Ideology, Logos & Belief

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

[1] You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description.

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

[3] This is episode 20.

[4] An interview and discussion between Dr. Peterson and transliminal media's Jordan Levine.

[5] It's entitled, Ideology, Logos, and Belief.

[6] Please consider supporting Transliminal Media on Patreon, as well as watching the original interview on YouTube.

[7] Links can be found in the description.

[8] It's been a few years since we last had our first interview, and a number of things have happened in your life, both personally in terms of your career and probably your intellectual development as well.

[9] So maybe just to start things off, if you could summarize in your own words, What that experience has been like for you just to catch up our viewers on what's been happening?

[10] Well, the most significant event was the fallout from a series of videos that I made in late September of 2016.

[11] I made one video critiquing the policy framework within which Bill C -16, federal Bill C -16, was likely to be interpreted, taking particular issue with its provisions for compelled speech in relationship to pronouns, but more fundamentally, I would say, by criticizing the theoretical framework regarding human identity that had been instantiated into the law, that the legal claim, and this is mostly stemming from legislation and policies that were developed in Ontario, but that will have a significant influence on the federal level, insisting that biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity varied independently, which is a, it's more extreme than a radical social constructionist view because the radical social constructionist view is that all of those tiers, including to some degree biological sex even, are socioculturally determined.

[12] And of course, human beings are highly cultural.

[13] animals, so there is pronounced sociocultural determination of virtually everything that we do, but that doesn't mean that those levels of identity vary independently, which is the claim that's being made.

[14] In fact, they're very, very, very tightly correlated would exceed 0 .95.

[15] They're virtually perfectly correlated.

[16] And so I believe that that's an unwarranted intrusion of a certain kind of ideology, its postmodern ideology fundamentally, with its roots in a kind of of a surround of Marxist identity politics and I thought it would think that it was completely inappropriate for that to be transformed into legislation.

[17] Anyways, there's been all sorts of consequences of that.

[18] I mean, my household was an absolute media tornado.

[19] I guess it still is, really, for months after that.

[20] There were journalists lining up outside the house.

[21] Outside your own home.

[22] Oh, yeah.

[23] Oh, I had no idea.

[24] Oh, yeah.

[25] There were journalists in the house all the time and one after the other and um what was this like for you you don't have to answer on camera if you don't feel comfortable but what was this like for your family i mean it was all very unexpected is my understanding oh it was completely unexpected i mean i didn't you know the reason i made the videos was because i had something to say i was i was trying to sometimes you know i can't sleep at night because i'm thinking about something and usually what i'll do is go write it down i have some writing to do so i get up and i go write down what i'm thinking and that usually does the trick.

[26] But because I had been playing with YouTube, I thought, well, I'll try making YouTube video and telling people what I'm thinking about and see if that performs the same function as writing.

[27] And to me, the function of writing, while it's twofold.

[28] One is conceivably to communicate with people, although the fundamental purpose for me is to clarify my thoughts so that I know to you know because if you if something is disturbing you what that means is that it needs to be articulated it what it's the emergence of unexplored territory something that disturbs you that that's the right way to think about it it's unmapped territory that's manifesting itself it's like a vista of threat and possibility and you need to articulate a path through it and so that's what I was doing it's like I was thinking well this is bothering me and this seems to be why and here's what I think is going on and and so I made the videos and in some sense I I didn't think anything more of it and then well see what happened I think and you know when I've been thinking about this in retrospect is it's never obvious what's going on because things go on at multiple levels and I think they go on at a theological level there's that's the most fundamental level of of let's call it epistemological reality it might even be ontological reality, but certainly epistemological reality.

[29] If I can interject for a moment, what do you mean by theological in this sense?

[30] What does that mean to you?

[31] Well, it's been my experience as a clinician that if you, the more serious the events that you're discussing with people, the more the language shifts towards what you might describe as the religious.

[32] So, for example, post -traumatic stress disorder, that's a good example, or cases of serious abuse, child abuse, or like truly reprehensible interactions between people.

[33] they're best conceptualized with regards to a dialogue about the nature of good and evil.

[34] And in fact, with post -traumatic stress disorder, that's actually necessary, I believe.

[35] And I should say, in keeping with that, I've had a number of war vets come up to me after my recent talks and tell me that watching my lectures has cured their post -traumatic stress disorder.

[36] Because I provided, and I've provided my clients with the same thing.

[37] if you're, most people develop PTSD and other catastrophic psychological reactions, when something terrible, not so much when something terrible happens to them, but when something terrible happens to them because of someone malevolent.

[38] And sometimes that malevolent person can be themselves.

[39] So soldiers, for example, often develop PTSD if they observe themselves doing something on the battlefield that they did not believe was within their realm of action.

[40] And so it's as if the archetypal adversary leapt forward out of their soul and seized them and acted for them on the battlefield.

[41] And then they're shattered by that.

[42] They can't believe that they were capable of that.

[43] That destroys their sense of what it means to be human and what being human means.

[44] And that's more likely to happen to people who are somewhat naive, I would say.

[45] Certainly that's the case with the PTSD literature.

[46] And so to treat someone in a situation like that, you have to help them develop a philosophy, I would say, but probably a theology of good and evil, because you have to investigate the structure of the motivation for malevolence.

[47] And you can't do that outside the confines of religious language, partly because, like, this is a difficult thing to understand, and I think you have had, you have to have had contact with true evil in order to understand it.

[48] But the fundamental motivation for the most malevolent actions is actually revenge against God.

[49] And that's even the case if the people who are malevolent are atheists.

[50] It doesn't matter.

[51] And it doesn't matter in some sense.

[52] It doesn't even matter if God exists.

[53] It's the people who are acting malevolently act as if there is a sapient creator who is responsible for this horrible mess against whom revenge must be promulgated and you know the earliest example of that is in that the earliest literary example of that is in the cane and able story because cane kills able who is also his ideal kills able clearly to spite god because his sacrifices were rejected it's an unbelievably profound story because it's that is exactly how people react when their sacrifices are rejected by God, for all intents and purposes, they become bitter and resentful and look for revenge.

[54] And the more vengeful they are, the more they enter the territory of absolute good and evil rather than proximal good and evil.

[55] And it's very helpful for people who have post -traumatic stress disorder to start to understand that sort of thing, because otherwise they can't find a way out.

[56] And so, you know, things have these levels of existence theological at the bottom.

[57] and that's where the battle between good and evil takes place and where the power of the word is of the truthful word is most evident and then above that is philosophical and then perhaps above that is political and economic and sociological and then individual or familial and then individual and you know and complicated things manifest themselves at all those levels simultaneously and you have to pick a level of analysis that's most suitable to formulate the problem well the proximal cause of my video production was the promotion of legislation to make compelled speech of a certain form mandatory.

[58] And that produced two responses.

[59] One was a proximal response.

[60] The transgender activist community a community which, by my estimation, in no way speaks legitimately for the transgender community and many transgender people have told me precisely that, a substantial number of them, in well -written and well -formulated letters to me. I've received at least, I think it's up to about 35 of letters like that now.

[61] They went after me along with the coterie of expected suspects, the LGBT activists and the radical leftists and so forth, and, you know, called me a transphobe and a racist, which is really something I just, I think it was because I made some disparaging comments about the leaders of the Black Lives Matter in Toronto, who, believe me, deserve all the disparaging comments you could heap on them.

[62] You know, that's completely independently of the potential validity of the Black Lives Matters movement.

[63] I've said virtually nothing about that.

[64] So then the argument started really, I suppose, in the media and online, is, well, what the hell was going on?

[65] Was I just this bigoted, transphobic, fossil dinosaur, or was something else happening?

[66] And I believe when I made the videos that the legislation itself and the policies were signifying a crisis, a disjunction in Western society that was far, of which the gender pronoun argument was only a tiny tendril.

[67] And the fact that the videos received so much attention and the aftermath of it also continues to reverberate.

[68] With no decrease whatsoever in intensity, I would say, and this is like, what, six months later, seven months later, it's a long time.

[69] It's no 15 minutes.

[70] It's a long time.

[71] It's because I stuck my, I put my finger on a nerve.

[72] And I've been thinking about why that was, because many people have decried political correctness.

[73] But they did it in generic ways, you know.

[74] And so here's a strange sequence of thoughts.

[75] So there's this idea in Christianity that the word, which is the capacity that's associated with consciousness, I would say, is the mechanism by which chaotic potential is transformed into habitable order, and also the mechanism by which order that has become too rigid is dissolved and reconstituted, right?

[76] That's the basic element of the hero myth.

[77] And the word, the logos, is a universally distributed eternal phenomena.

[78] But in the Christian context, it's also been given a localization.

[79] So it's as if this universal principle, while that's the word made flesh, it's as if the universal principle was also instantiated in the local.

[80] And there's a deep idea there, which is that the universal lacks something.

[81] And what it lacks is specificity.

[82] So in order to make the universal, even more universal, you make it specific.

[83] In what sense do you think this is, I mean, I find this fascinating as a cognitive anthropologist because it seems to speak to the level of cognitive processing that we find most workable as human beings, right there.

[84] We've evolved to live in small social units and be attentive to minds that are out there.

[85] We have a consciousness of other consciousness is essentially a heightened one.

[86] And it seems to be that in order to make things tangible for people, it has to be brought down to the level of our regular human cognitive.

[87] Exactly, exactly.

[88] Well, the linguists have noticed that as well, right, because they've identified, I don't remember what they call them, but they're natural, the natural level of semantic formulation.

[89] So words like cat, dog, they're often short words, and they seem to signify the typical, automatic, untrained level of perception.

[90] And so things manifest us manifest themselves to us at a certain level of resolution.

[91] And that's the level of resolution at which conscious reality exists.

[92] And there is something about that.

[93] There's the movement that the encapsulation of the universal into the particular is what produces reality.

[94] And the idea is also expressed in the image of the genie, which is of course genius.

[95] And the genie is tremendous power encapsulated in a tiny space and and the there's a the christian idea uh of that because one of the things the christians were trying to figure out was how was the entire majesty of god able to instantiate itself into a human frame and they had this idea they called canosis which was the emptying of god and i think of that i think a modern person would think about that as the difference between a high resolution photo and a low resolution photo it's so like human beings are low resolution representations of God, that's one way of thinking about it.

[96] And I think it's a, there's some, you know, there's a profound idea lurking behind that that we are not capable of formulating properly and it has something to do with the nature of consciousness, which is something we do not understand in the least.

[97] So, anyways, I think that what happened in my, in my case with the videos was that I took this general problem, which is this philosophical and theological schism that's developed in Western culture that's that's really destabilizing it in many ways.

[98] I mean, the New York Times had an op -ed yesterday about how the West has lost faith in its central mission.

[99] That was the New York Times, you know.

[100] But what I did was take that general problem and make it specific because what I said was, well, here's a law, it's kind of a little law, doesn't seem to affect many people, but it has an implication, and I'm not going to do it.

[101] And so it made, you know, every global thing manifests its in tiny real places.

[102] And so, you know, people have asked me, well, why did I pick that hill to die on?

[103] It's like, well, you know, you have to pick a hill to die on.

[104] That's why.

[105] That's why, because reality manifests itself in the particulars.

[106] So, anyways, it's, you asked about my family.

[107] Well, the most stressful period, I would say, was the first two months, because, you know, we've had we as a unit we've had some media experience not a tremendous amount but enough so that we were reasonably familiar with it but this was a clamorous onslaught and at the same time the university in its wisdom decided to send me first one letter telling me to stop doing what I was doing which was actually perversely helpful because I had made the claim that making that while making the video I made the claim that making the video was probably illegal under the pending legislation.

[108] And of course, people instantly accused me of overreacting.

[109] And then the university helpfully delivered me a letter, certainly informed by legal advice, stating that what I had feared about what I was doing was actually the case, that I was violating the university's principles of inclusion and diversity, and also likely violating the provincial guidelines.

[110] And I thought, well, thank you very much, because, you know, you proved my point.

[111] And And they also said that, you know, they'd been receiving many letters from people claiming that I had transformed the campus into an unsafe space without mentioning the fact that they were receiving hundreds and then thousands of letters and signatures supporting me, which I found, I actually mentioned it once I got the letter.

[112] I mentioned it to the university administrators and said, you know, you should take this letter back and rewrite it so that you take both sides of the argument into account, present both sides, and then say that you've decided that, you know, you need to.

[113] to discipline me, but don't omit half the story.

[114] But no, there is no movement on that.

[115] So that's really interesting.

[116] If I can just pause the conversation there, and this may be a tangent, this may be the next avenue of discussion, but what do you think it is on campuses?

[117] My understanding is that it's even worse in the States than it is here in Canada because of just the nature of the profit model, let's say, of the university.

[118] Why do you think it is that some administrations seem to have been, if not possessed by, in your terminology, the ideology of the radical left, or some aspects of the radical left, seem to be pushed more aggressively and essentially give way to those kinds of ideas as opposed to other ideas.

[119] Is this part of that the crisis of Western civilization that you were mentioning that you feel we may be experiencing now?

[120] Is there something more substantial underlying why it is that administration seemed to be willing to go in that direction?

[121] Well, I think there are profound causes, and they do have to do with a crisis in our belief system, the sort of crisis that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky both predicted, and that is a crisis in the faith in Logos, which fundamentally in Logos is the spirit that that you could say imbues matter with life.

[122] That's one way of thinking about it.

[123] And for viewers that haven't seen some of your previous materials, so how would we, let's instantiate that for a moment.

[124] The concept of logos, how would the everyday person experience that in their day -to -day life?

[125] And how is that a focus of the crisis?

[126] Well, you could think about it as, it's the power of speech to transform reality.

[127] But even more important, more importantly and more fundamentally, it's the power of truthful speech to transform reality in a positive direction and so we have this magic ability to change the future and we do that through action obviously but action is oriented by thought and thought is mediated by dialogue and so it's speech in particular that's of critical importance to this Logos process and the Logos is symbolically represented in the figure of Christ who's who's the word that was there at the beginning of time and so that's a very complicated topic but what it essentially means is that the West is formulated the symbol a symbolic representation of the ideal human being and that ideal human being is the person who speaks the truth to change the world right and so I'm really curious about this so in your opinion is this an especially Western concept or is it just simply a matter of you having studied mainly Western mythology?

[128] No, I think it's it's I mean there is emphasis in other in other belief system.

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

[130] You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description.

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

[132] This is episode 20.

[133] An interview and discussion between Dr. Peterson and Transliminal Media's Jordan Levine.

[134] It's entitled Ideology, Logos, and Belief.

[135] Please consider supporting transliminal media on Patreon, as well as watching the original interview on YouTube.

[136] Links can be found in the description.

[137] It's been a few years since we last had a first interview, and a number of things have happened in your life, both personally and in terms of your career and probably your intellectual development as well.

[138] So maybe just to start things off, if you could summarize in your own words, what that experience has been like for you just to catch up our viewers on what's been happening.

[139] Well, the most significant event was the fallout from a series of videos that I made in late September of 2016.

[140] I made one video critiquing the policy framework with which Bill C -16, federal Bill C -16, was likely to be interpreted, taking particular issue with its provisions for compelled speech in relationship to pronouns, but more fundamentally, I would say, by criticizing the theoretical framework regarding human identity that had been instantiated into the law, that the legal claim, and this is mostly stemming from the from legislation and policies that were developed in Ontario, but that will have a significant influence on the federal level, insisting that biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity varied independently, which is a, it's more extreme than a radical social constructionist view, because the radical social constructionist view is that all of those tiers, including to some degree biological sex even, are socioculturally determined.

[141] And of course, human beings are highly cultural animals, so there is pronounced sociocultural determination of virtually everything that we do.

[142] But that doesn't mean that those levels of identity vary independently, which is the claim that's being made.

[143] In fact, they're very, very, very tightly correlated.

[144] It would exceed 0 .95.

[145] They're virtually perfectly correlated.

[146] And so I believe that that's an unwarranted intrusion of a certain kind of ideology.

[147] ideology, its postmodern ideology fundamentally with its roots in a kind of a surround of Marxist identity politics.

