Put Yourself Together

[0] Welcome to Season 2, Episode 42 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's daughter and collaborator.

[2] I hope your week went well.

[3] The Peterson's are still in Russia.

[4] If you're over on this side of the world, I would recommend visiting.

[5] It's gorgeous.

[6] Maybe do you're visiting in the summer when it's not this dark, though.

[7] I looked it up, and there's the same amount of sunlight per day in Moscow as there is in Fairview, Northern Alberta, where Dad is from.

[8] It's pretty brutal.

[9] The sun comes up at around 9 and sets by 4 .30, and it doesn't ever seem to be that bright out.

[10] So come in the summer instead.

[11] Today's episode is a 12 Rules for Life Lecture recorded in Perth, Australia on February 9th, 2019, named Put Yourself Together.

[12] I hope you enjoy the podcast.

[13] Put yourself together at Jordan B. Peterson 12 Rules for Life Lecture.

[14] Thank you very much.

[15] That's much appreciate.

[16] and it's great to see it's great to see you all here on such a lovely evening when there's so many other things that you could be doing.

[17] I guess it's lovely here all the time in the summer, is it?

[18] It's not like that in Canada, I'll tell you.

[19] I left, it was 35 below and blowing snow and the city was a parking lot and this is much better.

[20] I was at the beach today and it was very nice.

[21] My wife got stung by some Stinger thing, though, and I'm blaming all of you for that.

[22] Anyway, she's okay, and it was still worthwhile going to the beach.

[23] So it's a pleasure to be here, and thank you all very much for coming to, what, a serious psychological discussion.

[24] What the hell?

[25] No, it's really something to see.

[26] I don't really quite understand it, you know, because I've been traveling all over the world now I think this is like the 130th city I've been in since last January something like that and you know this is a typical approximately typical size crowd and people are very enthusiastic about all of this and it's created quite surprising isn't something that you'd expect and so I don't know what to make of it except that I think maybe it's time it seems to be time that in the West and then there are parts of the world as well we're we're ready to have some serious discussions.

[27] And I don't know why that is.

[28] I have a suspicion, like I think that things are out of kilter on our culture for psychological reasons, important, what, deep psychological reasons, because life is confusing and difficult, and so it's not easy to keep things straight.

[29] But I think we have some things to put straight, and we all know it.

[30] And I think we can put them straight.

[31] And so, like, my sense is that, and this is partly what I'm trying to do, it's like, I believe from what I've studied psychologically is that we look at the world as if it's a story.

[32] And I don't mean that we've learned to do that exactly or that we're taught to do that.

[33] I mean that our brains are biologically constructed so that we see the world through the layers.

[34] ends of a story.

[35] And, you know, there's peripheral evidence for that.

[36] There's some central evidence for that, because if you actually look at how cognition operates, it seems quite self -evident that we naturally use metaphors and we naturally use narrative tropes, but more importantly, we understand stories.

[37] Like, we understand their structure.

[38] We use stories to convey information, right?

[39] And we tell children's stories, for example, and it's interesting because it's not that easy to get children to listen.

[40] You know, it's because they're smart.

[41] They don't want to just listen to you.

[42] They're too canny in some sense just to go out and do exactly what you say they should do, just like you're too canny to even go out and do exactly what you say you should do, you know, because what do you know?

[43] And so you have some resistance to that.

[44] But, you know, your children will drag a book over to you and ask you to you, to read it to them, which is really quite a remarkable thing, right?

[45] It shows you how profound and fundamental that impulse is.

[46] It's an impulse that seems to be at the same level of fundamental necessity as water or hunger or any of the basic motivations.

[47] And of course, so that's children, but of course adults are just as strange in that regard because a lot of what we do for entertainment, you know, an entertainment is, something you'll do spontaneously, right, without being forced, obviously.

[48] It's something that you enjoy so that produces a certain amount of positive emotion.

[49] It's a bit more complicated than that because you go watch horror movies and it isn't exactly obvious that what they produce is enjoyment, but whatever, you'll still go see them voluntarily.

[50] And so there's something about them that's integrally attractive.

[51] I think what it is with horror movies is that we have a profound need to face things that we're afraid of and disgusted by.

[52] We have to learn to do that because there's lots of things in life that you are frightening and also that are disgusting and that you have to put up with anyways and that you have to do competently.

[53] And so if you're too frightened or too squeamish, then in a terrible situation where you have to deal with something frightening and potentially something.

[54] disgusting, then you're not good for anything and that's not good.

[55] So you have to, what would you say?

[56] You have to habituate yourself.

[57] You have to learn to deal with those situations.

[58] And so we'll go watch horror movies, the frightening kind, or the gory kind, because, well, that's life.

[59] And so you bloody well better get used to it, or you're too weak, and then you're in trouble.

[60] So, and then there's the other sorts of stories.

[61] We go see.

[62] We see heroic stories, adventures, and we see romances.

[63] Those seem to be about the two real classes of stories, I would say.

[64] There's hero story and an adventure, and sometimes they're mixed together because the hero has a romance, and that's the sort of movie that I suppose attracts everyone to some degree, and hopefully that's the story of life.

[65] You know, you have a heroic adventure and you have a romance, and that's your life and that beats the hell out of not having a heroic adventure or a romance.

[66] And so, and we're so interested in those representations that we don't even think of them as learning, really, you know, because it's easy to think of learning, and some forms of learning are like this as difficult and demanding and certainly not something that you would necessarily, well, line up for a long period of time.

[67] and pay money for, right, and people will do that for, well, they did that for Star Wars.

[68] And, well, that happens a lot in popular culture, you know, that some story comes out that's so remarkably attractive that it's a world movement of some sort.

[69] And, I mean, the Star Wars phenomenon has lasted for, what, it's got to be 30 years now, something like that.

[70] And, of course, the same thing is true with the Lord of the Rings, and the same thing is true of the Harry Potter series, which made a woman who, who is a welfare recipient to begin with on social assistance, richer than the queen and able to, what, make tens of thousands of 10 -year -olds read 700 -page books.

[71] And not just one, like seven, they could hardly wait for the next 700 -page book.

[72] You know, it's really something to consider that that's the way that we're wired.

[73] and it's deeply worth considering that.

[74] It's like, you know, there's, at least in principle, if you're biologically, well, doesn't matter, if you're religiously oriented like a creationist type or an evolutionary biologist, it doesn't matter.

[75] You really come to the same conclusion.

[76] There's something driving, there's something powerful, powerful, powerful, driving people's attractiveness to, attraction to narratives and that it's hard to imagine that that's that there's just nothing to that you know i mean there's something to hunger if you don't eat you die there's something to thirst same thing there's something to lust if if that doesn't exist then there aren't any people i mean these fundamental motivations exist because life itself depends on them and so we have this fundamental motivation to be attracted to and tell stories and well why why would that be it must mean it must mean at some level that we need them right we need them so badly that they're they're burned into us as something of fundamental that we that we that we're fundamentally attracted to you know we tell stories we act them out we enjoy listening to them.

[77] We spend tremendous amounts of money on movies and video games too and they have a narrative structure, you know, participatory narrative structure, but still a narrative structure.

[78] You know, the most expensive computational equipment in the world, we devote to portraying stories.

[79] You know, like most, the high -end computer systems now, the highest development of technology is put forward to build simulated realities.

[80] partly for movies, high -end, high -end, high -graphics movies, because the graphics processes are very technologically sophisticated, but also in video games, too, so we're bloody well obsessed.

[81] If you think, well, the medieval people spent all their money building cathedrals over 300 -year periods, you know, immense amounts of money trying to do whatever it was that they were trying to do with cathedrals, glorify something, put forward some idea, some value or some some ideal while we spend an immense amount of money technologically on building realistic narrative simulations of the world and it's it's hard to believe that there's nothing behind that so it's worth thinking about you know and we don't because we're scientifically minded and and it's a good thing that we are it's been very helpful we tend to think of the world as objective and that that's the correct way of looking at the world.

[82] And it is a correct way of looking at the world, but it doesn't seem to me that it's the correct way of the world.

[83] Or maybe it's not, or maybe there's more than one correct way of looking at the world.

[84] That's the other possibility.

[85] I don't exactly know how to adjudicate between those two possibilities.

[86] I personally think that the narrative mode of looking at the world is the most fundamental, and that the scientific mode is nested inside that.

[87] And the reason I think that is because we think scientifically for motivated reasons, you know, and stories have a lot to do with motivation.

[88] All the characters in stories are motivated to do things.

[89] And while people are scientists for motivated reasons, like at least in principle, the reason that we think scientifically is to make life better, right?

[90] So the scientific enterprise itself is nested inside an ethical enterprise.

[91] And so then it's an open question.

[92] Is the scientific enterprise primary or is the ethical enterprise primary?

[93] And I had a huge, some of you know, I had a series of debates with Sam Harris about this.

[94] And I would say they were somewhat inconclusive because it's something like a cat chasing its tail.

[95] Both of those levels of reality are extremely important.

[96] You have to be a fool to dismiss one, you know, without thinking in favor of the other.

[97] But you're still stuck in the final analysis, as far as I'm concerned, with the problem that you wouldn't be pursuing a scientific interpretation of the world unless you were motivated to do so.

[98] Carl Jung, when he, the psychoanalyst, studied the emergence of science, he was very interested in why it was that people, decided to devote themselves to the microanalysis of narrow phenomenon, you know.

[99] It's kind of strange.

[100] You have people now that spend their whole lives like studying the mating behavior of fruit flies.

[101] You know, it's like it's not the sort of thing that you'd expect an animal to do.

[102] You know, if you think about as animals, it's really focused behavior.

[103] It's like, it's like, what the hell are you doing studying them?

[104] mating behavior of fruit flies.

[105] What are you up to?

[106] You know, it's not like it takes a lot of training, like seven or eight years of training if you're going to get a PhD so that you get good at that.

[107] And there's a tremendous amount of work goes into it.

[108] So there's something underneath it driving it.

[109] And Jung's idea, Carl Jung's idea, it's a very complicated idea, but he believed that in the first thousand years of Christianity, there was a tremendous emphasis on the spiritualization of the human psyche, right, is that we were trying to elevate ourselves in some sense above our base physiological desires.

[110] And those might be the sort of things that would have been on display in a Roman Coliseum, you know, absolute bloodlust and an extraordinarily casual attitude towards the quality of human life.

[111] And really, an impulsive and short -term mode of being, and we needed to be disciplined and trained in some manner that brought our psyches together and sort of elevated us above being possessed by our immediate need for gratification.

[112] And maybe it took a thousand years of Christianity to enforce that idea, that there was an ideal, an abstract ideal that was more than mere physical gratification, more than mere power, right?

[113] And what was supposed to go along with that was the, what would you say, the redemption of humankind, right?

[114] Because that was the promise of Christianity that human beings would end up in something approximating, I don't know, the state of the kingdom of God on earth.

[115] and in some sense that happened things got better but in some sense it didn't happen everyone was still suffering to a degree that was in some sense untenable you know we're still mortal we're still fragile it wasn't enough we're missing something Jung's idea it's a great idea he's an absolutely bloody genius that man his idea was that well we started to we started to dream in a sense because Jung believed that dreams preceded thought, like your imagination precedes your actions, you know, like maybe you don't know what you're doing in your life, and you have some dreamy idea about some ambition you're going to manifest, and maybe it's like a daydream about who you could be.

