Podcasts are referred to by episode name, others by link to source. Emphases like italics and uppercase reflect the speaker's tone, tempo, and volume as these are mostly audio sources. Some boldface sentences are my added emphasis or highlights.
[0:43] I saw an endless repetition in my clinical practice and in my own private life, when my
eyes were open, the consequences of not saying what was true. It's like whatever hell you might
fall into by opening your mouth when you have something to say that isn't popular, it's nothing
like the hell you're going to envelop yourself in if you lose control of your own tongue and mind.
... You need to be afraid of the right thing. And you should be afraid of contaminating your soul with deceit. That's what you should be afraid of.
[47:22] Peterson: That scene that's delimited out at the end of [the book of] Revelations,
that's a very interesting book, psychologically, 'cuz what it—it's very complicated... So there's
an idea that's expressed in that book, is that it's something like: things are always falling apart
in a fundamental manner. It's built into the structure—there's an apocalyptic element to human life.
We fail in small ways and we fail in catastrophic ways. And everything that we have we lose and we
die. And societies come to an end. There's an apocalyptic element built into the structure of human
reality.
And part of, part of what's revealed in that strange book at the end, which is like a hallucinogenic nightmare in some sense, is that the hero is born at the darkest point in the journey. And it's a psychological truth, and it's very very apt, because at the darkest point—this is also why Christ is born near the darkest time of the year, from a metaphysical perspective—there's an idea there that when things fall apart, that's the time for the birth of the hero. And the hero in Revelation is also the place where free, where truthful speech most clearly manifests itself, 'cuz in the Christian tradition Christ is identified with truthful speech. And so the notion there is that redemption under apocalyptic conditions is to be found in the revelation of truthful speech, which is something that you actually believe!
[1:23:57] Harris: You say you believe in God. You have been—
Peterson: No I say I act as if he exists.
Harris: You say what?
Peterson: I say I act as if he exists. Which is a much more precise claim.
Harris: Ok. But then in this case, what... so you act as though God exists, and in addition I've heard you say that I act as though God exists, that I can't really be an atheist.
[jokeful exchange]
Harris: So in that sense, I'm not really an atheist; I've heard you say this... So in what sense do you mean... what is the God that you act as though he/she/it exists, and what is the god-shaped thing I must have in my life to prevent me from being a, quote, real atheist? ...What do you mean by "God"?
Peterson: Ok, well I'm going to tell you some of the things I mean by "God", ok? ...I'm going to read some things I wrote because it's so complicated, that I'm not sure I can just spin it off the top of my head, and so you'll have to excuse me.
So, and what I'm going to do is sort of paint a picture by highlighting different things. I already made one point here, I made the point that part of the conception of God that underlies the Western ethos is the notion that whatever God is is expressed in the truthful speech that rectifies pathological hierarchies. And that isn't all it does, it also confronts the chaos of being itself and generates habitable order. That's the metaphysical proposition. And that's best conceptualized as at least one element of God.
And so I would think about it as a transcendent reality that's only observable across the longest of time frames, the longest of iterated time frames, to your point. So here's some propositions, and they're complicated. And they need to be unpacked, so I'm just gonna read them and that'll have to do for the time being.
- God is how we imaginatively and collectively represent the existence and action of consciousness
across time, as the most real aspects of existence manifest themselves across the longest of time
frames but are not necessarily apprehensible as objects in the here and now.
- So what that means in some sense is that you have conceptions of reality built into your biological and metaphysical structure that are consequence of processes of evolution that occured over unbelievably fast expanses of time and that structure your perception of reality in ways that it wouldn't be structured if you only lived for the amount of time that you're going to live. And that's part of the problem of deriving values from facts, because you're evanescent and you can't derive the right values from the facts that portray themselves to you in your lives, which is why you have a bioligical structure that's like, 3.5 billion years old.
- God is that which eternally dies and is reborn in the pursuit of higher being and truth.
- That's a fundamental element of hero mythology.
- God is the highest value in the hierarchy of values. That's another way of looking at it.
- God is what calls and what responds in the eternal call to adventure.
- God is the voice of conscience.
- God is the source of judgment and mercy and guilt.
- God is the future to which we make sacrifices. And something akin to the transcendental repository of reputation.
- God is that which selects among men in the eternal hierarchy of men.
- So you know, men arrange themselves into hierarchies, men rise in the hierarchy, and there's principles that are important that determine the probability of their rise, and those principles aren't tyrannical power, they're something like the ability to articulate truth and the ability to be competent, and the ability to make appropriate moral judgements.
- And if you can do that in a given situation then all the other men will vote you up the hierarchy, so to speak, and that will radically increase your reproductive fitness.
- And the operation of that process across long expanses of time looks to me like it's codified in something like the notion of God the father.
- It's also the same thing that makes men attractive to women, because women peel off the top of the male hierarchy, and the question is what should be at the top of the hierachy? And the answer now is tyranny as part of the patriarchy, but the real answer is something like the ability to use truthful speech in the service of, let's say, well-being.
- So that's something that operates across tremendous expanses of time and it plays a role in the selection for survival itself, which makes it a fundamental reality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast S4E34 - A Conversation so Intense it Might as Well Be Psychedelic | John Vervaeke
[1:11:05] Peterson: I think the atheist critique of religion is a critique at a propositional
level.
Vervaeke: I've made a similar point Jordan, I've made the point that they're not paying attention to—I mean when Nietzsche runs into the marketplace, he is talking to the atheists when he says "you don't know what you've done when you've killed God." Right? And so to think that religion is primarily about asserting propositions for which there is no evidence is to miss all of the non-propositional—so I make a distinction, and it lines up with this, I think that religion is not primarily about knowledge, I think it's primarily about wisdom. Because wisdom is about that fundamental transformation—
Peterson: It's about embodying it. It's about establishing a relationship with it.
Vervaeke: Yes!
Peterson: It's about worshipping it.
Vervaeke: ...about taking it into your identity, that's what I meant.
[1:14:00] Peterson: We've killed our religion by presuming it was a set of axiomatic
presuppositions and listening to the 19th century rationalist atheists.
Vervaeke: Well what we've done is we have confused modernity's understanding of religion with the phenomena, which is I think a fundamental mistake.
Peterson: No... with our blind critique of the phenomenon.
[26:00] Kaufman: It's like we don't even want to know the truth [of the role that genes play],
in certain circumstances.
Peterson: Y'know I've thought about that too, it's not surprising that people don't want to know the truth about IQ, because it's quite nasty. I mean, there are huge differences between people in their intrinsic ability to learn. And that has walloping economic and social consequences. And so there's a bitterness in that, that's...
I mean I still think we have to address it and take it seriously, so for me it's like: IQ does the liberal and the conservative political perspectives incredible damage, because the conservative are likely to say "well there's a job for everyone if they just get up and y'know, get at it." And the liberals like to say "well, everybody can be trained to do everything" and BOTH of those are wrong. Because there's a large number of people who are not, who have enough trouble with abstraction that finding a productive job in a complex society has become extraordinary difficult. And that's a huge problem. And we have no idea what to do with it, we won't even look at it!
[43:10] Kaufman: I love this transcendent view. And also the idea that you—the point that you
make about hate. Y'know, hate doesn't really have a place to program in the robot here once we
understand that there's no ultimate free will...
...But what I don't understand is in applying that in your own life, you don't apply that when you talk about Trump, I mean you get really angry about...you don't say things like 'we should have sympathy for Trump'—
Harris: —but that's a misunderstanding. So there're certainly moments where I'm captured by something I find so despicable that I'm blind to my own philosophy here. Like, I'm lost in thought; I'm identified with a moment of finding Trump despicable, say, and... yeah, so I'm just in the dream, I'm asleep and dreaming and unaware of
Kaufman: You're human. You're human.