[148] And I think that it was completely inappropriate for that to be transformed into legislation.

[149] Anyways, there's been all sorts of consequences of that.

[150] I mean, my household was an absolute media tornado.

[151] I guess it still is, really, for months after that.

[152] There were journalists lining up outside the house.

[153] Outside your own home.

[154] Oh yeah.

[155] Oh, I had no idea.

[156] Oh, yeah.

[157] There were journalists in the house all the time and one after the other.

[158] And what was this like for your, you don't have to answer on camera if you don't be comfortable?

[159] But what was this like for your family?

[160] I mean, it was all very unexpected is my understanding.

[161] Oh, it was completely unexpected.

[162] I mean, I didn't, you know, the reason I made the videos was because I had something to say.

[163] I was trying to, sometimes, you know, I can't sleep at night because I'm thinking about something.

[164] And usually what I'll do is go write it down.

[165] I have some writing to do.

[166] So I get up and I go write to.

[167] down what I'm thinking and that usually does the trick.

[168] But because I had been playing with YouTube, I thought, well, I'll try making YouTube video and telling people what I'm thinking about and see if that performs the same function as writing.

[169] And to me, the function of writing, well, it's twofold.

[170] One is conceivably to communicate with people, although the fundamental purpose for me is to clarify my thought so that I know, because if you're, if some something is disturbing you.

[171] What that means is that it needs to be articulated.

[172] It's the emergence of unexplored territory, something that disturbs you.

[173] That's the right way to think about it.

[174] It's unmapped territory that's manifesting itself.

[175] It's like a vista of threat and possibility.

[176] And you need to articulate a path through it.

[177] And so that's what I was doing.

[178] It was like, I was thinking, well, this is bothering me and this seems to be why.

[179] And here's what I think is going on.

[180] And so I made the video.

[181] and in some sense I didn't think anything more of it and then well see what happened I think and you know when I've been thinking about this in retrospect is it's never obvious what's going on because things go on at multiple levels and I think they go on at a theological level there's that's the most fundamental level of of let's call it epistemological reality it might even be ontological reality but certainly epistemological reality if I can interject for a moment, what do you mean by theological in this sense?

[182] What does that mean to you?

[183] Well, it's been my experience as a clinician that if you, the more serious the events that you're discussing with people, the more the language shifts towards what you might describe as the religious.

[184] So, for example, post -traumatic stress disorder, that's a good example, or cases of serious abuse, child abuse, or like truly reprehensible interactions between people, they're best conceptualized with regards to a dialogue about the nature of good and evil.

[185] And in fact, with post -traumatic stress disorder, that's actually necessary, I believe.

[186] And I should say, in keeping with that, I've had a number of war vets come up to me after my recent talks and tell me that watching my lectures has cured their post -traumatic stress disorder.

[187] Because I provided, and I've provided my clients with the same thing.

[188] If you're, most people develop PTSD, And other catastrophic psychological reactions, when something terrible, not so much when something terrible happens to them, but when something terrible happens to them because of someone malevolent.

[189] And sometimes that malevolent person can be themselves.

[190] So soldiers, for example, often develop PTSD if they observe themselves doing something on the battlefield that they did not believe was within their realm of action.

[191] And so it's as if the archetypal adversary leapt forward.

[192] out of their soul and seized them and acted for them on the battlefield.

[193] And then they're shattered by that.

[194] They can't believe that they were capable of that.

[195] That destroys their sense of what it means to be human and what being human means.

[196] And that's more likely to happen to people who are somewhat naive, I would say.

[197] Certainly that's the case with the PTSD literature.

[198] And so to treat someone in a situation like that, you have to help them develop a philosophy, I would say, but probably a theology of good and evil, because you have to investigate the structure of the motivation for malevolence.

[199] And you can't do that outside the confines of religious language, partly because, like, this is a difficult thing to understand, and I think you have had contact with true evil in order to understand it.

[200] But the fundamental motivation for the most malevolent actions is actually revenge against God.

[201] and that's even the case if the people who are malevolent are atheists it doesn't matter and it doesn't matter in some sense it doesn't even matter if god exists it's the people the people who are acting malevolently act as if there is a sapient creator who is responsible for this horrible mess against whom revenge must be promulgated and you know the earliest example of that is in that the earliest literary example of that is in the Canaan Abel story because Kane kills Abel, who is also his ideal, kills Abel clearly to spite God because his sacrifices were rejected.

[202] It's an unbelievably profound story because that is exactly how people react.

[203] When their sacrifices are rejected by God for all intents and purposes, they become bitter and resentful and look for revenge.

[204] And the more vengeful they are, the more they enter the territory of absolute good and evil rather than proximal good and evil.

[205] And it's very helpful for people who have post -traumatic stress disorder to start to understand that sort of thing because otherwise they can't find a way out.

[206] And so, you know, things have these levels of existence, theological at the bottom.

[207] And that's where the battle between good and evil takes place and where the power of the truthful word is most evident.

[208] and then above that is philosophical and then perhaps above that is political and economic and sociological and then individual or familial and then individual and you know and complicated things manifest themselves at all those levels simultaneously and you have to pick a level of analysis that's most suitable to formulate the problem well the proximal cause of my video production was the promotion of legislation to make compelled speech of a certain form mandatory.

[209] And that produced two responses.

[210] One was a proximal response, the transgender activist community, a community which, by my estimation, in no way, speaks legitimately for the transgender community.

[211] And many transgender people have told me precisely that, a substantial number of them, in well -written and well -formulated letters to me. received at least, I think it's up to about 35 of letters like that now.

[212] They went after me along with the coterie of expected suspects, the LGBT activists and the radical leftists and so forth and, you know, called me a transphobic racist, which is really something I just, I think it was because I made some disparaging comments about the leaders of the Black Lives Matter in Toronto who, believe me, deserve all the disparaging comments you could heap on them.

[213] You know, that's completely independently of the potential validity of the Black Lives Matters movement.

[214] I've said virtually nothing about that.

[215] So then the argument started really, I suppose, in the media and online, is, well, what the hell was going on?

[216] Was I just this bigoted, transphobic, fossil dinosaur?

[217] Or was something else happening?

[218] And I believe when I made the videos that the legislative, itself, and the policies were signifying a crisis, a disjunction in Western society that was far, of which the gender pronoun argument was only a tiny tendril, and the fact that the videos received so much attention, and the aftermath of it also continues to reverberate with no decrease whatsoever in intensity, I would say, and this is like, what, six months later, seven months later, it's a long time.

[219] It's no 15 minutes.

[220] It's a long time.

[221] It's because I stuck my, I put my finger on a nerve.

[222] And I've been thinking about why that was, because many people have decried political correctness, but they did it in generic ways, you know.

[223] And so here's a strange sequence of thoughts.

[224] So there's this idea in Christianity that the word, which is the capacity that's associated with consciousness, would say is the mechanism by which chaotic potential is transformed into habitable order and also the mechanism by which order that has become too rigid is dissolved and reconstituted right that's the basic element of the hero myth and and the the word the logos is a universally distributed eternal phenomena but in the Christian context it's also being given a localization.

[225] So it's as if this universal principle, while that's the word made flesh, it's as if the universal principle was also instantiated in the local.

[226] And there's a deep idea there, which is that the universal lacks something.

[227] And what it lacks is specificity.

[228] So in order to make the universal, even more universal, you make it specific.

[229] In what sense do you think this is, I mean, I find this fascinating as a cognitive anthropologist, because it seems to speak to the level of cognitive processing that we find most workable as human beings.

[230] Right there, we've evolved to live in small social units and be attentive to minds that are out there.

[231] We have a consciousness of other consciousness is essentially a heightened one.

[232] And it seems to be that in order to make things tangible for people, it has to be brought down to the level of our regular human cognitive.

[233] Exactly, exactly.

[234] Well, the linguists have noticed that as well, right?

[235] Because they've identified, I don't remember what they call them, but they're natural, the natural level of semantic formulation.

[236] So words like cat, dog, they're often short words.

[237] And they seem to signify the typical, automatic, untrained level of perception.

[238] And so things manifest themselves to us at a certain level of resolution.

[239] And that's the level of.

[240] resolution at which conscious reality exists.

[241] And there is something about that.

[242] There's the movement that the encapsulation of the universal into the particular is what produces reality.

[243] And the idea is also expressed in the image of the genie, which is of course genius.

[244] And the genie is tremendous power encapsulated in a tiny space.

[245] And there's a Christian idea of that because one of the things the Christians were trying to figure out was how was the entire majesty of God.

[246] able to instantiate itself into a human frame.

[247] And they had this idea, they called canosis, which was the emptying of God.

[248] And I think of that, I think a modern person would think about that as the difference between a high -resolution photo and a low -resolution photo.

[249] It's so like human beings are low -resolution representations of God.

[250] That's one way of thinking about it.

[251] And I think it's a, you know, there's a profound idea lurking behind that that we are not capable of formulating properly and it has something to do with the nature of consciousness, which is something we do not understand in the least.

[252] So anyways, I think that what happened in my case with the videos was that I took this general problem, which is this philosophical and theological schism that's developed in Western culture that's really destabilizing it in many ways.

[253] I mean, the New York Times had an op -ed yesterday about how the West has lost faith in its central mission.

[254] That was the New York times, you know.

[255] But what I did was take that general problem and make it specific because what I said was, well, here's a law, it's kind of a little law, doesn't seem to affect many people, but it has an implication and I'm not going to do it.

[256] And so it made, you know, every global thing manifests itself in tiny real places.

[257] And so, you know, people have asked me, well, why did I pick that hill to die on?

[258] It's like, well, you know, you have to pick a hill to die on.

[259] That's why.

[260] That's why, because reality manifests itself in the particulars.

[261] So, anyways, it's, you asked about my family.

[262] Well, the most stressful period, I would say, was the first two months.

[263] Because, you know, we've had, we, as a unit, we've had some media experience, not a tremendous amount, but enough so that we were reasonably familiar with it but this was a clamorous onslaught and at the same time the university in its wisdom decided to send me first one letter telling me to stop doing what I was doing which was actually perversely helpful because I had made the claim that making that while making the video I made the claim that making the video was probably illegal under the pending legislation and of course people instantly accused me of overreacting and then the university helpfully delivered me a letter, certainly informed by legal advice, stating that what I had feared about what I was doing was actually the case, that I was violating the university's principles of inclusion and diversity, and also likely violating the provincial guidelines.

[264] And I thought, well, thank you very much, because, you know, you proved my point.

[265] And they also said that, you know, they'd been receiving many letters from people claiming that I had transformed the campus into an unsafe space, without mentioning the fact that they were receiving hundreds and then thousands of letters and signatures supporting me, which I found, I actually mentioned it once I got the letter.

[266] I mentioned it to the university administrators and said, you know, you should take this letter back and rewrite it so that you take both sides of the argument into account, present both sides, and then say that you've decided that, you know, you need to discipline me, but don't omit half the story.

[267] But no, there is no movement on that.

[268] So that's really interesting.

[269] If I can just pause the conversation there and let's this may be a tangent.

[270] This may be the next avenue of discussion, but what do you think it is on campuses?

[271] My understanding is that it's even worse in the states than it is here in Canada because of just the nature of the profit model, let's say, of the university.

[272] Why do you think it is that some administrations seem to have been, if not possessed by, in your terminology, the ideology of the radical last.

[273] or some aspects of the radical left, seem to be pushed more aggressively and essentially give way to those kinds of ideas as opposed to other ideas.

[274] Is this part of the crisis of Western civilization that you were mentioning that you feel we may be experiencing now?

[275] Is there something more substantial underlying why it is that administration seem to be willing to go in that direction?

[276] Well, I think there are profound causes, and they do have to do with a crisis in our belief system, the sort of crisis that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky both predicted, and that is a crisis in the faith in Logos, which fundamentally, and Logos is the spirit that you could say imbues matter with life.

[277] That's one way of thinking about it.

[278] And for viewers that haven't seen some of your previous materials, So how would we, let's instantiate that for a moment, the concept of logos, how would the everyday person experience that in their, you know, in their day -to -day life?

[279] And how is that a focus of the crisis?

[280] Well, you could think about it as it's the power of speech to transform reality.

[281] But even more important, more importantly and more fundamentally, it's the power of truthful speech to transform reality in a positive direction.

[282] And so, you know, we have this magic ability.

[283] to change the future.

[284] And we do that through action, obviously, but action is oriented by thought, and thought is mediated by dialogue.

[285] And so it's speech in particular that's of critical importance to this Logos process.

[286] And the Logos is symbolically represented in the figure of Christ, who's the word that was there at the beginning of time.

[287] And so that's a very complicated topic.

[288] But what it essentially means is that, the West is formulated the symbol a symbolic representation of the ideal human being and that ideal human being is the person who speaks the truth to change the world right and so I'm really curious about this so in your opinion is this an especially Western concept or is it just simply a matter of you having studied mainly Western method no I think it's it's I mean there is emphasis in other in other belief systems on I think it's more explicit in Christianity it's I would say Christianity has done two things it's developed the most explicit doctrine of of good versus evil and it's developed the most explicit and articulated doctrine of of the logos and so I would say in many traditions it's implicit it's implicit in hero mythology for example and I think what happens is that if you aggregate enough hero myths and track out the central theme, you end up with the logos.

[289] It's the thing that's common to all heroes.

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

[291] Right.

[292] So this reminds me of, I don't know if you're familiar with this work, but a man named René Girard.

[293] Many people have been talking to be about René Girard.

[294] Right.

[295] Okay.

[296] So, and just to challenge the ideas here, so in our previous interview, I sometimes played devil's advocate and viewers apparently appreciated that attack.

[297] So when I say these things, just take that with a grain of solved.

[298] So René Girard has a fascinating theory about the scapegoat, the role of the scapegoat, which we won't get into too in depth here.

[299] But sort of coincidentally, in scare quotes, he winds up at a state where the answer to all his problems is Catholicism.

[300] You know, he has this roundabout and really actually intriguing theory about the nature of the role of envy and human society and how that, how the resolution of that creates bonds.

[301] But then, you know, And somehow he decides that the Catholicism, the particular religion that he was born into, is the solution.

[302] So in what case, in what sense, if you were to look at this self -critically, do you think this may be an instance of the same thing where in terms of what's available to you as a Western researcher is the Western mythology?

[303] So of course, that's salient and you're able to make meaning out of that.

[304] But is it really any more or less profound?

[305] in terms of its exploration of these ideas as, let's say, Buddhist mythology or Islamic Sufi mythology?

[306] How would you answer that question?

[307] Well, I thought, again, it's a matter of its articulation and dissemination into society as a whole.

[308] So you imagine that these ideas are implicit, which, you know, there's an idea, for example, in Christianity, that Christ is implicit in the Old Testament, right, which actually happens to be true.

[309] depending of course on what you mean by true because in the sense of the messianic figure yeah well there's this dawning awareness that out of a plethora of heroes the ultimate hero will emerge right think about this psychologically just think about it psychologically imagine that what human beings are trying to do is to abstract out the ultimate patterns for for modes of being and so what they do is they look for admirable people.

[310] And then they make a story about an amalgam of admirable people.

[311] That would be a hero.

[312] And then the hero stories get amalgamated.

[313] And so you get a meta -hero.

[314] And Christ is a meta -hero.

[315] It's completely independent of any historical reality.

[316] That's a whole different issue.

[317] And I'm not denying any historical reality.

[318] That's a different issue.

[319] But the Western imagination has been at work for a very long time constructing up a meta -hero and also his adversary and clarifying the nature of those and that has been done in a sufficiently delineated way so that it's produced a major it's produced a major impact on the manner in which our societies are constructed because the cornerstone of our society is respect for logos and that's instantiated in the doctrine of respect for free speech that also that it's also instantiated in the doctrine that every individual has transcendent value which I do believe is something that the West is developed to a far greater degree than any other culture that currently exists on that currently exists and probably ever existed it's just such an unlikely it's such an unlikely concept you know in the West even if you're a murderer even if people know you're a murderer you still have intrinsic value you have to be treated as if you're as if you have a spark of divinity within you so but Would you say that this was the case even during, let's say, the Middle Ages?