[116] And so that's sort of an outline of a potential future.

[117] And it's not real, because it's only potential, but the dream inspires you, right?

[118] It fills you as spirit.

[119] That's what inspiration means.

[120] And then that motivates you and then you go out and pursue that dream and then all of a sudden the dream becomes real and that and that's a bloody weird thing too if you think about it that you can dream something up and then you can enact it and then it happens and then what it implies at least to some degree is that we do in fact dream up the world and that's that's that's a strange one all right it's as if we can see and I think there's something I think there's something to this I think This is actually how we interact with the world.

[121] It's as if we can see multiple branching potential pathways that stretch out in front of us.

[122] This is how I think our consciousness works.

[123] You do a lot by habit.

[124] As a habitual person, you're deterministic, right?

[125] You do things by habit, and A follows B and B follows C, and you don't think much about it.

[126] You've built sophisticated neurological machinery in your brain.

[127] that works deterministically and so you can just do what you've learned to do but and you're not conscious of it really like you know if you're a pianist and you know a piano piece really well you're playing it and you get conscious about it it's not good you stumble right away or if you're speaking and you get self -conscious that's not good or if you're typing and you notice that you're typing that doesn't work worth a damn it's like once you've built the habitual machinery you want it to run you want it to run automatically if you're a damn and you get self -conscious, then you start to stumble over your feet.

[128] There's lots of things you don't want consciousness to do.

[129] But one of the things you do want consciousness to do is to do what's new, what's never been done before.

[130] And so part of what it is that we do when we're conscious is to do what's never done before.

[131] And it looks to me like the way that operates is that we awaken to consciousness, let's say, in the morning.

[132] and what we see in front of us, we're not driven by the past like deterministic machines.

[133] I mean, we are to some degree, but forget about that.

[134] That's the habit part I was already talking about.

[135] It's not that.

[136] What you see in front of you, and you perceive this with your imagination.

[137] You think, okay, well, here's the day.

[138] And maybe you think about the week and you think about the month, but mostly you think about the day when you wake up, you think, well, what do I have to do today?

[139] And that sort of means, well, what do I have to contend with today?

[140] And you think, well, here's the array of possibilities.

[141] You think, well, here's how the ship could sink, or at least list in the water, if there are some things that I don't do, right?

[142] You wake up and you have a set of obligations waiting for it, you think, well, there are pathways I could take, and if I take them in the proper manner, then things will be set somewhat more, what, straighter by the end of the day, or at least less crooked, or be in less trouble.

[143] Things won't have got out of hand, that's sort of to control the negative end of things.

[144] And then on the positive end, you might think, well, here's a variety of opportunities and possibilities that await me, and I can choose to interact with them.

[145] And that's quite a remarkable thing, that that's what you're like, is.

[146] that you can look into the future and you can see a set of possible futures.

[147] They're not infinite, right?

[148] They have to be within your grasp because you can't just do anything, at least not in one day.

[149] But you have a pretty decent array of possibilities waiting for you, and then somehow you're able to decide which of those possibilities you're going to manifest.

[150] And the consequence of that is that a world comes into being out of the potential, right?

[151] You take what could be, that's what you're interacting with, and then you act, and then it's not one -to -one relationship because you can make mistakes, but fundamentally you more or less manage what you set out to manage, you know, subject to error.

[152] Generally, when you decide to go to work, you actually make it to work.

[153] Like you can transform the potential into actuality, and that seems to be what consciousness does.

[154] That's part of the hero adventure.

[155] That's part of the story of humankind, is that that's what we do.

[156] We contend with the world.

[157] And so I've been thinking a lot about stories and about why it is that the story is the fundamental element of human cognition rather than the descriptive element of science.

[158] Well, Jung's idea, with regards to alchemy was that, well, we had this dream, it was the dream of the philosopher's stone, and the philosopher's stone was a substance, a magical substance, let's say, that could confer on people health, permanent health, wealth, because it could turn base metals into gold, and longevity, so that you could live forever.

[159] Say, well, so what was the dream there?

[160] I mean, it's a crazy idea, but the dream was that, well, there was some material, substance that there was something lurking in matter, let's say, that you could discover that would confer upon you those benefits.

[161] Well, he believed that that dream, crazy as it was, was the fantasy that motivated the emergence of the scientific revolution.

[162] It wasn't enough just to spiritualize the world.

[163] That wasn't the weight of full redemption, let's say.

[164] You couldn't just escape into like a monastery or some sort of beyond and leave the rest of the world in its suffering condition and have that be okay.

[165] You had to contend with the material of the world and try to do something with it that would also bring it, what would you say, that would improve its quality for everyone, and that it was that crazy dream that that was possible that motivated the first scientists.

[166] And then science grew out of alchemy as a consequence of that.

[167] And the alchemical fantasy was thousands of years old before science emerged out of it.

[168] It takes a long time to dream about something before you can turn it into a reality.

[169] And this isn't fiction.

[170] I mean, Newton, for example, and everybody pretty much admits that Newton was a scientist, you know, he wrote an immense amount of material on alchemy.

[171] He's a real mystical person.

[172] It's not something you often don't know about great scientists.

[173] They're very, very, very peculiar people.

[174] All you hear about is their rational side, you know, their scientific side, but if you read about them, they're, well, geniuses are extremely strange people, you know, obviously, because they wouldn't be geniuses, otherwise, they're very strange people.

[175] And Newton was certainly like that.

[176] And he was interested in, well, the transmutation of the world in a positive manner.

[177] And he believed that that's what he was doing.

[178] He was pursuing some sort of divine mission to make things better.

[179] And that's part of the story.

[180] And anyways, that's part of the reason that I believe that the scientific endeavor, which is the description of the objective world, is nested in something more biologically fundamental, which is how to conduct yourself in the world, how to act, because I would say that the fundamental purpose, that the fundamental problem that we have, because we're living creatures, isn't what the world is made out of.

[181] It's how to act in the world, regardless of what it's made of.

[182] And I don't see that.

[183] I don't think that that's arguable.

[184] I think that that's just factual.

[185] Like once you have an organism, no matter how simple that can move, its fundamental problem is how to move in the world, what to do.

[186] And the problem of meaning, you know, what's the meaning of life?

[187] That's the fundamental problem.

[188] And I do think that is the fundamental problem of life.

[189] Is how to act in the world.

[190] How should you act in the world?

[191] And it's a very dreadful thing to think something like, well, every way of acting and the world is equally okay.

[192] That's sort of a morally relativistic viewpoint.

[193] And it sounds good, but it leaves you with nothing, because if you could do A or B or C or Z or it doesn't matter if you lay in bed for two weeks or if you get up and conquer Europe, if those things are both the same, then why, boy, choosing between them.

[194] It's not helpful, right?

[195] You drown in possibility, not useful.

[196] And so there has to be a hierarchy of value in order for you to act in any reasonable manner.

[197] And if there's no difference between how to act, if nothing's valuable, then, well, you have the same problem.

[198] What do you do?

[199] What should you do?

[200] Well, it's a big problem because actually doing things It's hard, and you might fail, and there's pain involved in frustration and disappointment and inertial difficulty, all of that.

[201] And so you can't just say, well, everything's the same, and what the hell difference does it make what you do, because, well, then that just leaves you with an insoluble and tragic problem that produces a lot of misery and suffering, unless that's what you want, unless that's what you're aiming for, it's not a very good answer.

[202] And, you know, you can get cynical and you can say, well, there is no answer to that problem, but you might be wrong about that.

[203] You know, and I think, I think that is wrong.

[204] I really, I truly believe the moral relativists are wrong.

[205] I think their thinking is 150 years out of date.

[206] They're, they're so far behind what we now know about how people operate in the world neurologically and philosophically psychologically, that it's like arguing with I don't know, it's like arguing with physicists who still believe in ether or phrenologists who still read head bumps or something like that.

[207] It's just not a it's not a tenable it's not a reasonable it's not a reasonable discussion we're way past that and so also then you think well all right, you need something to do in the world and you need to know how to act.

[208] And the way that we figure out how to act or the way we describe ways to act is by telling stories.

[209] And that makes sense, I think.

[210] I mean, I'm trying to tell you things that I've beat to death, you know.

[211] I'm trying to tell you things that I've always think of, you know, a workman out in a street with a crowbar and there's a there's a manhole cover in the street and he's trying to put the crowbar under the manhole and lift it up you know and if i if i have a thought that i can put a crowbar underneath and lift up and find a hole underneath it then i don't think it's much of a thought and so i'm trying to tell you things that i've tried to put crowbars underneath and couldn't move they're solid at least i can't move them it doesn't mean they can't be moved but i haven't been able to move them I've been very motivated because I'm not interested in having things under my feet that will shift.

[212] I'm interested in having things under my feet that won't shift so that I can stand in a solid place.

[213] And so far, the things that I've told you, I think, fit into that category.

[214] They don't seem that disputable to me. We have to know how to act.

[215] Well, that seems reasonable.

[216] If we don't know how to act, then we're miserable.

[217] Well, that's partly because that just demonstrates how important it is to know how to act.

[218] If you don't know how to act, if you're not oriented in the world, if you don't have an aim, then you're bloody, miserable and wretched.

[219] And it's no trivial thing, right?

[220] You can be so miserable and wretched under those conditions that your biggest desire will be not to exist.

[221] And people act that out.

[222] They'll commit suicide because they don't know how to act.

[223] not that uncommon.

[224] And so it's an illness that can, you know, if you're depressed, which isn't that uncommon, you have a pretty decent chance of committing suicide.

[225] And to commit suicide is a pretty effective indication that there's something intolerably horrific about not being properly oriented in the world.

[226] It's no joke.

[227] And even if you're not suicidally depressed, even if you're just run -of -the -mill miserable and confused, it's still no joke.

[228] It's still no picnic, and it's not like you make things easier for the people around you, either.

[229] So I really do think about it as a, well, I think about it as a, I think it's reasonable to conceptualize it, perhaps not as a physical illness, although it is that to some degree, but certainly as a moral or psychological illness.

[230] It's not desirable, that's for sure.

[231] So you need to know what to do.

[232] You need to have a purpose.

[233] And you know how good it is to have a purpose, you know, if you're at work or with your family, or maybe you're listening to music or doing something you enjoy, and you're purposefully engaged in that.

[234] It's like, it's sort of, that's the same as saying that life is worth living.

[235] Those statements aren't different.

[236] You're so thrilled to be engaged in something, in a sort of unselfconscious way.

[237] Like even if you're contending with what's coming at you, you know, you're immersed in the moment, and that's a good thing.

[238] It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, and I'm willing to take that at face value.

[239] And, and, and we, we, we, we look at our visions and we look at our ambitions and then we look at other people as well.

[240] And we listen to what other people tell us and we watch how other people, and we watch how other people.

[241] act were unbelievably imitative.

[242] Hey, that's one of the things that that isn't as well known about human beings as it should be known.

[243] You know, there's lots of things that distinguish us from animals, posable thumbs.

[244] That's a big one.

[245] Upright posture.

[246] The ability to speak.

[247] These are big things.

[248] The ability to look into the future, the ability to conceptualize the world abstractly, those are huge, and the absolute, what would you say, polyvalent potential of our physical being.