Harris: Yeah. I'm not a Buddha. But much of the time a different thing is happening. And it's not personal, it's not that I hate Trump personally. It's that I hate—and again this is all slightly anachronistic because he's no longer President, so I'm basically never thinking about him now which is wonderful—but it's not that I hated him personally, it's that I hated the fact of him. Right? The fact that we made this sort of man President was so terrible...
...He's so bad, as a reliably malfunctioning robot. It's a little bit analogous to if we elected a rhinoceros to be President, I'd be fucking tearing my hair out over how awful that is. At no point am I imagining that the rhinoceros can be anything other than a rhinoceros, and at no point am I wishing suffering upon the rhinoceros. I don't hate the rhinoceros. The rhinoceros just shouldn't be President of the United States...
...And in some sense we elected a rhinoceros President. And so I spent a long time complaining about that, because of all the things to which that was connected in our society and in our possible future that were worth worrying about.
[1:25:40] Peterson: You cite an interesting stat here, too, which I thought was worth talking
about. Um... on who should pay the bill on the first date. Um...seventy-two percent of women
think that a man should pay the full bill on the first date. Now remember: they've already
selected this man and what that means is that he's likely to be at or above them in the
socioeconomic hierarchy. And perhaps slightly older, so y'know, in some sense they can afford—he
can afford—to pay better than she can.
But, in any case, eighty-two percent of men think the same. And so men are playing the hypergamy game even more intensely than women are, at least with regards to that particular statistic. So...
Farrell: And this gets into the psychology of the pay gap because many women feel okay about that because they feel like 'okay, men earn more than I do for the same work.' And in fact that is not really accurate. Here is what is accurate: fathers earn more than moms do. The pay gap is not men—women. The pay gap is dads versus moms. And when dads become dads, they're far more likely to give up the things that they love to do that pay less, and do the things that they like to do a lot less; quit that musician gig that paid much less, and do something responsible, quote unquote, like selling product Y.
[1:47:33] Peterson: I've made light of [rejection], by teasing my class, my students. I say...
well, what's the joke... "you're perfectly suitable as a companion, but in no way should your
genetic material be allowed to propogate itself into the next generation." Right, that's the core
of rejection, and it cuts to the bone. And it isn't obvious that that's sufficiently understood,
how terrified men are of female rejection.
...And that's the advantage of dating sites like Tinder, because the rejection is taken out of the game, essentially, or it's hidden—masked. Tinder is a revolutionary technology because it alters the reward structure, reward and punishment structure of dating. I mean, it's incendiary. And named properly.
[1:00:50] I could see a power play. I could also see a corruption of the idea of identity.
Identity isn't merely what you feel you are, at any given point. Identity is something you
negotiate with others, you have to negotiate with others, because they have to know what the
rules are! And if you can change the rules and make them arbitrary at any point then how can
anyone play with you? And maybe if you're setting up a game that no one can play you're doing that
because you're the one that has a problem with power. Just maybe.
[37:00] The work [i.e. the curse upon Adam and Eve in the garden] is the sacrifice of the present
for the future... So that's it, that's the curse, in some sense. The thing is there's a theory in
there, there's an interesting theory of suffering implicit in that story. The theory of suffering
is that suffering is built into the structure of self-conscious being—it's built right into
the structure. So if you're a self-conscious being, that's your lot.
It isn't someone else's fault.
It isn't a consequence of sociological oppression.
It isn't a consequence of the fact that our society isn't organized properly.
It's just part of being.
[2:20:23] audience question (paraphrased): Would you agree with the sentiment that the left pushes
so hard and keeps doubling down, and they just want to "win"?
[2:21:59] Well first of all...[t]hings can go out of hand very rapidly. And the reason they do
that is because of positive feedback loops...and that's what polarization is. It's like: I tap you,
you tap me. I slap you, you punch me. Well, up it goes.
Well I think that's partly why, in the New Testament for example, there's an injunction that says, uh, turn the other cheek; resist not evil. WHY?
[pause] Because otherwise you get into a positive feedback loop and you'd better look the hell out. And things can tilt very, very rapidly.
So I would say: maintain self control. And don't aim to "win". Aim at peace. Because winning... that's not peace. It's better to aim for peace.
... So it really is important not to "win". It's like fighting with your wife: you don't "win". You can't, cuz you have to live with her. You can't win! But maybe you can solve the problem and bring about peace. And so you gotta practice doing that, practice restraint.
And remember, too, that these people you're talking about who are radical leftists is that most of the time they're not. Like they're ninety-five percent like you. And if you pull them out of the mob they're just like your neighbor's nineteen-year-old kid who's kinda clueless, and rebellious. And who you might even like.
... You don't wanna make a low-resolution, homogeneous representation of them. And so that's why, again, I think instead of "winning" you turn to your own development. You turn to your own development. You do what you can to stop doing the things you're doing that aren't good. Cuz you're not gonna hurt anybody if you do that. All you're gonna do is help. Otherwise you'll participate in this polarization.
... We have to be careful... I really do believe it, I truly believe this—this is something I learned in part from Solzhenitsyn and in part from Jung—is that the way that you set the world straight is by constraining the malevolence in your own heart.
And that's no joke, man. That's no easy thing. And that's a good voyage for people to go on if they want something difficult and worthwhile to do.
[35:57] If Kavanaugh withdrew after being nominated, here's what might happen:
- It would be read as an admission of guilt on his part.
- It would embolden those who would use reputation destruction as a political maneuver.
- It would weaken the generally and vitally important idea of the presumption of innocence.
- It would indicate weakness on the part of the Republicans at a key moment prior to the November elections.
- It would mean that an innocent man has been successfully pilloried by a mob.
- It would validate the use of allegations of past behavior, well past any reasonable expiry date, as a weapon.
- It would destroy the Republican opportunity to choose a Supreme Court justice, hand the Democrats an unearned victory, embitter a large percentage of the conservative base who would regard the withdrawal as a betrayal, and last and perhaps least,
- Violate my own personal adage (for what that's worth) of 'don't apologize if you haven't done anything wrong.'
[1:01:03] Oz: "If zero is ultra-liberal and hundred is the ultra-conservative, alt-right, where
are you on that spectrum? Do you think of yourself as more conservative, more liberal, I know over
your life you've changed..."
Peterson: "Well I'm a traditionalist in many senses, y'know, but I'm a very creative person, so it's very difficult, temperamentally, for me to place myself on the political spectrum. It's not like I don't think the dispossessed deserve a political voice. That's why I was interested in socialist politics as a kid. And I understand perfectly well that hierarchies dispossess, and that something has to be done about that.
But I also think that we mess with fundamental social structures at our great peril. I think we've destabilized marriage very badly and that's not been good for people, especially not good for children. But I don't think it's been good for adult men and women, either.
And I certainly, as a social scientist...one of the things you learn if you're a social scientist, and you're well-educated and informed, is that if you take a complex system—let's imagine you have a complex system—and you have a hypothesis about how to intervene so it will improve. OK, so what will you learn? You'll learn, once you implement the intervention, that you didn't understand the system, and that your stupid intervention did a bunch of things you didn't expect it to do, many of which ran counter to your original intent. And you inevitably learn that.
So...I learned that...I had a whole series of very wise mentors who insisted to everyone they talked to who was interested in public policy, for example, that when they put in place a well-meaning public policy initiative that they put aside a substantial portion of the budget to evaluate the outcome of the initiative. Because the probability that the initiative would produce the results desired was virtually zero. And I believe that that's technically true.