[320] And I know in terms of my meager understanding of medieval historiography is that its previous characterization as the Dark Ages is actually quite unfounded.

[321] But could you not argue that what you're describing is actually a product of, and maybe they're related, but it's a product of what arose out of particular socio -political processes that actually distanced society from religion itself.

[322] They may or may not have been a product of that religious heritage.

[323] But, you know, in the height of the West's or Christendom's possession by Christianity in an ideological sense, as an all -encompassing explanation of the universe, I mean, witches were burned, people's thumbs were cut off for, you know, for challenging non -heliocentric positions.

[324] So how do you reconcile that historical trend, I suppose, away from religion and towards the sorts of respects for the individual that you're describing.

[325] Well, when you ask that question, I had a vision, and the vision was of a plane of earth, barren earth, with a gigantic crystal lean structure underneath forcing itself upward and breaking up the dirt.

[326] And that's exactly how I would answer that question.

[327] It's that there's this great idea attempting to manifest itself.

[328] Like it manifested itself, for example, in the decimation of slavery, right?

[329] Because there was an idea, and the idea was, well, all men are created equal.

[330] That's the idea.

[331] And that's idea is rooted in a much deeper idea, which is that there's a spark of divinity in everyone, and that's this logos capacity that enables people to name things and give form to the world, and that we're not to violate that.

[332] And that emerged, you know, you could say, well, that emerged, tremendously slowly, but didn't emerge slowly at all, man. The idea is only, in its thoroughly formulated sense, the idea is only about 2 ,000 years old.

[333] It emerged with incredible rapidity and demolished everything in its path, essentially.

[334] Now, you can, you know, the people who are, who like to trace the development of the Western mind back to the Enlightenment and stop there would say that it was actually the Enlightenment, and that ran counter to the Christian overwhelmingly oppressive Christian dogma that was standing in its way.

[335] And of course, there's a certain truth to that in that religious ideas, when formulated, can become restricted and dogmatic, that there's the spirit and the dogma that are always in conflict.

[336] And both are necessary because the dogma provides structure and the spirit provides transformation.

[337] But my reading of, see, I think I take a much longer time view than the typical Western Enlightenment philosopher who tends to think, like Charles Taylor, when he went back to look for the sources of the modern self, basically went back 500 years.

[338] But I think in evolutionary terms, it's like that's a scratch on the surface.

[339] What we're talking about here is something that's indescribably deeper than merely what happened in the Enlightenment.

[340] I just see that as a, in some sense, as a side show of this crystalline process that's emerging.

[341] You know, Nietzsche said that Christianity developed the sense of truth to such a degree that it died at the hands of its own construction.

[342] And I think that's brilliant.

[343] I think it's absolutely the case.

[344] And so you can see the Enlightenment as part of that.

[345] It's that the spirit of truth was highly developed and that led people to start to criticize the very structure that had given rise to that desire for truth.

[346] And some of it's also philosophical.

[347] confusion in my estimation.

[348] It's like once the rationalists and the empiricists got going, you know, we started to formulate a very powerful doctrine of the objective world.

[349] And that that doctrine appeared to stand in opposition to the doctrine that was put forth by the Christian church, the mythological doctrine, let's say, if you assume that what the mythological doctrine was was a variant of that kind of empirical truth.

[350] which it wasn't.

[351] It was something completely different than that.

[352] Right.

[353] And this is a really important point, because I think some people construe, I don't want to say misconstrued, because it could be correct.

[354] They construe that your description of what, let's say, early modern or early humans understood their religious mythology to represent was, in fact, material reality.

[355] and if I understand correctly you've been arguing that they didn't see it that way there was no the concept of material reality is a post -enlightment concept I mean if you look for example at how the alchemists describe things prior to the emergence of the material world they discuss the the nature of the essence of the lemon well let you know lemon is solar in essence it partakes of the sun well it needs the sun it's yellow like the sun it has the same it has the same stuff as the sun the sun is golden the sun is mercurial the sun is illuminating like it has all sorts of attributes that we would consider spiritual there there is no distinction between the spiritual and the material so right but if there's no distinction it's not that i i mean humans live in we operate on a material basis right so if there's if there's no distinction is it is it not in some sense, sort of a morass of confusion.

[356] And it's that what we would consider spiritual as opposed to material was equally material and spiritual to...

[357] It's more low resolution than confused.

[358] I mean, it's not...

[359] It's a morass in some sense in that, you know, when you can see a cell through a 10x or 100, let's say a 10X microscope, it have to be a fairly big cell.

[360] But anyways, you look at a cell through a 10x microphone.

[361] microscope.

[362] Well, now you can tell that the thing is composed of cells.

[363] Well, it's still unclear, right?

[364] Because the cell that you see is a low resolution cell.

[365] And then you zoom in and it's, wow, this thing is made out of all these other things.

[366] And then you zoom in more.

[367] It's like, wow, there's a bunch more things there.

[368] And so part of the progress of human knowledge is the differentiation of the map.

[369] Now, you can get quite a long ways with an undifferentiated map.

[370] In fact, often an undifferentiated map is actually more useful.

[371] because it obscures useless detail.

[372] And so we've always been making maps of the world.

[373] And you might say that we were making maps of the objective world, even when we didn't know it.

[374] And I would say, no, we weren't.

[375] I don't believe that.

[376] We were making maps of being.

[377] And that's not the same thing.

[378] And it's like, so imagine that you exist within a sacred landscape.

[379] Okay, just for the sake of argument.

[380] Well, how could a modern person conceive of that?

[381] Well, that's easy.

[382] leave home for a while and then come back let's say it's your parents' home and you've been gone for 15 years and you come back and everything in the house is imbued with magical significance and you might say well that's not inherent to the objects it's like yeah sure depending on how you define the objects now it's completely inherent to the objects as they manifest themselves in your realm of perception and you can dissociate the object itself from the, let's call it the subjective overlay.

[383] But that's not such an easy thing to do, and it's not so self -evident.

[384] And it's not even obvious that what you're doing when you do that is coming up with a more accurate picture of reality.

[385] Because the picture of reality that represents the item, let's call it an item of sentimental or sacred importance, how do you know that that importance isn't the most important part of that item?

[386] That's how you act.

[387] You won't throw it way well why it's just a material entity it's like no it's not it's an element of being and that's a different thing and so what the what people prior to the dawn of the materialist age let's say we're doing was producing maps of being and and that meant that things had historical significance the mountain where your where your grandfather was buried is not the same mountain as another mountain and you might say well yeah well yes they are they're made out of the same you know clay and silica and all of that.

[388] It's like, yeah, man, you're missing the point.

[389] Now, a Westerner would say, okay, well, probably not, but, but a Westerner might object, yes, but it's extraordinarily useful to differentiate and to act as if there's an objective reality and a subjective reality because it enables, it opens up all sorts of new avenues of pursuit.

[390] It's like, yes, that's why we're technologically, why we're technological wizards, but we've lost something.

[391] What we're we've lost is our capacity to understand the reality of that overlay that we scraped off in order to produce objective reality.

[392] And so...

[393] That's a fascinating point.

[394] So in what sense do you think that the persistence of religion, and not merely in, or not only, I should say, in the symbolic mythological sense that you've, it seems, made a significant effort to resurrect and articulate to a wider audience?

[395] not only in that form, but in the fundamentalist form, in the ISIS manifestation, let's say, or in the far -right evangelical Christian movement in the States, how much of that do you think is a response to what you're saying, the fact that we lost a certain element?

[396] Definitely it's a response.

[397] I mean, and this is something Nietzsche and Dostoevsky delineated with exceptional clarity.

[398] Western people had a whole.

[399] whole torn in their soul and something rush, nature abores a vacuum, something will rush in to replace it.

[400] Now you might ask, well, why is that?

[401] And, you know, people like Sam Harris, for example, and Dawkins would think about it as a regression to a form of barbarism, but I think they violate their own principles because they're not taking the past seriously enough.

[402] And this is particularly the case with Dawkins, who I think is actually starting to recognize this.

[403] If you take an evolutionary perspective on on on the development of of belief for example you there's all sorts of things you discover quite rapidly that that indicate that the manner in which belief structures are structured is an evolved is something that evolved and it evolved for for functional reasons let me step back from the perspective of the materialist there's nothing more real than the atom let's say okay from the perspective of a philosopher of of being, alternatively, there's nothing more real than suffering.

[404] You develop a different metaphysics, starting from those two different perspectives.

[405] And what do you mean by being in this sense?

[406] For those, you know, putting myself in the shoes of one of the people you just described a second ago, to them that I think all of a sudden when you shift to philosophy of being, it's like, okay, this could mean anything.

[407] So let's try to nail that down.

[408] And how would you articulate that to people for whom it doesn't resonate immediately?

[409] yes well that of course you'd ask me that because that's a very complicated problem being is the realm in which suffering is real now people act as if their pain is real okay so so now suffering specifically because it's not you can't argue with it it's the least it's the least denial aspect of one's subjective experience well so that's it now descart's you know descartes great investigation and to doubt led him to the conclusion that I think therefore I am and I don't think by think he meant think the way we think he meant more like I'm the fact that I'm consciously aware is something that I cannot deny that's good that's fine and you know more power to Descartes for taking it to that to that extreme and then producing what he did produce out of that but I don't for me when I investigated the structure of doubt the conclusion that I drew was that there is nothing more real than suffering And I would say you can tell what people experience as real and and believe, let's say, because their actions indicate that.

[410] And people's actions indicate that they believe in their own pain.

[411] And that's undeniable.

[412] You can't argue yourself out of it.

[413] So it transcends rationality.

[414] And so it's real.

[415] And then, of course, it's a tenet of the, of, it's a, it's an axiomatic tenet.

[416] of religious systems, generally speaking, that life is suffering, which is a restatement of exactly the same thing.

[417] And so, being is the domain in which pain announces itself as real.

[418] And that's not the material world.

[419] It's not the material world.

[420] Pain is not a material phenomena.

[421] Now, you can say, well, it's associated with material phenomena.

[422] It's like, well, yes, I wouldn't like to point out that that is hardly a brilliant observation.

[423] Everything is associated with the material world, because, here we are in this world but we do not understand so it's a qualia let's say if you want to think about it from a philosophical perspective and by so by pain here because I immediately leap to the devil's advocate position well yes but pain certainly is a neurological process that can be treated with with certain medications and those have metabolic and chemical interactions that can actually limit pain or decrease pain is treatable in some sense but by pain I believe what you mean is the experience of suffering generally, right, is inavoidable.

[424] You can tinker at the edges with medication or whatnot.

[425] Well, and quite nicely, and thank God for that.

[426] And you can tinker with it in all sorts of ways, which is exactly what we're doing all the time, you know, is trying to, people say, well, they're striving for happiness.

[427] Actually, if you look at the empirical investigations into that, that's wrong.

[428] When people talk about happiness, that isn't what they mean.

[429] Happiness is extroversion, and in its extreme, it's like mania, it's enthusiasm and and joy and and it's impulsive and expressive and that isn't what people want.

[430] What they want is the cessation of negative emotion.

[431] So actually the scales that measure well -being, for example, technically, which is something that Sam Harris is very concerned about, they basically measure the same thing that neuroticism measures.

[432] It's sensitivity to anxiety and emotional pain.

[433] And people want very little of that.

[434] Right.

[435] And then they say they're happy because they're not differentiating.

[436] like there's the positive emotion end of being happy, and there's the not -suffering end of being happy, and what people mean when they say that they want to be happy is that they don't want to be suffering.

[437] That's what they mean.

[438] Do you think there's an aspect of our current civilization or society, whether it's the West or at this point just globally, where we have elevated a confused notion of the former with the latter, in the sense that because those are undifferentiated in our minds, we use this word happy or happiness.

[439] People, I don't know, what pops in my mind are people's Instagram accounts.

[440] And Facebook's other social media things where everyone is trying to show everyone else just how joyous and enthusiastic and wonder -filled their life is because this seems to be our new ideal in a society that lacks any other ideal in the term.

[441] And as Solzhenitsyn said, the philosophy that life is for happiness is destroyed the second the jackboots kick down your door at three in the morning, right?

[442] It can't withstand tragedy.

[443] And that's the critical issue, because life is tragedy.

[444] So you need a philosophy that can withstand tragedy.

[445] That's what everyone needs.

[446] That's what everyone wants.

[447] It's, and I would say, the philosophy that can withstand the ultimate tragedy of being is as close to the ultimate truth as we can strive for.

[448] And that's what religious systems, and that's what religious systems are attempting to delineate.

[449] So, for example, in Christianity, there's an idea that people are fallen, and they've fallen into the terrible realm of history and self -consciousness, with its knowledge of suffering and finitude, and its necessity for work, which is associated with that, because if you know that there's you, and that you know that you can suffer because you're limited and that you could die, then you're cursed with work.

[450] Because even if you're okay right now, you're not like a lion who's going to go to sleep and be happy, or like the zebra beside it, who won't run away when the lion is sleeping.

[451] We know about the future.

[452] So we're cursed to work and make sacrifices constantly.

[453] That's our destiny, let's say.

[454] And in your estimation, is that a function of our, I assume what was an evolutionary process from which we arrived at a consciousness of time, future?

[455] We began to see the future.

[456] I think it was a large part of consequence of the development of our hyper -alert visual systems.

[457] So, and this ties back to some questions that we've received from previous viewers.

[458] So in the sense that you are articulating, and some people would construe it as defending, but articulating the validity of the Christian position per se, it's not in a literal sense that the, Let's say people who are Conflating the material and the spiritual May be assuming but it's in the sense that it reflects something that we have evolved and that has evolved with us and we have begun to experience And the religious symbology is how we make sense of that Oh definitely definitely.

[459] That's why mostly it's encapsulated in story and image the reason for that is it's too complicated for us to articulate So it's bottom up.

[460] It's bottom up development It's like the iconography of Christianity is an attempt to express something that we're not yet smart enough to understand.

[461] This is a fascinating concept.

[462] So, again, coming from a cognitive anthropological position, this is like, yes, obviously.

[463] But I think for many people, the idea that religious systems, belief systems in general, and very probably a lot of what we're living out in our day -to -day life, you know, now in 2017, is the outgrowth of something that we aren't fully conscious of, that we can't yet articulate, but is nonetheless a fundamental nature of our experience.

[464] Sure, let me give you an example.

[465] So a while back I was in New York, and unfortunately I don't remember in which museum.

[466] But in this room, in this museum, there was a spectacular collection of mid -to -late Renaissance art, staggering room, you know, the value of the paintings in that room, they're priceless, you know.

[467] So there was billions of dollars worth of art in that room.

[468] And then there were people from all over the world looking at it.

[469] And so one of the pieces was the assumption of Mary, beautiful, not in that iconic manner that was characteristic of medieval art that's very graphic, that's very abstracted, right?

[470] But the forms are personified so that Mary and Christ, in these sorts of representations, are identifiable individual human beings.

[471] And there were a lot of people standing in front of the painting looking at it.

[472] And I thought, well, let's be a cultural anthropologist about this.

[473] All right.

[474] That museum is on some of the most expensive real estate in the world.

[475] There's a tremendous amount of time and effort spent on producing the museum and fortifying it and guarding it.

[476] And then people from all over the world make.

[477] pilgrimages to stand in front of it and what they are looking at they do not understand so what the hell are they doing there why are they looking at those pictures well the answer is the pictures speak to their soul but not in the language that they understand and so but that's okay because we do we we don't understand ourselves that that's obvious we don't we're more than we can understand.

[478] Yes, by a tremendous margin and we're trying to understand ourselves and the artists and the mystics are at the vanguard of the development of that understanding and they come up with ideas that are clearer than mere feelings but are not yet clear.

[479] So we imagine that there's a...

[480] Is this analogous to the dream in some senses?

[481] It's analogous to the dream.

[482] It's the cultural dream.

[483] Sure, the dream is the vanguard of ideas.

