October 29, 2019 • 43 mins
In the third episode in this series with Dr. Oz and Jordan Peterson, they discuss the growing fascination behind the true crime genre. Dr. Peterson breaks down the psyche of some of the most depraved and dangerous minds, and helps us understand the truth behind nurture version nature: do we all have the ability to be evil? He also shares his thoughts on politics and the financial world.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
We're also fascinated by true crime stories because we want
to identify the predator. And so it's the same thing
we do when we go to horror movies to inoculate
ourselves against our fear of death or discussed. You know,
we have to expose ourselves to these realities of the
world so that we're not we're not the naive sitting
ducks that we might otherwise be. Hi, I'm Dr Oz
(00:47):
and this is the Doctor Oz Podcast. He's been called
an accidental icon of the modern day philosophical movement. Dr
Jordan Peterson's work as a clinical psychology professor at the
University of Toronto is international recognition as profound and often
controversial insights. I since I started covering true crime, and
number one question that I get is what goes on
(01:09):
in the minds of killers? I won't understand what motivates
these people? And how can we harness this information to
save lives? I mean, by the clinical psychologist Dr Jordan Peterson,
to help us explore this cultural phenomenon. Let just start
off with this broadust topic of interest. Why does everyone
infatuated with true crime? Well, I think it's partly because
(01:30):
we're infatuated with narrative, and the fundamental narrative is good
versus evil, right, it's human choice in the domain characterized
by good versus evil, And so the true crime genre
is a variant of that, and it concentrates on well both,
usually because there's an evil character and then there's the
good forces attempting to bring him down, and it's it's
(01:52):
I think it's indicative of the fundamental structure of human experience.
But it's also morally salutary in that to understand evil
is also to understand good, at least as its opposite.
And I think that evil, in some sense is more believable.
It's more immediate, it's more visceral, it's more undeniable, it's
more short term, and people often have direct contact with
(02:14):
it in one form or another. And to be fascinated
by that is to be fascinated by the moral structure
of the world. And given that you need and aim
in life, that you need a moral goal, that you
need a noble moral goal in order to live properly,
you have to distinguish between good and evil. And the
easiest way to start to do that is to start
(02:35):
to understand what constitutes evil. We're also fascinated by true
crime stories because we want to identify the predator, you know.
I mean, human beings are prey animals as well as predators,
and the worst of all predators are human predators by
a by a remarkably substantial margin. We don't have to
worry too much about eat being eaten by wolves, but
(02:56):
we do have some reasonable probability of encountering malevolent people,
and so we need to understand the nature of the predatory.
And so it's the same thing we do when we
go to horror movies to inoculate ourselves against our fear
of death or discussed. You know, we have to expose
ourselves to these realities of the world so that we're
not as naive, and we're not the naive sitting ducks
(03:18):
that we might otherwise be. You have worked in prisons, briefly. Briefly,
you've been supposed to people did very bad things. Yes,
what was that like? What was the like knowing they
could harm you? Well, that wasn't the shocking part. The
shocking part for me was that they weren't that much
(03:38):
different than me. I mean, that's the first thing I
learned when I when I spent some time in a
maximum security prison working part time for a psychologist. Back
in the nineteen eighties. There was a they are very
violent criminal that I meant, and they're very small guy,
very unassuming person who had taken two cops out in
(04:00):
them dig their own graves and shot them while they
were begging for their lives and making reference to their
families by his own testimony, And it was very difficult
for me to reconcile this rather unassuming small person with
this monster. And at the same time, to other prisoners
that I met, they had taken a third down and
(04:21):
pulverized his leg with a lead pipe because they thought
he was a stool pigeon and he might have been that,
and who knows. But I spent a lot of time
meditating on that, trying to understand how it is that
anyone could do that. It seemed beyond me, like it
seemed like something I could not manage, that I could
not do, and I thought about I actually thought about
(04:43):
doing that for weeks after that experience, and what I
realized about both about killing someone and about about the torture,
and I thought, I eventually realized that I could do it,
and that it would be easier than I thought. And
that was very is shocking. I've never forgotten that. And
so that part that parts there and all of us
(05:05):
and and and it can come out. It can come
It's they're more in some people than in others. Um,
you know, there are people who are prone to violence.
So I can tell you here, here's one thing that's
useful to know. If you take two year olds and
you put them in a room, there's a small proportion
of the two year olds, almost all male, who have
a proclivity to kick, hit, bite, and steal. Essentially, they
(05:30):
are very dominant, aggressive children, and they're almost all male,
about five percent of males, and the vast majority of
them are socialized by the time therefore, and so it's
possible to socialize even the aggressive males. But there's a
small proportion of them who don't become socialized, and then
they become alienated from their peer group because no one
(05:50):
can be friends with them, and they become habitual criminals.
And after four it looks like there's very little that
can be done to put them back together, because so
much of what happens to you after four is dependent
on peer socialization. And if you're isolated from your peers,
then you don't get socialized. So just to be clear
on this, as I was curiously, how much of being
(06:11):
a killer is genetic and how much of it is
the nurture? If let's just say one in twenty males
at age two is prone to becoming a bad apple
and most of them get better by four, makes you
feel nurture is important, Yes, definitely, no doubt about it.
But the fact that only one in twenty had the
predispision to begin with means there's a genetic element. Yes, definitely.
Well they're you know, I mean, men are definitely more
(06:33):
aggressive than women, which is why so many more men
are in prison. Um that personality traits that go along
with that are, in all likelihood high levels of emotional stability,
so low neuroticism, very little fear, um, low levels of
agreeable nous. So those are people who are um, harsh
and bruce, but who also tend to tell hard truths
(06:57):
and to be able to make hard decisions. There's so
there's real advantages to that. But then also low conscientiousness.
That's a bad triad of traits for criminal behavior. But
most most of the boys who show violent traits when
they're two and two year olds, by the way, are
the most violent of human beings. If you group kids
together by age, the two year olds engage in by
(07:20):
far the most the largest number of violent interactions. But
but it's a small minority. But most of that can
be brought under control. Is that why we seem to
see amongst these serial killers people who often respected positions
of society, police officers, politicians, that the some of those
traits seemed to overlap well the serial killers. Like the
(07:41):
problem with the problem with assessing those sorts of people
is that they're so statistically rare that it's hard to
draw any firm conclusions from it. I mean, I've thought
about it's a it's a very tough one. They get
hooked on it, they get hooked on a on on,
a on, a on on. The desire for the novelty
(08:03):
of more and more outrageous acts, that's part of it.
And they're often that would be the true serial killer type.
And there's often a really powerful sexual component that goes
along with that. So something's going wrong with their psycho
sexual development at a very early age and they become um,
they become sadistic, and there's a sexual pleasure in that
UM and you know, sex often involves domination and submission.
(08:27):
It's it's part of the sexual game. And so they're there.