[249] I mean, you watch people on the internet doing all those strange things that they do, parkour and those crazy gymnastic routines and extreme sports.

[250] I mean, man, people can stretch themselves in ways that are just absolutely unbiased.

[251] So we have a tremendous physical range of possibility.

[252] But we have this imaginative capacity as well, and that enables us to orient ourselves so nicely in the world.

[253] And so we need to know how to act, and it's a complicated problem, and we do a lot of thinking about it, and we do a lot of imitating of ourselves.

[254] That's one of the things the psychologist Jean Piaget pointed out.

[255] It's one of the ways we learn is, you know, when we're little kids and we interact with the world, maybe we have some sort of aim, and we do something that works by accident.

[256] And then we notice that we did it, and then we practice doing that over and over again, which means that we imitate ourselves, right?

[257] So we see ourselves, we see ourselves act, we act in a way that works, and then we imitate the thing that works, and we practice it until we get really good.

[258] good at it.

[259] So we imitate ourselves and that's how we bring ourselves into being, but then we also imitate other people and we're crazily imitative.

[260] I mean, we're watching other people just like mad all the time, you know, and we're watching what they're up to and we're watching what they're doing.

[261] If you think about how you watch a person, it's quite interesting because mostly what you do when you watch a person is you look at their face, right?

[262] I mean, there's lots of places you could look and there are places that sometimes you do look that aren't the face, but most of the time you look at people's faces.

[263] And not just their faces, you look at their eyes, you know, and you look at the space right around their eyes.

[264] And the reason you do that is because you want to see where they're pointing their eyes.

[265] And our eyes are actually evolved so that other people can tell where you're pointing them.

[266] This is one of the things that it's really quite cool about human beings.

[267] Other apes, because we're basically an ape variant, other apes don't have whites in their eyes.

[268] We do.

[269] And the reason for that seems to be is that because we have whites in our eyes, you can see the iris really set against the white, and you can see the pupil, right?

[270] So we can really see people's eyes extremely well, and that means we can tell where they're pointing them.

[271] And so basically what you're doing when you're looking at people all the time is you're looking to see where they're pointing their eyes.

[272] And the reason you're doing that is because, well, where they point them, pointing their eyes.

[273] Well, they're pointing their eyes at something they're interested in.

[274] And the thing they're interested in is what they're after, right?

[275] Because, well, that's what you're interested in, what you're after.

[276] You know, and so even if you go to a movie and you're watching the main hero on the screen, the reason you're doing that is because that's what you're after.

[277] You're putting yourself while you're watching the movie.

[278] You're putting yourself in the position of the hero in the movie.

[279] And you're doing that physiologically.

[280] We've come to understand.

[281] actually how people do that.

[282] You know, if I'm talking to you and I'm watching where you're pointing your eyes, then I infer what it is that you're up to, because I can infer what you're interested in.

[283] And once I can infer what you're interested in, then I can act out being interested in the same thing.

[284] And because we share a physiological platform and an emotional platform and an emotional platform, because we're basically the same sort of creature, as soon as I know what you're up to, and I act as if that's what I'm up to too, then I have the same emotional responses as you, roughly speaking, same motivational responses, and then I can understand you.

[285] And so that's how we understand each other, is that it's like we're capable of being inhabited by a multitude of spirits.

[286] That's one way of thinking about it, or you could say that we're a computational platform on which many other devices can be run.

[287] and those devices are other people.

[288] I like the spirit idea better because I actually think it's richer metaphorically, but every time I interact with someone, I'm using my body to simulate them, and then I understand what they're up to.

[289] That's what you do when you come to an understanding of someone.

[290] And we like to see that people are able to do that, which is why perhaps we'd like to dance with them when they can dance, you know, because if you can dance with someone and that works, it means they can adjust their output, to your output in some harmonious manner, and there's some indication that they can, what would you say?

[291] They can bring themselves into alignment with the emotions and motivations of someone else at the same time that they're also bringing themselves into alignment with the pattern, the complex patterned structure of reality, which is what music represents.

[292] And so to dance with someone is to pay attention to the background patterns of reality, That's the music, abstracted, and then to see if you can move together in a graceful and harmonious way doing that and maybe enjoy it at the same time.

[293] It's really complicated, and it's kind of a nice test to see if someone's actually up to that.

[294] It's another example of how good we are at imitating.

[295] And so we go to movies, and we watch plays, and we write plays, and we write scripts, and we all do.

[296] do that because we want to watch how it is that we act.

[297] You know, and you have a great, and we're better at, we're better than just merely imitating, too.

[298] That's another thing that's, that's quite cool.

[299] We're not just stupid imitators.

[300] It's actually just annoying to be imitated.

[301] You know, little kids do that when they're trying to annoy you.

[302] They'll just, they'll sit there and they'll do this.

[303] Let's see, I'll get you imitated here.

[304] It's sort of like that.

[305] And then you go like that, you know.

[306] Exactly.

[307] And so, you know, now we have this stupid game and you think, I quit imitating me because it's annoying, but we're good at it, right?

[308] I can use my body to replicate your body very rapidly.

[309] And it's a very fundamental way of understanding.

[310] It's pre -linguistic.

[311] You know, we can learn a lot from each other merely by watching and copying.

[312] And we don't just do it directly.

[313] You know, one of the things that's really cool about kids and their remarkable intelligence is underestimated in this regard, because we don't have a lot of appreciation for the sophistication of dramatic play.

[314] But you think about what kids are doing, say, when they play house.

[315] It's a pretty common game for kids to play, hypothetically, because they're going to set up a house, and they're trying to figure out what the hell a house is.

[316] And they don't need much of a house.

[317] When I used to take my kids to the beach, sometimes, you know, we'd be there for a few hours, and they'd want to play, and I'd draw them a house on the beach.

[318] You know, I'd just take my foot and make a box and put a couple of rooms in it and a couple of doors and, you know, a bed here and a stove there.

[319] And that was good.

[320] And they'd walk through the door, which is quite cool because actually in a sand house, you don't have to walk through the door.

[321] You can just walk right through a wall, right?

[322] But the kids wouldn't do that.

[323] They'd walk through the door and they'd walk through the doors of the room.

[324] And so as far as they were concerned, that was a house, and then they'd play house.

[325] so they just needed the basic schema of a house to have the whole house there and then they'd play out mom and dad and the cat or whatever it is what they were interested in that that day and it was it was interesting to consider that too because when when they were playing out dad say when my son was acting out dad it wasn't like he was doing what i just did to you he wasn't watching me and then duplicating me exactly while I was walking around on the beach.

[326] It was as if what he had done was he'd observed me being whatever dad was over a very large number of instances, right?

[327] And remember, he's like three.

[328] He's doing this when he's three years old.

[329] This is what dad is across a bunch of instances.

[330] And so that's an interesting thing, because it's as if he was abstracting out something like the spirit of the father.

[331] if you think about it this way is that you know you're a man you're in the house and and your kid watches you for a hundred days and you're always dad but sometimes you're acting like dad and sometimes you're just acting like whoever the hell you are and so you're acting like dad and your kid is figuring out okay well exactly what is this dad thing that dad happens to be and he watches this little episode here and he thinks oh there's some dad like behavior there and then there's some dad like behavior there and and there's some dad like behavior there and, and there and there and there and there, and there, and he abstracts out something that's common across all of those instances of behavior that characterizes dad, and then that's what he imitates.

[332] And so that's just, it's so sophisticated, it's just beyond belief, right, to be able to take those multiple instances of behavior and to decide what's common across them, and then to embody that without really being able to say anything about it, to act it out, but to Then even more importantly, especially maybe he's playing house with his sister and she's being mom.

[333] And part of the rule would be, well, in order to play house successfully with your sister, then you have to play it so that it's fun.

[334] And this is also kind of an important thing to know if you happen to be married.

[335] You know, you should be playing house so that it's fun.

[336] And there's a rule for fun, and the rule is sort of like, well, you want the game to continue.

[337] and so do you, right?

[338] Because that's sort of the nature of play is that, well, I can't just grab you by the neck and say, look, you're bloody well going to play.

[339] It's like, that's not a game.

[340] A game is when you want to play and you want to play.

[341] And so then one of the rules about a game is that it has to be conducted in such a way so that both of the people that are playing want to keep playing.

[342] And that's a very, this is an observation that developed, mental psychologist Jean Piaget made about play.

[343] It's one of the most fundamental philosophical discoveries of the 20th century as far as I was concerned and really as far as he was concerned as well.

[344] Piaget was interested in mediating between science and religion joining them together trying to come up with a maybe something like a scientific account of the emergence of ethics and one of the things he said about games was well we got to remember that if it's a good game then everybody wants to play it.

[345] It's the definition of a good game.

[346] And that's a cool idea.

[347] It means that everybody is pointed in the same direction.

[348] We've all decided roughly that we're going to do the same thing, which is whatever the game is, and then we're going to conduct ourselves well, we're all doing the same thing, so that everybody is on board voluntarily.

[349] And one of the things Pige claimed about that, first of all, he said, well, that's the basis of ethics, is to figure out how to formulate a game that unites everyone's motivations and emotions, everyone's purpose, everyone's desire to act, so it unites it, so that we're all doing the same thing.

[350] But even more importantly, it's united so that everyone, if they had their choice, would just as soon continue to do it.

[351] He said, well, that's a, occupies a very, it's a very constrained way of, it's a very constraint there aren't very many ways you can manage that successfully and you can see this with successful children because successful children are really good at conjuring up games that everyone everybody wants to keep playing and so that's that's an ethical construct it's like okay now we've come together we've united ourselves with purpose in such a way that it's spontaneously engaging and so this is what kids are doing when they're playing how is, well, they look at the father and they abstract out the spirit of the father, and then they embody it, and then they do the same with the mother, and they embody that, and then they come together, and they assign each other rules, and the role is, well, you have to play father, and you have to play mother, but you have to play each of those roles in a way that makes both of us want to keep playing the game so that it's fun.

[352] It's like, God, that's just bloody impossible, and yet they manage it quite remarkably, and have a hell of a fine doing it.

[353] And the more they do it, then this is the other thing we know is the more they do it, because pretend play is incredibly important, the more they do it, the better they get at it.

[354] And kids who are good at pretend play, which is why it's very useful to allow or even insist that your children have time to engage in spontaneous pretend play, is that that's how they learn to get along with other people.

[355] And you think, well, they're just getting along with other people.

[356] It's like, no, no, no, no, no. It's not that they're just getting a lot.

[357] It's not that they're just along with other people.

[358] That's the fundamental substructure of civilized society, right?

[359] You learn how to play games together when you're young, and you get more and more sophisticated at that as you get older and older, and if you're really good at it, then you're the sort of person that people want to play games with all the time your entire life.

[360] And what that means is that you've extracted out the pattern, whatever that pattern is, from all your interactions with other people that enable you to organize your actions cooperatively and competitively with other people in a way that makes them want to continue being with you, right?

[361] Doing things with you.

[362] And there isn't anything you can do that's more important than that.

[363] The childhood developmental literature is actually pretty clear on that, between the ages of two and four, kids are fairly egocentric at two.

[364] They can't play with other kids.

[365] They're still trying to get themselves together, you know, because they're sort of a morass of emotions and motivations, very short -term and impulsive in their behavior.

