that advisable.

[493] Now, the evidence isn't crystal clear, but it's suggestive.

[494] And so I think that was my friend, Chris, I think he had, if he was going to tilt towards some mental illness, that was going to be it.

[495] And so he started smoking pot, and that wasn't so good.

[496] And then he told me a dream that he had at one point, and he said that he was really upset about the dream.

[497] He was walking down the road.

[498] and as he was walking it it was crumbling underneath him and there was nothing below it just chaos and the void like he was a smart kid he'd read a bit he kind of knew what that meant you know in a sort of baby philosophical way he was very concerned about that and I could see him fragmenting in some sense and I wanted to go talk to his father but I didn't know what the hell was I going to say I was like 15 I didn't know what the hell to say to his father Sun's falling apart, you know, and here's the evidence, and doesn't seem like you're doing anything about it, and maybe you should.

[499] It's like I didn't know what to do, so I didn't do anything.

[500] And then we went on a trip after that, a bunch of friends of mine.

[501] I made some new friends, because most of mine dropped out of school, went to work on the oil rigs.

[502] They had a rather truncated sense of the future, which I also think had something to do with their dis -regulated relationships with their fathers like they didn't seem to have on there wasn't an ambition built into them for a long -term productive future you know and I don't know who provides that exactly in a family but I suspect that either parent can but that fathers often do and I again I think that's part and parcel of that harshness because you know to impose a long -term disciplinary structure on someone is no simple thing it's like you know maybe i want you to go to university i want you to have a decent life it means i'm not going to put up with a lot of crap in junior high and high school because you're going to do stupid things and then you're going to ruin your life and i'm not going to let you ruin your damn life because you know you've got your whole life and and and that's a battle it's not you can't just tell a kid that kids are stubborn and tough and they push back especially when they're adolescence, especially when they're surrounded by their stupid friends.

[503] And unless there's someone around to sort of put the hammer down a little bit and say, no, you don't get it.

[504] You're not getting away with this.

[505] Why should the kid even think it's important?

[506] Because like, how do you convince someone that something is important?

[507] You say, this is important?

[508] It's like, oh yeah, that really works.

[509] You want to change a habit you have.

[510] So you have, you sit down on the side of your bed and you say, hey, this is important.

[511] Change.

[512] Next day, man, you're a new man. It's like, no. No, that doesn't happen.

[513] If you're going to convince someone that something's important, you have to go to war with them.

[514] Like, it's a battle, including yourself, because there's all sorts of things that might be important.

[515] And to impose the idea that one thing is important rather than another, it's like it's a battle of wills, and it's the wills that make up destiny.

[516] And if you want your kid to have a vision for the long run, let's say, of who they might be across the entire adult spectrum, then there are impositions on their behavior that you have to impose when they're young, and they're not trivial, and they have to be enforced.

[517] It's not a game, because kids are really good at pushing boundaries and pushing thresholds, and they'll get away with whatever they can get away with, because they assume that if they can get away with it, then it doesn't matter.

[518] Because if it was important, then someone would stop them, and actually stop them, not just talk about how important it might be if they were stopped, which is not the same thing at all.

[519] It's not even in the same conceptual universe.

[520] So anyways, most of my friends dropped out by the time they were in grade 8 or 9.

[521] They went to work on the oil rigs, which wasn't a bad choice, except all they did was spend all their money on expensive vehicles and then get impaired driving tickets and lose their vehicles and crash them and spend all their money.

[522] and like it didn't work out well as a long -term strategy, even though they were making, like, ridiculous amounts of money.

[523] You know, certainly salary is equivalent to $150 ,000, $160 ,000 today when they were 16 years old.

[524] Now it was hard work.

[525] It's no joke being a roughneck out in the oil patch for two weeks at a time when it's 40 below.

[526] It's dangerous.

[527] You lose fingers.

[528] You lose toes.

[529] Like, you freeze your digits.

[530] It's dangerous work.

[531] But it was extraordinarily lucrative.

[532] And it was a hell of a lot better than doing nothing.

[533] So that was fine.

[534] And I met some new friends who came in from a town called Bear Canyon, which was even smaller than Fairview, which is hard to believe.

[535] We were way the hell out on the edge of the northern prairie.

[536] There was only one town north of us.

[537] And then it was like Siberia.

[538] It's like you could walk 3 ,000 miles north, and then you'd run into some Russian, you know, on the step.

[539] And that was that.

[540] And these kids came from even far.

[541] north and there wasn't west northwest and there wasn't even a high school there so they moved in they were kind of ambitious and so as my friends disappeared because they were pursuing their shorter term interest let's say I made these new friends and and they were they were they were better they had good relationships with their fathers so that was one thing all three of them had good relationships with their fathers they actually had some ambition despite coming from this little town and they were off to college and they were they were a willing to do well in school, well enough anyways, to ensure that their futures weren't compromised.

[542] And they weren't, what would you call it, spinelessly obedient.

[543] You know, they managed that nice balance between having a clue and doing something useful and also being cool.

[544] So that was good.

[545] That was really good.

[546] And we went on a trip with them, a long trip, 1 ,500 miles, something like that, and took along Rob and Chris Jesus and Chris just wasn't interested in anything on the trip you know we drove through the Rocky Mountains and we drove to lots of interesting places and we had some good adventures on little beaches there and like we had a good time he wasn't interested he was mostly interested in smoking cigarettes and pot and I'm buying soft drinks and we just we were kind of laughing him because he was so under -motivated you know and bugging him about it and but he was unhappy and miserable and it wasn't going anywhere and so that sucked and then we went off to college and he came but he dropped out after like three months and then and then he did a bunch of desultory jobs that were really good for nothing and then um that wasn't good either and then i went through college and and got my bachelor's degree and i moved to montreal and i went to graduate school and one day Chris announced that he was coming to visit, and I hadn't seen him for a long time, and so he came to visit, and he still had, he still had his truck, so I guess it did actually survive the convenience store episode, and I was kind of happy to see him, but he wasn't, I would say, he wasn't in good shape.