They represent an extraordinarily extreme variant of that. The mass
murderer types UM. They're usually more generally vengeful and angry
about the structure of the world, you know, and there
are those are the often the quiet people that you
hear about that never caused any trouble, who are actually
(08:49):
harboring immense amounts of resentment about the structure of the world,
like Kine and who are brooding in their basements or
in their lonely existences for fantasizing, and this is that
invitation of evil into your life, right, they start to
become vengeful, they desire destruction, they start to fantasize about that,
and then they start to live in that fantasy. And
(09:11):
that fantasy grows and grows and grows and grows, and
they and they entice it and invited along until it
dominates them completely. And then they have a plan and
then they execute the plan and then it's mayhem everywhere.
And what they're aiming as, what they're aiming at is
the mayhem no doubt about it. Amongst the serial killers.
When we look at that their stories, their version of
(09:33):
what happened, they seem to often had big time problems
with their mother, not with their father. Why didn't that
might be Well, it's definitely the case that one of
the best children are more likely to grow up healthy
and well functioning if they have two parents. So there's that.
(09:55):
I don't know what it is about the balance between
fatherhood and motherhood that increases the probability of that healthy outcome.
It might just be in part division of labor, right,
it's very difficult to raise children, and I think it's
probably too much for one person to work full time
and raise children full time. I think it's just too much. Um.
(10:15):
It may be that father's play some particular role in
the socialization of males, in particular decreasing their proclivity for aggression.
I mean, you even see this in species as divergent
from human beings, as elephants. Like if an elephant group tribe,
let's say, is disrupted and the old males are taken out,
then the young males get hyper violent. And so we
(10:37):
don't know exactly what rule functional males play in the
proper socialization of juvenile males. But it's not trivial, and
you can see you can understand that to some degree.
But because by the time you're say, your thirteen year
old kid, your boy, and you're kind of tough, and
let's say you're like six ft tall, and you a
hundred and fifty pounds already a hundred seventy pounds, like
(10:58):
kind of a man and not quite but kind of,
and certainly your friends are going to be on your
case to the degree that you're not. And it's pretty
much time to step away from your mother, even though
you may not be wise enough to do so. You're
not going to listen to what she has to say anymore.
And part of your way of displaying your masculine independence
is to push against authority, and if the authority doesn't
(11:21):
push back, well then you win, especially if you're aggressive
and dominant. And you know, the way that aggressive and
dominant people are put in their place, so to speak, civilized,
is by meeting someone who's more dominant than they are,
and that would, at least in principle, be someone male
who has the authority and the power to stop them.
(11:43):
It's the important role of the mother in Cyril murderers lives,
that's always caught me. They seem to detest them, have
very bizarre relationships with their mother. Many have killed or
threatened their mother. It's a it's out of proportion of
what I would have expected. The FBI profilers use that
as one of the risks criteria, one of the ways
(12:05):
of identifying this symptom of a serial killer. Yeah, well,
you know, like I said, it's pretty rare behavior, so
it's hard to draw conclusions. I would the best. There's
a documentary for people who might be interested in this
sort of thing called Crumb, which I would highly recommend,
which you've watched. Yeah, yeah, Well you could see the
disturbed relationship with the mother there, and a lot of
(12:26):
it in that particular situation was that she was hyper protective, right,
so she wanted her boys to remain in an infantile state,
and that meant that she had to do everything she
possibly could to cripple their proclivity for autonomous existence by
failing to reward it, failing to encourage it, or punishing
(12:49):
it every time it manifested itself. And you can do
I've seen families do this. You can do a very
effective job. I've worked with families where the basic rule
was that if the childild, who was often like thirty
five or forty by the time I was involved, if
the child did anything that was positive, your job was
to undermine it in every possible way. And then if
(13:09):
they did something that was negative and helpless, then you
did everything you possibly could to foster that and reward it.
And the rule was something like, well, here's the deal.
You stay useless and infantile, and I won't labor you
with responsibility, but you'll never leave right, And that's not
a good deal. And there's the psychoanalyst used to talk
(13:31):
about the necessary failure of the mother. So the good
mother fails. Why, Well, if you have an infant up
to six months, say, your job is to do whatever
that infant wants, because it's always right. It has misery,
it has needs, it has wants, and your job is
to figure out how to fix that. But as the
(13:51):
child starts to mature, you have to start to pull
back and you have to allow the child to start
to regulate its own behavior to the degree that that's possible.
But that separates you from the child, and if from
the infant, and if that's all you've got. Like, if
that's your whole life, you staked that on that infantile dependency,
maybe that's the only love you've ever had. Then to
(14:13):
see that burgeoning majority is going to be nothing but
a threat. Even my daughter when when when she she
used to call my son baby when he was starting
to walk, and we told her at one point that
he was no longer a baby. She had this very
complex dream where he fell into a hole and turned
into a skeleton, and then he came out in a
different form. And she told me this dream what I
(14:33):
was typing, so it was, it was an amazing dream.
And what I realized was that she was resistant to
the idea that he was no longer a baby because
she really liked this baby, Like we had encouraged her
to take care of it, and so now he was,
well what was he? He wasn't this baby anymore. She
loved the baby. He was a new thing, and she
(14:53):
wasn't very happy about that. She didn't know how to
cope with it. Well, you know, we we helped her
figure out, you know, that that there were some advantages
to his maturation and that she could play with him
and so forth. But it's really easy to especially if
you're hyper compassionate and let's say not very conscientious um
and you don't have your children's long term best interests
(15:16):
in mind, it's very easy to want to infantilize them
because then they need you and they have that maternal love,
that all encompassing maternal love can stay as the center
of your universe. But Jesus, that's pretty ugly by the
time your son is forty and still living in his
basement bedroom and you know, plotting revenge against you and
(15:36):
the rest of the world. So once someone has already
gone down the road of doing evil acts, mass murdering,
serial murdering, can they be rehabilitated? Well, I would say
from a practical perspective, you know, once you've committed a
crime of of a certain violence, especially multiple times, the
(15:58):
probability that you can be rehabilitated by some psychological treatment
is extraordinarily low. I mean, first of all, the resources
aren't there. Second, well, you didn't just do it once.
You did it like three times. It wasn't a drunken rage,
you know, it wasn't. It wasn't situationally determined. You You've
(16:22):
gone way beyond the pale of normative behavior. And it's
hard enough to treat people psychologically who've just deviated to
some small degree. I mean, in classic penalogical theory now
is something like this is that well, men are much
like men are pretty aggressive between fifteen and twenty six.
So it peaks up when testosterone kicks in, and then
(16:44):
it declines, and it declines quite rapidly after twenty six.
That's usually when men start to take on full responsibility
in life. If you have a repeated violent criminal, you
just keep them in jail till they're older than twenty six,
and the probability that they'll real fans starts to decline dramatically,
and a law of that seems to be maturation, and
a fair bit of it seems to be a consequence
(17:04):
of biological transformation. So, but that has nothing to do
with psychological treatment. And you know, you also have to
assume that the violent and let's say psychopathic criminal that
you're going to treat um wants treatment genuinely, and also
that you are wilier than they are. And I wouldn't
(17:26):
make that assumption. There's reasonable evidence that group therapy for
psychopaths makes them worse. Well, it trains them in a
whole new set of techniques that they can use to
manipulate people. You know, and if you're going to treat
someone who's a violent criminal, especially if they're psychopathic, well,
first of all, you know, beware, but don't be thinking
that you've got the upper hand. You're a fool if
(17:48):
you think you've got the upper you know, in in
a true crime movie, it's always the naive do good
or who gets taken down by the evil, by the
evil predators. Well, it's no wonder because the evil editor
has every advantage. So the naive person thinks they're naive,
They have no they have no defense against malevolence and
(18:09):
like they may not even believe it exists, or you
were just misunderstood. It's like, yeah, maybe you started out misunderstood,
but you you took a dark pathway and if you
encounter someone like that. The evidence on post traumatic stress
disorder is quite clear with regard to that is that
people who develop post traumatic stress disorder almost always develop
(18:30):
it because they've encountered someone malevolent, not might be themselves.