[366] Very fun because of that, because they're so spontaneous and active, but very difficult to organize.

[367] But by the time they're four, they can bring their idiosyncratic view of the world together with the view of another person, or several other people set a joint goal and cooperate towards it and compete as well in a civilized manner.

[368] And the kids that are really good at that, then they have friends, and then the friends socialize them, and then those kids have a pretty good life.

[369] And the kids that don't manage that by the time they're four, for one, maybe they're temperamentally aggressive, or they're really high and negative emotion, so they're hard to socialize, or maybe their parents just don't socialize them, and they don't have friends.

[370] They're basically, they're out of it by the age of four.

[371] Like if you're not capable of playing socially, by the time you're aged four, you almost never learn to do it for the rest of your life.

[372] So it's really, really important.

[373] All right.

[374] So that's the, well, that's what you have to do is you have to learn how to act.

[375] You don't only have to learn how to act.

[376] You have to learn to act with other people.

[377] See, this is part of the solution to the problem of moral relativism, as far as I'm concerned.

[378] It's also part of the reason, or maybe the entire reason, possibly, though there's many reasons, that the postmodernists are wrong.

[379] Because the postmodernists, especially the ones that are more oriented towards Marxist philosophy, like to think that the way that we organize our societies is by power.

[380] We have hierarchies, and the people at the top have the power, and they impose that on the people underneath them.

[381] They impose their will on them, and that's how the world is structured.

[382] It's like, actually, no, that's wrong.

[383] That's not how the world is structured.

[384] That's how the world is structured when things aren't going very well.

[385] You know, like if you have a family, and you probably do, and someone in the family is a tyrant, and the tyrant says, you bloody well better do what I want, or else, you know, and there's lots of or else's else I'll drink too much, or else I'll be addicted, or else I'll be so passive -aggressive that you wish I was dead, or else I'll be violent, you know?

[386] I mean, there's all sorts of ways of imposing your idiosyncratic will on other people, right?

[387] All sorts of power games that you can play.

[388] Conscious, unconscious, underhanded, sophisticated, unsophisticated, but none of them work very well.

[389] You know, you generate a tremendous amount of resistance as a consequence of the arbitrary imposition of power.

[390] It's a really sub -optimal means of organizing a society.

[391] And the Marxist postmodern critique that there's a very large number of ways of interpreting the world, and that what we do is organize ourselves into groups of self -interest, although they never explain exactly why that happens, usually has something to do with sex or ethnicity or race or gender, some arbitrary grouping that somehow unites us, although I really don't understand that at all.

[392] It's not like it seems obvious to me that all women get along better than men and women get along on average, you know?

[393] I don't buy that for a second, but in any case, the idea is that we organize ourselves into hierarchical groups.

[394] We learn how to interact with other people, and the people who are most successful at that are those who are the most successful at exercising power.

[395] And I think that's complete bloody rubbish.

[396] I don't it works on the playground.

[397] Like I've watched kids who don't, I've watched kids a lot.

[398] I've watched kids who don't know how to play a lot because it's quite painful to me to see kids that can't play.

[399] It's really, it's really sad to see that, you know, because they're so alienated and they're so isolated and they're so unhappy.

[400] And often the reason that they're, that they can't play is because they don't, they don't know how.

[401] Like, what they do is they try to force other kids to do what they want.

[402] And that just doesn't work.

[403] I'll give you an example.

[404] So there's been lots of studies of how kids sort of organize themselves spontaneously into playgroups on the playground.

[405] And so here's an example.

[406] This is an example taken from popular kids.

[407] So even popular kids can't necessarily get into a game once it started.

[408] You know, because you don't necessarily want someone jumping into the middle of your game, right?

[409] Because your game, right?

[410] Because your game, it kind of has a beginning and a middle and an end and it has a point and you can't just hop into it in the middle and so once the game is started you have to be canny if you're going to interweave yourself into the game and so maybe there's a bunch of kids and they're on the school ground and they're playing helicopter and they have erasers and they're just buzzing their erasers around like they're helicopters which is actually a pretty remarkable thing to be able to do too and they're making helicopter I don't know what they're doing, rescuing each other, attacking each other, whatever you do with your eraser helicopter when you're five years old, you know.

[411] But they've all got themselves together, and they've made a little play, a little drama, and they're playing helicopter.

[412] And, you know, an unpopular kid will come along, kind of at a klutzy way, because you see that with kids that haven't been played with enough.

[413] They're kind of physically awkward, you know.

[414] They can't dance well.

[415] They haven't been rough and tumble played with enough.

[416] That's part of it.

[417] And they're not, they don't really know where their bodies are.

[418] And they certainly don't know where their boundaries are.

[419] And so it makes them, and it makes them immature.

[420] And kids don't like to play.

[421] Kids will play with young kids if they know they're young and they'll take care of them.

[422] But they don't like to play with immature kids their same age.

[423] They're not interested in that because they like to play with kids that challenge them so that they mature.

[424] And adults are the same way.

[425] So anyways, if there's these kids standing together and they're all playing helicopter, and a popular kid comes along, the popular kid will stand there and watch and see what the hell is going on.

[426] Sort of clue into the drama, you know?

[427] And then they'll take out a pencil eraser, if they have one, or some reasonable substitute thereof, and they'll watch what's happening, And then maybe they'll start to make a helicopter noise with it.

[428] And that's sort of, well, it's an entry point, right?

[429] It's like, you're playing helicopter?

[430] I'm playing helicopter.

[431] And then they see if there's an entry point into the drama where they can do something like amusing or playful or interesting, and the group will open up and let them in.

[432] And exactly the same thing happens at cocktail parties.

[433] You know, you go to a cocktail party, and there's four or five people standing around and you're sitting there with your drink and wondering what the hell you're doing at this cocktail party.

[434] Or maybe you're having a cigarette, but people don't smoke anymore very much, so you don't get to do that.

[435] And there's these people standing around and talking, and you're sort of a foot and a half away, and you're feeling kind of awkward and stupid, but maybe you're listening, and maybe at some point there's a little opening, and you have something like to do with your helicopter eraser, and you can just do it, and then it opens up, and you get to talk, and you think, well, that's a lot better than standing there stupidly on the outside.

[436] It's not much different than being in a playground.

[437] And you have to be sophisticated to do that.

[438] You can't just bloody well blunder up to the group of four people and start talking about, like, I don't know, the bad sexual experience you had last week, you know.

[439] That's a sign of not good boundaries, you know, and it isn't going to work.

[440] And so you have to be aware enough of the game in order to enter into it.

[441] And so, well, that's part of how people get socialized.

[442] And it's a really useful thing to know, is that, you know, the world's a very complicated place.

[443] And there's a bunch of things we have to do in it to stay alive because it's a difficult place.

[444] and one of the ways that we learn to do that is by learning to organize ourselves with other people towards a goal, which is pretty much what we do with our games.

[445] Forget about stories for a minute.

[446] We could talk about games.

[447] They're very, very similar stories and games.

[448] You know, like a...

[449] I watched this very, very cool documentary a while back called Hit Man Heart, which I would highly recommend It's a brilliant documentary, and it's about a guy named Brett Hart, yeah, who was for a long while, the world's most famous Canadian, and he was part of the Worldwide Wrestling Federation, and he was a wrestling hero.

[450] You know, there's bad guys and good guys in wrestling, and, you know, wrestling is a, I wouldn't call it sophisticated drama, exactly.

[451] But it's a nice, it's interesting, though, because it's a nice intermingling of narrative and sport, because it's a drama of good against evil.

[452] And it's a pretty primordial drama.

[453] It's like, you know, if it's a sophisticated story of good against evil, maybe it's like Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, right?

[454] It's 800 pages long, and there's 200 characters, and they each have six names, and, you know, it's complicated, or maybe it's breaking bad, you know?

[455] You have to watch it for a long time.

[456] It takes a lot of cognitive ability to follow a story like that, story about the interaction between good and evil.

[457] But wrestling, it's there for everyone, man. There's like the bad guy, and you can tell he's bad because he comes out in a bad cape, and he's like narcissistic, and he insults people, and he's clearly the bad guy.

[458] As soon as you see him, you want to hit him with a chair.

[459] And even if you don't want to, you definitely.

[460] definitely want someone to hit him with a chair.

[461] And Brett Hart was a good guy.

[462] And the good guy you want to win.

[463] And so then the good guy and the bad guy go into the wrestling ring and they have it out.

[464] It's like Christ against Satan in the wrestling ring.

[465] It's good against evil.

[466] And it's half story and it's half sport.

[467] There's an overlap between story and sport.

[468] And you see the same thing in other forms of sports.

[469] You know, if it's basketball or or football or any of the games.

[470] Again, those sorts of competitive social games have things in common that are quite interesting.

[471] They have a point, right?

[472] The point is usually to put something small in a...

[473] It's at a target.

[474] That's the point of one form or another.

[475] There's all sorts of different ways of hitting the target, but that's basically the issue.

[476] It's like, okay, well, We need to hit a target, you guys need to hit a target, and we're going to have a competition about who can hit the target.

[477] We're going to kind of get in each other's ways, but we're going to have some rules about it, and then we're going to see who's good at it under this system of constraints.

[478] And it's important because, well, you need to hit a target in your life.

[479] You know, you need to orient yourself towards some purpose.

[480] You need to cooperate and compete with other people.

[481] You need to do it in a landscape of cooperation and competition.

[482] You have to do it in a civilized manner.

[483] You have to do it in a way that the game is interesting.

[484] You have to do it in a way that everyone wants the game to progress.

[485] You have to do it in a way that the game can be played over and over and over, and so that there's a sequence of victories across time, right?

[486] It's all very sophisticated.

[487] You got to have an aim.

[488] You got to play with other people properly.

[489] You got to cooperate.

[490] You got to compete.

[491] And you can't just play one game.

[492] You have to play each game in a way that allows you to continue to continue to to play the games properly.

[493] It's very, very sophisticated and complicated.

[494] And so that's the story that people are out watching when they go see pro sports and it's just as bloody, curious and peculiar as it is that you line up to see movies.

[495] It's like, what the hell are you doing out there watching these characters kick around a ball?

[496] You know, it's, what are you up to?

[497] And why are you so thrilled about it?

[498] You wear their damn uniforms.

[499] And maybe even they have you, you have the name of the hero, of the soccer team on your chest and you're all puffed up about that you know that if you watch a soccer game if you're male if you watch a soccer game and your team wins your testosterone levels go up if your team loses well it's a it's a drab night for you let's put it that way but but i mean that's how tightly wired you are to the game you know and then you think about the sorts of things that people do, watching a soccer game and, you know, some character who's been practicing, aiming for, God only knows how many thousands of hours, does some absolutely insane thing that no one in their, no one could ever possibly imagine doing.

[500] You know, maybe they flip in the air and kick the ball upside down and it goes right into the net, four feet away from the goalie.

[501] And you think, what do you think?

[502] You don't even think.

[503] You just, leap up spontaneously, like it's the greatest thing that's ever happened to you in your life, which is pretty weird, but that's what you do?

[504] Well, it is.

[505] It's like, what the hell are you doing?

[506] And it just grips you, right?

[507] Everybody stands up at the same time.

[508] It's like you're cheering away.