[547] I was about 27 or 28 at that point, and, you know, my life was going upward in a pretty decent direction, and his, wasn't and so he was more like 40 year old 27 year old you know and he'd been smoking too much his fingers were yellow and you know and he was too thin and and he was a lot more cynical than he used to be oh before that I remember one episode with him I was walking down the street with him in a town called Edmonton which was where I had been going to college and he had come out to visit and we were walking down the street it was winter and he was snapping off the rearview mirrors of cars you know the side view mirrors of cars one after another.

[548] And this was irritating the hell out of me because it seemed pointless.

[549] And I said, well, what are you doing?

[550] And he said, well, all these people, they're just driving these cars.

[551] They're just, all their activity is just ruining the planet.

[552] And they deserve whatever punishment can be meted out to them.

[553] And this is the toxic masculinity thing.

[554] See, one of the things that had happened to him was that he had deeply incorporated this idea for one reason or another.

[555] And a reason I can't quite understand, that that any ambitious activity on the part of someone, perhaps someone at all, but certainly on the part of someone who was male, was wrong.

[556] And the reason it was wrong was because, well, look at what we were doing to the planet.

[557] We were polluting the damn thing in 50 different ways.

[558] And, you know, there was the omnipresent threat of thermonuclear war.

[559] And we weren't concerned about global warming at that point.

[560] I think it was global cooling instead, because that was a big deal for a while in the 70s.

[561] But in any case, you know, Owen, we were overpopulating the damn planet to the point where by the year 2000 there was going to be mass starvation, you know, and we were going to run out of fossil fuel.

[562] And like, there are more fossil fuel reserves now, by the way, than there has been ever, just so you know, which is quite curious.

[563] So we haven't run out yet.

[564] And we're not likely to.

[565] And we're not going to overpopulate the goddamn planet.

[566] We're going to hit 9 billion in about 20 years.

[567] and then the population is going to precipitously decline.

[568] And so all of that turned out to be utter, utter anti -human nonsense, which he imbibed thoroughly and used, I think, in part to justify his unwillingness to participate in the world, but also because there was some genuine moral concern on his part that participating in the world, let's call it the oppressive patriarchy, was somehow negative in and of itself.

[569] And that people were a cancer on the face of the earth, which I think is how we were described by the Club of Rome, which is not exactly a description I'm particularly happy about, because you know what you do with cancer, you try to eradicate it.

[570] And so he had these very lofty ideas about why he wasn't participating in sort of an act of Buddhist in some sense, an active, a passive pseudo -Buddhist in some sense could justify his lack of involvement in the world by making reference to the fact that any sort of masculine ambition was only contributing to the destruction of everything good.

[571] And so he never really got a girlfriend and he never really got a job and never really had a life and, you know, that's not so good.

[572] That's not a real recipe for anything but bloody, profound misery and bitterness.

[573] And by the time he came to visit me in Montreal, that was there in spades, man. It was there in spades.

[574] And the darkness that was in him was a lot deeper and a lot more dangerous.

[575] And I would sit and analyze his dreams now and then, and he had dreams that were quite similar.

[576] One of them was he was in a spaceship way out in space alone.

[577] And he was the only person on it.

[578] So it was this mechanical, dead mechanical entity floating out in the chaotic void.

[579] He was the only person that inhabited it.

[580] And, you know, that's just not a good dream.

[581] It's not a good dream.

[582] And I was living with my wife at that point.

[583] And her and Rob used to get into entanglements quite a bit because he actually liked her quite a lot.

[584] And but, so there was some rivalry between us in high school with regards to her but more importantly she really doesn't have any patience with useless men and so when he was being useless she would call him on it in a pretty straightforward way and that just didn't make him happy one time this is exactly what he was like um he was sort of we we'd made arrangements in because he moved in with us he we made a domestic arrangements about who was supposed to do what and he would take care of our daughter a bit and do some work around the house and he actually got a job which was a good thing but he was very resentful about what he had to do generally speaking especially domestic duties even though hypothetically he was an egalitarian and one day we came home and he was fixing the stove which sounds like a good like it was wobbly you know and it sounds like a pretty good thing to fix the stove that's a good thing except that dinner was on the top of the stove and it was like burning and not just a little bit like it was burning like a statement you know and so we walked in there and the bloody kitchen was full of smoke and rob was down on the floor chris um jesus definitely going to get in trouble for this and he was shimming the stove and it was so interesting to watch because on the one hand what he wanted was a pat on the head for being mechanically epped enough to fix the stove and on the other hand he wanted to burn the hell out of dinner and fill the entire apartment with smoke to indicate that he was above that sort of domestic necessity and so both of and then of course he also thought because there was a deep arrogance that was associated with whatever was going on with him that we would be too stupid to notice what was going on and we actually weren't that stupid particularly by wife who wasn't very stupid about that sort of thing at all and she just tore him a new skin and it was brutal man and I was worried because like she really enraged him because he was very angry at women because of course women didn't want to have anything to do with him at that point because he was completely good for nothing and so he was very mad about women even though you know he decided that he had decided a long time ago that you know having a relationship and getting married and and having children and all that was just contributing to the downfall of the planet.

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

[586] You know, you still want a mate.

[587] You still want companionship.

[588] That's all complete bloody ideological bullshit, and you know it, and it's just covering up your inadequacy, and it's making you vengeful, and it's filling you with hatred, and that really came out, and there was a vicious, vicious fight, and I was, like, making sure that it didn't get out of hand, and it sort of did, but not too bad and then we went we had this weird experience I don't know how to explain this but it happened so I'm going to tell you this story anyways the next day I think it was the day after that I believe it was the day after that my wife and I she was pretty upset about this for a good reason we went walked we lived in a poor part of Montreal but you could go underneath the railway tracks and then you could get into a rich part of Montreal where there was a nice park.

[589] And so we went for a walk in this park.

[590] And don't be thinking that it was fun, because it wasn't.

[591] It was like 28 below, and it was really windy, because Montreal is brutal wind, along with its brutal winters.