And so that tilts me in the conservative direction because I think 'well, that's sort of working, that system!' And I'm also not a utopian, so I don't expect systems to work perfectly. If they're not degenerating into absolute tyranny, I tend to think they're doing quite well. Because if you look worldwide and you look at the entire course of human history, degeneration into abject tyranny is the norm.
And so if you see systems like our system, say in the democratic Western world, that are struggling by not too badly, it's like you should be in AWE of those structures, because they're so difficult to produce and so unlikely.
And then I think well you take a system that's working not too badly and think 'well, I'm going to radically improve it.' It's like, no...you're not. You're not gonna radically improve it. You might be able to improve it incrementally, if you devoted a large part of your entire life to it, and you were very humble about your methods and your ambition. But if you think that some careless tweak of this complex system, as a consequence of the ideological presuppositions you learned in three weeks in your social justice class at university and that's gonna produce a radical improvement? It's like, you can't even begin to fathom the depths of your ignorance."
[1:51:06] "Why does reality have an adversarial nature? Why would God set something on you...
say, an enemy?
An adversary makes you stronger.
'Well isn't that cruel?' It's like, not if the person who sets the adversary on you believes that you could win."
[2:13:43] "The way I look at this is: let's say that you're blessed with success, so you have a
lot of resources at your disposal, ok. Now you can feel guilty about that, and perhaps, to some
degree, you should. That's between you and your conscience.
But let's say that you've generated your resources in a fair game. And that a lot of people have benefitted along with you, so you've played a straight game. Now you have all these resources. OK, so what should you do with the resources? Well, impulsive pleasure. It's like well, a little of that goes a long ways, and it's liable to take you down in a very short period of time.
So how about not that, OK, it's not a good medium- to long-term solution. OK how about: your ethical responsibility grows in proportion to the resources that you have at your control. And the right thing to do is that as you become more competent, authoritative, and able, is to expand the range in which you're operating. To do more good."
[1:10:07] "Now, I've put forward the proposition that the winner of the meta-game is also the
person who goes out to conquer the unknown. Now, let's see if we can take that apart a bit.
Well, one of the attributes of being a good sport, let's say, is that you're trying to extend your skill during the game. And so you are confronting the unknown in the game because you're trying to get better at the game. And then you're also doing that in a way that's of benefit to the team. And so then you can imagine that being a team leader, in the meta-game—which is the game of extending your skill across the broadest possible set of games—is analogous to leading a team into the unknown.
So if you're gonna go confront the unknown, you're probably not gonna do it alone, although you could. And to some degree you have to be alone, but you're generally going to do it in a cooperatively and competitive way. I mean that's why in stories like The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, for example, and even Harry Potter for that matter: none of those people are alone. They lead or are part of a broader social group. And they're important, and they're team players in that group.
So the team player element seems to be something that's common to conquering the unknown and to reciprocal altruism and to being invited to play the largest number of games. And the question then is what makes an effective leader? And an effective leader is someone who's able to synthesize the group and to lead it forward towards the goal."
[34:20] Peterson: "[the Self] is often composed of things you refuse or weren't willing to
develop. And so when Jung talks about, for example, the incorporation of the Shadow is that you've
constructed an ego and there's things it can do and can't do that it's allowed to do and isn't
allowed to do, and then there's a shadow domain that would consist of those things you could do
but haven't. And some of that's terrible, but some it's what you need to break free."
Brand: "Is there an infinite variety in the Shadow? Or are there sort of templates there, would you say, that are a common component of the shadow—"
Peterson: "—aggression. Aggression and lust. Because they're the most difficult to integrate into the ego. Because aggression destroys and, of course, lust subsumes the individual to, well, to sexual desire."
[51:33] "Well the thing about the games that's different—like the video games—what's different
is... so, a game for a little kid has to be immediately rewarding. That's why rough-and-tumble
play works, for example, it has to be immediately rewarding. And then the game shades into real
life. But as the game shades into real life, what happens is the rewards are deferred. And you get
more and more disciplined at not being immediately rewarded, like when you're learning to read or
play the piano, for the long-term goal.
The thing about video games is that they DO require the development of skill; but the immediate reward is built-in along with the delayed reward. Because otherwise the game wouldn't be fun for someone who's learning. So the problem is that a lot of real-life games aren't necessarily fun while you're learning them. 'Cuz you have to attain a certain level of mastery and that requires discipline.
That's also what's wrong with the idea that children can just learn in keeping with what they're spontaneously interested in. It's like there's some truth in that, because why not follow a child's interests, but the problem is that many highly skilled endeavors—virtually any endeavor that's going to be of economic or productive utility—requires [an] apprenticeship where there's a lot of grinding. There's a lot of just disciplined repetition."
[38:49] Fidler: "You wrote a book early on in your academic career called Maps of Meaning, and
what were you looking for when you were writing that book?"
Peterson: "I was doing two things: I was trying to understand what the fundamental issue was at the heart of the Cold War; and then I was trying to determine whether what the Cold War was was merely an argument between two hypothetically equally valid narratives...which would be kind of a postmodern view of it, right. 'Well, there's a radical left-wing narrative and it's arbitrary, but perhaps we can organize society along its guidelines. And there's a free market capitalist, democratic narrative, and it's just as arbitrary, and perhaps we can organize society along those lines, but one's arbitrary and so is the other. And so is any other narrative you might impose.'
And so I was curious about that because I thought, 'well, it looks like there's something really at stake here. We've generated tens of thousands of unbelievably powerful weapons, we've aimed them at each other, we're willing to put the world to the torch because of this argument. Maybe there's something to it.'
So I went into it with what I would say is an open mind, trying to understand if it was merely an argument between two arbitrary systems of moral relativism, or if there was something else at stake. And what I discovered, I would say—partly by reading the works of other people who had discovered this before me, let's say—is that no, they weren't equivalent systems in any way at all.
The West is founded on something that's far deeper than mere arbitrary narrative. Part of that is the idea of the sovereignty and divinity of the individual, which is the most powerful idea there is—the most powerful human idea there is.
And it's also the idea that, without which...in the absence of that idea you cannot produce a functioning society, at any level of analysis. You can't function in relationship to yourself, because you won't take yourself with any degree of seriousness. You won't function well within your family because you won't treat your family members like they matter. And you won't function well as a citizen because you'll be nihilistic and cynical."
[28:40] "I think that the failure to separate church and state...or, even if we don't call it a
failure, the fact that church and state hasn't technically been separated in Islam, makes it
difficult to understand how it's possible for Islam and modern Western democratic traditions to
coexist. I don't know how that gap can be bridged.
You could say 'well, with good will' and let's hope that's the case. That doesn't mean I don't think that Muslims can live in a modern Western democracy, I mean there are many many kinds of Muslims just like there are many kinds of Jews and Christians. And then there's the problem of the current proclivity of the extreme end of the Muslim fundamentalist world to be very violent in very many ways.
[1:31:53] "'Do I believe in the crucifixion?'
Well, certainly, I mean people...the crucifixion, how can you not believe in it if you think symbolically...it's like, human beings are—we're eternally crucified, right? Our lives are tragic and they end in death and we're all betrayed. We're all betrayed. We all experience betrayal. So you can't not believe in the crucifixion.
'Do you believe in the resurrection?'
Well, people die and are reborn all the time. This is what [the asker] is after here, 'I'm a sober alcohol and drug addict.' Well y'know you had to let a lot of you die when you stopped being an addict and something new be reborn. It's like what's the ultimate significance of that? And how's it tied to the notion of bodily resurrection? Well, I don't know what the ultimate significance is, but it does seem to be the pathway through life."