[509] You think, that's what a human being is like, man. We can hit the goddamn target, flipped upside down, moving at an impossible rate.

[510] That's what we're like.

[511] Hooray.

[512] And we've just seen it demonstrated and that's a testament to our indomitable spirit and it grips you way deep inside way before you think and you stand up and you think bloody right man that's what we've got to bring to bear against the world right and so you see all these people this is why these you know there's movements now to get rid of competitive games there's something wrong with competitive games right everyone no one should win and no one should lose it's like well that's a stupid goddamn theory if I ever heard one well think about it man it's like okay no one should win and no one should lose it means nothing's worth doing right because even when you're trying to do something you're trying to be better than the loser that you are right now well it's true because otherwise why would you do it you think oh i'm a i'm just i don't need to compete with myself i'm perfectly fine the way i am it's like fine just lay in bed mold, you know?

[513] Because there's nothing worth doing.

[514] You've already managed everything.

[515] It's like, of course, someone's got to win and someone's got to lose, because if there's no winning and losing, there's nothing worth doing.

[516] And then why bother getting out of bed?

[517] And so what you do is you celebrate the people who win correctly.

[518] And winning correctly is a complicated thing, because it means, well, you won for you, and like, good for you, man, hooray.

[519] But I read this story about a coach the other day and he was talking about how he picked professional athletes you know how he how he drafted them he said well obviously skill has a tremendous amount to do with it let's make no mistake about that if you're going to play a game you should bloody well be able to play the game you should be able to put the ball through the net right and better than anyone else but better is complicated and he said one of the things he would watch is like well if one of the star players managed a remarkable goal and he was down in his end like having a little dance all by himself and his teammates were ignoring him he wasn't very interested in that player but if the player scored a goal you know hit hit the target and everyone came together and mobbed him and like put him up in the air and had a little celebration then he thought man that's someone I want on my team because he's not only winning for himself which is important but he's winning for himself in a manner that makes everyone else on the team thrilled that he's winning, which implies that his victory is more than merely a victory for himself, right?

[520] It's also a victory for the team in some comprehensive way, is that he's great at what he does in a way that makes everyone else admire it, or want to be great in that way, or maybe he's great in a way that he shares so that the rest of the team becomes greater.

[521] And so he's not just great because he managed to make that one goal.

[522] He's great because he makes a bunch of goals in a variety of spectacular ways at the same time that he develops all of his teammates so that the team is much better so that they're much more likely to win across a set of games and that they're championship material, right?

[523] And that's all embodied in the actions that he takes while he's undertaking each of his skillful actions.

[524] And so the skillful action isn't just merely hitting the goal because you need to hit the goal.

[525] it's hitting the goal in a way that hits the goal for you and hits the goal for let's say your family that's a nice additional constraint why not bring them along for the ride and then maybe it's a way of it's a way of hitting the goal so that you do it for your family and for your broader community that would be good it's harder but who cares why shouldn't it be harder maybe it'd be more worthwhile if it was harder it's like i'm going to do good things for me but i'm only going to do good things in a way for me that are also good for my family.

[526] And then I'm only going to do good things in a way that are good for me and my family that are also good for my community.

[527] It's like that's something worth getting up in the morning and looking at the array of possibilities that confronts you and considering.

[528] Could I do that?

[529] You know?

[530] Because well, maybe you could.

[531] You get all those things stacked up.

[532] That's sort of like dancing, right?

[533] You got the patterns of the world behind you and you're dancing with all sorts of people at the same time.

[534] and all in the right direction.

[535] And how could you not think that that was worthwhile?

[536] You know, you might be cynical and you think, ah, Christ, man, it's only for me, you know, and to hell with the rest of those people.

[537] But it doesn't work.

[538] It's not a helpful.

[539] It's not a good game.

[540] You should have got over that when you were like three.

[541] And there's a reason for that.

[542] There's even a technical reason for that.

[543] It's like, well, imagine that you are selfish for the sake of argument.

[544] well selfish about who because you know there's you right now and you might say I'm going to do everything I can to make myself feel as impulsively pleasureed as I possibly can right now and maybe and to hell with everybody else and maybe that's a pretty good definition of selfish but it's kind of a stupid definition of selfish, you know, I saw this Simpsons episode a while back, which I thought was really quite funny.

[545] Homer was mixing up a quart jar of vodka and mayonnaise.

[546] And Marge, he was mixing that way, and Marge said, well, do you really think that's a good idea?

[547] And Homer said, that's a problem for future Homer.

[548] Man, I sure don't envy that guy.

[549] Then he drank the whole thing.

[550] It's like, that's so funny.

[551] It's like, well, it's great.

[552] So he's selfish and he gets impulsively drunk.

[553] But it's like, it's not really very intelligently selfish because good old future Homer's going to be there the next morning and he's actually you.

[554] And so if you were halfway intelligently selfish, you might think, well, there's you now, but there's also you in half an hour.

[555] You might as well take care of him.

[556] He's probably still going to be there.

[557] And then there's tomorrow you, and he's a little bit not quite you, a little distant.

[558] You know, you don't know him quite as well, but you still might want to give him some consideration, and there's next year you, and there's 10 year from now you, and then there's old you, and so you're this community that stretches across time.

[559] And so even if you're selfish, being a human being, It doesn't work out very well because you're a community.

[560] The fact that you're aware of the future means that you're a community.

[561] And that immediately places a very tight system of constraints on what constitutes your ethical behavior.

[562] Because you have to act in a way that's good for you, but good for tomorrow you and good for next week you and good for next month you and next year you and all of that.

[563] And maybe old you as well, which kind of means you should be maybe thinking about how you treat old people because, hey, You're one of them.

[564] Just not yet, but it's coming, or you're dead.

[565] Then you're dead you, and I guess you don't have to worry about that then, but hopefully you're trying to avoid that.

[566] So the problem of community is built right into the singularity of human being, because we're aware of the future.

[567] I think that's why, you know, one of the fundamental religious injunctions is treat your neighbor like you would treat yourself.

[568] Why?

[569] Well, because you're the same thing, because you're a community that's extended across time.

[570] And so if you're going to act wisely, let's say, in your life, you don't just act like there's today and there's today and there's nothing else because there isn't.

[571] There's you stretched across time, and you want to optimize the manner in which you behave.

[572] You want to play a game with yourself that you can iterate across your entire life that you would like to play.

[573] And the probability that that's much different than the game that you would play with people that were close to you, your siblings or your family or even your broader community, for that matter, the probability that those games converge is unbelievably high.

[574] So that's another reason that it's reasonable to consider that there's such a thing as a natural ethic.

[575] And I was talking a bit earlier about what, an antidote to moral relativism or to nihilism, or to the idea, well, those are the basic problems.

[576] Moral relativism and nihilism, nothing's worth doing.

[577] Good, well, try that out for a while and see how it works.

[578] All that does is produce suffering.

[579] And if you think suffering's okay, well, then there's no arguing with you, but no one thinks suffering is okay.

[580] So that argument just goes nowhere.

[581] So sitting around doing nothing, that's not going to do it, man. That's not going to work.

[582] So, and then, well, one thing is as good as another, it's like, yeah, no. It's not as good as, it's not as good as another.

[583] And there's a very tightly arranged, narrow range of manners in which you can conduct yourself appropriately across time.

[584] It's a, that's the straight, narrow path, you know, and, and I would say, no, no, does that make sense conceptually, because you're a community, you know, that, that, that, that, that, that, that stretches across time and you have to take care of yourself across that entire time.

[585] I mean, that's sort of the minimal necessary precondition for being a reasonably admirable person.

[586] At least you can take care of yourself.

[587] And if you can add to that the ability to take care of your family, well, another thumb up for you because that's not so easy, you know?

[588] And then if you can do that in a way that also benefits your community, hey man you're you're batten 750 you know you've got it together pretty damn strikingly and the probability that that's going to feel worthwhile to you is extremely high and that's another thing that's extraordinarily interesting and I also think true one of the things that I've been very curious about there's a chapter in 12 Rules for Life called do what's meaningful not what's expedient Expedient is sort of for the moment, you know, or maybe expedient is, well, you and I are going to have a conversation and I want something from you, and so I'm going to craft my conversation so that I get what I want.

[589] That's expedience.

[590] And it's a very bad way of proceeding in the world.

[591] It's very manipulative.

[592] And it doesn't work.

[593] That's actually why it's a bad way.

[594] The things that we actually consider ethical, as far as I'm concerned, the reason we consider them ethical is because they actually work.

[595] they're practical it's not well you should do this because that's what a good person does you know and but if you're really going to have some fun you'd go off and do this it's it's not that sort of arbitrary issue at all it's that there are ethical rules and the reason that the rules are there are ethical patterns ethical instincts for that matter and deep ones is because they're the ones that actually work and you violate them at your great peril and so So, okay, so we've walked through the idea of cooperation a bit, and the idea of competition, the idea of shared aim, the idea of imitation.

[596] But we could add to that other evidence, like the evidence of guilt and shame.

[597] And this is associated, let's say, with the phenomenology of meaning.

[598] You know, I said, well, if you could set yourself up so you were being good to yourself, you were taking care of yourself like someone you had responsibility for.

[599] That's rule too, right?

[600] Treat yourself like you're someone, you have the responsibility of taking care of.

[601] Well, what does that mean?

[602] It means you have a certain innate value and that you have to structure your life so that you're taking that into account.

[603] Well, so what happens if you don't?

[604] Well, the first thing that happens, as far as I can tell, is, well, you suffer.

[605] So you're in pain, you're frustrated, you're disappointed, you're nihilistic, you're depressed, you're anxious.

[606] none of that's good and worse than that you're ashamed and full of self -contempt you know and you know that because you wake up at like three in the morning or two in the morning or whenever you're alone and feeling miserable and you have these feelings guilt's another one you have these feelings that are running through your head half -formed thoughts about all the bloody opportunities that you're not taking advantage of and you know you're contempt for your inability to regulate your habits and and then that sort of turns into a a bitter cynicism because it's too damn painful to think that it's actually you're doing, and so you start blaming other people, and it's just like a spiraling trip down to hell.

[607] And I mean that, you know, if you go down that loop far enough, you can get to places that are so awful that that's the only way to describe them.

[608] And people go there, and quite often, and very often they don't get back.

[609] And so that's another indication that there's something like a natural ethic.

[610] It's like, well, if there wasn't, what the hell are you doing, torturing yourself for it?

[611] You know, why bother with the conscience?

[612] Why do you have shame and contempt?

[613] And what do you think?

[614] That's just some sort of pathology that you learn because, you know, your father ruled over you with too much of an iron fist?

[615] It's like, no, it's not, that's not how it is at all.

[616] It's way more complicated than that.

[617] It's because, you know, you're not at your core, there's something at your core that's wise.

[618] It's not smart.

[619] It's not intelligent.

[620] It's not, it doesn't think, like it's not a rational thing in some sense.

[621] It's this sense of where you should be positioned in the world.

[622] And I think it's the instinct of meaning.

[623] And it's deep.

[624] It's not a newly evolved phenomena.

[625] It's a deep, deep, deep instinct.

[626] And it places you in the world.

[627] And again, I think the idea of the example of music and dance is a really good one because, you know, even if you don't dance with someone else, you know, people like to go to concerts.