[592] And it was like no one with any sense at all, except for people with homicidal roommates, we're out in the park.

[593] And so we were out in the park, and she was thinking maybe she'd go to Ottawa, a city ways away, to get away for a while.

[594] And we walked into the park, It was an uncanny day because it was so brutal at our house because of what was going on.

[595] And we knew what was happening with Chris and how dark it was and how unlikely it was to be fixed.

[596] And we went into the park and, God, the strangest thing, there are black squirrels in Montreal.

[597] And squirrels hibernate, basically, not exactly, because they'll come out when it's warm in the winter, which isn't that often in Montreal.

[598] But basically, when it's cold, they go in their little squirrel burrows, which are all.

[599] packed with nice warm material and they stay the hell in there because it's 40 below you know and and you die if you go out as I already mentioned and we walked into the park we were the only people there and it was foggy and windy and and there was all these bloody squirrels all over the place and they had mange and mangy squirrels lose a lot of their fur so they were tailless squirrels and squirrels without hair on the back of their bodies and and they were all over the place there must to be like 40 of them like clinging to the tree shivering away and it was like it was like a stage set you know it's like what the hell what the hell are these squirrels it was like it was it was like the place was full of ravens or crows or vultures or something like that we don't have vultures in canada because it's too cold and they die and it was per it was perfect in this weird metaphorical way it was like it was the stage was set for the conversation we had to have and there's all these poor, furry, cute little animals that were out there in the cold, being insane for reasons we couldn't understand, like freezing to death.

[600] And so that added a real, I don't know what you'd call, real nice undertone of surrealism to the entire sequence of events.

[601] And so she went off to Ottawa for a few days.

[602] And then a little while later, my brother came with his wife.

[603] And Chris wasn't very happy about that either because my brother had got married.

[604] and was doing all right, not perfectly, but pretty all right.

[605] And then he had a girlfriend, which was all right.

[606] But he was also taking attention away from Chris.

[607] They were taking attention away from Chris, and that was making him angry.

[608] And, you know, they decided they were going to go out for a walk, and Chris got dressed up in this, like, black, long black coat he had, and this, like, dark toque, and my brother got dressed up, and so did his wife.

[609] And we looked at Chris, and, I think my brother laughed, said, Chris, you look like a serial killer.

[610] And it's, ha, ha, ha, ha, that's a serial killer.

[611] You know how funny they are.

[612] And so they went for a walk, and then they came back.

[613] And Chris wasn't any happier when he came back.

[614] And he had his bedroom, and my brother and his wife were sleeping in their bed, and I was sleeping in my bed with my wife.

[615] And it was like 2 in the morning, and I wasn't sleeping at all.

[616] And then it was like 2 .30 in the morning, and I wasn't sleeping.

[617] And it was like 3 in the morning, and I wasn't sleeping.

[618] thinking, man, there is something in this house going on that is like not good.

[619] And I knew what it was.

[620] And so I got up and I walked over to Chris's door and I knocked and I came in and then he was sitting up in bed and not looking happy at all.

[621] And I had a chat with him about how resentful he was feeling about everything and just exactly what the hell he thought he was up to.

[622] And if he really thought that was a good idea and talked him back down into something vaguely resembling sanity.

[623] And I don't know why I was awake.

[624] I think it was probably a smell, because you can smell things that you don't know you can smell.

[625] And that's part of what keeps you alive when you need to, but there was no doubt that some plot of bloody murder was being hatched in the imagination of my erstwhile friend.

[626] And I knew him well enough to know that he was capable of going extraordinarily dark places.

[627] and certainly had gone there that night.

[628] And anyways, we talked, and that was that, and it was settled, at least for that evening.

[629] And he went to bed, and I went to bed, and I went to sleep.

[630] But my brother woke up the next morning, you know, and he said to me, he said, I don't know what the hell was going on here last night, but I really couldn't sleep.

[631] I don't know what was wrong.

[632] And I didn't really tell him what was going wrong, but that was what was going wrong.

[633] And, well, so we lived with Rob, Chris for about about another six months after that and he actually made some progress he got a job wasn't much of a job he was working in a parts warehouse which by the way is a fine job I'm not complaining about that and you know I was trying to convince him that he could try to do a good job at his parts warehouse job it was below his intelligence because he was a very smart person you know and he could have been anything really I think and you know I said well you can help you can try to work card there and there are people running a business and you can try to help them run the business better and you know maybe you could get good at it and and be helpful and find a bit of a community and straighten things out in the business to the degree that you can and you know you'd have something which would be a lot better than having nothing and he did try that for a while and we finally moved to boston and he didn't come along and he visited us about a year later and he wasn't doing too bad at that point he moved back to albert and he had a job there and it was okay it was okay And he'd started to write, and he wrote some nice stories, and he took some good photographs, too.

[634] He was quite talented, actually, at both of those things.

[635] But then, you know, old habits reasserted themselves, or maybe his underlying illness reasserted himself, and he drifted back off into unemployment, and moved back with his parents, and things just went from bad to worse.

[636] And he phoned me on his 40th birthday, and he was quite happy in a melancholy way.

[637] and he said that these short stories that he had been writing and he'd been sending to me which he'd made into about three quarters of a novel and actually quite a good novel he had a good eye for detail you know and he could tell a story and I'd like these stories quite a bit anyways they'd been compiled into a sequence of stories and they'd been published by a small press in northern Alberta which was quite an accomplishment you know for him and so he was very happy about that and so we had that conversation and said goodbye and then week later i heard from his father he'd taken that god damn truck out into the rocky mountains and hooked up a pipe from the exhaust to the cab and sat there smoking cigarettes and till he died and you know they found him, I don't know, a couple of weeks later, which I don't imagine was particularly pleasant.

[638] And that was that.

[639] It was one less manifestation of toxic masculinity.

[640] We're playing a stupid game in our society, you know, with young men, young women too, failing to encourage them properly and allowing them to believe that something intrinsic wrong with human beings and our activity.