[1:32:35] "To believe. I would say you start believing not by attempting to convince yourself
that the statement 'there is a God' is true like a fact is true, but to act out the proposition
that you should shoulder your cross and stumble uphill towards the City of God; that's belief,
man. And you can do that, right away.
Now, you might ask: 'well do I have any guarantee that that has transcendent and universal significance?' It's like well, it's not a bad model for emulation, so it has universal significance in that regard. We each have to shoulder the tragedy of our existence and stumble upwards despite that; that has universal significance.
'Does it have universal significance outside of life? Like in the eternal realm?' [pause]
It wouldn't surprise me if it did. I suppose it would depend on what you mean by the eternal realm. It seems to have significance in the eternal realm of consciousness. It seems to have significance in the eternal realm of conscious fantasy—implicit fantasy, and mythology.
'How is it connected with the factual world?' [pause]
That's a hard question because the factual world in some sense divorced itself from that transcendental world during the development of the scientific methodology. So, 'never the twain shall meet'. It's a methodological issue in part."
[04:43] "So the stereotype literature is interesting, because one of the things so-called
stereotype researchers have failed to do is to distinguish stereotype from heuristics. People use
low-resolution representations of the world all the time, to simplify it. And it's absolutely
vital that we do that—we cannot function without categorization.
And I know this was a problem with [Mahzarin] Banaji's work—she did some of the early work on stereotyping—and I remember she did a talk at Harvard when I was teaching in Boston, and she was taken to task by the audience, who weren't all social psychologists, for failing to distinguish between categorization and stereotyping. And like that's actually a really big problem—it's not a trivial issue with regards to that research."
[1:20:12] “It’s pretty obvious that if you treat people well, if you really think about it and
you’re not being naïvely optimistic, and like y’know a ‘nice, good person’, with all the weakness
that that intimates. If you’re being hard-nosed and sensible you understand that if you treat
people—if you trust people—that’s an act of courage. If you’re not naïve, right; if
you’re naïve it’s an act of stupidity. Because you might get bit, and you probably will. And if
you’re naïve and you get bit, you will suffer for it, it’ll traumatize you.
But if you’re not naïve, and you know you can get bit, then you might ask, well, what should you do with people? And the answer is you should trust them. Not because you’re naïve and not because they couldn’t betray you and not because you don’t know that they could betray you, but because if you hold out your hand in trust then you’re inviting the best part of that person to step forward and that won’t happen unless you take that initial step and that’s courage, not naïvety.
And so to trust someone once your eyes are open, that’s an act of courage. And that opens up the world."
[38:47] "Here's something I learned about true art—this is something I learned from Jung,
it's so smart—so you imagine that you inhabit the land that you know, conceptually and
practically, and imagine outside of that there's that massive space of things you don't know, and
even outside of that there's this space of things that NO ONE knows, right, so it's the known
territory surrounded by the unknown—that's the canonical archetypal landscape. And the
unknown manifests itself to you and that's where new knowledge comes from.
But the question is: how is that knowledge generated? It doesn't just leap from completely unknown
to completely articulated in one move, that isn't how it happens. It has to pass through stages of
analysis before it becomes articulable. And the first stage of analysis as far as I can tell is
that you act it out; so if something really surprises you, the first way that you react to it,
your category's actually embodied like this, [pantomimes a frightened cat] that's your first
category. It's not conceptual at all, it's embodied.
And then maybe you start to...you're at home at night and y'know something startles you and you freeze, and then it's dark and your imagination populates the darkness with whatever might be making the noise. And that's the sequence, it's like: embodied response, imaginative representation, exploration, articulation. That's how information moves from the unknown to the known.
And artists are the people who stand on that imagistic frontier, and they put themselves out into the unknown and they take a piece of it and they transform it into some mythological image. And they don't know what they're doing exactly, because they're guided by their intuition if they're real artists, otherwise they're just propagandists. They have to be contending with something they don't understand. And what they do is they make it more understandable."
[43:55] "You have to admit, even if you think about it as a modern person, that the act of
sacrificing something [like a baby goat] might have some dramatic compulsion to it. Y'know, to go
out into a flock and to take something that's newborn and to cut its throat and to bleed it and to
burn it...might be a way of indicating to yourself that you're actually serious about something.
And it isn't so obvious that we have rituals of seriousness like that now.
And so it's not so obvious that we're actually serious about anything. And so maybe that's not such a good thing. And so maybe we shouldn't be thinking that these people were so archaic and primitive and superstitious. It's possible that they knew something that we don't. And certainly in the Abrahamic stories one of the things that maintains Abraham's covenant with God is his continual willingness to sacrifice, and so that sacrificial issue is so important because you are not committed to something unless you're willing to sacrifice for it. Commitment and sacrifice are the same thing.
And I think it borders on miraculous that those concepts are embedded into this narrative at the level of dramatic action, y'know, instead of abstract explanation—people are acting this out. And the fundamental conception is so profound that it's really quite...awe-inspiring, it's breathtaking, really, when you understand what message is trying to be conveyed. You have to make sacrifices and what do you have to sacrifice? You have to sacrifice that which is most valuable to you currently that's stopping you. And God only knows what that is; it's certainly the worst of you, it's certainly that. And God only knows to what degree you're in love with the worst of you."
[1:51:18] "Y'know when Christ comes back in the Book of Revelation to judge people—because he
comes back as a judge—and virtually everyone gets cast out with the chaff and not saved with the
wheat...he says something very interesting, he appears in the vision with a sword coming out of
his mouth, it's a horrifying vision. And he divides humanity into the damned and the saved. He
says something very interesting. He says: 'To those who are neither hot nor cold I will spew you
out of my mouth.' And it's a disgust metaphor, right, and what it says is the worst punishment
isn't waiting for those who committed to something and did wrong. The worst punishment is reserved
for those who committed to nothing and stayed on the fence.
And that's really something, too. That's really something to think about. And it's also something I believe to be true because I see that stasis is utterly destructive. Because there's no progress, all there is is movement backwards. There's aging, and suffering, and no progress. And so to not commit to anything is the worst of all transgressions. To commit means to put your body and soul into something, to offer your life as a sacrifice means that you're willing to make a bargain with fate. And the bargain is: 'I'm going to act as if, if I give it my all, then the best possible thing will happen because of that.'
And to not see the analogy between that and the act of faith in God is to misunderstand the story completely."
[11:23] “Just because you read something doesn’t mean you have a right to it. You have to
understand it, and understanding something that’s deep means a deep transformation, means you have
to live it."
[36:55] Weiss: "Since we're on the subject of universities, you recently said that what
universities have done is beyond forgiveness. I wonder if you can explain what you mean by that; a
second connected question is...should we abolish universities, or—"
Peterson: "No, they'll do that themselves." [laughter]
Weiss: "...let's hear a little bit about what you think renders them beyond forgiveness."
Peterson: "Well...
- They're overwhelmingly administratively top-heavy. And they don't spend any more money on the faculty than they did 30 years ago. And the cost of that administrative top-heaviness, which is well-documented—not by me, by other people, and it's been that way, it's been accelerating over the last 20 years—has been a radical increase in tuition fees, especially compared to the radical decrease in price of most things over the last 20 years.
- Now, so they've become administratively top-heavy. The way—and this is especially true in the United States—the way that's been managed is that unsuspecting students are given free access to student loans that will cripple them through their 30s and their 40s, and the universities are enticing them to extend their care-free adolescence for a four-year period at the cost of mortgaging their future earnings in a deal that does not allow for escape through bankruptcy.