[628] Almost everybody loves to go to a concert.

[629] And, you know, a concert's great when the performer gets everybody hopping, you know, it's like the instruments, the performers are all harmonized together.

[630] They're all doing the same thing at the same time, which is an amazing thing to do, especially if they're improvising.

[631] I can't figure out how they do that at all.

[632] It just seems impossible.

[633] But they're improvising, right?

[634] And they're just tight as hell.

[635] They're on the beat.

[636] The patterns are coming out just perfectly.

[637] And then they've got the whole stadium kind of reverberating.

[638] Because if they're really good musicians, they can hear the acoustics of the instruments and the amphitheater itself, and they get the whole thing vibrating in the same manner.

[639] And then with any luck, they can get all the people in the place doing the same thing, right?

[640] And so all of a sudden, you put yourself in a position where you're in harmony with this immense construction of patterns, and it's so deeply meaningful.

[641] It's people just absolutely bloody love it.

[642] It's a primary religious experience to have that happen, which is why people will pay so much money to experience it, and it's beneath criticism.

[643] Like, nobody comes out of a concert that has any sense and goes, what the hell was that all about?

[644] Like, you just look at them like there's something wrong with them.

[645] It's like the person in the movie that taps you on the shoulder and says, you know, none of this is real.

[646] It's like, what do you want?

[647] You want to slap?

[648] It's like, what's wrong with you?

[649] I mean, I know it's, well, and what do you mean it's not real?

[650] It's actually hyper real.

[651] It's more than real, right?

[652] It's condensed real.

[653] So it's not that it's not real.

[654] It's, if it wasn't real, you wouldn't be watching it.

[655] It's just not dull.

[656] It's, it's the most, it's the most real that things can be condensed together so you can watch it all at once.

[657] It's way more real than just real.

[658] And so it's a foolish argument and to rationally criticize a musical experience, like you just have to be out of your bloody mind.

[659] You have to be so divorced from who you are to do that that, well, that it should be against the law for you to go to concerts, right?

[660] Because you're just annoying.

[661] And so there is this intrinsic sense of being in alignment with things, you know?

[662] And I don't know how deep it goes, because I think if you're healthy, you're aligned way down into your structure.

[663] You know, your cells are healthy, and your organs are healthy, and they interact together in a healthy manner, and they're put together in a unified way, and then you take that unified you, which hopefully comes together somewhere around three years of age, and then you unify it with other people, and then you unify it across time, and then you unify it with the layers of the world.

[664] And you can tell when that's happening in two ways.

[665] One is your conscience isn't torturing you, to death for not being in the right place at the right time, right?

[666] And you wake up in the morning or you wake up in the middle of the night.

[667] And, you know, maybe you're doubtful about some of the things that you've done in your life, but at least you can say, look, man, I'm trying to get myself together.

[668] I'm pursuing something that seems to be important.

[669] And I'm kind of trying to take someone along with me, you know, maybe it's my partner, my intimate partner.

[670] Maybe it's a friend, maybe it's my family.

[671] Like, it's not just for me. Or even if it is, because you're isolated, it's not just for me right now.

[672] I'm trying to set me. my life up.

[673] So there's some grander sense of continuity there, you know, that's extending beyond you.

[674] And God only knows how far that can extend beyond you.

[675] And what seems to happen is the more of those layers that you get stacked up, so the more it is beyond the you that's just here and now, the better it is, you know, and you can wake up and you can think, God damn it, you know, I can justify my life, miserable as I am, wretched as I am, ignorant as I am.

[676] knowing so little and being so full of error, well, at least I'm pursuing something of value.

[677] You know, and I'm doing my best for myself.

[678] I'm taking care of myself.

[679] You know, I'm not being a burden to anyone else.

[680] That's at least something.

[681] And then I've got something left over for some other people.

[682] And there's a sense of meaning in that.

[683] It's like, and you can be cynical about that, but doesn't help.

[684] All the cynicism about that does is leave you in something that approximates hell.

[685] And that's not helpful.

[686] That's just a place where things go from bad to worse.

[687] And so you'll torture yourself for not acting properly, and you'll reward yourself at least to some degree for acting properly.

[688] And if you do act properly, then other people want to be around you, at least more than they otherwise would be.

[689] And then you can cooperate with them, and you can compete with them, because that can be fun, you know.

[690] If we're friends, we're trying to do something, I might see if I can outdo you, and you might see if you can outdo me, but it's not like we're doing it as enemies, we're doing it as beneficial adversaries who are pushing each other forward.

[691] There's something to be said for that, and that's what competition does.

[692] And that's within our grasp, and so we can wake up in the morning as conscious beings, and we can look at this array of potential that stands in front of us with our newly awakened consciousness, and we can say, well, look, we can put the world in order, stack things up layer on layer.

[693] And we can make things harmonious.

[694] And we can make things better for ourselves.

[695] You know, we can stop doing some of the foolish things that we're doing.

[696] And we can make things better for ourselves.

[697] So we can make things better for our family.

[698] And we can improve the quality of our communities.

[699] And we can find the meaning in our life that's associated with that.

[700] That's a meaning that's associated with responsibility, which is also a very interesting thing to know.

[701] And that I don't think people know very well.

[702] It's like, People were told so often, I'll probably close with this, we're told so often that, well, you know, really the purpose of life is to be happy.

[703] And I think, I don't know who the hell came up with that.

[704] But I really don't.

[705] It's like, it's so obviously wrong that it's barely worth considering, partly because there's a bunch of times you're just not going to be happy, right?

[706] Because bad things happen.

[707] It's like, what the hell are you going to do then?

[708] Well, seriously, man. it's like there's going to be times in your life where you're like you're dealing with someone who's sick for like three years care of and that's really going to be helpful it's like no that's not it at all it's like there's something about this getting things in alignment right you take some responsibility for yourself and get yourself together because God only knows what you're capable of you know I mean you're probably not doing too bad the way you are and you're nowhere near as good as you could be so God only knows what you could be like if you really got your act together think man let's see what happens if I really concentrated on something one of the chapters I'm writing right now and My new book is concentrate on one thing as hard as you can and see what happens.

[709] That's a nice disciplinary strategy.

[710] It's like, pick something.

[711] I don't care what it is.

[712] Who the hell cares?

[713] Pick something.

[714] Aim at it.

[715] See if you can get really good at it.

[716] See what it's like to be really good at something.

[717] Then maybe you could be really good at two things and then maybe ten things and starts to multiply, you know.

[718] It's hard to get good at one thing.

[719] But once you're good at one, it's easier to get good at two.

[720] And once you've got two down, four is not so hard.

[721] And once you hit four, eights, like within your grasp, and then it really starts to accelerate upward.

[722] And you think, well, who the hell could you be?

[723] Maybe the world wouldn't be such a miserable, wretched, bitter, unsightly place, you know, where you're consumed by nihilism and prone to addiction and all of that.

[724] If you got your act together, if you're aiming at something worth aiming at, and then you bring other people along for the ride, you think, well, I can make my family's life a little less wretched, you know, or maybe a little better, and I've got something left over for the community, I've got something left over for the long run, and all of that deprives me of all that self -contempt and guilt that's normally tormenting me, and then I can wake up and I can think, useless as I am, bounded as I am by my own mortality and finitude, ignorant as I am, right, prone to error as I am, I've still got this extremely difficult thing that I'm pursuing, that's worthwhile, it's meaningful, that gives me some sense of purpose and that's something but more than that it's not just psychological it's not just a sense of purpose it's actually the case that you're quite useful you know like if if there's someone in your family that's sick and you're halfway together you can make them a lot less miserable than they would otherwise be i mean it might be pointless in the final analysis they still might be fatal but it could be a lot less like hell than it would have been if you wouldn't have been there and that's not nothing and we all all know that we're capable of making things better.

[725] And so you think, well, what the hell would happen if we just tried to make things better?

[726] And then stopped asking about it in some sense.

[727] It's like it's not good that things aren't good.

[728] Everyone knows that.

[729] And they especially know that about themselves.

[730] It's like, okay, wake up in the morning and think, well, I'm going to orient myself towards the highest thing that I can conceptualize at that moment.

[731] I'm going to try to make the world a better place.

[732] I'm going to try to improve the fabric of being.

[733] And I'm not going to go out and advertise about it, you know.

[734] I'm just going to start today, locally, with me. I'm going to start not doing some of the stupid things that I do, that I know I could quit doing if I was willing to do it.

[735] I'm just going to experiment and I'm going to see what would the wretched, miserable world be like if I wasn't so useless, incompetent and malevolent.

[736] It's a good it's a great question because it's within your grasp you could actually do that you could try that for two years and think okay I'm just going to stop doing all the stupid things I'm doing you know one at a time because God knows I'm not going to stop all hundred of them at once but I can stop them one at a time I'm going to suspend judgment that's rule six right don't criticize the world till you put your house in order put your house in perfect order before you criticize the world that's a good one it's a nice hypothesis It's like, well, what would it be like if you put yourself in order?

[737] Well, there's a bloody goal.

[738] That'd be worth trying.

[739] And now, and so, well, why are we all here listening to this?

[740] Well, who the hell knows?

[741] It's not an easy thing to figure out.

[742] But I think it's because, like, I've watched, I'm a psychologist, and I've watched how psychological knowledge has developed over the last 300 years, say.

[743] You know, that's been my purview of study.

[744] And, you know, we're waking up to our own being to some degree.

[745] We're starting to understand what we're like.

[746] We're starting to put things together, things like the ethical conduct that I'm talking about today.

[747] And we're starting to become more aware of what it is that we are and who we could be.

[748] And it's about time, because we're very technologically powerful.

[749] And we have a world that's, you know, this realm of possibility that's open in front of you all the time that you're interacting with.

[750] It's growing in magnitude, because you're growing in power.

[751] You know, when we have this opportunity right now, I think, to really make things terrible or really make things good.

[752] And I also think, and I believe this firmly, that which of those two things happen is dependent on the choices that each of us make.

[753] There's an idea.

[754] Solzhenitsyn wrote this in the Gulag Archipelago.

[755] He said there's this old idea.

[756] It's the idea that's at the basis of Western civilization fundamentally, You know, that each of us is a center of the cosmos, right?

[757] With a spark of divinity within us.

[758] It's something that's made in the image of God.

[759] And God is the thing that creates out of nothing, right?

[760] Is to create out of potential.

[761] And that's what we do.

[762] That isn't what our consciousness does.

[763] That's really what we are.

[764] I've never read a better description of consciousness than that.

[765] Because once you've made a habit and you're deterministic, you're not conscious anymore.

[766] You're not dealing with potential.

[767] You're dealing with actuality.

[768] It's already established.

[769] Your consciousness is there to help you deal with that which has not yet come into being.

[770] And so that's what you are.

[771] You're the thing that confronts what hasn't yet come into being and determines what that's going to be.

[772] And that's on you.

[773] And in some sense, and this is the thing I don't really understand, you know, it's on each of us equally.

[774] That's partly what gives us that spark of divinity or that sovereign value that our culture attributes to us as citizens, as people with the right and the responsibility to vote and to determine the direction of the state, we wouldn't have that if we didn't have the conception that there was something intrinsically valuable about us.

[775] You think, well, God only knows what you could do to make the world a less hellish place.