[641] You know, I mean, we cause trouble.

[642] We have hard time regulating what we're doing.

[643] Life's tough, man, you know.

[644] The world's out trying to kill us, and we're doing our best to survive, and we make a fair bit of mess while we're doing it, and we've done that forever.

[645] You know, there's lots of blood and horror in history.

[646] There's no doubt about that, just like there is in the natural world.

[647] We've made our fair share of mistakes, that's for sure.

[648] men and women alike.

[649] Well, we've been building whatever we've been building.

[650] But, you know, we had our reasons.

[651] It's not like it's a bloody cakewalk.

[652] We are trying to straighten things out.

[653] You know, and it's good to separate the wheat from the chaff.

[654] I've seen this with lots of young men, lots of them, lots of the ones who come to see my talks.

[655] All they've heard their whole goddamn life is that there's something toxic and oppressive about our patriarchal society.

[656] And that's the fundamental way of looking at it and that the right way of construing the relationship between men and women through history is one of unbridled oppression on the part of men in relationship to women.

[657] What the hell are they supposed to derive from that?

[658] What kind of message are they supposed to derive from that?

[659] Hey, that there's something good about ambition?

[660] There's something good about getting up in the morning and wanting to take your place in society?

[661] It's like, no, a society, it's an oppressive patriarch, it's responsible for everything that's hell in the world.

[662] It's like, oh, so what are you supposed to do as a man?

[663] let's say, withdraw, it's like, well, I'm not going to participate in that because it's all pathological.

[664] It's like, that's not helpful.

[665] I mean, then you don't have a life, right?

[666] You've got nothing to do, and it's not like there's no problems to solve, and you can rationalize it with this notion that, well, if I can't be good, and I can't, because, you know, toxic masculinity, then at least I can be harmless.

[667] It's like, well, harmless isn't good.

[668] Harmless is pathetic.

[669] You've got no respect for yourself if all you are is harmless.

[670] I mean, like, trust and put in a corner, you're harmless.

[671] You know, and besides, you're not here to be harmless.

[672] You know, you're here to be dangerous in a useful way.

[673] That would be good.

[674] So that was Chris.

[675] He couldn't figure out how to be dangerous in a useful way.

[676] So he became dangerous in a useless way.

[677] And that's another thing to think about is that all these young, men that we're teaching about toxic masculinity, what we're trying to dampen down the oppressive patriarchy.

[678] We're going to teach them to be, let's say, harmless, let's say useless, all of those things.

[679] And what's going to happen?

[680] You think that danger's going to go away?

[681] You're an absolute bloody fool if you think that you're going to reduce a human being, a man, to something harmless, and that that's going to work.

[682] All you're going to do by failing to channel that unbelievable ambition and ability to move forward into the world into a like a self -restrained hopelessness is to produce someone bitter and resentful and then cruel and then dangerous and I would recommend strongly against that unless that's what you want and it isn't that I only saw that that in my friend Chris.

[683] You know, I talked to this kid just, I'm going to stop just after this, I talked to this kid just before I left Toronto and his family was fragmented and his relationship with his father was fragmented and I like this kid, man. He's a good -looking kid, you know?

[684] You see him and you think, man, there you are.

[685] Do something with your life.

[686] and Christ he'd spent most of the last six months in bed and he was suicidal three quarters of the time and he had this he was kind of interested in biology it was about the only interest he had it was sort of what was keeping him alive and he had this damn fish some weird fish a couple of them in an aquarium his room was a complete bloody disaster by his own admission but his aquarium was pristine and clean and he was raising these fish and he said forthrightly the only reason I'm still alive is because of those damn fish, you know, and I mean, that's blackly comical on the one hand, but it's pretty damn sad on the other, you know, and there's nothing fun about spending six months in bed.

[687] You drag yourself out when you have to get something to eat, you know, and that's about it, and everything's degenerating around you, and you're 24 years old when you should be out there in the world, like trying something.

[688] And I talked to him about his plans and what he should be doing, and, you know, it went fine.

[689] We were doing all right, and I was kind of coming up with a plan with them because I thought I might be able to help them a little bit.

[690] And then we started having this conversation about, you know, the nature of the oppressive patriarch and how human beings were a cancer on the earth and that we were headed for environmental disaster and that there was no goddamn point doing anything anyways.

[691] It was like, I just couldn't talk to.

[692] As soon as that came up, it was like, I don't know what I was talking to.

[693] Whatever I was talking to did not like human beings.

[694] I can bloody well tell you that.

[695] And it certainly didn't like men.

[696] And then I was talking to that.

[697] And there was no talking to that, like even though he was only 24 and what the hell does he know about anything, having never done anything in his life with no real knowledge, he was certainly 100 % committed to his cynicism about the apocalyptic outcome all awaiting us because of the pathological actions of the human race.

[698] It's like, well, if you believe that, well, what are you going to do?

[699] You're going to get out of bed?

[700] You're going to get at it?

[701] Especially if you've got six other things wrong with you?

[702] No, at least you're going to use that as an excuse, at least as an excuse to not engage in the world, because it's actually hard, right, to get up and do the small things you have to do to start climbing up the damn hierarchy and struggle your way back into the middle class.

[703] If you've got this extra ideological excuse that, well, after all, the whole damn culture is corrupt, oppressive patriarchy.

[704] It's done nothing but rape the planet and destroy.

[705] It's like, well, not only do you have every reason to not get out of bed because it's so easy just to lay there anyways and maybe smoke a joint too and play a video game and watch some porn, but then you can also be moral about it because, hey, at least I'm not taking my active part, just spoiling the world.

[706] And so then not only are you worthless and helpless and resentful and bitter and unhappy and useless and aging and all of that, but you're also virtuous in the, I've talked to about 350 ,000 people in the last year.

[707] There's a lot of people.

[708] And I've met afterwards 15 ,000, something like that.

[709] And then another, God, I don't know how many people on the street, because I meet people on the street.

[710] all the time now, because wherever I go, people stop me on the street, you know, like three or four times an hour or something like that.