So it's essentially a form of indentured servitude; there's no excuse whatsoever for that. [It] means the administrators have learned to pick the future pockets of their students. And because they also view them in some sense as sacred cash cows and fragile, let's say, because you might wonder why the students are being treated like they're so fragile, it's like... 'well, we don't want them to drop out now, do we? If they drop out then we can't get our hands on their future earnings in a way that they can't escape from.'
And that cripples the economy, because the students come out overlaid with debt that they'll never pay off, right at the time that they should be at the peak of their ability to take entrepreneurial risks. So they can't do that, because they're too crippled by debt. And so that's absolutely appalling.
- They're gerrymandering the accreditation processes so that the degree no longer has its credible value.
- They're enabling the activist disciplines which have zero academic credibility whatsoever in my estimation, and I'm perfectly willing to defend that claim.
- And by enabling the activist disciplines they're allowing for the distribution of this absolutely nonsensical view that western society is fundamentally a patriarchal tyranny, which is absurd on at least five dimensions of analysis but is becoming increasingly the thing you have to believe if you're allowed to speak in public
...
- They're not teaching students to read critically.
- They're not introducing them to great literature.
- They're not teaching them to write.
The list goes on and on."
[52:02] "Now you might ask 'well, why is that [differentiation of the right and left brain]
conceptualized as masculine versus feminine—because it's not male versus female, by the way, those
are not the same thing, because one's conceptual. That's extraordinarily complicated. I think the
reason is that we're social-cognitive primates, and that our fundamental cognitive categories—a
priori cognitive categories—are masculine, feminine, and child. It's something like that, that's
the fundamental structure of reality. Because we're social creatures and we view reality as
something that's essentially social in its nature.
And then when we started to conceptualize reality outside the social world—which wasn't very long ago by the way, and which is something that animals virtually don't do at all—we used those a priori social categories as filters through which we interpreted the external world. And we're sort of stuck with that, in some deep sense. And you might say 'well, why do we have to be stuck with that?' It's like, well because some things are very difficult to change.
Like if you go watch a story, and the characters in this story slot themselves into those archetypal categories, then you'll understand the story. And if they don't, you won't. Because your understanding is predicated on application of the archetypal a prioris to the story. You wouldn't understand it otherwise."
[29:49] “And the way that totalitarian states develop is that people give up their right to be,
the right to exist with their own thoughts. They lie! That’s what happens, is that individuals
sacrifice their own souls to the dictates of the state. And then everything goes badly sideways.
And it’s like, you think how much evidence for that do we need? Y’know, you’re looking at a
quarter of a billion deaths. It’s like, isn’t that enough?
Well the people that I read were profound—Victor Frankel is a good example for beginners if you wanna read about this sort of thing, wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning. And Frankel, and also Solzhenitsyn, and a variety of other commentators as well who really looked into what happened both in Nazi Germany and the Communist states. Their conclusion was universal: that the lies and tyranny of the state are aided and abetted by the moral sacrifice of the individual. It’s not top-down, the Nazis telling you what to do and you’re all innocent and obey. THAT’S not how it works—is you falsify your being, bit by bit, and you end up where you don’t wanna be. And that’s a bad idea.
And if you’re interested in that there’s a great book called Ordinary Men…you read that and you won’t be the same person afterwards, so I would beware of reading it. But it’s a story about these policemen in Germany. So they were middle-aged guys, y’know, and they grew up and were socialized before the Nazis came to power, so they were just your typical middle class policemen. And they were brought into Poland after the Nazis had marched through and charged with keeping order in the occupied state. And their commander knew that it was going to be brutal, because they were in wartime, and they regard the Jews for example as enemies, so there was going to be a fair bit of rounding up and all of that, and with all of what that implied.
And the commander told the policemen that they could go home if they wanted to, that they didn’t have to participate in this. And then, what Ordinary Men does is document their transformation from ordinary policemen—the sort of people that you know—to guys who were taking naked, pregnant women out into the middle of fields and shooting them in the back of the head. And it documents ONE STEP AT A TIME how an ordinary person turns into someone like that. You think ‘well, we don’t want that sort of thing to happen anymore.’ Well, then you don’t wanna be that sort of person. That’s how it’s fixed. And if you’re not gonna be that sort of person then you don’t take the first steps. Cuz the first steps lead you down a pathway you don’t—at least in principle—you don’t wanna go.
So, I think part of what makes me combative, compared to someone like [Jonathan] Haidt, is I’ve spent years looking at the worst things there are to look at. And I’ve learned from that. And I’ve certainly learned things that I won’t do. And one of them is I won’t let the government regulate my speech. It’s a mistake. I don’t care what compassionate principles hypothetically motivate that move. It was unprecedented in English common law, that move. It was all buried under this leftist “compassion” which is mostly… it’s mostly a lie."
[1:26:15] “I’d also say if you’re interested in Jung, the best book to read is The Origins and
History of Consciousness. It’s the best intro to the Jungian world.”
[1:44:40] “But that’s the Holy Grail, and the Holy Grail is lost—that’s the redemptive
substance—and the knights of King Arthur go off to search for the Holy Grail. But they don’t know
where to look! So, where do you look when you don’t know where to look? For something you need,
desperately, but have lost? Well, each of the knights goes into the forest at the point that looks
darkest to him.
And that’s Jungian psychoanalysis in a nutshell. It’s like: that which you fear and avoid. That which you hold in contempt. That which disgusts you and that you avoid. That’s the gateway to what you need to know. There’s nothing new-age about that, that’s for sure.”
[15:45] “You’ve got the fact that things aren’t exactly the way they should be at least gives
you something to do, y’know, and maybe something great to do, cuz there’s no shortage of
suffering and trouble that besets the world that you could conceivably ameliorate in some way. And
the utility of that and the intrinsic meaning of that is self-evident.
So it also makes me curious about nihilism, for example, and despair, because—I understand those emotions, I understand them deeply, and the intellectual mindset that goes along with it; but they just seem beside the point to me in some sense because there are so many things that need doing, that all you really have to do is open your eyes and look at them, and then decide that you’re actually going to do something about them.
And you might think ‘well, what’s within my scope of influence is so trivial that it’s not worth doing.’ It’s like, it won’t stay trivial for long if you do it! Not at all. And I don’t think it’s trivial to begin with. I don’t think that any—I really don’t believe that anything done right is trivial. And my experience in my life has been that anything I actually did paid off. It didn’t pay off necessarily in the way that I expected it to pay off, that’s a whole different story. But if it was genuine commitment to do something, even if it went sideways and the outcome was really something other than what I expected, the net consequence over time was nothing but good.”
[20:28] “The issue is that there are times in your life where you know that the thing that
you’re saying is not true. It’s a deception. It’s a lie of some sort, and you’re using it to
manipulate yourself or another person or the world. And you’re also fully possessed of the idea
that you can get away with it. And there’s a satanic arrogance about that. In fact, that is the
archetypal arrogance that’s portrayed in the mythological character of Satan, because Satan is
precisely the archetype of the element of the mind that believes that it can twist and bend the
structure of reality without paying the price for that.
And you can’t imagine anything that’s more arrogant than that because really, do you really think that you can twist the structure of reality and that that’s going to work out for you without it snapping back, is so obvious that that can’t work, that everyone knows it.”
[23:11] “And the warning in the Flood story is: don’t [feed with no gratitude and no attempt to
replenish what it is that you’re taking from] for very long. Because things will happen that are
so awful that you cannot possibly imagine it. And that’ll happen to you personally, and it’ll
happen to your family, and it’ll happen to your community, and it’s happened to people over and
over throughout history.