[484] right the that there's the body and the dream emerges from the body and then the idea emerges from the dream and and the body the social body is the body politic it's the it's the communal body that's extended over millennia far longer than that it's extended forever and the dream is the mythology that emerges from that and the idea is our attempt to articulate that mythology would it be fair to say that some of the not to get you off track but that this just popped in my head.

[485] So would it be fair to say that some of the frustration that you and other people who are interested in the same material as you feel with respect to, let's say, the new atheist movement, is that there's a failure to realize that what they're critiquing is precisely the equivalent of the dream, that there's value in the not yet precisely articulated experience of being human.

[486] Well, they're also not taking the revolutionary argument seriously.

[487] You know, these ideas are old, like really, really old.

[488] They disappear back into the far reaches of time.

[489] You know, I mean, if you look at Franz de Wall's work, for example, on dominance hierarchies and chimpanzees, you know, there's this old idea that the dominant chimp, because chimps are quite patriarchal as opposed to bonobos, but we won't bother with that for the time being.

[490] Chimps are quite patriarchal.

[491] And, you know, you might think, well, the biggest, meanest.

[492] ugliest chimp wins.

[493] He's the king chimp.

[494] He's the one that gets to father all the baby chimps.

[495] Yes, and no. Yes, because sometimes it is the tyrant that rules the troop.

[496] But the problem with the tyrant is that two semi -tirants can rip him into shreds, and they do, and with incredible brutality.

[497] And it disturbs the entire troop when that happens.

[498] But they'll tear off his genitals with their teeth.

[499] They'll rip off his skin.

[500] skin.

[501] I mean, chimpanzees are super strong.

[502] Like they're about six times as strong as the most well -conditioned man. They can break 300 -pound test steel cable with their bare hands.

[503] They're super strong.

[504] And they have absolutely no restraint whatsoever on their aggression, except the reactions of their conspecifics.

[505] And so don't mess with chimpanzees.

[506] Well, so brute rule is unstable among chimpanzees.

[507] So what's more stable?

[508] Well, the more stable rulers are they pay attention to the females they they facilitate social interactions they reciprocate they have friends and allies and they and they maintain their friendships and their and their formations of alliances and so their rule stabilizes and it's because they're acting out what you might describe as the beginnings of an archetypal pattern they're acting as culture heroes for the chimps and and that means that they have to be acting in a manner that's commensurate with the interest of the group, as well as acting in a manner that's commensurate with their own interest.

[509] And so, while the chimps are starting to act that out, the wolves act that out, the rats acted out, like when two rats engage in rough and tumble play, two juvenile rats, which they will work to do, if one rat is bigger than the other by about 10%, that gives him the kind of weight advantage that makes him able to pin the smaller rat in the wrestling match, pretty much 100 % of the time.

[510] But if you pair those rats repeatedly, if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win at least 30 % of the time, the little rat will stop asking him to play.

[511] Like there's a morality that emerges out of the necessity of social interaction.

[512] Okay, so let's say a morality emerges out of the necessity of social interaction.

[513] Okay, that's not a particularly contentious statement.

[514] But let's say that's been true for hundreds of millions of years, ever since the dominance hierarchy emerged, that's about 350 million years ago.

[515] There's ways of comporting yourself within the dominance hierarchy that allow for your survival and the possibility of your victory.

[516] Okay, so that's the beginnings of morality.

[517] Now, because the dominance hierarchy is so ancient, it actually acts as a selection mechanism.

[518] You see that in human beings.

[519] You see that in all mammals.

[520] The females use the dominance hierarchy, not in every mammalian species, but in most, to peel off.

[521] the top.

[522] So the successful climbers are the ones that leave the most offspring.

[523] So we've been shaped immensely by the necessity of acting morally within the social space.

[524] And so there's an optimal manner of interacting with the dominance hierarchy, and then that becomes the environment, that selection mechanism, and then the organisms are selected by that.

[525] And so that morality becomes structurally part of us as well.

[526] So then there's this concordance between our felt sense of moral obligation and the demands of the social world.

[527] And that's real.

[528] It's as real as anything, especially if you're a Darwinian, because what's most real from the Darwinian perspective is that which selects.

[529] That's the most real.

[530] In fact, it's the definition of real.

[531] It's not the material world, right?

[532] It's not.

[533] It's that which selects.

[534] And that's far broader than the mirror.

[535] material world.

[536] This is a meta process you're saying that is so fundamental to shaping what we view as material reality and that it's more real than let's say an atom in the sense that gravity is more real than, you know, I give you material.

[537] Well, it's real in that it accounts for emergent properties.

[538] You know, like it's not a simple thing to reduce consciousness to its material substrate, but complex forms of social interactions aren't easily reduced in a causal manner to the material substrate.

[539] I mean, we can't draw causal links.

[540] We just don't have that level of sophistication, and perhaps never will.

[541] But the reality of the processes that make up social interactions among social animals can't be reduced to their material substrate, but they're real.

[542] And they're so real, they select.

[543] So they're real.

[544] And this is the problem I have with the people who are simultaneously reductionistic materialists and evolutionary biologists.

[545] It's like, sorry guys, you don't get to be both.

[546] So, and that's the argument that I was trying to have with Sam Harris, you know, which, which augured in very rapidly in the first discussion.

[547] And I thought proceeded adequately well in the second discussion.

[548] You know, we, we, Sam, he, he thinks that you can get the facts to speak moral truths for themselves.

[549] And, and he also has this theory that we should be attempting to, you know, max, well -being, but I'm not going to deal with the second claim at all because the devil's in the details there with regards to how you measure well -being.

[550] And our ability to measure well -being is catastrophically unsophisticated to say the least.

[551] The well -being scales that we have are extroversion minus neuroticism.

[552] That's a big problem for someone who wants to do scientific measurement.

[553] It's like, okay, we're going to increase well -being.

[554] Hey, no problem.

[555] How are you going to measure it?

[556] and who's well -being?

[557] And mine, okay, mine now, my next week, my next month, mine in a year, how about 10 years, how about 50?

[558] And who chooses who, how to measure it?

[559] Well, precisely, and my well -being in relationship to my significant other, in relationship to my family, in relationship to the community, at all those levels of temporal distinction, you're going to measure that, eh?

[560] Good luck.

[561] And don't come and say we can maximize well -being and we can do it scientifically until you get your measurement devices in place.

[562] and they're not in place, and that's fatal, that's a fatal flaw.

[563] I mean, I assume Sam would disagree with this, but in some sense, is that not the fatal flaw of the history of Marxism in the 20th century?

[564] Sure, it's utopianism.

[565] Right.

[566] We can define well -being, and then we can collectively work towards it.

[567] It's like, well, I'm afraid it's just not that simple.

[568] From each according to his ability to each according to his need, right?

[569] Sounds great, devil's in the details, and definitely the devil was in the details of that.

[570] So who defines need?

[571] Who defines ability?

[572] That's a big problem, right?

[573] It's a fatal problem.

[574] And literally, it's a fatal problem.

[575] So, so anyway, so I trace back the development of these religious ideas to, you can trace them infinitely far back.

[576] And the issue of hierarchy and hierarchical position is absolutely key.

[577] It's key to evolutionary survival.

[578] It's key to mate selection.

[579] It's key to survival.

[580] It's key.

[581] On that note, another side checker of potential interesting avenues, we had a very incisive question from a viewer, or a statement from a viewer, I should say, that the centrality of the dominance hierarchy in your thinking or understanding of the evolutionary process, in what sense is that not just a re -articulation of the Marxist and or post -modernist position that powers everything?

[582] Well, it is, that assumes that the reason that you...

[583] Power relations, I should say.

[584] Yeah, well, that assumes that you relate dominance hierarchy mastery to power.

[585] Well, you can do that because you could define it that way.

[586] Power is what gets you up the dominance hierarchy.

[587] Well, first of all, we should make a couple of things clear.

[588] I use dominance hierarchy because that's a shorthand.

[589] People understand what that means.

[590] It's not clear that hierarchies are, in fact, dominance hierarchies.

[591] And one of my insightful colleagues once told me that I shouldn't use the words dominance hierarchy because Marxism is built into that conceptualization, that the reason that hierarchies exist is because of power.

[592] And I thought, Jesus, that's probably true.

[593] And it never, like, it was quite a devastating criticism in some sense, a comment, because it could easily be that the reason that hierarchical structures were formulated as dominance hierarchies was because the biologists who were, were doing the investigations and the people who were formulating the ideas had already been saturated with a Marxist view of power relations.

[594] But the reason that I brought up DeWall earlier is...

[595] Marxist or colonial.

[596] Sure, sure, absolutely.

[597] I mean, a lot of the recent history of Western civilization has been one of dominance over what we're conceived of, perceived of, as inferior cultures, right?

[598] The white man's burden.

[599] Yes, well, I mean, we don't want it.

[600] We don't want...

[601] I mean, there are a variety of things that contribute to...

[602] success, let's say, and one of them is force.

[603] We won't talk about power because, you know, power.

[604] Force is when I get you to do something you wouldn't choose to do.

[605] And you could say, well, the person who's best at doing that is the winner.

[606] And I would say, no, that's wrong.

[607] That isn't how the evidence stacks up.

[608] Because the problem with being the person who gets the other person to do something by force is you have to enforce it.

[609] And that's costly.

[610] And you can be killed.

[611] You can be be overthrown.

[612] And so even the most effective tyrannies suffer during times of power transition, right?

[613] It's unstable.

[614] That's the problem, is that a hierarchy built on power is unstable.

[615] It isn't operating as a consequence of the will of the masses.

[616] And so Piaget, the developmental psychologist Piaget, thought about this in depth, you know, and he believed from a biological perspective that there were, you could think about it.

[617] it as two important, two importantly different categories of games.

[618] One is the set of games that I make you play.

[619] And then the other is the category of games that you and I play voluntarily.

[620] And then you might say, well, let's have a competition between those two sets of games.

[621] So we'll orient both of them towards the production of a certain goal.

[622] Let's say a stable and civilized society for the sake of argument, including one in which some people can be very, very wealthy and powerful.

[623] Because of course, that's what the tyrant wants.

[624] So we're going to put them head.

[625] head to head, Piage said, well, look, the voluntary game society will win because it doesn't accrue enforcement costs.

[626] It's brilliant.

[627] It's brilliant.

[628] And that was part of how he formulated the equilibrated state.

[629] And as something like, what would you might, you might describe it as a particularization of the kingdom of God.

[630] That's one way of thinking about it.

[631] And I think that's fair when talking about Piaget, because Piaget, what motivated him throughout his entire life, and people don't know.

[632] this about Piaget, generally speaking, was the reconciliation of science and religion.

[633] That's what drove him.

[634] So, and most people, just for the audience that may not recognize his name, so most people, I'm making an assumption here, recognize him as largely a child and developmental psychologist.

[635] Yes, which is not how he conceptualized himself.

[636] He thought that he was a, it's something like developmental epistemologist.

[637] And can you refresh my mind and perhaps those are the viewers as to what that equilibrated state meant in Piaget's knowledge structure and how that relates to what we were to say.

[638] Sure.

[639] Peekaboo with an infant.

[640] Right?

[641] And so the infant can play peekaboo.

[642] And what happens when you play peekaboo with an infant is that very rapidly by by gesturing, you and the infant settle on the rules of the game.

[643] And what you want to do is engage the infant, right, in play because you find that intrinsically rewarding.

[644] And so the infant will look at you because And then if you smile, he'll smile, generally speaking.

[645] You can tell if the infant's in a playful mood.

[646] And then you can hide your face and look.

[647] And you can, you calibrate that so you don't startle the infant.

[648] You want to surprise the infant.

[649] You want to put the infant on the border of order and chaos.

[650] Because that's where the fun is.

[651] And so you play with hiding and re -manifesting yourself, and it produces delight in the infant.

[652] And so what you've done there is spontaneously organized a tiny micro, a tiny societal microcosm.

[653] And so, and that's the sort of thing that Piaget was particularly interested in.

[654] He was interested in how children formulate games.

[655] And the games are tiny societies.

[656] Everyone agrees on the rules and they play them out.

[657] They're, they're microcosms of society.

[658] And as the child, children transform, the confines of the game expand until the game and the social world are indistinguishable.

[659] It's like the life of a pro football player.

[660] Is that real life or is that a game?

[661] well at some point the game is life right and and so then the question is well what should the game be and Piaget's answer was well the game should be one that everyone agrees to play and so then that's one that and there's more to it than that and some of this is a I suspect some of my develop further development perhaps of Piaget's ideas is that there's a bunch of rules of the game and this is why the postmodernists by the way are wrong about the infinity of interpretations They're wrong.

[662] There isn't infinity of potential interpretations, but there isn't an infinity of viable interpretations, and that's the issue.

[663] That's the critical issue.

[664] So what constrains the range of interpretations?

[665] Well, let's say there's an infinite number of ways of construing the world.

[666] Well, there are.

[667] And that's, again, the postmodernist take, right?

[668] Not only can you interpret texts in infinite number of ways, but the world is a text, and it can be interpreted in a number of ways.

[669] And so you can't define any particular mode of interpretation.

[670] as canonical.

[671] That's the fundamental claim.

[672] Okay, let's take that apart.

[673] Wrong.

[674] First of all, my interpretations have to keep me going.

[675] And they also shouldn't result in an excess of agony.

[676] Because those are games I'm not going to play.

[677] So if I extract out an interpretation, like a hot stove is something upon which I can rest my hand, my agony will tell me that that's a non -viable solution.

[678] And it isn't just agony.

[679] It's the whole panoply.

[680] of things that produce suffering, hunger, thirst, temperature regulation, the necessity of elimination, sexual desire, all these built -in biological modules that are part and parcel of our evolutionary history, which the postmodernists are forced to deny, partly because it undermines their theory, and partly because it interferes with their sociocultural determinism and their Marxism.

[681] But the biological evidence is quite clear.

[682] This is why our concordance with animals is so tight.

[683] that you can use antidepressants on lobsters.

[684] And we diverged from lobsters about 300 million years ago.

[685] There's conservation like you wouldn't believe.

[686] And so we're made up of biological modules, and they have their own worldview.

[687] The hunger system has a worldview.

[688] The pain system has a worldview.

[689] And the pain system, that's a dominating system.

[690] You mess with that thing.

[691] It'll flatten you.

[692] Is there not a tension here that?

[693] I'm with you completely on this.

[694] I follow you because this is sort of my bread and butter as an academic.

[695] I hope the audience is able to keep up as well because it's incredibly important, I think.

[696] But is there a tension in your mind between what you're describing, the fact that we're nested in a biological reality that inherently constrains our viable options for interpretation?

[697] Is there a tension between that and the notion of optimizing for being as opposed to material reality?

[698] Because I think when some people hear you talking about the realm of being versus the realm of the material, they assume or conflate the realm of being with what you're describing the postmodernist to indulge in, in the sense of, well, anything is open to, you're in the realm of imagination, you're in.

[699] Oh, no, being is radically constrained.

[700] Radically.

[701] Well, let me outline the other constraints.

[702] And if I understand correctly, this is precisely the difference between your position, your version of pragmatism.

[703] and the post -modernist position, about which there's been significant confusion.

[704] Well, that's because Harris had me talk about the person from whom he...

[705] Rorty.

[706] Rorty.

[707] It isn't Rorty.

[708] Wasn't part of my pragmatism.

[709] I made that clear.

[710] It's the William James and C .S. Purse version.

[711] But there's a conflation, I think, in some people's mind.

[712] So this, what you're describing is precisely, you're differentiating.

[713] Yes.

[714] Precisely.

[715] Okay.

[716] So we'll say, first, we're subject to biological construction.

[717] Okay, we're subject to biological constraints, and then we're subject to temporal biological constraints, which is that not only are we hungry today, but we're going to be hungry tomorrow, and we're going to be hungry in a year.

[718] So the biological constraints are now and later.

[719] Okay, so the solution has to solve both those sets of problems, but that's only the beginning, because I have those problems, but I also have the problem that there you are, and you have those problems.

[720] And so then we, We either fight, which is a problem, or we mutually negotiate such that we generate a solution, such that you get to solve your problems, at the same time I get to solve my problems, or maybe we even do it better.