[776] That'd be a good start.

[777] I mean, if you're looking for meaning, let's make things slightly less wretched.

[778] That'd be a good start, but there's no sense stopping there.

[779] We can expand beyond that, maybe to the limits of our imagination.

[780] It's like, put yourself together and see what happens.

[781] One of the things that's been really fun about this tour, and I think part of the reason that I keep doing it, apart from the fact that what's such a miracle that people come and have this sort of discussion, is that people keep, they come up and talk to me afterwards, you know, groups of 150 people, so I've met 10 ,000 people or 15 ,000 people.

[782] And so many of them, and some of them have had, like, bloody miserable times of it, you know, like you just can't imagine.

[783] Well, some of you can't.

[784] And they said, look, well, I decided I was going to develop a vision.

[785] You know, I'm going to have an ambition.

[786] I decided I was going to have an ambition.

[787] So I started to pursue it, and I thought I'd take some responsibility, see if I could put my family together a bit and start telling the truth, you know, get rid of some of my bad habits, the ones that they're kind of obvious, you know, that I thought maybe I could dispense with.

[788] I thought I'd just try it.

[789] And it's way better It's way better than it was.

[790] And it's really something to hear thousands of people say that.

[791] And you think, well, what would happen if everyone did that?

[792] Well, maybe things would be a lot better, and that would be good, because there's a lot better to be had yet.

[793] And God only knows what we could manage to attain.

[794] And so, and there isn't a better adventure than that, you know, and that's the difference.

[795] That's not happiness.

[796] It's like, that's happiness is for people who aren't too bright at an amusement park.

[797] That's what happiness is for.

[798] It's like that's not your life, man. Your life's an adventure.

[799] You've got things to contend with, you know.

[800] You've got death to contend with.

[801] You've got illness to contend with.

[802] You've got tyranny to contend with.

[803] You've got malevolence to contend with.

[804] The malevolence of other people and the malevolence in your own heart.

[805] You've got adversaries, man. And they're powerful.

[806] And your adventure is to stand up against that and to push back and to transform that into something that's, well, God only knows what it could be.

[807] That's your adventure.

[808] That's something worth getting up for, man. That's something worth living for.

[809] Yeah, I guess then, you know, maybe if you're lucky, then you have a little bit of music in your life because you put things together, the way they should be put together.

[810] And, you know, you're okay for yourself.

[811] You can wake up with a bit of self -respect, not self -esteem.

[812] Self -respect, a little bit anyways, for something as wretched as you are.

[813] You're struggling against impossible odds with a certain amount of success.

[814] There's something to be said about that, you know.

[815] And it's good that you have a kid or two, and they're depending on you, and you're helping them out.

[816] Like, more power to you, and, you know, that you're halfway's decent to your wife.

[817] It's great, and maybe you're kind of useful to your employer.

[818] That'd be all right.

[819] He or she could probably use the help.

[820] And then society itself, well, it's stumbling along blindly like it always does.

[821] It might not be so bad if someone else with open eyes was added to it.

[822] So, what the hell?

[823] hell man that'd be a good thing to do and that's what i've discovered to be the truth and it seems to be resonating with people and and you don't have anything better to do anyways because you're bloody well all in in this right this is something you devote your whole life to whatever it is you're doing you stake your whole life on it and so that's what you're looking for you're looking for something that's so bloody worthwhile that you could say it's worth staking my life on this and keeping things from hell and moving them away a little bit closer to heaven, that's probably worth staking your life on.

[824] Thank you very much.

[825] Thank you.

[826] Much appreciated.

[827] You're feeling good, my friend, the two longest shows that we've done, these last two nights.

[828] It's all that sun and beach.

[829] Yeah.

[830] Beats the hell out of 35 below and blizzardy.

[831] Fair enough.

[832] You know what they say about Canada?

[833] It's the largest uninhabitable country in the world.

[834] All right, here we go.

[835] There's a ton of good ones.

[836] I thought this would be a nice way to start because of the tweet that I've been reading at the beginning of the show for this past year.

[837] I'm thrilled to be here tonight to watch you think, but I'm terrified that I'll be seen by colleagues.

[838] What does this say about me and society?

[839] I mean, if they're here, you're probably okay.

[840] That's right.

[841] That's right.

[842] You can harass them for being here.

[843] But that does seem to be a theme that we've come across.

[844] It's hard to say.

[845] I don't know what it is that...

[846] Okay.

[847] I'd be trying to think about why I bother so many people.

[848] I mean, I'll tell you a few things about that, though, first.

[849] Like, I meet people out.

[850] in public all the time now, you know, it's rare now that if I go out, that someone doesn't stop me, and it usually happens, I don't know, a couple of times an hour when I'm out, and doesn't really matter where.

[851] And what's really interesting about that is that, so I don't know how many times that's happened, say, it's happened for two years, and maybe that's 10 times a day, so it's 8 ,000 or 9 ,000 times, probably something like that.

[852] Every single one of those interactions has been positive, except two.

[853] One, I met some horrible drunk herodon woman in Dublin, and she was toting along her completely crushed husband, and she had some rude things to say, but she was mildly intoxicated by Dublin standards, which meant completely unconscious, even by Australian standards.

[854] And then when I first came to Australia, when I landed in Perth, I met this young guy who had a rather sour look on his face, and he walked by me, and he said, Jordan Peterson, and I said, yes, and I put up my hand, because usually people want to shake my hand.

[855] He said, I wouldn't shake your hand, and he, you know, trounced on by, which will probably be the highlight of his life, I presume.

[856] But, and part of me is hoping that that will be the case.

[857] But other than that, man, I tell you, it's been unbelievably positive.

[858] People are very careful when they come and talk to me. They are alert and paying attention, and they're very polite, and they're happy to see me, and they usually apologize for interrupting me, although I don't regard it as an interruption.

[859] And they usually have some good thing to tell me, you know, they've read my book or they've been listening to my lectures, and they tell me something positive that's happened in their life as a consequence.

[860] And that's absolutely wonderful.

[861] And then there's all these talks, and we figure that's about 300 ,000 people now, something like that, which is a lot of people, man, in a lot of different cities.

[862] And the response is always the same, which is really quite interesting.

[863] And so, but then there's this small minority of people that really they don't like me. And some of the feelings mutual, you know, because I'm no fan.

[864] I'm no fan of Marxists, and I'm no fan of postmodernists either.

[865] And so, you know, if you're a Marxist or a postmodernist or some ungodly monstrous combination of both.

[866] then it's no wonder.

[867] But apart from that, which is kind of political, I think that at the bottom of what's happening in our culture wars is something like an assault on the idea of competence itself.

[868] Because, like I truly believe, imperfect as our structures are, that we've organized hierarchies in the West and increasingly in the rest of the world that are fundamentally based on common.

[869] Like a hierarchy is like a game, you know, it's got an aim, and the aim is whatever the business, the venture is producing, and some people are better at it than others, and by and large the people who are better occupy positions of authority.

[870] You know, it's not perfect.

[871] Correlation is probably only about 0 .5, something like that.

[872] There's plenty left over for luck and arbitrariness and all that, but by and large it works pretty damn well.

[873] I think people are afraid of the responsibility.

[874] And then what they think is, well, you know, you think that it's all about personal responsibility, and so you're not taking into account the fact that our social structures are corrupt.

[875] It's like, yeah, yeah, I know they're corrupt.

[876] Social structures are corrupt.

[877] Like, what do you think that's news?

[878] It's like, all you have to do is read history and you know that.

[879] That's not the point.

[880] The point is, it's like, you don't have a better, option than to get your act together.

[881] And that's also how you undo the corruption.

[882] So what's your bloody point?

[883] It's an excuse for you to be miserable and wretched and useless and bitter and resentful and cynical and dangerous because your culture is not perfect?

[884] Well then everyone has that excuse and no one fixes it and that's that.

[885] So that's the reason I think is that there's a substantial minority of people who are very angry at the idea that the problems are on them.

[886] And then there's this weird twist that goes along with that, that if you believe that, like if you dare to believe that Western culture isn't a fundamentally oppressive and corrupt patriarchy, and I mean it is in part, but I mean fundamentally, then you're immoral.

[887] And if you're immoral, there's something wrong with you and you shouldn't be.

[888] and so that's why you get glared at, let's say, or treated unkindly if you happen to come to an event like this.

[889] And then you have to think it through, I guess, and you think, well, what the hell are you doing here?

[890] It doesn't look to me like it's exactly casual entertainment.

[891] You know, I'm, you're not coming here and being told in some sense how intrinsically wonderful you are or how easy the world is.

[892] Like, I don't think they're saccharine pills to swallow.

[893] I think a lot of it's quite bitter.

[894] It's like, so then you're embarrassed about that because people might see it.

[895] Well, some of that means that you're just human and social, you know, because no one likes to be the target of mob outrage, you know.

[896] Normally, if a mob is outraged at you, it's because you deserve to be ridden out of town on a rail.

[897] under normal circumstances, right?

[898] And if you're completely opaque to that, you're probably a psychopath.

[899] It's pretty easy to feel bad when people are judging you harshly, even if their judgment is inappropriate.

[900] You decide what side you're on and you put up with it, you know.

[901] I think it's better to be on the side of difficult endeavor, courageous movement forward, truth and responsibility.

[902] And to do what you can, not to be apologetic about that.

[903] and to give yourself a bit of a break if you happen to be, because it's very easy to be the, it's very easy to feel bad when people are arbitrary judging you.

[904] You know, when I had all this trouble with the press, which seems to have decreased to a substantial degree recently, which I don't miss, you know, a typical contentious interview would pretty much do me in for like three days.

[905] It's not pleasant to be grilled like that, you know, to have your fundamental morality questioned.

[906] But I don't think there's anything wrong with what we're doing here.

[907] I can't see it, man. It's like, what the hell is the problem?

[908] What's the problem with suggesting to people that they should get their act together and that the weight of the world rests on their shoulders and that their malevolence and willful blindness and inability or unwillingness to contend with the world makes things worse.

[909] It's like, isn't that true?

[910] Well, and if it is true, it's going to generate resistance because it's asking a lot of people, man. You know, the world's a pretty brutal place, and it's your fault, a lot of it.

[911] It's my fault, too, you know, but it's our fault.

[912] And so it's not surprising that people are resistant to that, and people have always been resistant to that.

[913] that idea.

[914] So I would say, yeah, have a little sympathy for yourself, but don't stop, but don't stop.

[915] Don't stop reading and don't stop thinking about the sorts of things that you're thinking about and presume that calmer minds and wiser heads are going to prevail because I think they will.

[916] And that'll also depend to some degree on how you act.

[917] And the other thing I would say, too, just to close this is if you're ever attacked by a mob don't apologize you know you can scour your conscience and you can figure out what you did wrong or what you didn't do right enough but if you didn't do anything wrong don't apologize if you don't apologize and you can stand it for two weeks it's a long time when you're being mobbed they'll go the hell away and you'll win So, you see what happened with Jeff Bezos the other day?

[918] Did you read about that?

[919] It's so cool.

[920] So he's being blackmailed, right, by the National Enquirer.

[921] He has some goods on them about some underhanded interactions they were involved in.

[922] Had evidence for it.

[923] And they had got some photographs of Bezos.

[924] He runs Amazon.