And it’s quite interesting, y’know, it’s very soon after the story of Cain and Abel, when you see evil enter the world in the story of Adam and Eve; along with self-consciousness and evil there is the ability—that’s the knowledge of good and evil—that’s the ability to hurt other people—self-consciously, to know what you’re doing, and then of course instantly Cain takes that to the absolute extreme and he uses that capacity to destroy, really, what he loves best. He gets as close as a human being can to destroying the divine ideal. Because, of course, his brother is Abel and Abel is favored by God, and Cain destroys him.
Which, Cain tells God at the end of that episode that his punishment is more than he can bear. And I think the reason for that is: where are you once you destroy your own ideal? What’s left for you? There’s nowhere to go. There’s no up. And when there’s no up, there’s a lot of down.
And, y’know, there’s an idea put forth very nicely in Milton’s Paradise Lost, when he was describing, from a psychological perspective, essentially what hell is. And hell is...you’re in hell to the degree that you’re distant from the good. That might be a good way of thinking about it. And if you destroy your own ideal, which you do with jealousy and resentment and the desire to pull down people who you would like to be, let’s say, then you end up in a situation that’s indistinguishable from hell.
And the way the Biblical story unfolds is, well, it’s Cain…and then it’s the flood. And so Cain adopts this mode of being that’s antithetical to being itself, at least to positive being itself—he does it voluntarily, he does it knowing full well what he’s doing—and the net consequence of this, that it ripples through the entire social structure, is that God stands back and says: This whole thing has got [sic] so bad the only thing we can do is wipe it to the ground. And that is no joke. That’s exactly how things work.”
[2:05:30] “I see this [intellectual arrogance] for example happening in the United States in
particular because the last time I went down there, for example, I had friends down there and some
of those friends are very, very smart people. And some of them were talking about the Trump
voters. And they were talking about the Trump voters with contempt. And I thought ‘you better
watch that. Cuz that’s 50% of the damn population. And it might be convenient to think that
they’re stupid and beneath you, but it’s not conducive to a civil state, and there’s no evidence
that it’s true, because there isn’t a straight line between intelligent and wise.’”
[1:06:51] “I’m trying to formulate a sentence, so I try to think up a good sentence that’s
nailing what I’m trying to formulate, and then I try to pick it apart. And I do that a bunch of
ways; I take the sentence and I put it on another page and then I write, like, ten different
variants of the sentence and see if I can get a better variant. And then I try to think of ways
that it’s a stupid sentence to see if I can, y’know, put a pry bar underneath it and loosen it up.
And if I can’t do anything—if I can’t manage that then I keep the sentence that I’ve got. And I do that with ten sentences in a paragraph and I make sure the sentences are all arranged properly in the paragraph the same way, by rewriting a bunch of different variants of it, trying to get the word right and the phrase right and the sentence right and the sentence order right and the paragraph order right. And I can tell when it’s right enough because I can’t make it any better.
That doesn’t mean it’s right, it just means I can’t improve it. And so I get to the point where if I’m writing a paragraph and I write a variant, and I can’t tell if the variant is any better and it might be worse, then I’m done. I’ve hit the limit of my intellectual capacity, and it’s time to move on."
[22:04] “This is one of mankind’s fundamental discoveries. Sometimes things do not go well.
That’s self-evident. But here’s the rub: sometimes when things are not going well, it’s precisely
that which is most valued that is the cause. Why? It’s because the world is revealed through the
template of your values.
If the world you are seeing is not the world you want therefore, it’s time to examine your values. It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions.”
[1:29:18] “The other thing about marriage—this is really worth knowing too—is that—I learned
this in part by reading Jung—it’s like what do you do when you get married? That’s easy. You take
someone who’s just as useless and horrible as you are, and then you shackle yourself to them. And
then you say: ‘we’re not runnin’ away. No matter what happens.’ Yeah, well that’s perfect because
then you don’t get to run away.
And the thing is, is like if you can run away you can’t tell each other the truth. Because if you tell someone the truth about you and they don’t run away, they weren’t listening. And so if you don’t have someone around that can’t run away you can’t tell them the truth. And so that’s part of the purpose of the marriage. It’s like okay okay, I’ll bet on you, you bet on me, it’s a losing bet, we both know that. But given our current circumstances we’re unlikely to find anyone better, that’s for sure.
There are two things that come off of that. One is, y’know people are waiting around to find Mr. and Mrs. Right and it’s like, here’s something to think about, man. If you went to a party and you found Mr. Right, and he looked at you and didn’t run away screaming, that would indicate that he wasn’t Mr. Right at all. It’s like the old Nietzschian joke: if someone loves you, that should immediately disenchant you with them.
[2:07:58] “The shadow is rooted in hell. And you think, well, that’s a nice metaphor. It’s like,
don’t be so sure it’s a metaphor. It’s not exactly a metaphor. I mean I can elaborate on that a
little bit.
If you walk down Bloor (?) Street and you watch, you can see people in hell with no problem. They’re not only the people who are completely lost—the homeless—but they’re the homeless that you cannot look at. And the reason you can’t look at them is they find your act of mirroring their state of existence intolerable. It will instantly enrage them. And that’s because they’re in chaos, they’re in the underworld, but they’re in a particular suburb of the underworld. And that little suburb, that’s hell.
And you think ‘well, is it eternal?’ Depends on what you mean. It’s been around a long time. It’s been around a long time. And it’s really deep. And there’s another weird thing about hell, which is: if you’re in it, no matter how bad it is, there’s some stupid thing you can do to make it worse. And that’s why it’s bottomless.”
[2:40:20] “One of the things I’ve really tried to puzzle out, and it’s not like I believe this,
right, I’m just telling you where the edges of my thinking has been going, is that you have this
crazy alliance between the feminists and the radical Islamists that I just do not get. It’s like
why aren’t they protesting non-stop about Saudi Arabia is just completely beyond me. Like I do NOT
understand it in the least. And I wonder too, I just wonder—and this is the Freudian me—is that is
there an attraction that’s emerging among the female radicals for that totalitarian male dominance
that they’ve chased out of the West? And I mean that’s a hell of a thing to think but after all, I
am psychoanalytically minded and I DO think things like that. [laughter]
Because I can just see no rational reason for it. The only other rational reason is that ‘well, the West needs to fall, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ Yeah, so that could be the case. But I’m not going to shake my suspicion about this unconscious balancing because as the demand for egalitarianism and the eradication of masculinity accelerates, there’s going to be a longing in the unconscious for the precise opposite of that. The more you scream for equality, the more your unconscious is going to admire dominance.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6qBxn_hFDQ
[1:46:27] “Cuz one of the old metaphysical problems is ‘why would God allow evil into the
world’. I think well maybe God didn’t allow evil into the world; maybe God allowed the possibility
of evil into the world—that’s different. And maybe the world with the possibility of evil is
actually a better world than the world without the possibility of evil.
It’s something like that, y’know, in that maybe a man is better when he is a dangerous man who is being good than he would be if we was just a good man who wasn’t capable of being dangerous. And I believe that because the best men that I have ever met are very dangerous men. You don’t mess with them.”
Timon Dias: “So do you think that someone without teeth, or without the options to sin, can be good?”
Peterson: “See that’s a real theological question, right? Cuz the question you’re asking is—and this is tied up with the idea of free will and evil—‘can a person who doesn’t have the option to be evil be good? And I would say no.”