[721] You get to solve your problems in a manner that helps me solve my problems, and I do the same for you.

[722] Okay, that's not easy.

[723] That's narrow, and you know that because if you live with someone, you're constantly arguing with them.

[724] And the argument is, which interpretation will suffice?

[725] Right.

[726] And so, no, there's not an infinite number of interpretations.

[727] There's hardly any.

[728] Okay, so, but then it isn't just me and the person I live with.

[729] It's me and the person I live with, and the family, and the family and the community, and the community and the polity, and the economic system, and the biological system.

[730] All of that has to be stacked up, one on top of the other.

[731] So the game is played at every level.

[732] simultaneously the same way.

[733] And that's, in my estimation, that's what a symphony expresses, right?

[734] That's what it's telling you.

[735] It's stacked the level of being so that every level operates harmoniously with every other level.

[736] And then I would also say that because we're evolved for that, we can tell when it's happening.

[737] And that's what the sense of meaning is.

[738] The sense of meaning is, it's our third eye, you could say.

[739] Your eyes blind you, because they only see what's here right in front of you now.

[740] They blind you.

[741] And so you have to use modes of perception that transcend mere vision in order to conceptualize being properly.

[742] And one of those modes is the sense of meaning and engagement.

[743] And that involves extraordinarily ancient systems.

[744] So, for example, it's produced in part by the dopaminergic system.

[745] and they're rooted in the hypothalamus, which is an extraordinarily old part of the brain and a very, very, maybe the most fundamental part of the brain.

[746] It's the one where most of the biological subsystems have their rootings, you know, the hunger systems and the lust systems and that sort of thing.

[747] And so the sense of meaning is extremely old, old, old, old.

[748] But it's differentiated very finely in human beings.

[749] And when you're engaged meaningfully, then what that is it's an intimation that the levels of being are lining up at least to some degree and you'll feel that you can feel it as a as a well as a sense that life what it is is a sense that life is meaningful and that sense is the thing that enables you to overcome tragedy correct me if I'm wrong but there can be a tension between what is meaningful for a given individual and what is meaningful on a societal level or for the most number of individuals right I'm thinking of let's say you have a despot what's meaningful for the desk is when, you know, he feels like he's in complete control of his country.

[750] And then he experiences that subjective state of meaning that you're describing as ancient and...

[751] Yeah, but I don't think that is what he experiences.

[752] I think he's driven substantially by terror and malevolence.

[753] And that's not the same thing.

[754] It's not like those things aren't motivating.

[755] I'm not saying that this sense of transcendent meaning is the only motivator.

[756] Clearly, it's not.

[757] There's sub -motivational systems that can take control at any time.

[758] But I don't believe that the sense of meaning that I'm describing is akin to what a tyrant feels when he's tyrannizing.

[759] That's more like jealous rage or something like that or resentment.

[760] Now, I would say that there's an exception to that.

[761] Because one of the things we haven't talked about is the necessity for truth.

[762] So let's allow for a moment that the faculty that produces this sense of engagement has the qualities that I attribute.

[763] to it, but I would say that also only works properly under certain conditions, which is if you are sick physically, biologically, neurologically, then it's certainly possible that that meaning system is going to go astray, and it's going to signify meaning where the alignment isn't proper.

[764] Well, that could happen for any number of reasons.

[765] It seems to happen in schizophrenia, for example, at a very, very low level.

[766] but I would also say you risk making that happen to you which means you can no longer trust your deepest instinct by lying to yourself because what you do so that could be selective omission of information that's the most common form of lie it's passive avoidance you know willful blindness that's the most common form of deception although active deceit can also play a role if you if you contaminate the structure of your being with false information, with deceptive practices, and you willfully blind yourself, then you're going to be led astray by your sense of meaning.

[767] You're going to pathologize it.

[768] So part of the issue here is that you don't want to interfere with your ability to see because you'll wander off the road into a ditch.

[769] And so, you know, people think, well, why should I tell the truth?

[770] Which is a great question, man. Every smart kid figures that out.

[771] Like, the smarter the kid, the younger, they figure that out.

[772] It's like, well, if I can lie to get what I want, why shouldn't I, given that I want to get what I want?

[773] And that's a great question.

[774] Okay, so here's a follow -up then.

[775] Why not engage in a series of white lies?

[776] First of all, sometimes that's the best you can do.

[777] Like, you could say that, well, you're morally impelled to come up with the best solution you can under the circumstances.

[778] And what you want is a statement that validates, that serves all levels of being.

[779] simultaneously.

[780] But sometimes you don't know how to do that.

[781] And that's when you, when someone, you know, the example that springs to mind for me always is that the classic kind of joke situation where a wife asks her husband, you know, does this dress make me look fat?

[782] Or what do you think of this dress?

[783] And maybe the answer is, I hate that goddamn dress.

[784] And maybe that's the answer.

[785] But maybe the answer is, if the question is, do I look fat in this dress?

[786] The answer is, I don't answer questions like that, right?

[787] So that would be the truth in that situation.

[788] And that's, or there would be the white lie, which is, oh, you look beautiful.

[789] But I don't believe white lies are suboptimal solutions to a complex problem.

[790] So that's all, because they're true at some levels of analysis and they're false at others.

[791] Are there cases where stating what appears to be the truth to the best of your ability to articulate it is inferior to a pragmatically functional white lie I would say it depends on your motivations because I can use the truth to hurt you but then I would say that I miss then what I'm doing is like a white lie it's like a black truth let's call it that it means that it also doesn't serve the ordered structure entirely because it's true on three levels of analysis, usually sub -levels, and not true on a really profound level.

[792] So I can say, well, I'm just telling you this for your own good, and I tell you something true, but I picked a context in which, or a state of vulnerability that I know you're in, in which delivery of that message has an undermining effect, and I know that.

[793] So I could, well, it was true.

[794] It's like, well, no, all things considered, it wasn't true.

[795] Some things considered it was true.

[796] And a white lie is the inverse of that.

[797] It's like, well, on some levels, it's true.

[798] You know, it would be wrong of me to hurt your feelings over such a trivial issue.

[799] And so, in order not to violate that higher moral principle, I'm going to violate a subordinate moral principle.

[800] Right.

[801] And in your system of thought, that higher moral principle, that higher level, is still part and parcel, in fact, it's perhaps the pinnacle of the notion of truth.

[802] Whereas for someone, again, just to make reference to the, to a previous interview you had with Sam Harris, the conflation or the intentional combination of moral truth with factual truth is either bizarre or just it doesn't occur to people.

[803] But he wants to do that anyways.

[804] He just wants to do it in reverse.

[805] Right.

[806] Because I was making the case that by necessity, factual truth is subordinate to moral truth.

[807] And he was saying, no, moral truth can be derived from factual truth.

[808] It's like he doesn't get out of the problem.

[809] The problem is the necessary coexistence both forms of truth he just inverts the causal order right now the problem with sam's account is that and this is the problem that emmanuel can't identify so many years ago is like do the facts speak for themselves well no they don't because facts say a number of different things like if you there's if there's a field in front of you it does not tell you which path to take through it right but it's worse than that it's worse than that because there's an unlimited number of facts And the problem is how do you select them?

[810] And the answer to that is the facts themselves cannot tell you that And that's why you have an a priori interpretive structure, which is of course what Kant was insisting upon And Sam doesn't take that into account and that's mind -boggling to me because that a priori interpretive structure is the sum total of the effect of our evolutionary history So like what about that?

[811] Where does that play into the play into the into the game.

[812] We select, we're so selective in our attention.

[813] It's unbelievable.

[814] You know, we can, what, there's been estimates that the bandwidth of our conscious attention is like four bits.

[815] We're, we're pinpointing the world.

[816] Well, some of that's conscious because we can make decisions about what we look at, and a lot of it's unconscious because our attention is attracted by, directed by these fundamental underlying biological subsystems.

[817] But we're making intrinsic value judgments all the time that are not derived from the facts at hand.

[818] That's a blank slate viewpoint.

[819] Now, and how Harris can't be a blank slate believer if he's an evolutionary biologist.

[820] And the same goes for Dawkins.

[821] What you just said made me think of, I think in our previous interview, you had mentioned motivated action and motivated speech.

[822] And I think for people who are not necessarily familiar with or are more than happy to readily dismiss psychoanalytic approaches, that doesn't make much sense.

[823] of it's a, it's a boogeyman, an intellectual boogeyman in a sense.

[824] But I think, if I understand correctly, when you reference motivated processes, you're describing something similar to what you've just described in the sense that we have a whole series of sort of undeniable biological impulses that constrain our cognition, that constrain what we pay attention to and what motivates us.

[825] And even when we think at a conscious level that we're doing something for one reason, we're very good at creating rational explanations for behavior that we're actually engaging in for much deeper impulsive reasons.

[826] Well, that's part of the fact that we're not transparent to ourselves.

[827] You know, like people like Gazanaga have made the claim.

[828] And I think Dennett has really been hitting this hard lately that mostly what our conscious mind does is come up with post hoc rationalizations for our behaviors.

[829] And it's like, well, just because something is partly true some of the time does not mean that it's absolutely true all of the time.

[830] It is, we are trying to understand ourselves continually, and sometimes we come up with partial accounts for why we did what we did.

[831] But consciousness is also the builder of our habits.

[832] Now, it's not the only builder, but you know, you consciously attend to some action in a new domain and practice it.

[833] The consciousness builds up those habitual structures, and then they run automatically.

[834] But that doesn't mean that consciousness was irrelevant to their production.

[835] It was very relevant to their production.

[836] It's not just a mere post -hawk add -on.

[837] It's not that at all.

[838] consciousness is what you're playing a sonata and you make a mistake and you play it again you make the same mistake and so what do you do because you're playing it automatically you've built the habit with hours and hours of practice and conscious attention you've rewired yourself building automatic mechanisms an automatic mechanism fails so what do you do you do you look more intently at the notes then you slow down and you restructure the habit and then you speed up you speed up you speed up then you play the segment then you play the segment again then maybe go back to the beginning and zip through, and then you've restructured that automatic system.

[839] Consciousness did that.

[840] It's not just a post hoc rationalizer, although it can be that, and it's often not rationalization either.

[841] Sometimes it's an investigation into the actual causal structure.

[842] It's like, well, I did that?

[843] Why did I do it?

[844] Well, sometimes I want to come up with a story that sounds good to other people, let's say, which seems to be, you know, Gazanagan's theory about why we consciously utter post hoc rationalizations to justify our behaviors to ourselves.

[845] Jesus, that's pretty cynical.

[846] No, often it's a deeply, it's a deep attempt to identify the likely causal contributors.

[847] And in part, look, I mean, you could say, well, that's just, we just don't have that capacity.

[848] It's like, yes, we do, because otherwise we would continually repeat the same mistakes.

[849] The fact that we can learn from, if we learn from our experience, what we do is reconstrue our map.

[850] of value so that we don't replicate the error in the future and because we are capable of not replicating past errors obviously we're capable of consciously altering our pathway and also of performing a pragmatically useful causal analysis of the cause of our error now if you do psychotherapy with people and they have a traumatic memory won't go away well what do you do with it well you go back into the memory and you you assess the sequence of events in detail until they have an account that is sufficiently plausible so that they believe that if the same circumstances arose in the future, they would no longer fall prey to that error.

[851] So, for example, if it's a naive person who was manipulated badly by a potential romantic partner, then what you do is you say, okay, well, look, you know, you, what was it about your viewpoint that put you at risk?

[852] Now, that isn't blaming the, victim.

[853] It's helping the victim not be a victim again.

[854] It's like, yeah, it was 95 % the other person's fault, man. Whatever.

[855] They're not in the room with you.

[856] All you can do is try not to fall into the same pit.

[857] That didn't mean someone else didn't dig the pit.

[858] Okay, so, well, I was too trusting.

[859] Okay, well, so let's take that apart.

[860] What do you mean too trusting?

[861] Well, I always assume the good in people.

[862] Well, okay, so, well, what about these instances of people acting in a bad way?

[863] Well, I don't really understand that.

[864] It's okay.

[865] You start to, see, they need to differentiate up their worldview to take into account the existence of predatory people.

[866] And they also generally have to differentiate their view of themselves to stop thinking themselves as nice and harmless.

[867] Because it's the nice and harmless, naive person that's exploitable by the malevolent psychopath.

[868] And that's not moral virtue.

[869] That's just weakness.

[870] That's all it is.

[871] It's naivity.

[872] It's child.

[873] It's child.

[874] it's the maintenance of a child -like viewpoint, a view of the world.

[875] Far past, it's expiry date.

[876] And so you go back and take that apart.

[877] You formulate a more differentiated and sophisticated view of the world.

[878] The person finds that plausible.

[879] Then you have them practice it so they can see that it has applicability in the real world.

[880] And then the emotion from the traumatic memory will go away.

[881] Because what's happening is the anxiety system.

[882] is saying unexplored territory, unexplored territory, unexplored territory.

[883] And what that system wants is to know, A, that someone is trying to map that territory, instead of just avoiding the problem, and B, that there is a plan.

[884] Now, it's not cognitively sophisticated enough in some way to know if the plan works.

[885] It wants to know that someone's in charge and that it's being taken care of.

[886] Well, so that's what you do in psychotherapy.

[887] You say, look, you can face this, even though you think you can't, You can.

[888] We'll break it into pieces.

[889] I'll discuss with you a plethora of potential solutions.

[890] We can do it slowly.

[891] You can bite off as much as you can chew and no more.

[892] And we're going to come up with something that isn't a rationalization for your behavior, a post hoc rationalization.

[893] It's a set of new tools so that you do not, when you see that hole in the road, you walk around it.

[894] First of all, you'll see it.

[895] Second, you'll walk around it.

[896] And people are massively encouraged by that process.

[897] They're not made less afraid.

[898] In fact, they might be made more afraid, but the fear is much more focused, and they know how to deal with it.

[899] It's like, I didn't think there were dangerous people in the world.

[900] Well, there are.

[901] Oh my God, the world's much more dangerous.

[902] It's like, yes, it is.

[903] Well, what am I going to do about that?

[904] You're going to get smarter and sharper, right?

[905] Because that's the cure.

[906] It's not we're going to make the world less dangerous.

[907] The world is plenty dangerous, but it turns out that you're a lot more careful.

[908] capable than you thought.

[909] So in what sense is this corrective mechanism that you're describing that is epitomized in this case in psychotherapy?

[910] In what sense is that is is that only accomplishable with a within a social context where you have feedback from other agents?

[911] Well, that's a good question.

[912] I mean, the first of all, I would say to to tie this back to our earlier conversation is that that curative process is the action of the logos in dialogue.

[913] Okay, that's what it is.

[914] That's what it is.

[915] Okay, and so I would, and I would also say that the degree to which you can manifest the logos is going to be radically associated with your functionality in human hierarchies, right?

[916] It's the primary determinant of that.

[917] It's the essence of genuine charisma.

[918] So, now, that can be parasitized upon, like Hitler did that.

[919] That can be parasitized upon, but that doesn't, just because, a mechanism has value doesn't mean it can't be parasitized that happens all the time it happens constantly and the mechanism you're referring to here as genuine charisma is the is is a clear ability to be able to effectively navigate a dominance hierarchy or a hierarchy yes yes yes and well and the world but you know it's like the dominance hierarchy is sort of the mediator between you and the world so you when you're negotiating the social world you are simultaneously negotiating the actual world, unless the social world has become so corrupt that it no longer bears any relationship to the real world, in which case, you know, everyone is in serious trouble, serious, serious trouble.

[920] Yes, I can think of parts of the world where that is the case of that.

[921] Oh, yes, it happens quite frequently.

[922] You know, that's the, that's the emergence of the tyrannical and senile king, right?

[923] So the society is no longer adapted to the real world.

[924] So then if you adapt to the society, well, you know, it's like you're, you're the captain of sinking ship it's like well you're going to drown along with everyone else so it's not it's not that great it's not that useful right so we right we were talking about how so someone who exhibits those qualities those qualities can be used for for good or evil let's say but it's uh someone who exhibits those qualities that it's the simulacrum of those qualities that's used for evil right yeah and then in terms of and to relate this to whether people are able to gauge proper behavior or meaningful behavior on their own or is there a necessity for social?