[925] Sexual photographs, you know.

[926] What do they call them?

[927] bottom half selfies or some goddamn thing.

[928] You know.

[929] Dick picks, Peterson.

[930] Yeah.

[931] Bottom half selfies.

[932] Well, they said, okay, now I'm embarrassed.

[933] They actually said that in the article.

[934] Dick picks.

[935] Yeah, that's a lot more, that's a lot more elegant, man. So they got a few of these.

[936] And he came out yesterday.

[937] wrote an article in Medium, and he said, go ahead, you sons of bitches.

[938] Publish them.

[939] Up yours.

[940] I'm not going to lie about your corruption.

[941] And that was that.

[942] And I think he'll come out, you know, he's married.

[943] There's going to be some trouble.

[944] This was with his, well, I was with his mistress, apparently, and God only knows about his marital status.

[945] I don't know anything about that.

[946] But he wasn't willing to be cowed.

[947] And, you know, he's probably, I mean, he's quite the remarkable person, and no doubt he has his flaws in perhaps.

[948] Perhaps now we have some photographic evidence of them.

[949] But I don't mean physiological flaws.

[950] Well, maybe that was the reason for his marital trouble.

[951] I don't bloody well know.

[952] But he didn't apologize.

[953] And I think he's going to come out as ahead as he possibly could have.

[954] And I would say the same thing to all of you.

[955] It's like there's nothing to be apologetic about for this.

[956] So sometimes you have to make enemies.

[957] Not unnecessary ones, but sometimes you have to make enemies, and sometimes that's the best thing you can do.

[958] Not usually.

[959] So basically you're saying rule 13 is don't send bottom half selfies.

[960] No, the rule 13 is don't say bottom half selfies.

[961] There you go.

[962] Jesus.

[963] There you go.

[964] This one's actually not a question.

[965] I just thought this was nice.

[966] There's someone who's in the front area over here who's sitting with a friend, and he wrote that he's had a brutal few years.

[967] and tonight is huge for him.

[968] He actually named his son after you.

[969] I just thought, we'll just give you some accolades there on that one.

[970] Well, that's, that's, that's, that's really something.

[971] So I can't really say thank you for that because that's rather weak comment.

[972] So hopefully the name suits him well.

[973] Or her, I suppose, because sometimes it's Jordan, is a woman's name.

[974] How do you get over betrayal?

[975] You develop a philosophy of good and evil.

[976] That's how you get over trauma.

[977] You know, one of the things that's been quite interesting about the last couple of years is I've talked to a lot of soldiers.

[978] They've given me a lot of their military paraphernalia, which is quite interesting.

[979] Somebody gave me his second lieutenant's bars the other day had warned them through Afghanistan.

[980] So a lot of military people have given me their insignia and a lot of people who've been in service and they told me that watching my lectures has helped them get over their post -traumatic stress disorder.

[981] And I've treated people with post -traumatic stress disorder.

[982] And it's, you know, you kind of hear that it happens when people encounter something like tragic and terrible.

[983] But that isn't what happens.

[984] You develop post -traumatic stress disorder when you encounter something malevolent.

[985] Something like if you're touched by evil, that hurts you.

[986] And it's not just psychological.

[987] It changes your brain structure.

[988] And in a way that's not that easy to change back.

[989] You can modify it to some degree, but there's a certain degree of permanence to it.

[990] You have to start to understand the world as deeply polarized, you know, it's like you can understand the natural world and you think, well, the natural world it's a French impressionist painting, man, it's beautiful, right?

[991] It's a sunny day at the beach.

[992] It's beautiful and generous beyond compare, but man, there's part of it that's just trying to kill you.

[993] And so it's brutal, and you need to know that.

[994] You know, in the story Sleeping Beauty in the Disney movie, you remember maybe, when the princess is born her parents are older and they're really happy to have her born and they have her christening and they don't invite the evil queen to the christening Maleficent and she's the dark side of mother nature and extraordinarily powerful and you think well why the hell would you invite the evil queen to your daughter's christening and the answer is because you need to toughen her up you cannot protect your children from the catastrophe of reality you have to expose them to it carefully, right?

[995] That's the point of being a parent, is that you do it judiciously.

[996] And then the child starts to understand that terrible as things are, they can be dealt with.

[997] And it's the same with culture.

[998] Like culture is the same thing.

[999] Well, that's why there is the patriarchal oppression narrative.

[1000] It's one -sixth of a religious story.

[1001] Who's in charge?

[1002] The evil king.

[1003] Well, obviously, the evil king is always a charge.

[1004] He's not the only thing that's in charge.

[1005] There's the good king too, you know, and there's a war between them like there always is, and there's awake people that are trying to help the good king win, and we can't forget about them either.

[1006] And then, you know, there's the malevolence in your own heart that you have to contend with.

[1007] Now you have to tell me the question again.

[1008] I am coming to answer it, though.

[1009] Hold on.

[1010] I was with you.

[1011] What was the question, guys?

[1012] Somebody yelled it out.

[1013] Betrayal.

[1014] How do you deal with betrayal?

[1015] Oh, yes.

[1016] Betrayal.

[1017] Well, yeah, okay, well, so, no, it's important.

[1018] The thing is you have to understand the structure of the world.

[1019] You know, nature is brutal.

[1020] Culture is a bloodthirsty tyranny.

[1021] And human beings are, what did Jung say?

[1022] A tree that wants to grow to heaven has to have roots that go all the way down to hell.

[1023] You know, and he believed that the encounter with the shadow, that's the dark side of the human psyche, was literally, it was as close to a journey to hell as anything can possibly be, because to undergo that journey properly, you have to understand what it is to be human, how dark that is.

[1024] You have to understand, like, people read about World War II, they read about the Nazis, they read about the Soviets, they read about the Maoist, the people who ran the Maoist Inquisitions, and the people who conducted the torture.

[1025] and they never think of themselves as those agents.

[1026] They think that's someone else.

[1027] Maybe they think they read the stories or they don't even read them at all because they're too horrifying.

[1028] They think, well, I'd be the good guy.

[1029] It's like, no. No, you wouldn't.

[1030] Probably not.

[1031] Maybe you wouldn't be the worst person.

[1032] But maybe you would be.

[1033] You know, and that's a hell of a thing to come to terms with.

[1034] And you think, well, how the hell does that help you with betrayal?

[1035] It's like this polarity is built into the structure of the world.

[1036] You know, this terrible tension, let's say, between good and evil.

[1037] It's there.

[1038] It's not just, it's not, it's you, it's, you're in it, and you're responsible for it.

[1039] But it's not, it's not of you in some sense.

[1040] It's of everything.

[1041] It's built into the structure of reality.

[1042] And now and then, you stumble across some of the malevolence, and it takes you out.

[1043] And if you're naive, and you don't understand that, it takes the bottom out of your world.

[1044] You think, well, everything's good.

[1045] People are good.

[1046] Society's basically good.

[1047] Nature is basically good.

[1048] It's like you sound like Jean -Jacques Rousseau, right?

[1049] Who put all five of his children in orphanages where they all died.

[1050] You need to understand that malevolence exists in the world and that it's there in you and it's there in others.

[1051] and then you have to learn to accept that as a reality and you have to decide that you're going to begin to contend with it.

[1052] And then that's a way out.

[1053] It's a way out.

[1054] So look, you're much more likely to be betrayed if you're naive.

[1055] You think everyone's good.

[1056] No one would hurt a fly.

[1057] The person who loves you only loves you.

[1058] And then you miss all the warning signs.

[1059] You're just a passy.

[1060] You're just there to be plucked and picked and exploited.

[1061] Christ, you invite it.

[1062] Because you're so damn blind, you don't stand up for yourself when you're supposed to.

[1063] You don't tell the other person to go to hell when they really need to be told to go to hell, when they're pushing against you in ways they shouldn't.

[1064] You bend over backwards to be nice and friendly and easy to get along with and to never have butter melt in your mouth.

[1065] It's all the other person can do not to betray you.

[1066] You just need it just so you'll grow up.

[1067] You know, I'm not justified.

[1068] I know that that can be incredibly cruel.

[1069] And you can run into people that are so malevolent that it's just beyond absolute comprehension.

[1070] But naivety definitely increases the probability that that will happen.

[1071] Or that you'll run into your own malevolence, which is what happens to soldiers a lot, because they think they're good people.

[1072] And then they go out in the battlefield and they find out that well, good people they might be, but they're also the same sort of bloodthirsty soldier that's been roaming the earth for the last like three million years.

[1073] So it's a hell of a shock to encounter that in yourself.

[1074] And then you go from naivety to being hurt and cynical, right, about everything.

[1075] It's like, oh, my God, the world, it's so terrible.

[1076] How can I possibly live in it?

[1077] And that's no good.

[1078] Then you're in the post -traumatic hell.

[1079] And then maybe you get out of that and you think, well, things are as bad as I thought, and I can be betrayed, and I can betray myself.

[1080] And that's all in the structure of the world.

[1081] but there's more to me than I thought there's more to courage than I thought there's something to being awake and then you replace your naive what would you call it your naive defenselessness with the courage to reintegrate with the world it's like yeah you were hurt once or twice or five times it's like wake the hell up back into the world extend your hand again, not because you're naive, not because you're unaware that you can be burnt.

[1082] You extend your hand in courage despite the fact that you've been burnt because you need to make contact with people and it's the best thing you can do for someone.

[1083] Say, I know what you're like, but I still want to be with you.

[1084] It's best for both of us.

[1085] It elevates both of us.

[1086] It's the best way out of it, even though there's always the possibility for misunderstanding and betrayal and all of that, it's still that the hand of trust, courage, and truth is the best antidote for the catastrophe of malevolence and betrayal.

[1087] And that's what moves you out of that despair and cynicism.

[1088] It's courage, right?

[1089] It's, I was hurt.

[1090] It was real pain.

[1091] And maybe you didn't deserve it, because, like, I've seen people hurt very badly by people.

[1092] and not because, not particularly because they were naive.

[1093] They just were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

[1094] What gets you out of that?

[1095] It's courage, man, and truth, and that works.

[1096] And so, and the knowledge that that's how the world is structured.

[1097] And the knowledge that that's not an excuse to withdraw and be permanently hurt and to be bitter and cynical.

[1098] It's like you got your reasons, man, for sure, but it's not a solution.

[1099] courage go back out again risk getting hurt again but this time man keep your eyes open and defend yourself as soon as you need to and then maybe you'll have a chance at the kind of relationship that will heal the betrayal that ladies and gentlemen is how you end a show so I'm going to get out of the way and make some noise for Dr. Jordan Peterson everybody thank you very much everybody thanks Dave if you found this conversation meaningful You might think about picking up dad's books, maps of meaning, the architecture of belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 Rules for Life, and antidote to chaos.

[1100] Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1101] See Jordan B. Peterson .com for audio, ebook, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

[1102] Remember to check out Jordan B. Peterson .com slash personality for information on his new course.

[1103] Tag Jordan or I on Instagram to share your results from Discovering Personality.

[1104] I really hope you enjoyed this podcast.

[1105] If you did, please leave a rating at Apple Podcasts, a comment, a review, or share this episode with a friend.

[1106] Thanks for tuning in.

[1107] Talk to you next week.

[1108] Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram at jordan