[1:51:07] “One of the most amazing things I discovered this year, or stumbled upon, was I was
puzzling over a line in the New Testament which I’ve always been curious about because it never
sat right with me: ‘the meek shall inherit the earth.’ …and I found out that the word ‘meek’
either doesn’t mean now what it meant when people first translated the text, or it was a
mistranslation. Either way. Because ‘meek’ sounds like ‘powerless’ and ‘harmless’ or something
like that. But what ‘meek’ actually means is it’s the derivation of the word, it’s the translation
of a word that meant something more like ‘those who have swords and know how to use them, but
keep them sheathed.’
And I thought ‘oh yes, that’s exactly it.’ Those who have swords and know how to use them but choose to keep them sheathed… ‘shall inherit the world.’ It’s like yes. Exactly right.”
https://www.artofmanliness.com/2017/08/31/podcast-335-using-power-myths-live-flourishing-life/
Note: just minutes before this monologue, Peterson makes a distinction between his use of the
terms masculine/feminine versus male/female; they are not always equivalent in the analysis of
archetypal stories.
“If you look at the movie Sleeping Beauty, for example. So the female—the feminine—is unconscious in that movie, that’s Sleeping Beauty. And she’s unconscious because she couldn’t tolerate the trauma of puberty and sexual development, essentially. And the reason for that is because her parents overprotected her, right?
If you remember at the beginning of Sleeping Beauty, the king and queen have been waiting a long time for their daughter to decide not to invite Maleficent to the christening. And Maleficent is the evil queen, right, she’s the negative element of nature and the world, and if you don’t invite the negative—if you don’t allow the negative element of life and the world into your child’s environment then you overprotect them and make them weak, and then when they grow up and face the inevitable confrontations of adolescence and adulthood, they deeply desire to remain unconscious, or to become unconscious again. That can manifest itself in suicidal ideation, for example.
So Sleeping Beauty falls unconscious when she’s pricked, when blood emerges when she’s pricked, and it’s just after she, y’know, she falls in love naïvely with the prince, and then that collapses. So she can’t tolerate the catastrophe of her existence so she falls unconscious. And something has to rescue her. And it’s the hero, it’s the prince.
Now, you can read that as an external prince because in some degree, in a woman’s life, the adult feminine in her is awakened by the man that she chooses. So you can read it as a love story, but you can also read it as a story of individual development because what the woman is going to use to call herself out of unconsciousness is her own masculine propensity to develop her consciousness to move forthright out into the world. I mean these archetypal stories can be read at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously, they apply across multiple domains.”
[16:00] “Those experiences in life where the fundamental constants that keep you oriented shift,
and then you fall into the unknown, that’s the underworld of mythology. You fall into the unknown.
And part of that underworld would be hell. Now hell is the part of the underworld that emerges
when you’re embittered by your failure and you turn towards the desire to destroy. And everyone
who thinks about this can appreciate that, because most people—at least if they reflect on their
own experience—can understand full well the negative psychological consequences of falling flat on
your face. It’s not only that you fail, it’s that you become bitter and turn agains the world.
That’s a trip to hell for all intents and purposes.”
[47:25] “When young men mature and become men, it isn’t power that accrues to them, it’s
competence. And the problem with the narrative that grips our culture at the moment is that we
fail to make a distinction between power and competence. Power is just that I can hurt you and
therefore I dominate. Competence is that I have status because I am offering to myself and to
other people something that they voluntarily regard as of value. And my invitation to young men is
to become competent, to forego power. Power is the tactic used by the incompetent to gain status.
Competence is the tool used by the morally oriented to accrue authority and do good things in the
world. Well that’s a noble call. And the only way out of the tragedy of existence is to follow the
noble call.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnIFlD5Zvs8
[7:40] “Life isn’t a game, it’s a set of games. And the rule is: never sacrifice victory across
the set of games for victory in one game. Right? And that’s what it means to play properly. You
wanna play so that people keep inviting you to play. Cuz that’s how you win—you win by being
invited to play the largest possible array of games. And the way you do that is by manifesting the
fact that you can play in a reciprocal manner every time you play even if there’s victory at
stake. And that’s what makes you successful across time.
[8:40] “And to act morally is not to win today’s contest at the expense of the rest of possible
contests. And again, I don’t see that as something that’s arbitrary. It’s not relativistic.
There’s an absolute moral stance there, and everyone recognizes it. And I also think it’s the key
to success.
And I would also say it’s very much akin in a strange way, like the person who is the master at being invited to play the largest possible number of games is also the same person that goes out forthrightly to conquer the unknown before it presents itself as the enemy at the door. They’re the same thing.”
[10:08] “There’s a recognition there in the image that the person who’s most dominant—who has
the most authority—is the one who’s voluntarily accepted the suffering that’s a part of being. And
that’s what that picture represents. It’s like the authority holds [a cross] and says ‘This is
what you have to accept.’ And that transfixes the viewer, because of the fact that it’s true.
Think about it this way: do you like brave people, or do you like cowards? Well that’s pretty straightforward. And what’s the ultimate act of bravery? It’s to come to terms with the fact that you’re mortal and limited, and to live forthrightly regardless. Well obviously, that’s what is at the core of what’s admirable.”
(Peterson)
[37:50] “Get it into your head that you have the capacity for great evil. And stop
targeting—stop assuming that that’s something manifesting itself only in the people that you
disagree with politically. Take responsibility for that, and try to put your life together.”
[1:45:30] “What Marx observed was that capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and
fewer people. And he said that’s a flaw of the capitalist system. THAT’S wrong. It’s not a flaw of
the capitalist system. It is a feature of every single system of production that we know of no
matter who set it up and how it operates. And so now we have a problem, because what happens is as
soon as you set up a domain of production—and you need to because you need things to be
produced—then you instantly produce a competition, and the spoils go disproportionately to a tiny percentage of people.
So then, so what? So the rest of the people starve, or the system becomes unstable because everybody’s mad. It’s like, that’s a big problem. 'Kay, so how do human beings fix that? Well the first thing we did was diversify the number of productive games. So you don’t get to be an NBA basketball star, okay, but you can run a podcast. It’s a completely different competitive landscape. So we can fractionate the production landscape, and then people who aren’t successful in one domain might be successful in others; that’s human creativity.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gakoqQz6aUc
[5:38] “Actually I’d just as soon we got rid of the whole hate speech thing because I think it’s
unbelievably dangerous to drive people who hate underground and not let them talk. That’s
partly because you don’t know where they are, you don’t know what they’re doing, and you can’t
refute them.”
(Peterson)
[1:41:35] “So imagine that the normal world of mankind is inside that dominance hierarchy where
everything is going well, because nothing abnormal is happening and you’re getting what you need
and you want and your conscious knowledge suffices. Right? Okay, but then something tilts, and
that structure no longer works. Where do you end up? You end up in the underworld. That’s when
your partner of 20 years has a long-term affair, and you find out about it. It’s like you thought
you knew where you were…but you didn’t. And now that you found out, you don’t know where you are.
When you don’t know where you are, you’re in the underworld.
Right, and that’s where the unconscious forces play: those are the gods, that’s why there’s gods in the underworld. And people go to the underworld all the time. It’s chaos and fear and depression, and hopelessness and imaginativeness, it’s everything—it’s chaos. It’s terrifying and promising, because dragons have gold. Because the unknown has two things, just like the future. It’s like ‘look out, it’ll do you in’ and ‘look out, it offers everything to you.’ That’s the underworld.”