[925] Oh yes, yes.

[926] Well, they can do it to some degree on their own, but that only works until they have a problem they can't solve.

[927] Right, and is that not sort of an opening for self -deception?

[928] Of course.

[929] Of course it is.

[930] And self -deception in all sorts of ways.

[931] Self -deception has a consequence of implicit biases, temperamental biases.

[932] You know, I mean, your capacity to to think, let's say that's your self -reflective logos, is limited by your ability.

[933] So it's limited by your motivations and their purity, let's say.

[934] It's limited by your knowledge.

[935] It's limited by your localization in this particular period of time and place.

[936] And so it's insufficient.

[937] And you can tell it's insufficient because problems arise in your life that you can't solve.

[938] Well, so then what you do is engage very frequently in joint problem solving.

[939] you might say, well, what makes a person particularly, let's say powerful, but wrong, influential, able to function well in the social hierarchy.

[940] That's easy.

[941] They solve problems.

[942] That's what they do.

[943] It's like, you know, if you come to someone with a problem and they say, well, here's how you deal with that.

[944] It's like, you're pretty happy about that.

[945] You'll come back and see them again.

[946] It doesn't matter what the avenue is.

[947] That's what a mechanic does.

[948] You know, this doesn't work.

[949] Well, I'll fix it.

[950] It's like, hey, Right on, man. I'm bringing my car back there.

[951] So we're pretty good at evaluating whether or not a problem has been addressed because the problem goes away.

[952] And so then we're happy about that because we don't want the problem.

[953] But then how do we account for all the various flavors of self -deception that we perceive and mystification of our own hidden motivations that we observe in ourselves in some cases, but certainly in others, right?

[954] when you talk about, not to pick on the mind necessarily, but just because they pop in my mind.

[955] The new atheist, you'd mentioned in our previous interview, that it seems that a lot of that thinking is motivated to a degree, but they certainly wouldn't recognize it as motivated.

[956] They see it as rational.

[957] So it is rational.

[958] It's just, it's just rationality that's bounded to, to greater degree in my estimation.

[959] And, you know, some of the motivations are, well, you know, they picked a hill to die on.

[960] That's one way of looking at it, you know, like Dawkins' idea of meme is so close to the idea of archetype.

[961] In fact, the last time that Harris and Dawkins spoke, they actually made a joke about that.

[962] And then, and Dawkins said, well, if I admitted that, everything would just fall apart, and then they both laughed.

[963] Ha ha ha, ha.

[964] And then they went on.

[965] It's like, yeah, guys, you got it, but you backed away.

[966] And so as soon as you get the idea of meme, it's like, okay, I'll.

[967] functional memes and non -functional memes?

[968] And then how functional is a functional meme?

[969] And how about if it's super functional?

[970] Well, of course, what a meme is just going to rise is like a parasite?

[971] It's only a parasite.

[972] I don't think so.

[973] Why would you make that presumption?

[974] I mean, it certainly seems possible that there are parasitic -like memes.

[975] There are.

[976] There's absolutely.

[977] There's no doubt about that.

[978] Ideologies are parasitical memes.

[979] Right.

[980] There are multiple ways we can take this.

[981] The battery is running low.

[982] So I'm just going to switch that up.

[983] Okay, I'm going to get a glass of water.

[984] What time is it?

[985] There are multiple directions that we can take this discussion because it's so relevant to so much of what we experience, both on an individual and a societal level.

[986] But I think to be timely and respectful of some of the questions that people have posed in their responses, maybe we can relate what we were just discussing to two areas in particular.

[987] So one is the degree to which we should take our religious or mythological formulations.

[988] that are the product of thousands of years of evolution, both biological and cultural, seriously and or literally.

[989] Sure, you would ask that question.

[990] Right, and that ties back to the question, I think, of the white lie, that we were discussing earlier, the white lie or the black truth in the sense of if something is pragmatically true, but literally appears to be untrue, how does one reconcile that if it's serving the ultimate good?

[991] Okay, okay, so let's start with the first one.

[992] Okay, so that question pushes me...

[993] Just from my own memory, and the second point that I want to get to is the risk of ideological possession in today's political climate and what your own research and what we discuss brings to bear on how to avoid what seems to be an increasingly problematic issue with this particular point in Western history.

[994] Okay, so the first one, is with regards to the relationship between the metaphorical and the literal, let's say.

[995] Yes.

[996] We've had questions, for instance, to concretize it.

[997] We've had questions from Orthodox Christians that view you, for instance, as a defender of Christianity because of what they read online.

[998] And then they listen to what you say, and they're like, well, okay, so he's on my side, so to speak, but does he really believe in the divinity of Christ?

[999] Does he believe in the transformation of bread into flesh and these sorts of things?

[1000] Well, of course, that depends on what you mean by believe and what you mean by divinity.

[1001] Yes, exactly.

[1002] And the third issue, just to go from there, is, and if so, or if not, what in Peterson's estimation is the role or importance of ritual and acting out certain religious process?

[1003] Good.

[1004] Good.

[1005] We'll start with that.

[1006] So people often ask me, do you believe in God?

[1007] Which I don't like that question.

[1008] First of all, it's an attempt to, to, it's an attempt to box me in, in a sense.

[1009] And the reason that it's an attempt to box me in is because the question is asked so that I can be firmly placed on one side of a two, of a binary argument.

[1010] And, and the reason I don't like to answer it is because, A, I don't like to be boxed in, and B, because I don't know what the person means by believe or God.

[1011] and they think they know, and the probability that they construe belief and construe God the same way I do is virtually zero.

[1012] So it's a question that doesn't work for me on multiple levels of analysis, but strangely enough, just as we were talking, the answer to that question popped into my head.

[1013] I act as if God exists.

[1014] Now, you can decide for yourself whether that means that I believe in him, so to speak.

[1015] But I act as if he exists.

[1016] So that's a good enough answer for that.

[1017] Then with regards to these other issues, the divinity of Christ, well, I would say the same problems with the question formulation obtained.

[1018] What do you mean by divine?

[1019] And also what do you mean by Christ?

[1020] These are very, very difficult questions.

[1021] Now, I believe that for all intents and purposes, I believe that the Logos is divine.

[1022] insofar as we if by divine you mean of ultimate value of ultimate transcendent value yes it's divine it's associated with death and rebirth clearly because the logos dismantles you and rebuilds you so that's what happens when you make an error when you make an error some part of you has to go that's a sacrifice you have to let it go sometimes it's a big part of you sometimes it can be such a big part of you that you actually die right instead of dying and being reborn is there something more than merely metaphorical about the idea of being of dying and being reborn yes there is because those are associated with physiological transformations how what's the ultimate extent of that that's a good question you know the question is what happens to the world around you as you as you increasingly embody the logos and the answer to that is we don't know We don't know what the ultimate level of this.

[1023] Now, the hypothesis is, and it's a hypothesis that extends to some degree to Buddha as well, the hypothesis is that there has been one or two individuals who managed that, and that in their management of that, they transcended death itself.

[1024] Well, then you might ask yourself, well, what do you mean by transcended death?

[1025] Well, in the case of Christ, let's assume he was a historical figure for the time being, which I think is the simplest thing to assume.

[1026] I think there's sufficient evidence to conclude that.

[1027] You could conclude otherwise, but personally I feel that there's sufficient evidence to conclude that.

[1028] Is his resurrection real?

[1029] Well, his spirit lives on.

[1030] That's certainly the case.

[1031] In what sense do you mean spirit, just to qualify that?

[1032] Well, let's imagine that a spirit is a pattern of being.

[1033] And we know that patterns can exist.

[1034] patterns can be transmitted across multiple substrates, right?

[1035] Vinyl, electronic impulses, air, vibrations in your ear, neurological patterns, dance.

[1036] It's all the translation of what you might describe as a spirit, right?

[1037] It's that pattern.

[1038] It's independent of its material substrate.

[1039] Well, Christ's spirit lives on.

[1040] It's had a massive effect across time.

[1041] Well, is that an answer to the question?

[1042] Did his body resurrect?

[1043] I don't know.

[1044] I don't know.

[1045] The accounts aren't clear, for one thing.

[1046] What the accounts mean isn't clear.

[1047] I don't know what happens to a person if they bring themselves completely into alignment.

[1048] I've had intimations of what that might mean.

[1049] We don't understand the world very well.

[1050] We don't understand how the world could be mastered if it was mastered.

[1051] completely.

[1052] We don't know how an individual might be able to manage that.

[1053] We don't know what transformations that might make possible.

[1054] I'm going to do a series on the Bible.

[1055] That's one of the things I want to investigate more thoroughly and formulate my thoughts about more thoroughly, because it is a crucial issue.

[1056] A friend of mine said, and I wouldn't describe him, he's certainly not the sort of person that you would describe as a classic Catholic.

[1057] He's extraordinarily well -educated individual.

[1058] And he's come back to Christianity with the most vicious of internal battles.

[1059] You know, and he said to me, he was the same person who made the comments earlier about the dominance hierarchy.

[1060] And so he's very insightful.

[1061] You know, he said that it all falls apart unless you believe in the divinity of Christ and in the resurrection of Christ.

[1062] And he meant that in a very fundamental way.

[1063] And there's a way in which that's true.

[1064] But I don't know exactly what it means yet.

[1065] Like the metaphorical element of that to me is quite clear.

[1066] The death and rebirth idea, yeah.

[1067] I mean, you see that echoed all over.

[1068] It's the most recent manifestation of that idea is, or one of the most recent manifestations, popular manifestations, is in the Harry Potter series because it's full of deaths and rebirths of the central hero.

[1069] Is it not a manifestation of hope something beyond the finality of which we have become inescapably conscious?

[1070] Well, yes, and of course that's the Freudian critique, right?

[1071] He just thought about it as a wish fulfillment.

[1072] Although the problem with that theory is, well, you know, people also generated up the idea of hell, which doesn't, you know, you could say, well, that's a convenient place to put your enemies and still put it in the wish fulfillment framework, but I think that's absurdly cynical.

[1073] Right.

[1074] People who believe in hell are terrified of hell about for themselves, and in my estimation they should be, because I also believe in hell, although what that means, again, is, you know, subject to interpretation.

[1075] Lots of people live in hell.

[1076] And lots of people create it.

[1077] But beyond the sort of the basic Freudian, you know, snide interpretation, is it not a belief in the identification with something that transcends your limited existence?

[1078] Yes, definitely.

[1079] Well, but it's funny, too, because in the more Christian formulations, there's an insistence on the resurrection of the body, which I find extremely interesting.

[1080] You know, even the, say, more sophisticated dais types are, Kind of willing to go along with the idea that there might be something Eternal transcendent about consciousness or about the spirit or the soul something like that But they're there are certainly not willing to go beyond that But there's this very peculiar emphasis in Christianity on the resurrection of the body which is a glorification of the body Which is quite interesting, you know, it's not something you want to dismiss so so rapidly Because it is a glorification of the body and an indication of the necessity of the body of the body of the that limitation.

[1081] Could that not be an instance of what we were describing earlier in terms of an instantia, a specific instantiation of a general?

[1082] Yeah, right.

[1083] It's the instantiation itself that makes it real.

[1084] The body is the most real thing that we experience on it on an individual.

[1085] Right.

[1086] Well, and it's real in part because it's limited, right?

[1087] It has limitations.

[1088] So the focus on the mythological representation of the body is resurrected is saying this is more real, this is just as real as you can imagine.

[1089] Yes, yes.

[1090] Well, it's an element.

[1091] of the material interestingly enough right not a denial of the material an elevation of the material it's very interesting idea and as I said I want to explore that more because I'm not I'm not fully comfortable with my my ability to bridge the gap between the metaphorical and the real although I think that the way that I described it is as close as it's as close as I can come right now magical things happen as the Logos manifests itself.

[1092] Now that's self -evidently true.

[1093] When people...

[1094] And when you say magical, you mean magical for all intents and purposes in terms of our perception as relatively naive human consciousness or magical in like rabbits out of hats?

[1095] Well, certainly the former.

[1096] And God only knows about the latter.

[1097] So, you know, you know, know, that takes us a field into strange areas, like Jung's observations of synchronous events, for example.

[1098] We don't understand the world.

[1099] Like, I do think the world is more like a musical masterpiece than it is like anything else.

[1100] And things are oddly connected.

[1101] Now, you know, I know that sounds new agey and it sounds metaphysical.

[1102] And I'm saying bluntly, this is speculative, right?

[1103] I'm feeling out beyond the limits of my knowledge, but there are a thing, I'm not willing to dismiss the mysterious, because I've experienced the mysterious in a variety of different ways, and it's very mysterious, very.

[1104] From a cognitive perspective, is that not the most rational position to take in any case?

[1105] Because we know our cognition is inherently bounded by a whole range of constraints.

[1106] Well, we certainly know that we're bounded by ignorance and there's far more going on than we know or can know.

[1107] We do.

[1108] The problem is that when you start to speculate, it's a projection of your imagination.

[1109] Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing because that is actually knowledge advances through projection of imagination.

[1110] But the problem is you can see yourself reflected back at you and then it's self -fulfilling.

[1111] So you can see what you want to see.

[1112] That's right.

[1113] And what you're describing reminds me of.

[1114] both um what i what i've read and and through my experience understood in terms of the buddhist tradition as well as as the Islamic sufi tradition they use almost identical metaphors as as we were just using to describe this experience in the sense that to to experience the mysterious in its most pristine form you precisely have to rid yourself of yourself to avoid those projections you You want a clean mirror, so to speak, is the symbology that's often used in Islamic mysticism so that it best reflects what's actually mysterious, and you're not merely projecting your vain imaginations.

[1115] Well, that would also be akin to the idea that I presented earlier, that you want to speak and live the truth so that you don't muddy your vision, right?

[1116] Because then you're blind and you will walk into things.

[1117] That's why you tell the truth.

[1118] You see, the problem is if you lie, you believe the lies.

[1119] The problem with not telling the truth is you falsify your map and you will wander off the pathway.

[1120] How could it possibly be any other way?

[1121] And that's also precisely what according to the scripture Buddha said.

[1122] He said false beliefs are the problem, right?

[1123] You have to rid yourself of these false beliefs.

[1124] And if you follow that all the way through, then you will reach that then you have the satirological goal, which may or may not be, you know, an achievable reality.

[1125] Right, right.

[1126] It's an ever -receding horizon.

[1127] That's right.

[1128] But it's nonetheless, you know, that's what we're aiming.

[1129] Yeah, well, and it seems like the right aim.

[1130] It seems like the right aim.

[1131] And in Islamic Sufi mysticism, you know, you can speculate as to the ideology of Islamic Sufi mysticism and its relationship to other forms of mysticism, the predate Islam, the goal is precisely the same.

[1132] It's literally the metaphors that are used are polishing the mirror.

[1133] So you best reflect what is divine, and in this sense divine in terms of the law.

[1134] logos the ultimate truth and you're not muddying it with your own lies precisely or purely inaccuracies or so that there seems there seems to be something fundamental that yeah well the fundamental the fundamental issue is that you should get your map right right I mean the problem is is that even if you try it isn't clear how good a map you can make but that's okay because try as hard as you can you'll find out.

[1135] But it's certainly the case.

[1136] And maybe it'll be a good enough map.

[1137] Maybe it'll be an accurate map.

[1138] You don't know.

[1139] Independent of your inevitable ignorance, you can certainly stop being willfully ignorant and see what happens.

[1140] And my sense, too, is that you don't get to complain about the structure of the world until you stop falsifying your relationship with it, because you don't know to what degree the pathology of your being is associated with the falsification.

[1141] because it's inherently bound up with your subjective experience or we can even subtract subjective it's essentially bound up with one's experience right right right it's essentially because because what you're doing is you're twisting and bending your value structure and that's what determines the focus of your perception and your emotional responses all of that so get your aim right well what's the aim truth and I think it's it has to be nested in love and love is the notion that it's something like the notion that despite its suffering, being is good.

[1142] And you should serve being.