They might have observed themselves doing something they can't believe
they did, and they can't recover from it, But it's
often that they've encountered someone who wishes to do them
harm for the sake of the harm right, and to
meet someone like that and then to get a glimpse
into what they're like, that's no joke, especially if you're
(18:52):
a naive person. And then there's more pragmatic considerations too
that people don't often think about. A trumendous amount of
violent crime is fueled by alcohol, Like fifty of it,
fifty percent of the people who are murdered are drunk,
of the people who do the murdering are drunk. It's
a it's the major contributor to familial violence. And so
(19:13):
alcohol is the one drug we know of, the one
drug that makes people violent. So and and that's and
that's also very much worthy of consideration because it's it's
an appropriate situational diagnosis. There's lots more will be come back.
(19:39):
I asked the question to everybody because I'm seeing more
and more reports that folks get super offended if their
children are dating someone from a different political affiliation that
they it's the elevated in terms of its importance in
our society, way beyond what I would have envisioned as
a child or young person. What are the risks of
this transformation. Well, if you imagine that there is a
(20:01):
religious function psychologically and sociologically speaking, it's going to have
to find its expression somewhere. And you know, we've always
hoped that the church and the state would be separated.
But if the church starts to deteriorate, which seems to
be the case arguably, then that function is going to
be folded somewhere and it will contaminate the function of politics.
(20:23):
And like I, I certainly don't think that the arguments
that are going on in campus, for example, with regards
to free speech are political. I think they're religious. So
they have to do with fundamental arguments about the nature
of man. They're they're underneath the constitutional axioms of the
(20:43):
United States. So there, I felt when my own country
introduced compelled speech legislation that they had jumped the political
border and entered into metaphysical terrain. That wasn't appropriate, because
they were requiring that their citizens utter words of a
certain form, of a certain ideological form. So yes, I
(21:05):
think politics has taken on a religious element, and that's
not good. That needs to be separated. Having said that,
I'm not exactly sure what to do about it. I mean,
partly what I'm trying to do with my lectures is
to reestablish the conceptual relationship between the political and the
(21:26):
philosophical and the theological, to get those elements separated out again,
so that people understand the distinction between them, and I'm
hoping that that will serve as an antidote to ideological
possession through those three levels. Well, the theological level is
a narrative level, as far as I'm concerned, it's a
(21:47):
level of story. People tell stories and learn from stories,
and and enjoy stories tremendously. They'll pay to go watch them.
I mean, their primary form of communication, they seem to
be something like abstracted my mesis or imitation. You know,
you imitate someone that you're that you admire. Then you
tell a story about someone that you admire, and you
(22:07):
imitate the story, and it's it's it's a it's a
form of extra life, how to how to live your
life that's right or how are or how not to
which either either the theological yeah, and it's and and
and there's there's there's there's metaphysical presumptions built into that.
It's something like the world of experience is a moral
(22:29):
world of good and evil, and and you're an actor
in that, and that you're a conscious actor, and that
you have some role to play in the in the
interplay between those forces. So and that's that's axiomatic in
some sense. It isn't amenable to this sort of proof
that we accept scientifically. It doesn't matter because it's at
(22:53):
the bottom of our society. It's it's it's it's a
foundation stone that we we stand on. And now on
top of that you of philosophy, and philosophy is the attempt,
at least in part, to subject that to critical analysis
and to make it more articulate. It's like the difference
between Dostoevsky the novelist and Nietzsche the philosopher. They talked
about very similar themes, but Dostoevsky encapsulated those themes in
(23:16):
active characters and Nietzsche made it explicit. And so that's
what the philosophers do. And then on top of that
is the political it emerges. But it rests on those
those those other two foundations. And when when those lines
get blurred or when the political starts to become either
philosophical or theological worse, then well, then then there's trouble brewing.
(23:39):
There's revolutionary trouble brewing, because if the political is nested
inside the philosophical and people accept a certain philosophical viewpoint,
and that's nested inside the theological and people accept a
certain theological viewpoint, you get revolutions happening when those underlying
structures are moved. So in the expecting too much from
(24:01):
our politics, I gather and part of what I see
you trying to do is to pull back some of
the power that we have ceded to politics and recognize
that things like our narrative is are up to us.
You've made the point often that you're in a story,
right and you better know a story it is, because
if you're in someone else's story that's not your in
my character, in your own life, or maybe you're acting
(24:24):
out a tragedy worse or worse, or or or a
trip to hell, you know, and people act those out
pretty effectively, and they can get pretty deep, and so
it's not good. So someone sitting at home right now
and they're just so upset, so angry about the political system,
whatever side of the aisle they're on is, is that
(24:45):
a person who should probably be rethinking their narrative and
their philosophy because it's maybe is blurring into their politics. Well,
I think I think that that's a question worth asking.
I mean, certainly, one of the things that I've often
recommended to my clinical clients who were depressed was to
stop watching the news because it wasn't helpful to them.
(25:06):
First of all, most of it isn't news. If it's
only important today, it's not news, right, it doesn't matter.
So maybe it has to still be important in a
month to be news or something. I don't exactly know,
but I did. I did, and I took my own
advice for a long time, although I haven't for quite
a while now for a variety of reasons. Um, I
(25:27):
would also say that there's something grandiose about the political
discussion because it's always about high order abstractions and about
large scale institutions and about the actions of other people,
you know. And I believe that, well, that's dangerous because
of its grandiosity, but also in some sense it deprives.
(25:50):
In some sense, it's predicated on a misapprehension about where
power actually lies. There is political power, but there's individual pour.
And I believe that it's far more potent. Your best
bet if you're interested in making things better, is to
put your life together individually. And there's some humility in that,
(26:12):
because you have to recognize what's wrong with you and
what small steps that you have to take in order
to fix it. But there's some real revelation of self
worth in that, to understand that the small domain that's
been offered to you, that's under your control, the potential
that manifests itself to you and in you, is in
some sense of incalculable worth and also inexhaustible. We need
(26:35):
to pull away from our belief in politics and return
to the notion that moral action on the part of
individuals is the lever that moves the world, and that
the political only functions when the when individuals are actually
doing that properly. We've always known that to some degree.
I mean, the point of a liberal education, let's say,
(26:57):
classically speaking, was to produce an informed citizen, right, not
a consumer, not a happiness pursuer, none of that, but
an informed citizen, someone who could take their place as
the eyes and the mouth of the state, and who
could bear that responsibility. And part of that was to
live a noble and moral life, and then and and
(27:21):
a recognition that the integrity of the state itself dependent
on that. And I believe that's the case. You know,
It's another thing that's been so interesting to discuss with
my lecture audiences. They say, look, look at what you believe.