[711] And it's actually really good.

[712] They're really polite.

[713] They're almost always men.

[714] They're really polite.

[715] My wife is stunned.

[716] She said, I don't know that's what men were like.

[717] You know, and my wife likes men, by the way, except me sometimes.

[718] But she said, I didn't know what that was what men were like.

[719] And I said, Well, yeah, they can be like that, and they're not always like that.

[720] But they're apologetic, and, you know, they come up and they say, well, they ask me if I'm who I am, and I say yes.

[721] And they say, you know, I was in this miserable place of one form or another.

[722] It's a general story.

[723] And that I've been trying to get my act together in various ways, trying to tell the truth, trying to take on a little bit more responsibility, married my girlfriend that I'd been living with for five years, you know, decided to start having a family, decided to put some of my dreams into action, you know, and to get rid of some of the things that I'm doing that are stupid and miserable and destructive and just out of curiosity and things are way better.

[724] And so it's lovely, right?

[725] It's a lovely thing to go all over the place and have people come up to you and say, well, you know, I was having kind of a rough time and here's a bunch of reasons why, and now things are way better.

[726] And the heartbreaking thing about that is that so many people, it took so little encouragement for that to happen.

[727] You know, it's like I've got YouTube channel and podcasts in my book, but it's not like I'm in their family or something.

[728] I'm not directly there speaking with them.

[729] I'm not a father or an uncle or someone close.

[730] I'm this sort of distant, abstract figure, saying, you know, you're not for all your flaws and their manifold, just like mine are.

[731] It's like, Jesus, man, there's something to you.

[732] You've got a destiny.

[733] You know, it's important that you get your act together.

[734] And they don't generate any excess hell around you.

[735] and you get hell out of bed in the morning and clean up your room and straighten yourself out because who the hell knows who you could be and your family's suffering and maybe you could fix that a little bit and then if you're concerned about the state of the world why don't you practice a little bit and get good at something and try fixing it because you could that's what you're like you could certainly make it worse no one debates that you could stop doing that that'd be something and then you could and that'd be something you know God only knows how good the planet would be if we just stopped actually trying to make it worse out of spite and then you could take the next step and actually try to do something good and then it turns out that well that works your life's better because you're doing something good it's sort of like the definition of having a better life and then it turns out that things around you do get better because you could take care of yourself a little more and you could take care of your family a little more and you do have something to offer the community.

[736] And so then all these people come up to me and say, well, you know, hey, I decided enough hell for a while.

[737] Maybe I'll give that a chance.

[738] And then they say, guess what?

[739] It works.

[740] It's like, it's a shock.

[741] And the shock is that, why didn't they know that it worked?

[742] Why didn't anybody tell them in some way that was coherent?

[743] Like, I don't understand it.

[744] Well, I do understand it.

[745] It's this deep animus, you know, this guilt that I can't explain fully tonight, this guilt we have about being human and about our activities and all of that and about our inadequacies and our malevolence and our ignorance and our biases and all the things that wrong with us.

[746] And there are plenty of them, but there's no excuse, man. It's like, bad as you are.

[747] You're also something remarkable, you know, truly remarkable.

[748] The notion that there's a spark of the divine in each of us.

[749] That's a hell of an idea.

[750] And it's worth investigating just for the possibility that it might be true.

[751] You know, you feel guilty as hell when you're not living up to your potential.

[752] You know you're not who you could be.

[753] You know you're doing things you shouldn't be doing.

[754] It's like, who's calling you on that?

[755] If it was just you, you'd think, well, why not just let yourself off the hook?

[756] I mean, that'd be a hell of a lot easier.

[757] You'd just wake up in the morning and it doesn't matter what sort of situation you were in.

[758] it's like you're completely satisfied with your life because after all it's just you and you're responsible to you and nothing else and no one else there's no transcendent meaning it's like well then where where's the source of the guilt and the shame and the self -recrimination and the knowledge that you're wasting your goddamn time where is that coming from well maybe it's the oppressive patriarchy you know active within you but i don't think so i think it's the call of conscience you know and you can follow that and it can lead you somewhere useful and then you don't end up in the rocky mountains you know when you're 40 after having 25 pretty goddamn miserable years hooking a exhaust pipe a pipe to your exhaust so that you can kill yourself quietly and alone out in the middle of nowhere so that's what I have to say about Talked masculinity.

[759] Thank you.

[760] It's a rough story, man. Okay, well, we're going to reset the clock.

[761] I talked a little longer than I should have, so the Q &A is going to be a little shorter than it might have been.

[762] So, John, if you can let me know what time I have left, I can decide to continue.

[763] Well, here's the first question.

[764] What's the difference between toxic masculinity and non -toxic masculinity well we covered that to some degree so non -toxic masculinity builds things like look around you know there's this book I love this book called infidel by Ian Herzia Lee a woman who by all right should be a hero of every feminist on the planet she is really something that woman and she's not you know She's an enemy of, I would say, the majority of the radical feminist types.

[765] And it's amazing to me because she's such a heroine in every sense of the word.

[766] And it had such an impossible and amazing life, which is still continuing.

[767] She's so brave.

[768] It's just unbelievable.

[769] You know, and she went to, she went from Somalia, if I remember correctly, to the Netherlands.

[770] And it was so cool reading her book.

[771] Because now and then, you know, one of the advantages of reading something written by an outsider is you get to see what the outsider sees that you always see, but to see it in a new way.

[772] And she said that when she got to the Netherlands, which is a hell of a place, man. I mean, I love the Netherlands.

[773] It's a great country.

[774] And they're ashamed of their country, by the way.

[775] The people in the Netherlands are deeply ashamed of their civilization.

[776] It's endemic there.

[777] And for the same reasons we talked about tonight.

[778] And I go there and I think, okay, let's think about this country.

[779] Well, first of all, it should be underwater.

[780] And it's not.

[781] Like, that's pretty good, you know?

[782] Like, it actually should be underwater.

[783] And the Dutch, they built these dikes.