[1143] And that's a decision you have to make because you can easily say, well, being is corrupt and evil.

[1144] And there's plenty of evidence for that.

[1145] So it's a decision.

[1146] And so being is good.

[1147] I'm going to serve good being.

[1148] And to do so means to tell the truth.

[1149] Well, then that's, and then you play that out.

[1150] And then the magic happens.

[1151] And that I believe to be the case.

[1152] I think that that's, I do believe in some sense that's self -evident.

[1153] What you just described to me, so you're most familiar with the Christian theological tradition.

[1154] I'm more familiar with Islamic Sufi and Buddhist theological tradition.

[1155] What you just described is incredible from my understanding of Sufism and other mystical traditions in the sense that the twin principles that motivate ones, the polishing of one's mirror, so to speak, are the principle of truth, ultimate truth, which is synonymous in the Arabic and Persian language, is with God.

[1156] It's one in the same.

[1157] Haq.

[1158] And love.

[1159] And not love in the sense of, I love my puppy, but love in an all -consuming sense, one that motivates your entire being.

[1160] Right, right.

[1161] Well, the way that I interpret that, and I try to do this in my therapeutic property, I try to do this all the time.

[1162] is, I want the best for what wants the best in you.

[1163] It's like that part, I'm that part's friend.

[1164] And when my clients come in, it's like, and this is different than the unconditional positive regard that the Rogerians talked about, which I think was an oversimplification.

[1165] It's like, I don't have unconditional positive regard.

[1166] I am not on the side of you that's aiming at your defeat.

[1167] I'm not at all on that side.

[1168] I'm on the side of you that's struggling towards the light, right?

[1169] And I'm on the side of that part of me, at least I'm trying to be on the side of that and that's the definition of love I believe because what it means is I truly want the but I said it I truly want the best for what wants the best in you yeah and people love that they love that man if you're react if you're interacting with people with that ethos in mind they find that well I think that's partly why people are responding so positively to my videos because that ethos informs the videos I'm saying I'm trying to figure out what's the best for us really like the best not the best for me although that's part of it because here I am you know and I'm in the game too but I'm I'm I'm so greedy let's say I don't just want the best for me that's not enough for me I'm too greedy for that maybe I'm too selfish for that I want the best for me in a way that's the best for everyone else too because that's even better and so and I think well that's another interesting thing about being bounded by death is that you have nothing to lose.

[1170] You might as well aim for the highest goal because what have you got to lose that you aren't already going to lose?

[1171] Nothing.

[1172] And you have everything, hypothetically, to gain.

[1173] So what, on the last point then, to direct us to the second question, I think it flows quite nicely, is what motivates people to cling to their particular ideological map of reality in spite of what you just?

[1174] described and it seems like to me and to other observers this could be a question of confirmation by an issue of confirmation bias but it seems like as you've said that we're at a sort of turning point in Western I would say I would say global civilization at this point I think so Eastern distinction I don't think is any longer that helpful mm -hmm where people seem to be reacting to what they're experiencing with an unusual degree of ideological fervor yeah again it's only been about 60 years, 60, 70 years since we saw a major conflagration premised on that issue.

[1175] You bet.

[1176] Right?

[1177] How do we avoid this?

[1178] How do we learn from that based on your understanding and your in -depth study of this?

[1179] What's the solution there?

[1180] Well, I think the solution is an individual one because the other solutions are collective and the collective solutions are, in some sense, the problem.

[1181] Now, why do people become ideologically possessed?

[1182] Okay, well, some of it's just confirmation bias, like temperamental bias.

[1183] Then you can add ignorance to that.

[1184] Then you could add willful blindness to that.

[1185] And with the ignorance issue, you can, more specifically, diagnose historical ignorance.

[1186] That's why I recommend that people read the Gulag Archipelago, for example.

[1187] There's things that we need to know in order to set ourselves right and the people that I found that have been most useful in that regard have been Dostoevsky and Nietzsche and Carl Jung and a smattering of others, but I think they had their finger on the pulse fundamentally and it's not like they're the only people.

[1188] I'm not claiming that at all then but there's there's deeper issues too and one of the deeper issues is well what what do you do with the responsibility?

[1189] Well if you're an idiologue, then the bad people are those who don't think like you.

[1190] That's really convenient.

[1191] It's like not only do you not have to do anything about it because you're already on the side of the good, so it's alleviated you of any moral responsibility, but yet you can still act as if you're the exemplar of morality itself.

[1192] Plus, you have a target now for all the unexamined vengefulness and hatred and corruption in your own heart.

[1193] And so that's a tempting plethora of, of, it's a tempting plethora.

[1194] of temptations, right?

[1195] It's easy, it's quick, it's handed to you.

[1196] It means that you don't have to adopt any responsibility.

[1197] It means you can camouflage yourself as a moral agent.

[1198] It means that you have a target for your hatred, and it's a justifiable target.

[1199] And, but I think, I think of all of those issues, the avoidance of responsibility is the cardinal issue.

[1200] It's the most important issue.

[1201] It sort of fights with the, yeah, well, that's it.

[1202] It's, it's the most important issue.

[1203] This is, this is what I see at the universities is that the students are taught to go out and protest.

[1204] There's the people who are messing up the planet.

[1205] Go tell them that they're bad.

[1206] You don't offer a solution, even, you just tell them that they're bad.

[1207] It's like, that's the pathway to achievement it's no it's not what one can do both and and we see evidence of that in in very recent yeah you know Western political history right the civil rights movement I think that you can't do the latter till you earn the right to you can't because you and this is because I don't believe that you you in what's in what sense is it is it a case that's that people on on both sides I hate to bifurcated this way, but it's perceived this way, two sides of the divine, the left and the right, right?

[1208] In what sense is that people are mistaking the form for the content in that they may be looking back in history and looking up to movements that involved either speaking truth to power, which I think is part of what motivates a lot of the right and the, and even the so -called alt -right.

[1209] It's just saying things that they should be able to say regardless of whether, you know, serves the higher moral truth or not, and the inclination to protest and speak truth to the power of the dominance hierarchy, the power structure I think is often what motivates much of what's on the left.

[1210] To what degree do you think the conflagration that we're, or the coming to a head that we're experiencing is when people mistake the form of that expression, the form of that protest for the importance of the content.

[1211] in the sense of the purity of the...

[1212] Yeah, fine, that's a perfectly reason...

[1213] But that's, again, why I would say that it heads back towards the individual.

[1214] Okay, so how...

[1215] But how do we collectively solve that individual problem?

[1216] Or is that not solvable?

[1217] I think that we collectively solve the individual problem by noting that the collective is subordinate to the individual, which is really the Western claim.

[1218] It's the fundamental Western claim, is that what's at the pinnacle of the collective is the piece of the pyramid that detaches itself, that's the eye, right?

[1219] It's it's it's it's it's the individual logos fundamentally that the collective has to serve because the logos is the thing that rejuvenates the collective.

[1220] So is there a conflation there between the individual as in the individual human being versus or as well as that that which is able to speak truth as precisely and clearly as possible?

[1221] In your mind, are those two melded?

[1222] Well, that would be the ideal, that they're melded.

[1223] The individual is the truth -bearing vessel.

[1224] Not the collective.

[1225] The collective is the dead remnants of the past.

[1226] Now you need it.

[1227] It's a container.

[1228] It's necessary.

[1229] But it's always out of date.

[1230] Always.

[1231] It's always out of date and at least semi -terranical, partly because it's out of date, partly because it's partly corrupt.

[1232] But it's the soul of the individual.

[1233] the spirit of the individual, we could say motivated by love, attempting to manifest itself in truth, that's the cure for that malaise.

[1234] And that's an ancient, ancient idea.

[1235] It's the most ancient idea.

[1236] It's the most ancient written idea we have.

[1237] You see it in the Anoumaelish, the Mesopotamian creation myth.

[1238] That's Marduk.

[1239] So could one, again, from a devil's advocate perspective, not argue that what's motivating some of the things that have concerned you with respect?

[1240] respect to the left, is advocating precisely for that, the rights of individuals who have thus far been maligned in our society, or not given the proper space because of stigma.

[1241] Well, I do think that to the degree that the left is motivated by love and the desire for truth, that the left does serve that.

[1242] I mean, I think the left has been very effective in many ways in holding the concerns of the less fortunate up so that others can see it.

[1243] I believe that that's a valid role the left can play.

[1244] I believe that they've abandoned that role because they're serving a particular ideology.

[1245] I believe that that's why Hillary Clinton lost the last election.

[1246] They abandoned the working class.

[1247] That's a bad idea because the working class needs a voice and the working class is in rough shape.

[1248] And there's a variety of reasons.

[1249] for that, that are complex.

[1250] The working class needs a voice, the oppressed need a voice.

[1251] But that doesn't mean they need a genuine voice.

[1252] They need a genuine voice.

[1253] And I think that genuine voice is lacking.

[1254] I think it's been, I think the left has been hijacked by by people who are neither motivated by love nor by truth.

[1255] So to concretize this then, in terms of people's, at least here in Vancouver, for instance, instinctive reaction to protect otherwise marginalized individuals such as transgender people.

[1256] Yes, we're not talking, we are definitely not talking about instinctive reactions.

[1257] The instinctive reaction is nothing but an impulse.

[1258] It is not a moral virtue.

[1259] Right.

[1260] That's just maternal instinct.

[1261] And maternal instinct is just as dangerous as it is benevolent.

[1262] I mean, that was, I suppose, Freud's major contribution.

[1263] But, you know, the Oedipal mother is the devouring mother.

[1264] That's the witch who lives inside the castle or the gingerbread house.

[1265] She's just too damn good to be true.

[1266] The problem with over -mothering creatures is that they stay infantile.

[1267] So the fact that you feel sorry for someone and want to help them is just the bare beginning of what you need to do to actually do something that's useful.

[1268] And to confuse that with solving the problem is, well, I'm caring.

[1269] Well, yeah, who cares if you're caring?

[1270] Like, fine, what?

[1271] A sparrow is caring.

[1272] that's not the issue that's that's that's the issue at the most at the at the that's not the issue so again to concretize this because I think this exercise is extremely useful based on what we started the conversation with to take this from the more general to the specific in terms of let's say protecting transgender people who have been really maligned in society there's an incredibly high suicide rate amongst transgender's right they have difficulty finding work They have difficulty maintaining normal relationships.

[1273] And let's...

[1274] Well, of course they have difficulty maintaining normal relationships.

[1275] They're not going to maintain a normal relationship.

[1276] And that's not possible.

[1277] They're in an abnormal situation.

[1278] So by now, that doesn't mean they don't get to have relationships, but it certainly means that they're not going to be normal.

[1279] And, you know, there's a price to be paid for being different.

[1280] Now you could say, well, that price should be minimized to the degree that that's possible.

[1281] Fair enough.

[1282] That is the argument.

[1283] I believe that that is the articulated argument of people on the left, amongst those in the radical left that you say are motivated by more nefarious.

[1284] Yeah, I don't believe it.

[1285] I don't believe that, in fact, I don't think the transgender people believe it, because I've got letters from about 35 transgender people.

[1286] Now, every single one of them, except one, said they agreed with me. They do not regard these activists as their legitimate representatives.

[1287] They are not happy with the fact that this pronoun issue has made them more, like more salient to the community.

[1288] they don't trust the people who purport to represent them.

[1289] So, like, representation requires legitimacy.

[1290] And just because you're an activist who says that you care for people, or even if you happen to be a member of the community, which, by the way, is not a community in any sense of the word, it's a range of people that are just as diverse as any other range of people.

[1291] None of that gives you legitimacy as a representative.

[1292] And this brings us right back to the beginning.

[1293] I do not believe that legislation like Bill C -16 is in the law.

[1294] least in the interest of people who, these people who are marginalized.

[1295] Quite the contrary.

[1296] I believe they're the, there are sacrificial victims to the onslaught of a continuing postmodern neo -Marxist ideology.

[1297] Right.

[1298] And I think many people just, they don't see what you say you see.

[1299] They don't see the historical context in which you are observing the phenomenon.

[1300] So how, as a message to people who are watching this and trying to work their way through a lot of young people who were trying to navigate this increasingly perilous mindfield of divisive politics in today's day and age.

[1301] How do they know what are the heuristics they use?

[1302] What are the signposts they use to understand am I on the right path?

[1303] Is what I'm being taught or is what I'm being attracted to politically motivated from a sense of what's actually best for the community that I'm nominally caring for?

[1304] Well, that requires, you might say, well, that requires careful meditation and prayer.

[1305] You know, if you wanted to be traditional about it, I would say you have to orient, you have to determine, this is a process of soul searching.

[1306] What are you oriented towards?

[1307] And the answer could easily be nothing.

[1308] Well, this is why I produced the future authoring program.

[1309] Like, you've got to be oriented towards something because otherwise you're disoriented.

[1310] You just spin around in circles and then you suffer and sort of people around you.

[1311] It's not a good solution.

[1312] Orient yourself towards something.

[1313] You have to figure out what it is.

[1314] What will work for you?

[1315] What goal would justify the suffering of your life?

[1316] Start trying to piece that together.

[1317] You're going to get better at it.

[1318] But it's a personal process.

[1319] And you should use your education to inform that.

[1320] So you need a personal place to stand because otherwise you're going to be handed a place to stand on a plate.

[1321] And it may be one that that makes you a puppet of someone else's goals.

[1322] So I would say, you know, what are the processes?

[1323] Well, I think what I've recommended to people is clean up your room.

[1324] That's a good start.

[1325] Organize your local landscape.

[1326] Schedule your time.

[1327] Start taking control of yourself.

[1328] See if you can stop saying things you know to be lies.

[1329] That's not the same as telling the truth.

[1330] You don't get to do that to begin with because you're not good enough at it to even attempt it in some sense.

[1331] But everyone can stop saying.

[1332] things they know to be falsehoods.

[1333] They can use their own damn definition of falsehood.

[1334] Right, but in your definition, importantly, I think, in your definition, falsehood includes the higher level moral truth.

[1335] Yes, it's living wrong.

[1336] You can say something that is literally true, but of course, like you said earlier, it's a black truth in the sense that at a moral level, you're saying something to cause a social effect that is actually negative.

[1337] I would say stop saying things that violate your conscience instead of stop saying things you know to be untrue because we run into the truth problem.

[1338] But I would say stop.

[1339] Here's another idea.

[1340] Stop saying and doing things that make you feel weak.

[1341] Just all you have to do is pay attention to that.

[1342] Some things you do will make you feel disintegrated.

[1343] It's a physiological sensation.

[1344] Disintegrated and weak.

[1345] It's something that Carl Rogers commented on.

[1346] He thought about that as part of, oh, now I can't remember the word.

[1347] It's something like integrity, but that isn't the word he used.

[1348] But some things improve your integrity and some things disintegrate you.

[1349] Now, the things that disintegrate you, you often do to impress other people, or because you're taking a shortcut, or you're escaping what you know to be your moral obligation.

[1350] And your moral obligation stems naturally from your aims.

[1351] Like once you have aims, you have moral obligations.

[1352] They come together because the moral obligation is what you.

[1353] need to do in order to obtain the aim so and if you don't have an aim well then you're aimless so that's not a solution so along with the aims come the moral obligations then when you violate the moral obligations you'll have a sense of that violation it's like well you have to stop doing that or or that's something you could do you don't have to you don't have to do any of this but i would say that's where where people should start you start small it's not small you think it's small it's not small i had a girl come up to me last night at the end of my talk and this happens all the time.

[1354] She said, I started cleaning up my room last year and it completely changed my life.

[1355] She said, your room is an externalization of your mind.

[1356] And that's right.

[1357] That's exactly true.

[1358] To the degree that you're in your room, the room is you.

[1359] Now, that isn't how people think, but that's okay.

[1360] It doesn't matter if they think that way.

[1361] That's how it is.

[1362] So straighten up what you can straighten up and quit saying things that make you feel weak.

[1363] And then you'll know what to do Next.

[1364] It's one last point on this that, because we're running short on time, but I would like to touch on this.