Where you act like you get to vote, What does
that mean? It means your society has decided that, for
better or worse, despite all your manifest flaws, that the
(27:44):
destiny of the state. There's something about you that's of
sufficient import to allow you to do to determine, at
least in part, the destiny of the state. And it's
it's an axiom of the entire political system that that
characterizes you. It's like, well, that speaks volumes about the
fundamental worth of the individual. So I'm trying to establish,
(28:06):
re establish I suppose the idea of the primacy of
the individual as the central moral actor and the central
locus of responsibility. If we don't do that, there's democracy
become mob rule. Well, I think we already see that.
You know, of course, it becomes mob rule because what's
the alternative to individual responsibility. There's the dissolution of responsibility
(28:29):
to the mob that that's it. People stop saying what
they know to be true. A small minority can take
power under conditions like that. I mean. There is an
interesting article in the New York Times just a week
ago looking at Twitter democrats versus Democrats. You know, and
the the Twitter democrats who who who dominate Twitter? From
(28:52):
the democrat perspective are all the radical progressives. The moderates
hardly say anything. It's like things can get warped badly
when people by small minorities of people, when individuals aren't
awake to the possibility of that occurring. More questions. After
the break, my friend, legendary hedge fund founder Ray Dally
(29:22):
wrote an excellent article helping us all understand our nations,
in fact, the world's financial challenges under a capitalistic society. Now,
the research that he quoted was Startling'll give you just
a little bit of it. The income gap is about
as high as it has ever been, and the wealth
gap is the largest since in the thirties, when has
a lot of bad things happened around the world, including
the Second World War and the Great Depression. The wealth
(29:44):
of the top one percent of the population. To give
you a specific number, is more than the bottom of
the population combined. That's how big difference there is. Prime
age workers, folks at their prime and the bottom sixty
percent of the population in terms of income have had
no real income growth since night. In the same forty years,
incomes for the top ten pc of urge of earners
(30:06):
have doubled, and those are the top one percent have tripled.
In the face of these scary statistics, many argue for
seismic shifts to our current economic system. These disparities, unfortunately,
can cause violence. So Dr Pearson, as a psychologist, has
spent a lot of time on this. Let's start off
with where humans historically have been with this issue of
(30:28):
growing financial inequalities, because it has happened for all known histories. Well,
the first thing we should do is to be very
clear that this isn't something that you can lay at
the feet of capitalism, right, this is something that you
can lay at the feet of hierarchical structures. And hierarchical
structures are, as far as I'm concerned, inevitable. That doesn't
mean they're all good. If you imagine that there's a
(30:49):
complex problem that needs to be solved, I think we
can all agree that there are complex problems that need
to be solved, and then imagine that we have to
solve them cooperatively and competitively, so we organize ourselves into groups.
And then if we're aimed at solving the problem, what
we try to do is organize ourselves into a hierarchy,
so the people who are most competent at solving the
problem root rise to the top of the hierarchy. And
(31:13):
then maybe we set up reward structures so that we
incentivize them to the degree that's possible to extract out
the maximum value from their competence. Now, the problem with
that is that hierarchies, once set up, even if they're
set up to solve problems, can become corrupt and they
can be dominated by people who are only after power
and who will exploit the resources of the hierarchy. And
(31:34):
we have to be always awake to that. That's that's
the danger of that's the ever present danger of tyranny
at every level of bureaucratic organization. And that can happen
within a capitalist system just like every other system. But
the inequality problem is much deeper, because when you structure
a hierarchy, you get winners and you get losers, and
that can get really steep, so the winners take all
(31:55):
and the losers have nothing. Now, a complex society has
a variety of ways of dealing with that sets up
multiple hierarchies, for example, so that if you fail in one,
you might be able to succeed in another. It tries
to make the hierarchies open so that if you are competent,
you have the possibility of rising. And that's one of
the things that can take the edge off the inequality. Like,
one of the reasons that Americans have been able to
(32:16):
deal with inequality quite appropriately throughout their entire history is
that those at the bottom believed that with sufficient sacrifice,
they had some probability, even if it was a multi
generational probability, of moving up the ladder. And it's it's
the loss of that, it's the loss of hope that
I think is even more important than the rising inequality. Now,
(32:37):
with regards to seismic shifts, it's like, well that to me,
it's like, okay, fair enough, but seismic shifts are dangerous.
And what makes you think that, you know what, seismic
shifts are going to repair inequality? Because inequality is very,
very difficult to deal with. This is one of the
things that annoys me about the Marxists is that there
(32:58):
they blame inequality capitalism, and inequality has its terrible consequences.
It puts people at zero where it's hard for them
to get moving, you know, and and and it can
destabilized societies if it if it becomes steep enough. But
the idea that that's something that's unique to capitalism is
there's no evidence for that whatsoever. There's less inequality um
(33:20):
statistically speaking, in the European countries, you know, I'm including
North America and Australia, and that then there is in
non European countries inequalities very difficult to get rid of,
and and we don't know how to do it. That's
the other thing. Let's let's talk to this a little bit.
You've offered some ideas that I think we can all
benefit from. In the thirties, when we had similar numbers
we were talking about now, we did some things. We
(33:41):
started to believe in philo political philosophies. We followed leaders
like Hitler and Mussolini, Toto Toto and others that that
took us some places that we didn't want to go,
and then there were subsequent horror stories of tens of
millions of of humans killed because we followed these ideologies.
What did we do wrong back then? What do we
(34:02):
not want to repeat now? And by forgetting what happened
back then, what mistakes we make? And I don't want
the capitalism off the hook yet, because capitalism is very
very good at creating value. Yes, it's not part of
the essence of capitalism to distribute its you No, although
it does distribute it, I would say, and its defense
is that it, like all systems we know of, produce
(34:22):
hierarchies of inequality, but very few also produce wealth. And
capitalism at least produces wealth, and a fair bit of
that goes to the poorest people. So, for example, between
the year two thousand and the year two thousand and twelve,
the number of people in the world in abject poverty
fell by and by u n current projections, there won't
be anybody living underneath the abject poverty marked by the year.
(34:45):
So despite the fact that inequality is growing in the
way that we just described, absolute wealth is growing as well,
and a fair bit of that is lifting up the
poorest people in the world too. To the point where
they might be able to start to actually get away
from zero and to have a life, and that that's
a big deal. In the socialistic settings philosophies, you still
(35:08):
have a hierarchical issue, right, So what makes those soul
luring to some folks? What's the promise that people? Well,
no one, no one, no one likes the the negative
consequences of hierarchical structures, especially when they start to become
corrupted by by power seeking. You know, if you walk
down the street, if you're a well off person, you
(35:29):
walk down the streets in Manhattan and you see a ruined, alcoholic,
homeless person on the street, it's not like you're dancing
in delight because you're in your position and he's in his.