[2:03:15] “We’re very complicated creatures, and we’re run by all sorts of very strange things
down there in the unconscious, y’know, and the Greeks thought we were the playthings of the gods
because we serve lust, we serve thirst, we serve hunger, we serve rage. And y’know those things
all transcend us. So that’s why they were gods. Y’know, rage—that’s the war god. Well, why is it a
god? Well, it exists forever. It exists in all people. It takes them over and directs their
behavior. It’s a god.
Well, you can quibble about the details: ‘no it’s not a god.’ Ok fine, it’s a psychological force.”
Rogan: “Right, people get hung up on that one word.”
Peterson: “Well they don’t really… we have to think about it functionally to some degree, we have to think about what that idea means. We’ve had that idea forever; it isn’t just some superstition. Jesus, you gotta be more sophisticated than that, man! And this is partly what I think is unfortunate about the new atheists, let’s say: they don’t take the damn problem seriously. They think ‘well, Christianity, that’s just a bunch of superstition.’ It’s like: really?? No. Sorry. That’s just not deep enough man."
[2:24:46] “So then we ask people: ‘Ok, so here think about this real carefully. Take all your
faults and inadequacies, and your hatred for life, all of that. And imagine that gets the upper
hand. And then think about where you could be in three to five years.’ Everyone knows, eh?
Some people know they’d be a street person, some people know they’d be an alcoholic, some people know they’d be a prostitute or a drug addict. Like everybody’s got their own little hell they could descend into, with fair degree of rapidity and a fair bit of enjoyment. And people know that, and so I say well, delineate that out too, so you know where you’re headed when you fall off the path. And so then you’re running away, and running towards…it’s like yes, that’s heaven and hell. And you need it. And they’re real. They’re as real as anything you can… It depends on what you mean by ‘real’ I suppose, but… they’re as real as you make them, how about that. And people can make hell pretty real.”
[2:41:00] “I know for many people someone who’s rich is someone who has more money than them.
Right? Which is one of the things I really find funny about the radical left protests on the
campuses, it’s like ‘down with the 1%’. It’s like ‘hey, sunshine, you’re part of the 1%. You’re
actually a baby 1/10th of 1% or maybe 1/100th of 1%, or you’re just angry because you’re not there
yet. But you will be when you’re 40. And you know it and so does everybody else. And now
instead of regarding yourself properly as a fledgling member of the elite, you wanna have it both
ways. You wanna be fledgling member of the elite, and champion of the underprivileged. So how
narcissistic can you get? You wanna have all the benefits of having all the benefits, and you want
all the benefits of having none of the benefits. Because just all the benefits isn’t enough for
you.”
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson
sources unknown
The basic totalitarian claim: What I know is everything that needs to be known, and if only it were manifest in the world, the world would become a utopia. I also think that that’s the core idea behind the Tower of Babel. It’s the idea that we can build a structure that makes the transcendent unnecessary.
What happens in the story of Adam and Eve is that when people become self conscious, they get thrown out of paradise and then they're in history. And history is a place where there's pain in child birth, and where you're dominated by your mate, and where you have to toil like mad like no other animal because you're aware of your future. You have to work and sacrifice the joys of the present for the future constantly, and you know that you're going to die. And you have all that weight on you. How could anything be more true than that? Unless you're naive beyond comprehension. There's something that's echoed about your life in that representation. We’re such strange creatures because we don't really fit into being in some sense, and that's what's expressed in the notion of The Fall.
The notion that every single human being, regardless of their peculiarities and their strangenesses, and sins, and crimes, and all of that - has something divine in them that needs to be regarded with respect, plays an integral role, at least an analogous role, in the creation of habitable order out of chaos. It's a magnificent, remarkable, and crazy idea. Yet, we developed it and I do firmly believe that it sits at the base of our legal system. I think it is the cornerstone of our legal system. That's the notion that everyone is equal before God. That's such a strange idea. It's very difficult to understand how anybody could have ever come up with that idea, because the manifold differences between people are so obvious and so evident that you could say the natural way of viewing someone, or human beings, is in this extremely hierarchical manner where some people are contemptible and easily brushed off as pointless and pathological and without value whatsoever, and all the power accrues to a certain tiny aristocratic minority at the top, but if you look at the way that the idea of individual sovereignty developed, it is clear that it unfolded over thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years, where it became something that was fixed in the imagination that each individual had something of transcendent value about them, and man I can tell you - we dispense with that idea at our serious peril. And if you're going to take that idea seriously - and you do because you act it out, because otherwise you wouldn't be law abiding citizens. It's shared by anyone who acts in a civilized manner - the question is: why in the world do you believe it? Assuming that you believe what you act out - which I think is a really good way of fundamentally defining belief.
The proper path of life is to take the tradition and spirit that is associated with consciousness as such and to act it out in your own personal life in a way that is analogous with the way Christ acted it out in his life. What that means in part is the acceptance of the tragic preconditions of existence. That's partly: betrayal by friends and by family and by the state, it's partly punishment for sins that you did not commit (the arbitrary nature of justice), and the fact of finitude. Your duty, and the way to set things right in the cosmos is to accept all those details as necessary preconditions for being and to act virtuously despite all that. That's a very, very powerful idea.
If you are not capable of cruelty, then you are absolutely a victim of anyone who is. For those who are exceedingly agreeable, there is a part of them crying out for the incorporation of the monster within them, which is what gives them strength of character and self respect, because it is impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth. And if you grow teeth, you realize that you're somewhat dangerous, or seriously dangerous. Then you might be more willing to demand that you treat yourself with respect and that other people do the same thing. That doesn't mean that being cruel is better than not being cruel. What it means is that being able to be cruel, and then not being cruel is better than not being able to be cruel, because in the first case you're nothing but weak and naïve, and in the second case you're dangerous, but you have it under control. If you're competent at fighting, it actually decreases the probability that you're going to have to fight, because when someone pushes you you'll be able to respond with confidence, and with any luck a reasonable show of confidence, which is a show of dominance, will be enough to make the bully back off.
I know that the evidence for genuine religious experience is incontrovertible, but it's not
explicable. So I don't want to explain it away... I want to pull back from that and leave it as a fact and a mystery, and then we're going to look at this from a rational perspective, and say that the initial formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to abstract out the ideal, and to consider it as an abstraction outside its instantiation. And that's good enough. It's an amazing thing if it's true. But I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Ideology is a parasite on religious substructures. A religious narrative has a particular set of characteristics. It's very balanced. So for example there's the feminist idea of the patriarchy. Well the religious idea of society has a patriarchal notion built into it. That would be the dying king. The once great dying king. In a religious story, there's the natural world, the chaotic world - there's a positive element and a negative element. Then there's the social world - there's the wise king and the tyrannical king. Then there's the individual world - that's the adversary and the hero. There's always a positive and a negative at each level. And it stops it from being an over simplification.
There's a transformation to some degree in the Prophetic Tradition, where there is a spirit that rises above the law, but this transformation really takes place in the New Testament. The Old Testament is prohibition, and the New Testament is, 'here's the good things you do once you're more than merely prohibiting yourself from impulsive sin. There's a positive good to be accomplished, not just a negative to be avoided. You have to look around you within your direct sphere of influence, and you fix the things that announce themselves to be in direct need of repair. And those are often small things. They can start with things as simple as: your room. Put it in order. It's not important that you put your room in order necessarily, what is important is that you learn to distinguish between chaos and order, and that you learn to be able to act in a manner that produces order. In most households there's a hundred things that could be done to make it less hideous and horrible. So practicing that is both a useful form of meditation, but it's also a divine act.
Women are attracted to men's ability to generate, to be productive, and to share. These qualities transcend wealth, which can disappear.
Maps of Meaning digest version: http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?10.077