[1365] So one point that concerns me is that is what you're saying, because I find so much of what you've shared with, well, with the world at this point, using the technological means we have available to be of immense value, the way you articulate what many of us feel to be true, but aren't able to put into logo.

[1366] Well, see, that's another, that's another hallmark of truth.

[1367] is that it snaps things together and people write to me all the time and say that it's like it's say it's it's as if things were coming together in my mind it's like well that's what archetypes do archetypes glue things together so yes it's it's it's it's the proper expression of unconscious being teaches people what they already know it's it's it's kind of like the platonic idea that all learning was remembering it's it's it's you know it's it's it's it's not right exactly the way that we would think of learning and remembering now.

[1368] But you have a, you have a, you have a, you have a nature.

[1369] And when you feel that nature articulated, it's, it's like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

[1370] They're right there.

[1371] Yes, well, that's the, that's the, that's the, bringing the levels of being into sync, into synchrony.

[1372] That's what you feel.

[1373] It's like, oh, that's synchronized now.

[1374] It's like what I think and the way I feel have come together.

[1375] And you feel that snap.

[1376] It's like, oh, that's a simple.

[1377] It's a simpler state.

[1378] It's something like that.

[1379] It's not rife with contradictions anymore.

[1380] So just to follow through on this thought then, so what concerns me to a degree is, and maybe it shouldn't concern me, but I'll express this anyway, there's such value in what you've been sharing for the reasons we just discussed just a second ago.

[1381] But because of the context in which this arose recently, some of your ideas have been taken up by people on the right who may suffer from exactly the same kinds of ideological possession issues that you argue some people on the extreme left suffer from and the degree to which what you have been arguing or putting forth or sharing with people becomes conflated with the ideologically possessed arguments on the right or the alt right is is deeply concerning for someone who thinks that who feels and knows that what you have to say is so incredibly valuable um because people will they'll just i've had many many people write me from the right or from from you know from the fringes of the radical right say saying precisely that listening to my lecture stop them from going all the way you know so i would say that if people listen to what i'm saying then that isn't going to happen now how to Has my message been co -opted?

[1382] I would say to a much lesser degree than people think.

[1383] All you have to do is go read the YouTube comments.

[1384] And there's thousands and thousands of them.

[1385] And I mean, YouTube comments, it's like most of them are generated by denizens from the pits of hell.

[1386] They're really dismissive, aggressive, rude, vulgar, thoughtless, provocative, prejudicial.

[1387] I mean, you name it, man. We're discussing before off -camera the notion of, I think, is called Godwin's Law.

[1388] be aware.

[1389] At a certain point, a YouTube or any internet discussion will degenerate into Nazi comparisons.

[1390] Right.

[1391] Exactly.

[1392] Exactly.

[1393] And so, but that isn't what characterizes the comment stream on my YouTube videos with very rare exceptions.

[1394] And so I don't believe that what I've been discussing has been co -opted to any significant degree.

[1395] I think that what has happened is that at this time and place, for some reason, it isn't the people on the left who are particularly open to the message.

[1396] But But that's because I think that they're far more gripped by the totalitarian spirit than people aligned along the rest of the spectrum.

[1397] And they also have more power.

[1398] Now, it's a, it's a, they have, they have more institutional power of a certain type, particularly in the universe.

[1399] I was going to say this sounds like a highly academic context in which you're, that you're describing.

[1400] And I, and I identify, I've experienced what you're identifying, so I can relate to that.

[1401] But in terms of what concerns me is looking at, at the wider.

[1402] societal and global context, there is definitely a resurgence of the right.

[1403] And as someone whose family, for instance, suffered under the Nazi regime, it's disturbing.

[1404] Well, it's the polarization, eh?

[1405] The polarization is disturbing.

[1406] And, you know, what I try to recommend to people, and I did in my talk last night, for example, is that they find someone that they don't agree with and have a conversation with them.

[1407] Now, it has to be someone that you can have a conversation with, but a lot of that will just involve listening.

[1408] It's like we have to extend our hands across the gap, because otherwise we'll polarize.

[1409] That's what's happening.

[1410] You know, you saw it in Berkeley last week.

[1411] And that's, you know, that could be just the beginning.

[1412] And there's lots of people who would like that.

[1413] That's not a good idea.

[1414] It's a very bad idea.

[1415] You know, and I would say, it's still my estimation that at the moment, it's the radicals on the left that are primarily responsible for this.

[1416] And they're primarily responsible, particularly because of their stance on free speech.

[1417] Like, I can't go to Linfield College now.

[1418] And some arbitrary administrator used a specious excuse to say, no, well, he can't come.

[1419] Even though I was invited.

[1420] I was already invited.

[1421] I'd already paid for the airfare.

[1422] It's like they feel that there is a large coterie of people who feel that it's in their bailiwick to determine who can speak.

[1423] And that's a very bad idea.

[1424] So to clarify for people, because I think the way you're describing this, inherently speaks to people on the, at the moment, and again, I hesitate to buy into this bifurcation, but people who identify at the moment with the right.

[1425] Yeah, well, put it this way.

[1426] The campuses have not been infiltrated by right -wing radicals.

[1427] Not at all.

[1428] Not in the least.

[1429] The campuses.

[1430] Yeah.

[1431] Well, the thing, the problem with that is that's where the campuses, the humanities, let's lay it out again.

[1432] Theology at the bottom, philosophy after that.

[1433] Well, that's where the humanities are.

[1434] The humanities are nearest to the foundation of our culture.

[1435] And they're completely dominated by radical leftists, postmodern neo -Marxists.

[1436] And that's not my opinion.

[1437] That's well documented.

[1438] Like, there aren't even conservatives in those domains, let alone right -wingers.

[1439] There's not even any conservatives.

[1440] I mean, maybe you can call conservatives right -wing.

[1441] I think you've got to, you know, you're pushing your luck when you do that.

[1442] But there's no conservatives even.

[1443] So the centrists are on the right.

[1444] right as far as the people in the humanities are concerned, well, that's not good.

[1445] And it's seriously not good, because those, the humanities have way more effect on our culture than we think, way more.

[1446] In what sense do you think the rise, and in some sense, or frightening resurgence of popularity in right -wing, in even extreme right -wing political movements, political, as opposed to what's on campus, is a semi -conscious reaction to the possession of, as you were saying, the inherent ideological foundations of our society being...

[1447] I think it's exactly that.

[1448] I mean, it's more than that, because, you know, things get amalgamated.

[1449] It's always useful for people to find someone to hate and hit.

[1450] And so that motivation drives radicals on both sides of the political spectrum, right?

[1451] And obviously you can see that because it's starting to happen.

[1452] So, but it's certainly the case that, look, if the Democrats wouldn't have played identity politics, Hillary would have won the election.

[1453] It's as simple as that.

[1454] And people also should note that it wasn't just the federal presidency that the Democrats lost.

[1455] They lost everything, right?

[1456] At the state level, too.

[1457] It's like they're pushing people too hard.

[1458] And they have their ideological reasons for it, and I don't find them credible.

[1459] And it's the grounding in postmodernism and the secret grounding underneath that in neo -Marxism and people are not going to put up with that and they shouldn't so it so I think we have to wrap up because because you haven't a remaining schedule here in Vancouver but would you be willing to say for the record and to the camera and if you're not that's fine but would you be willing to say that you you yourself actually do not identify with the what appear to be for some of us more insiduous elements of the right I'm not political I've made my decision many times I've thought of, you know, running for political office.

[1460] And if I did in Canada, the most logical place for me to be within the Liberal Party, although I think that it's also been hijacked by the social justice warrior types to a, to a very damaging degree, especially you see that in Ontario.

[1461] But I've decided at multiple points in my life that I'm not playing at the political level.

[1462] I'm playing at the philosophical level, or maybe I'm playing at the theological level.

[1463] And what I'm trying to do is to say what I think as clearly as I possibly can and to listen to the feedback and modify my message when that seems to be necessary.

[1464] And apart from that, I'm willing to let the chips fall where they will because that's also part of the decision.

[1465] The decision is that if you believe, if you choose to believe, if you choose to act as if the truth brings being into existence in the best.

[1466] possible manner, then you speak your truth, you examine your conscience, you listen to feedback, and you allow the events to unfold as they will.

[1467] And I am trying to do that.

[1468] That's what I'm attempting to do.

[1469] So on the very final question then, on that point, you've mentioned how what's most important to you is having the space, both individually and as a society, to think through the things that you are trying to make sense of in public.

[1470] or with others, to be able to freely articulate what you're...

[1471] To jointly articulate it, yes.

[1472] And we don't know how to do it right at the beginning, right?

[1473] Right, definitely not.

[1474] We need that space to make mistakes.

[1475] Oh, absolutely, yes.

[1476] And even to make them publicly.

[1477] That's right.

[1478] Is there anything personally now looking back that maybe you haven't said thus far, maybe you have, or maybe something you haven't, that knowing what you know now, having gone through what's happened over, you know, the last year or so, Is there anything that you would reformulate?

[1479] Is there any correction or corrective measure that you would take to more clearly articulate things that you articulated back when this...

[1480] Well, I would say that I'm trying to do that on an ongoing basis.

[1481] I mean, right from the beginning, after the first video went roughly viral, I have a group of friends who span the political spectrum, who stood by me, let's say, as well as my family, And I'm talking to them constantly about what I'm doing wrong and mostly what I'm doing wrong.

[1482] You know, when I'm angry, when I'm, because maybe that's maybe I have learned to some degree how to harness part of the energy of anger as a source of energy.

[1483] Now, that has its advantages and disadvantages.

[1484] Its advantage is a certain kind of forcefulness.

[1485] It's also a good suppressor of a good competitor for fear.

[1486] because anger suppresses fear the feedback I've received is that the more reasonable I am the better and that of course makes sense and then there's been plethora of small and specific criticisms and I've tried to attend to them I've tried to attend to them as carefully as I can I mean I've been in a situation for especially for the first four months where had I said one thing that was self -evidently non -credible, you know, that would have justified a claim of bigotry or racism or any of those things, I would have been sunk.

[1487] And so I wouldn't say I'm pleased with my performance because it isn't a performance and it isn't something to be pleased about or displeased about.

[1488] But I can say that to the degree that it's possible, I've done my best to say to do what I said I'm doing, which is to say what I think as clearly as I can.

[1489] That's all I'm trying to do.

[1490] When I go in front of people, I'm not trying to convince them of anything.

[1491] I'm really not.

[1492] It's up to them to do.

[1493] I don't want to convince people of something.

[1494] They're responsible for their own suffering.

[1495] I don't want to manipulate their destinies.

[1496] I don't believe that I know enough about the particularities of their life to dare to do that.

[1497] What I do when I speak to people is try to formulate my thoughts.

[1498] on that particular topic more clearly.

[1499] That's my lecture style.

[1500] I'm thinking.

[1501] I'm not delivering a pre -packaged talk.

[1502] I mean, now and then I'll write it, but that's only when I'm developing a really new idea, and I haven't, and it has to be a structured argument.

[1503] And I've only done that like in three of my YouTube videos.

[1504] It's very rare.

[1505] Most of the time I have a skeleton.

[1506] There's the argument.

[1507] There's a skeletal outline.

[1508] I see how I'm going to get from point A to B to C. And then when I'm talking, like today, It's an exploration.

[1509] It's not here's what I think.

[1510] It's right and you should believe it.

[1511] It's like, no, I'm trying to rectify my errors and extend what I know when I'm speaking and when I'm listening.

[1512] And so I think that genuinely is what I'm doing.

[1513] And I genuinely don't want to give people advice.

[1514] It's something I've learned not least by being a psychotherapist.

[1515] It's like your destiny is not mine.

[1516] to mess with.

[1517] I don't want to be responsible for your decisions.

[1518] What if I'm wrong?

[1519] Nonetheless, as you said, you do have the impulse to want the best by with what an individual?

[1520] Yes, we could have a discussion, a productive discussion about what might be the best for you.

[1521] And I do that with my clients all the time.

[1522] It's like they come and see me and they've got problems and I say, okay, well, if we could come up with a solution, what would that solution look like?

[1523] You know, let's lay the cards on the table.

[1524] We can explore a bunch of different solutions, but I'm really trying, and this is partly the influence of Carl Rogers, you know, is I'm really trying to help the person find their own way, because that's not going to be my way.

[1525] It's going to be their way.

[1526] And if they find their way, that will be best for them, and it will be best for the people around them.

[1527] And so it'll be best for me, for that matter.

[1528] So it's in my interest, in my selfish self -interest to help the other person find his or her way.

[1529] And not my way.

[1530] Except insofar as my way is trying to explore and generate more accurate representations of the world.

[1531] Right.

[1532] So is there a concrete example to just end on this note of concretization that we discussed and the importance of bringing it to a cognitive level that is familiar and embodied for us?

[1533] Is there a concrete example of something where you said something, and I'm not thinking of anything in particular.

[1534] I'm being entirely genuine here.

[1535] Is there an instance where you feel you said something that appeared to be true to you at the time and knowing what you know?

[1536] Yes, I think I was a little dismissive of the men going their own way.

[1537] Because I think I called them pathetic weasels, which, and I had my reasons for that.

[1538] My reasons were, roughly speaking, that I...

[1539] Who are the men going their own way, just for context?

[1540] Well, they're a group of people mostly on the net who have had, who've been burned in their relationships or who conceptualized themselves.

[1541] as having been burned in their relationships, and they believe that the legal structure in particular in Western countries is so tilted against men, particularly in family dispute situations, and divorce settlement, that it's safer for men not to establish permanent relationships with women, not to cohabit with them, ever.

[1542] And they're a large movement.

[1543] Now, how large they are, I don't know, but they're large enough.

[1544] And they have what I would regard as an undue influence over relatively bitter and resentful young men who haven't had great success in the dating market and who are looking for a rationale to write off all women because they're so hurt by their continual rejection.

[1545] And that is not good for those young men.

[1546] And so the reason that I disparaged the men going their own way was because I had seen the pernicious effect, these are often older guys, the pernicious effect of their world, philosophy on young men.

[1547] Now, these guys think that they're just warning them, and they are warning them, but they're not just warning them.

[1548] Now, the reason I regret calling them pathetic weasels is because they also have a point.

[1549] I do believe that the court systems are staggeringly anti -male, absurdly, horribly anti -male.

[1550] And I've seen my own clients, some of them who are really, really decent, hardworking, family -oriented people demolished by the court systems.

[1551] And so the men going their own way have a point.

[1552] And so I'm sorry that I called them pathetic weasels.

[1553] But I outlined my reasons.

[1554] And so, yes, I do regret that.

[1555] I have to be careful because I do have a satirical, dark, satirical sense of humor.

[1556] And I can utter epithets, let's say, for the sake of punctuating a point, Well, simultaneously forgetting that 150 ,000 people will listen to it.

[1557] So, I regret that.

[1558] Other than that, I'm judging my behavior on the degree to which my trajectory is upward.

[1559] And I believe that I have responsibly improved the articulation of my arguments with every iteration of them.

[1560] And so, and I think that had that not been happening, I would have been, I would have been taught a very serious lesson, because there were plenty of people, and still are, who would be perfectly happy to see me be taught a very serious lesson.

[1561] It's quite terrifying, you know, I'm on a tightrope.

[1562] It's not as much a tightrope as it was.

[1563] But for a long time, for months, had I said anything erroneous or insufficiently careful, I would have been in trouble, and had anybody dug up anything that I said in the past, which is also, and that's worked in my favor, because of course when I made these public pronouncements, there was already 500 hours of videos online.

[1564] And so had I been a reprehensible individual, you know, unless I was capable of deceit at levels that far exceed the average, there would have been some line somewhere in one of the videos that I made when I was having an off day where I said something that could be taken out.

[1565] of context and and you know paint me and and and smear me with it but that hasn't happened and I think the reason that that hasn't happened is because touch wood those utterances actually don't exist so that's a great point to Annan thank you so much we've gone way over time but I think it was worth it thank you for listening to the Jordan B Peterson podcast to support these podcasts you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description of this episode.

[1566] Dr. Peterson's self -development programs can be found at self -authoring .com.