It's painful, you know, and you think, well, wouldn't it
be lovely if our system could be set up so
that that kind of suffering could be alleviated by adjustments
to the social structure. And that's associated with compassion, which
(35:51):
is a fundamental trait, and it's an egalitarian trait, and
it characterizes, for example, it's one of the predictors of
political correct belief is can passion and the idea that, well,
we should equalize things so that everybody has a fair
shake and maybe even a fair outcome. But how did
they how did humans historically deal with this? I mean,
these higher coal structures do become unstable after a while,
(36:13):
whether it's because of capitalism or socialism or communism, whatever
the cause of it is, any group of humans work together,
has it. So what's to solve How do but what
role of for example, has faith placed in widening that
hierarchy so more people have flexibility? Well? What what we
hope is that we solve it through negotiation, you know,
And that's another issue that's relevant to free speech. You know,
(36:35):
it's not like the billionaires. It's not like the American
billionaires are sitting at home with their mattress stuffed with money. First,
their money is out there in the world doing all
sorts of things, and there's many of them who are
banding together for all sorts of philanthropic purposes. And I
would say that one of the things that has to
be built into capitalism is this notion of a higher
(36:56):
moral purpose. It's like, well, it isn't how much money
you have, is what decide to do with it? And
that money opens up the possibility of solving, possibly of
addressing at least very very complex problems, problems for everyone,
And so the money can be used wisely. I would
say that what you have if you're rich, is not
so much a responsibility to flatten the economic distribution as
(37:18):
it is to use your money in the most appropriate
possible way to alleviate the problems that disturb your conscience
about the structure of the world. You have to do
that carefully. So let's say, along with the wealth comes
in attendant responsibility, you know, you credit. We criticize the
wealthy because we think, at least in part of their
(37:39):
um excessive lifestyle, let's say, their excessive reliance on luxury
and and and decadence. Yeah, and you know, and that
characterizes a certain proportion of rich people, but also a
certain proportion of middle class and poor people. It's not
a sin that's unique to the rich. But what's required
(38:01):
of the rich in a society that's functioning appropriately morally
is that they use their money wisely. That's that's the
responsibility that goes along with having that access to that power.
Why is it not happening now? The numbers that I
just quoted to you reveal the opposite is happening, that
(38:22):
it's seemingly anyway more of the fruits of capitalisms benefit
are accruing to the wealthiest Americans. Yeah, well, it's so
people who don't have that money are getting appropriately understandably angry,
afraid to afraid and you know and stresses a rich
man's word for fear. So well, there is some good
news on the horizon. I mean, unemployment rates have been
(38:44):
falling quite nicely, and there is some evidence that wages
are increasing and dependent of what's an actually happening that
if people have a lot can make a lot more
and more easily that people don't have a lot. What
is the structural solcition? What does the next generation of
advance look like in bit lists? I don't know. I
don't know. The hierarchical problem this is why the Marxists
(39:06):
bothered me. Part of it. The problem of hierarchical inequality
is unbelievably deep. I mean, people are really different, and
people range unbelievably widely in their talents, and you they're
the consequence of that is in the social environment that
you get incredible disparity no matter where you look. Ask
(39:27):
a leading question, then historically faith at least of values
that came from faith, and the faith doesn't have to
be a particular religion, just belief as something bigger than
you had some kind of a governor effect, limiting effect
on the extravagant playback you could that you that capitalism
could actually take the extremes that we could take, we
(39:47):
could go. If you don't have that cultural almost at
this point morality, then you begin to slip. That might
be reversing, that might be one of the ways we
start to deal with things. Well, well, one of the
things you pointed out is that if the hierarchical differentiation
(40:08):
gets too steep, then things start to destabilize. And so
that's so fear, at least fear of the negative consequences
can be one impetus towards change. But I would say
this is actually, in some sense, this is a problem
that's a political problem. It's like it's a natural it's
natural for hierarchies to produce dispossession and and in an
(40:30):
unequal distribution of assets whatever they happen to be. In
any creative domain, this happens to be the case. And
so we have a constant problem of what to do
with those who are dispossessed. And I would say that
the dialogue between the left and the right is a
continual attempt to solve that problem, because the right says, look,
we need these hierarchies, and here's why they're functional and
(40:50):
why they're efficient, and we need to reward the people
who are able and willing and competent and conscientious. And
the left says, yeah, but don't forget. These structures are siffy.
They become blind, and they start to serve the interests
of power, and then they leave people who have something
to contribute on the bottom, and that's to no one's benefit.
And both those positions are correct, and sometimes one is
(41:12):
more correct than the other, depending on the historical point
that we're in. You need a constant dialogue between the
reasonable right and the reasonable left so that you can
figure out how to maintain the hierarchies so that they
continue to perform their necessary functions and at the same
time distribute the resources in a way that enable people
who are at the bottom to have well, let's have
(41:33):
let's say, to have optimal equality of opportunity. And you
want everyone wants that, because you also want to be
able to benefit from the talent pool that's isolated at
the bottom of the hierarchy at zero and can't rise
up because all of those additional people could be adding
useful use of various sorts to the world. But I
think it's a political issue, and I think the dialogue
(41:56):
between the right and the left, that's really what it
focuses on. Two things. It focuses on that inequality, and
it focuses on borders. But it isn't obvious how to
rectify inequality. And to say that it's well, it's it's
due to capitalism and it's flaws. It's like, well, yes,
but it's a way, it's a way deeper problem than that.
(42:17):
And and we've tried solutions. We've tried We tried to
radically egalitarianized societies, you know, the Soviets tried that, and
the MAUIs tried that, and it was just an absolute
bloody disaster. And there's a certain amount of inequality that
everyone is going to have to live with because we
all come into the world with different talents and abilities
and we actually want that. So it's an unbelievably tricky question.
(42:40):
But again I would say from my perspective, the best
way to address that is to put your own house
in order. That means morally, means financially, to to use
your money wisely, not to use it to to chase
impulsive and reprehensible pleasures. It's also something that does your
reputation no good and destabilizes society because it makes the
(43:03):
rich look like parasites, and some are. Some people are parasitical,
but many aren't. And we don't want to put a
situation in place where people have their faith in the
entire economic system destabilized, because then they will look for
those radical solutions. And that's I don't see any evidence
that radical solutions produce anything but a lot of unnecessary
(43:27):
misery a comparion, Thank you very much,
We're also fascinated by true crime stories because we want
to identify the predator. And so it's the same thing
we do when we go to horror movies to inoculate
ourselves against our fear of death or discussed. You know,
we have to expose ourselves to these realities of the
world so that we're not we're not the naive sitting
ducks that we might otherwise be. Hi, I'm Dr Oz
(00:47):
and this is the Doctor Oz Podcast. He's been called
an accidental icon of the modern day philosophical movement. Dr
Jordan Peterson's work as a clinical psychology professor at the
University of Toronto is international recognition as profound and often
controversial insights. I since I started covering true crime, and
number one question that I get is what goes on
(01:09):
in the minds of killers? I won't understand what motivates
these people? And how can we harness this information to
save lives? I mean, by the clinical psychologist Dr Jordan Peterson,
to help us explore this cultural phenomenon. Let just start
off with this broadust topic of interest. Why does everyone
infatuated with true crime? Well, I think it's partly because
(01:30):
we're infatuated with narrative, and the fundamental narrative is good
versus evil, right, it's human choice in the domain characterized
by good versus evil, And so the true crime genre
is a variant of that, and it concentrates on well both,
usually because there's an evil character and then there's the
good forces attempting to bring him down, and it's it's
(01:52):
I think it's indicative of the fundamental structure of human experience.