[784] When the U .S. Army Corps of Engineers built the levees in New Orleans, they built them to withstand in principle the worst storm in 100 years.

[785] And that's not so good because there's a one in two days.

[786] chance that the worst storm in a hundred years will come within 50 years and a one in four chance say in 25 years that's just not very good plus they never did quite make it up to those standards anyways because of endemic corruption and so we know what happened to new orleans we think well that was a natural disaster a hurricane hit it's like yeah yeah it wasn't a natural disaster it was the inevitable consequence of decades of corruption and so you can blame that on god if you want but you know storms happen and They happened in New Orleans, and everyone knew it.

[787] The Dutch, they built their dikes to withstand the worst storm in 10 ,000 years.

[788] Right, and, you know, you might think about that as overkill, because you're probably not going to be here in like 9 ,900 years or something like that.

[789] And so, who cares?

[790] But, you know, they're serious about having their country not be underwater.

[791] And you can kind of tell that everywhere you go, because it's really organized and orderly and beautiful.

[792] all at the same time, and it's a really free place, you know, so you can go to the Red Light District, for example, in the Netherlands, and it's a strange place because it's a pretty straight -laced country, but, you know, the laws are pretty loose, and it's like the Dutch have figured out that, well, you want to make things orderly, so your country doesn't become flooded by chaos, but you've got to leave some space for disorder, because if you tighten it up too much, then you go too far in the other direction.

[793] And so they really got it right.

[794] And they built this amazing civilization there, like the civilization that you've built here, like the civilization that characterizes Australia and the United States and Canada and most of Europe and almost all the countries where anyone with any sense wants to move to if they can.

[795] And a tremendous amount of blood and catastrophe and malevolence went into the building of those civilizations, right?

[796] And we're constantly having fingers wagged in our faces about that.

[797] And fair enough, you know, it's like there's no doubt that human history is a bloody nightmare.

[798] But, you know, you've got to separate the wheat from the chaff and you've got to think, well, what's worth preserving out of all of that?

[799] And there's lots worth preserving.

[800] I mean, these are pretty good places.

[801] You have a nice city here.

[802] it's unlikely this city it's like you go out you can go out and no one mugs you you know well that's something you know and it isn't something to be taken for granted and the probability that someone's going to break into your house is like zero really and you're not going to be the victim of a violent crime unless you party too much with drunk family members and then that's your own fault because drunk family members happen to be more dangerous than any other people.

[803] You know, and no one here is starving, with the exception of a tiny minority of people for very complex reasons.

[804] And, you know, it's pretty good, and it's way better than it was 150 years ago, and there's every bit of evidence that it's actually getting better.

[805] And there's also every bit of evidence that as the core Western values of individual sovereignty and private property rights and free enterprise spread around the world, relatively untrammeled by the Soviets, by the communists, like it was for so long, that other countries are starting to get rich, you know?

[806] China's pretty rich.

[807] India's pretty rich.

[808] Southeast Asia's not doing too bad.

[809] There's more middle -class people in India than there is in the United States.

[810] There's still plenty of poor people there, but like, they're getting better off at a very rapid rate.

[811] The whole damn country now is just about electrified.

[812] That was announced last week.

[813] It's like, wow, India's on the electric.

[814] grid.

[815] You know, and the fastest growing economies in the world are in sub -Saharan Africa.

[816] It's like there's good things happening.

[817] So what's the difference between toxic masculinity and non -toxic masculinity?

[818] Well, I would say from the perspective of the questioner, one of the differences would be, how about a little gratitude?

[819] That'd be nice for everything that you have.

[820] I think about these university professors, you know, that are in these critical disciplines that are describing Western civilization in the way they describe it.

[821] I think you people are so protected from the terror of nature and the terror of culture that you can't even imagine it.

[822] It's like you have the most secure job in the world at a reasonable amount of pay.

[823] Because if you're in the West and you're a tenured professor, it's like you have an optimal combination of security and freedom.

[824] You can pretty much do what you want.

[825] and you're not going to get fired.

[826] And so, and that's pretty good.

[827] And it's your whole life, plus you have a pension.

[828] It's like, wow, this horrible, oppressive patriarchal organization has gifted you this amazing privilege.

[829] And then, you know, and you're safe on campus, I mean, compared to most places that you could be anywhere in the world or in the entire span of history.

[830] and you're reasonably well respected and so you're in the university and that's pretty protected and you're in a town and that's got a good governance structure and it's pretty protected and you have a police force that you can trust.

[831] Ian Herzia Lee, she said when she came to Amsterdam one of the things that shocked her to death was that she could go up to police officers which she didn't like to do and they would help her.

[832] She said she never really recovered from that.

[833] She couldn't believe that police officers helped people Because where she came from, they were just thugs, fundamentally.

[834] And their job was to take bribes and make your life wretched.

[835] So they would help you.

[836] And it wasn't a trick to take money from you later.

[837] They were actually helping.

[838] And, you know, she could see that that was a miracle.

[839] Because it is a miracle to arm a section of society and have them behave in the main as civilized and decent people.

[840] Well, there's some non -toxic masculinity.

[841] The other thing she couldn't believe, she said, she would, I was in Morocco decades ago.

[842] And when you go to Morocco and you take a bus, the first thing you do is you get in a line and then you pay for your bus ticket.

[843] But whoever you're paying has nothing to do with the bus.

[844] You just pay them.

[845] And then when you get on the bus, then they come and have you pay for the ticket.

[846] And so after a while, you learn that you just get on the bus.

[847] And there's a timetable for the bus, but it bears no. relationship whatsoever to when the bus is going to be leaving or arriving so the timetable is like a it's like a little mystery play that hasn't well Ellie went to Amsterdam and you know she was standing waiting for public transportation and there was a digital sign there and that sign said train will be arriving in 27 .6 seconds and so she was watching this sign and then the train showed up in 27 .6 seconds and she thought what the hell it's like how did that happen and of course we just take that for granted because those things happen here all the time the power stays on all the time your houses i don't know do you heat them with natural gas we do in canada they don't explode hardly ever and there's like millions of houses and they're all full of natural gas and they don't explode.