But it's also morally salutary in that to understand evil
is also to understand good, at least as its opposite.
And I think that evil, in some sense is more believable.
It's more immediate, it's more visceral, it's more undeniable, it's
more short term, and people often have direct contact with
(02:14):
it in one form or another. And to be fascinated
by that is to be fascinated by the moral structure
of the world. And given that you need and aim
in life, that you need a moral goal, that you
need a noble moral goal in order to live properly,
you have to distinguish between good and evil. And the
easiest way to start to do that is to start
(02:35):
to understand what constitutes evil. We're also fascinated by true
crime stories because we want to identify the predator, you know.
I mean, human beings are prey animals as well as predators,
and the worst of all predators are human predators by
a by a remarkably substantial margin. We don't have to
worry too much about eat being eaten by wolves, but
(02:56):
we do have some reasonable probability of encountering malevolent people,
and so we need to understand the nature of the predatory.
And so it's the same thing we do when we
go to horror movies to inoculate ourselves against our fear
of death or discussed. You know, we have to expose
ourselves to these realities of the world so that we're
not as naive, and we're not the naive sitting ducks
(03:18):
that we might otherwise be. You have worked in prisons, briefly. Briefly,
you've been supposed to people did very bad things. Yes,
what was that like? What was the like knowing they
could harm you? Well, that wasn't the shocking part. The
shocking part for me was that they weren't that much
(03:38):
different than me. I mean, that's the first thing I
learned when I when I spent some time in a
maximum security prison working part time for a psychologist. Back
in the nineteen eighties. There was a they are very
violent criminal that I meant, and they're very small guy,
very unassuming person who had taken two cops out in
(04:00):
them dig their own graves and shot them while they
were begging for their lives and making reference to their
families by his own testimony, And it was very difficult
for me to reconcile this rather unassuming small person with
this monster. And at the same time, to other prisoners
that I met, they had taken a third down and
(04:21):
pulverized his leg with a lead pipe because they thought
he was a stool pigeon and he might have been that,
and who knows. But I spent a lot of time
meditating on that, trying to understand how it is that
anyone could do that. It seemed beyond me, like it
seemed like something I could not manage, that I could
not do, and I thought about I actually thought about
(04:43):
doing that for weeks after that experience, and what I
realized about both about killing someone and about about the torture,
and I thought, I eventually realized that I could do it,
and that it would be easier than I thought. And
that was very is shocking. I've never forgotten that. And
so that part that parts there and all of us
(05:05):
and and and it can come out. It can come
It's they're more in some people than in others. Um,
you know, there are people who are prone to violence.
So I can tell you here, here's one thing that's
useful to know. If you take two year olds and
you put them in a room, there's a small proportion
of the two year olds, almost all male, who have
a proclivity to kick, hit, bite, and steal. Essentially, they
(05:30):
are very dominant, aggressive children, and they're almost all male,
about five percent of males, and the vast majority of
them are socialized by the time therefore, and so it's
possible to socialize even the aggressive males. But there's a
small proportion of them who don't become socialized, and then
they become alienated from their peer group because no one
(05:50):
can be friends with them, and they become habitual criminals.
And after four it looks like there's very little that
can be done to put them back together, because so
much of what happens to you after four is dependent
on peer socialization. And if you're isolated from your peers,
then you don't get socialized. So just to be clear
on this, as I was curiously, how much of being
(06:11):
a killer is genetic and how much of it is
the nurture? If let's just say one in twenty males
at age two is prone to becoming a bad apple
and most of them get better by four, makes you
feel nurture is important, Yes, definitely, no doubt about it.
But the fact that only one in twenty had the
predispision to begin with means there's a genetic element. Yes, definitely.
Well they're you know, I mean, men are definitely more
(06:33):
aggressive than women, which is why so many more men
are in prison. Um that personality traits that go along
with that are, in all likelihood high levels of emotional stability,
so low neuroticism, very little fear, um, low levels of
agreeable nous. So those are people who are um, harsh
and bruce, but who also tend to tell hard truths
(06:57):
and to be able to make hard decisions. There's so
there's real advantages to that. But then also low conscientiousness.
That's a bad triad of traits for criminal behavior. But
most most of the boys who show violent traits when
they're two and two year olds, by the way, are
the most violent of human beings. If you group kids
together by age, the two year olds engage in by
(07:20):
far the most the largest number of violent interactions. But
but it's a small minority. But most of that can
be brought under control. Is that why we seem to
see amongst these serial killers people who often respected positions
of society, police officers, politicians, that the some of those
traits seemed to overlap well the serial killers. Like the
(07:41):
problem with the problem with assessing those sorts of people
is that they're so statistically rare that it's hard to
draw any firm conclusions from it. I mean, I've thought
about it's a it's a very tough one. They get
hooked on it, they get hooked on a on on,
a on, a on on. The desire for the novelty
(08:03):
of more and more outrageous acts, that's part of it.
And they're often that would be the true serial killer type.
And there's often a really powerful sexual component that goes
along with that. So something's going wrong with their psycho
sexual development at a very early age and they become um,
they become sadistic, and there's a sexual pleasure in that
UM and you know, sex often involves domination and submission.
(08:27):
It's it's part of the sexual game. And so they're there.
They represent an extraordinarily extreme variant of that. The mass
murderer types UM. They're usually more generally vengeful and angry
about the structure of the world, you know, and there
are those are the often the quiet people that you
hear about that never caused any trouble, who are actually
(08:49):
harboring immense amounts of resentment about the structure of the world,
like Kine and who are brooding in their basements or
in their lonely existences for fantasizing, and this is that
invitation of evil into your life, right, they start to
become vengeful, they desire destruction, they start to fantasize about that,
and then they start to live in that fantasy. And
(09:11):
that fantasy grows and grows and grows and grows, and
they and they entice it and invited along until it
dominates them completely. And then they have a plan and
then they execute the plan and then it's mayhem everywhere.
And what they're aiming as, what they're aiming at is
the mayhem no doubt about it. Amongst the serial killers.
When we look at that their stories, their version of
(09:33):
what happened, they seem to often had big time problems
with their mother, not with their father. Why didn't that
might be Well, it's definitely the case that one of
the best children are more likely to grow up healthy
and well functioning if they have two parents. So there's that.
(09:55):
I don't know what it is about the balance between
fatherhood and motherhood that increases the probability of that healthy outcome.
It might just be in part division of labor, right,
it's very difficult to raise children, and I think it's
probably too much for one person to work full time
and raise children full time. I think it's just too much. Um.
(10:15):
It may be that father's play some particular role in
the socialization of males, in particular decreasing their proclivity for aggression.
I mean, you even see this in species as divergent
from human beings, as elephants. Like if an elephant group tribe,
let's say, is disrupted and the old males are taken out,
then the young males get hyper violent. And so we
(10:37):
don't know exactly what rule functional males play in the
proper socialization of juvenile males. But it's not trivial, and
you can see you can understand that to some degree.
But because by the time you're say, your thirteen year
old kid, your boy, and you're kind of tough, and
let's say you're like six ft tall, and you a
hundred and fifty pounds already a hundred seventy pounds, like
(10:58):
kind of a man and not quite but kind of,
and certainly your friends are going to be on your
case to the degree that you're not. And it's pretty
much time to step away from your mother, even though
you may not be wise enough to do so. You're
not going to listen to what she has to say anymore.
And part of your way of displaying your masculine independence
is to push against authority, and if the authority doesn't
(11:21):
push back, well then you win, especially if you're aggressive
and dominant. And you know, the way that aggressive and
dominant people are put in their place, so to speak, civilized,
is by meeting someone who's more dominant than they are,
and that would, at least in principle, be someone male
who has the authority and the power to stop them.
(11:43):
It's the important role of the mother in Cyril murderers lives,
that's always caught me. They seem to detest them, have
very bizarre relationships with their mother. Many have killed or
threatened their mother. It's a it's out of proportion of
what I would have expected. The FBI profilers use that
as one of the risks criteria, one of the ways
(12:05):
of identifying this symptom of a serial killer. Yeah, well,
you know, like I said, it's pretty rare behavior, so
it's hard to draw conclusions. I would the best. There's
a documentary for people who might be interested in this
sort of thing called Crumb, which I would highly recommend,
which you've watched. Yeah, yeah, Well you could see the
disturbed relationship with the mother there, and a lot of
(12:26):
it in that particular situation was that she was hyper protective, right,
so she wanted her boys to remain in an infantile state,
and that meant that she had to do everything she
possibly could to cripple their proclivity for autonomous existence by
failing to reward it, failing to encourage it, or punishing
(12:49):
it every time it manifested itself. And you can do
I've seen families do this. You can do a very
effective job. I've worked with families where the basic rule
was that if the childild, who was often like thirty
five or forty by the time I was involved, if
the child did anything that was positive, your job was
to undermine it in every possible way. And then if
(13:09):
they did something that was negative and helpless, then you
did everything you possibly could to foster that and reward it.
And the rule was something like, well, here's the deal.
You stay useless and infantile, and I won't labor you
with responsibility, but you'll never leave right, And that's not
a good deal. And there's the psychoanalyst used to talk
(13:31):
about the necessary failure of the mother. So the good
mother fails. Why, Well, if you have an infant up
to six months, say, your job is to do whatever
that infant wants, because it's always right. It has misery,
it has needs, it has wants, and your job is
to figure out how to fix that. But as the
(13:51):
child starts to mature, you have to start to pull
back and you have to allow the child to start
to regulate its own behavior to the degree that that's possible.
But that separates you from the child, and if from
the infant, and if that's all you've got. Like, if
that's your whole life, you staked that on that infantile dependency,
maybe that's the only love you've ever had. Then to
(14:13):
see that burgeoning majority is going to be nothing but
a threat. Even my daughter when when when she she
used to call my son baby when he was starting
to walk, and we told her at one point that
he was no longer a baby. She had this very
complex dream where he fell into a hole and turned
into a skeleton, and then he came out in a
different form. And she told me this dream what I
(14:33):
was typing, so it was, it was an amazing dream.
And what I realized was that she was resistant to
the idea that he was no longer a baby because
she really liked this baby, Like we had encouraged her
to take care of it, and so now he was,
well what was he? He wasn't this baby anymore. She
loved the baby. He was a new thing, and she
(14:53):
wasn't very happy about that. She didn't know how to
cope with it. Well, you know, we we helped her
figure out, you know, that that there were some advantages
to his maturation and that she could play with him
and so forth. But it's really easy to especially if
you're hyper compassionate and let's say not very conscientious um
and you don't have your children's long term best interests
(15:16):
in mind, it's very easy to want to infantilize them
because then they need you and they have that maternal love,
that all encompassing maternal love can stay as the center
of your universe. But Jesus, that's pretty ugly by the
time your son is forty and still living in his
basement bedroom and you know, plotting revenge against you and
(15:36):
the rest of the world. So once someone has already
gone down the road of doing evil acts, mass murdering,
serial murdering, can they be rehabilitated? Well, I would say
from a practical perspective, you know, once you've committed a
crime of of a certain violence, especially multiple times, the
(15:58):
probability that you can be rehabilitated by some psychological treatment
is extraordinarily low. I mean, first of all, the resources
aren't there. Second, well, you didn't just do it once.
You did it like three times. It wasn't a drunken rage,
you know, it wasn't. It wasn't situationally determined. You You've
(16:22):
gone way beyond the pale of normative behavior. And it's
hard enough to treat people psychologically who've just deviated to
some small degree. I mean, in classic penalogical theory now
is something like this is that well, men are much
like men are pretty aggressive between fifteen and twenty six.
So it peaks up when testosterone kicks in, and then
(16:44):
it declines, and it declines quite rapidly after twenty six.
That's usually when men start to take on full responsibility
in life. If you have a repeated violent criminal, you
just keep them in jail till they're older than twenty six,
and the probability that they'll real fans starts to decline dramatically,
and a law of that seems to be maturation, and
a fair bit of it seems to be a consequence
(17:04):
of biological transformation. So, but that has nothing to do
with psychological treatment. And you know, you also have to
assume that the violent and let's say psychopathic criminal that
you're going to treat um wants treatment genuinely, and also
that you are wilier than they are. And I wouldn't
(17:26):
make that assumption. There's reasonable evidence that group therapy for
psychopaths makes them worse. Well, it trains them in a
whole new set of techniques that they can use to
manipulate people. You know, and if you're going to treat
someone who's a violent criminal, especially if they're psychopathic, well,
first of all, you know, beware, but don't be thinking
that you've got the upper hand. You're a fool if
(17:48):
you think you've got the upper you know, in in
a true crime movie, it's always the naive do good
or who gets taken down by the evil, by the
evil predators. Well, it's no wonder because the evil editor
has every advantage. So the naive person thinks they're naive,
They have no they have no defense against malevolence and
(18:09):
like they may not even believe it exists, or you
were just misunderstood. It's like, yeah, maybe you started out misunderstood,
but you you took a dark pathway and if you
encounter someone like that. The evidence on post traumatic stress
disorder is quite clear with regard to that is that
people who develop post traumatic stress disorder almost always develop
(18:30):
it because they've encountered someone malevolent, not might be themselves.
They might have observed themselves doing something they can't believe
they did, and they can't recover from it, But it's
often that they've encountered someone who wishes to do them
harm for the sake of the harm right, and to
meet someone like that and then to get a glimpse
into what they're like, that's no joke, especially if you're
(18:52):
a naive person. And then there's more pragmatic considerations too
that people don't often think about. A trumendous amount of
violent crime is fueled by alcohol, Like fifty of it,
fifty percent of the people who are murdered are drunk,
of the people who do the murdering are drunk. It's
a it's the major contributor to familial violence. And so
(19:13):
alcohol is the one drug we know of, the one
drug that makes people violent. So and and that's and
that's also very much worthy of consideration because it's it's
an appropriate situational diagnosis. There's lots more will be come back.