[848] And that's pretty amazing.

[849] And the natural gas doesn't stop coming, which is really good, because in the winter, then you die.

[850] Right?

[851] So it's good.

[852] And there isn't fighting on the streets.

[853] And the firemen come when there's a fire, and the ambulance comes when you're sick, and the doctors take care of you when you go to the hospital.

[854] And none of that works perfectly, but I can tell you, man, it works a hell of a lot better than any other system that's ever been devised.

[855] And so how about that for a bit of non -toxic masculinity, that?

[856] And the desire to do more of that, to do more of that.

[857] You know, that's the thing, is to take that aggression and ambition that characterizes you as someone who wants to move ahead into the world and to discipline yourself into someone who can play reciprocal games and cooperate and compete in a civilized manner and who can aim to tame nature further in, let's say, a sustainable way, and who can work to keep society awake and articulate, and who can constrain the malevolence in their own heart and take care of themselves properly and do a good job for their family and all of that, right, and to live a purposeful and meaningful and honest and courageous life.

[858] How about that?

[859] And how about the fact that lots of people already do that?

[860] You know, I knew this guy, this is a crazy story.

[861] This guy had a motorcycle accident, and it really ruined him.

[862] And he was a line worker, which is not an easy job, especially in the winter.

[863] And he wasn't much good at it because the motorcycle accident ruined him.

[864] And so they paired him up with this guy with Parkinson's disease.

[865] And, you know, that's no joke, Parkinson's disease.

[866] By the time you have your first symptoms, 95 % of the relevant neurological tissue is already destroyed, and it's degenerative, you know.

[867] And there are these two guys.

[868] neither of them could be linesmen, but together, you know, their disabilities were sufficiently different so they could work as a linesman together.

[869] And so that's what they did.

[870] Despite being three -quarters bloody well destroyed, there'd be a terrible storm and the lines would go down and out they'd go and help each other out and put the power back together.

[871] And I thought that was a pretty goddamn good example of non -toxic masculinity myself.

[872] And I also see that, you know, people are like that lots of people have difficult demanding harsh and often intrinsically unrewarding jobs you know and they do the best they can and they get the hell up at six in the morning when it's cold and they make themselves lunch or maybe they're lucky and they have someone make it for them and they go out there and they do their duty and they keep the lights on and they keep the power going and they keep this unbelievably amazing society for which we are so ungrateful, it's a sin.

[873] They keep it moving forward.

[874] And it'd be nice to see, you know, just an iota of appreciation for that now and then.

[875] So here's a rough one.

[876] I postponed my suicide to see you.

[877] I've watched your video on suicide and hurting my abusive family motivates me further to kill myself.

[878] Why should I live?

[879] Well, the first question you might ask is, why do you postpone your suicide to come and see me?

[880] I mean, I'm serious about this, a serious answer to a serious question.

[881] You did that because you thought, you thought, obviously, and I'm not making any claims of any sort, that this was of sufficient utility to justify your miserable existence one day further.

[882] Well, so, you know, if there's one thing like that, maybe there's much, more, you know, and maybe you need to discover them.

[883] And maybe you can discover them.

[884] And so I would say, this old professor, you know, he worked at the University of Alberta, and he worked with criminals at the Maximum Security Ward.

[885] And he was a strange guy.

[886] And he took me out there a couple of times, which was a very weird experience.

[887] And he said something to me about suicide once that I thought was really helpful.

[888] He said, you can always put it off till tomorrow.

[889] And, you know, that's actually a very helpful thought if you're feeling suicidal and desperate.

[890] Because, you know, the time collapses in on you and you think, oh, this is absolutely hopeless.

[891] I can't stand one more moment.

[892] It's like, no, that's probably not true.

[893] You probably can stand one more moment.

[894] You can probably stand one more hour.

[895] You can probably stand one more day.

[896] You know, and at some point, you get to the point when you're desperate and you're depressed, where maybe that's what you're doing is you're enduring.

[897] that's what you've got you're enduring and you think god it's just and depression can be unbelievably awful I'll give you a quick example of that my daughter because it's very difficult to understand if you've never experienced it my daughter had polyarticular arthritis and it affected 40 of her joints and just having one arthritic joint is no joke it makes people's lives quite miserable and 40 that's a lot and it was degenerative and so when she was a teenager she had to have her hip replaced and her ankle replaced and she was walking around for two years basically on two broken legs while we were waiting for the surgery procedures to sort themselves out and she was on extremely high doses of opiates to control the pain and riddle and to keep her awake to the degree that she could be kept awake and she was also extremely depressed it was an autoimmune condition a lot of depression this is good to know for the person who's feeling There actually might be something wrong with you, like you might be ill in a way that would be worth investigating for about four years because maybe you can figure out what's wrong, you know.

[898] Now, you did say that as well that you have an abusive family, which is also not helping.

[899] But I asked her at one point, because I was curious.

[900] I've suffered from depression, and it's no bloody picnic can tell you that.

[901] I said, okay, kid, here's your choice.

[902] You can have your arthritis.

[903] You can get rid of your arthritis or you can get rid of your depression.

[904] Which one would you get rid of?

[905] And she said, like, instantly, I'd get rid of the depression.

[906] And so, like, that's something to think about, man. And then another thing she told me, we were talking about the feeling of this depression.

[907] And she said, well, you know, it's kind of like you wake up, and you have this dog, and you really love this dog, and it died.

[908] And it just died.

[909] And that's what it's like all the time.

[910] and so I thought that was pretty good because she got the grieving part of it right that sort of sense of continual overwhelming grief that's part and parcel but not the whole hell of depression and then like two years ago she had this dog named Seiko who was a pretty good dog far as dogs go and she really loved that dog and he died and she said this is nowhere near as bad as having depression and so look whoever you are out there in the audience like I feel for you and your proclivity for self -destruction like you might be in one hell of a dark place and there are dark places and there are certainly places that are so dark that they make death look preferable.

[911] If you are more if you think that being afraid of death is the ultimate fear all that means is that there are things that you have not yet encountered because death is not the thing to be ultimately afraid of.

[912] And so I can imagine that you're in a desperate place, but I would say a variety of things.

[913] First of all, you've got to ask yourself if you've done everything you can to get out of it.

[914] You know, like have you tried an array of antidepressants?

[915] Have you tried them at different doses?

[916] You might say, well, I don't trust them or I want to do this on my own.

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

[918] You have a high probability of mortality.

[919] You don't mess with it, if you're dead, you're not going to get better.

[920] If you took an SSRI at the right dose, that's an antidepressant, try it for a month.

[921] You should know in a week, if it makes you tired, that's a good sign.

[922] You should know in a month if it makes you feel somewhat better.

[923] Give it a shot.

[924] If it doesn't work, try another one.

[925] If that doesn't work, try another one.

[926] If that doesn't work, try another one.

[927] Try it for a bloody year and see if it...

[928] Because, you know, you'll still be around in a year.

[929] You've got a year to experiment with, and if they don't work, quit taking them.

[930] go talk to someone find someone at least and if you can't afford it you can't find someone at least try the damn medication and then there's other treatments as well that can be effective and then as I said you should also consider the possibility that there's actually something physically wrong with you and so don't give up too soon because you give up and that's the end of it but then there's something else you said here which I would also point out here, which is also important.

[931] Hurting my abusive family motivates me further to kill myself.

[932] Well, that's a rough one, man. I don't know how old you are.

[933] And that's relevant.

[934] If that's your motivation, then I would guess that you're suffering from some variant of post -traumatic stress disorder because you wouldn't be possessed by the idea that you could torture your family by killing yourself unless you had reason for revenge.

[935] Now, it's possible that your thoughts have gone to a point that's so dark that you're not seeing things clearly.

[936] That's a possibility, and you should, you know, you should really keep that thoroughly in mind because it is possible.

[937] But let's assume that you've had a terribly abusive family.

[938] Well, what's at the bottom of that abuse.

[939] It's malevolence, right?

[940] It's the spirit of malevolence.

[941] That's certainly what's animating that kind of abuse.

[942] It's the spirit of evil, for lack of a better word.

[943] And you don't recover from post -traumatic stress disorder or from abuse until you understand that.

[944] And you know, it isn't obvious that you want to let that win, and it wins by taking you out.

[945] And it wins worse, it wins its worse than it winning by taking you out.

[946] You see, it wins because it also possesses you.

[947] Because whatever it is that's abused you, that spirit of malevolence, now wants to inhabit you so that you can extract your revenge.

[948] And so not only will it kill you, it will also take your soul.

[949] And I would say that's a very bad idea.

[950] So, well, what are the reasons?

[951] There's probably more things that you could try.

[952] And you know, I've seen people recover from unbelievably serious cases of depression, like immobilized in bed and definitely suicidal on a 24 hour on a 24 -hour continuum.

[953] You can recover.

[954] Medications can work, I would say, get the hell away from your family if you can do it.

[955] And if you're 16 or 15 or 17 and you can't quite manage it yet, well then in year for a year or two, and leave.

[956] And don't look back, like Lot's wife.

[957] Remember in this story, when Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, God warned Lot's wife not to look back because she would turn into a pillar of salt.

[958] Salt, that's tears.

[959] Man, if you leave, don't look back.

[960] You brush all that catastrophe off and see if you can set yourself up a life.

[961] And if that's, if it's justice that you need rather than revenge, and justice is much better than revenge, then what you do to obtain justice for yourself is to go out and have yourself a life, despite the fact that these malevolent forces have conspired to take you down, and to see if you can do it.

[962] You know, there's beauty in the world, and there are things to do, and there's a place for you in the world.

[963] There's a hole that you leave in the fabric of being by your sudden departure, and the addition of the catastrophe that you produce as a consequence of your suicide, all it does is make things more like hell.

[964] And that's not the right answer.

[965] And so that's what I would say.

[966] You say, why not kill yourself?

[967] Because it's wrong.

[968] It's wrong.

[969] You know, and it's, I don't mean wrong in the finger -shaking way.

[970] I mean that even if you follow the logic that has driven you to the, straits that you find yourself in.

[971] What you do by taking your fantasies of vengefulness to their final conclusion and making your abusive family miserable, let's say, in a vengeful manner, is you fall prey to the very force that brought you to the brink of catastrophe.

[972] And there's no victory in that.

[973] And you could instead have the victory.

[974] It's not going to be easy.

[975] I'm not trying to make light of this and not everybody who has who is depressed recovers you know you may be in for you know sporadic periods of depression through your life but there are lots of treatments that work and you can you if you work diligently and carefully and you're willing to pursue every avenue you have a reasonable chance of finding out what the hell is wrong and fixing it and then maybe you can have a life and then you have your life and you don't look back and then you have your justice and that's way better and so don't you don't commit suicide because it's wrong you go out and live like you could conceivably live with some good luck and and some goodwill and and some willingness to attain help and the grace of God let's say all of that and you prevail and that would be much better and so that's what I would recommend for you in the two minutes that I have to make such a recommendation.

[976] So best of luck to you and I hope that you can endure and do remember people do recover.

[977] There may be something out there that could help you.

[978] There's a hundred things you could try and maybe you've tried 20 of them already but certainly getting the hell away from your family sounds like a start.

[979] So Jesus what have you got to lose man?

[980] You're already willing to contemplate death leaving, that's a relatively trivial problem by comparison.

[981] So best of luck to you.

[982] And on that note, good night to all of you.

[983] Thank you very much for coming.

[984] 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.

[985] Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[986] See Jordan B. Peterson .com for audio, e -book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

[987] Remember to check out Jordan B .Peterson .com slash personality for information on his new course, now 50 % off.

[988] I really hope you enjoyed this podcast.

[989] Talk to you next week.

[990] 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