(19:39):
I asked the question to everybody because I'm seeing more
and more reports that folks get super offended if their
children are dating someone from a different political affiliation that
they it's the elevated in terms of its importance in
our society, way beyond what I would have envisioned as
a child or young person. What are the risks of
this transformation. Well, if you imagine that there is a
(20:01):
religious function psychologically and sociologically speaking, it's going to have
to find its expression somewhere. And you know, we've always
hoped that the church and the state would be separated.
But if the church starts to deteriorate, which seems to
be the case arguably, then that function is going to
be folded somewhere and it will contaminate the function of politics.
(20:23):
And like I, I certainly don't think that the arguments
that are going on in campus, for example, with regards
to free speech are political. I think they're religious. So
they have to do with fundamental arguments about the nature
of man. They're they're underneath the constitutional axioms of the
(20:43):
United States. So there, I felt when my own country
introduced compelled speech legislation that they had jumped the political
border and entered into metaphysical terrain. That wasn't appropriate, because
they were requiring that their citizens utter words of a
certain form, of a certain ideological form. So yes, I
(21:05):
think politics has taken on a religious element, and that's
not good. That needs to be separated. Having said that,
I'm not exactly sure what to do about it. I mean,
partly what I'm trying to do with my lectures is
to reestablish the conceptual relationship between the political and the
(21:26):
philosophical and the theological, to get those elements separated out again,
so that people understand the distinction between them, and I'm
hoping that that will serve as an antidote to ideological
possession through those three levels. Well, the theological level is
a narrative level, as far as I'm concerned, it's a
(21:47):
level of story. People tell stories and learn from stories,
and and enjoy stories tremendously. They'll pay to go watch them.
I mean, their primary form of communication, they seem to
be something like abstracted my mesis or imitation. You know,
you imitate someone that you're that you admire. Then you
tell a story about someone that you admire, and you
(22:07):
imitate the story, and it's it's it's a it's a
form of extra life, how to how to live your
life that's right or how are or how not to
which either either the theological yeah, and it's and and
and there's there's there's there's metaphysical presumptions built into that.
It's something like the world of experience is a moral
(22:29):
world of good and evil, and and you're an actor
in that, and that you're a conscious actor, and that
you have some role to play in the in the
interplay between those forces. So and that's that's axiomatic in
some sense. It isn't amenable to this sort of proof
that we accept scientifically. It doesn't matter because it's at
(22:53):
the bottom of our society. It's it's it's it's a
foundation stone that we we stand on. And now on
top of that you of philosophy, and philosophy is the attempt,
at least in part, to subject that to critical analysis
and to make it more articulate. It's like the difference
between Dostoevsky the novelist and Nietzsche the philosopher. They talked
about very similar themes, but Dostoevsky encapsulated those themes in
(23:16):
active characters and Nietzsche made it explicit. And so that's
what the philosophers do. And then on top of that
is the political it emerges. But it rests on those
those those other two foundations. And when when those lines
get blurred or when the political starts to become either
philosophical or theological worse, then well, then then there's trouble brewing.
(23:39):
There's revolutionary trouble brewing, because if the political is nested
inside the philosophical and people accept a certain philosophical viewpoint,
and that's nested inside the theological and people accept a
certain theological viewpoint, you get revolutions happening when those underlying
structures are moved. So in the expecting too much from
(24:01):
our politics, I gather and part of what I see
you trying to do is to pull back some of
the power that we have ceded to politics and recognize
that things like our narrative is are up to us.
You've made the point often that you're in a story,
right and you better know a story it is, because
if you're in someone else's story that's not your in
my character, in your own life, or maybe you're acting
(24:24):
out a tragedy worse or worse, or or or a
trip to hell, you know, and people act those out
pretty effectively, and they can get pretty deep, and so
it's not good. So someone sitting at home right now
and they're just so upset, so angry about the political system,
whatever side of the aisle they're on is, is that
(24:45):
a person who should probably be rethinking their narrative and
their philosophy because it's maybe is blurring into their politics. Well,
I think I think that that's a question worth asking.
I mean, certainly, one of the things that I've often
recommended to my clinical clients who were depressed was to
stop watching the news because it wasn't helpful to them.
(25:06):
First of all, most of it isn't news. If it's
only important today, it's not news, right, it doesn't matter.
So maybe it has to still be important in a
month to be news or something. I don't exactly know,
but I did. I did, and I took my own
advice for a long time, although I haven't for quite
a while now for a variety of reasons. Um, I
(25:27):
would also say that there's something grandiose about the political
discussion because it's always about high order abstractions and about
large scale institutions and about the actions of other people,
you know. And I believe that, well, that's dangerous because
of its grandiosity, but also in some sense it deprives.
(25:50):
In some sense, it's predicated on a misapprehension about where
power actually lies. There is political power, but there's individual pour.
And I believe that it's far more potent. Your best
bet if you're interested in making things better, is to
put your life together individually. And there's some humility in that,
(26:12):
because you have to recognize what's wrong with you and
what small steps that you have to take in order
to fix it. But there's some real revelation of self
worth in that, to understand that the small domain that's
been offered to you, that's under your control, the potential
that manifests itself to you and in you, is in
some sense of incalculable worth and also inexhaustible. We need
(26:35):
to pull away from our belief in politics and return
to the notion that moral action on the part of
individuals is the lever that moves the world, and that
the political only functions when the when individuals are actually
doing that properly. We've always known that to some degree.
I mean, the point of a liberal education, let's say,
(26:57):
classically speaking, was to produce an informed citizen, right, not
a consumer, not a happiness pursuer, none of that, but
an informed citizen, someone who could take their place as
the eyes and the mouth of the state, and who
could bear that responsibility. And part of that was to
live a noble and moral life, and then and and
(27:21):
a recognition that the integrity of the state itself dependent
on that. And I believe that's the case. You know,
It's another thing that's been so interesting to discuss with
my lecture audiences. They say, look, look at what you believe.
Where you act like you get to vote, What does
that mean? It means your society has decided that, for
better or worse, despite all your manifest flaws, that the
(27:44):
destiny of the state. There's something about you that's of
sufficient import to allow you to do to determine, at
least in part, the destiny of the state. And it's
it's an axiom of the entire political system that that
characterizes you. It's like, well, that speaks volumes about the
fundamental worth of the individual. So I'm trying to establish,
(28:06):
re establish I suppose the idea of the primacy of
the individual as the central moral actor and the central
locus of responsibility. If we don't do that, there's democracy
become mob rule. Well, I think we already see that.
You know, of course, it becomes mob rule because what's
the alternative to individual responsibility. There's the dissolution of responsibility
(28:29):
to the mob that that's it. People stop saying what
they know to be true. A small minority can take
power under conditions like that. I mean. There is an
interesting article in the New York Times just a week
ago looking at Twitter democrats versus Democrats. You know, and
the the Twitter democrats who who who dominate Twitter? From
(28:52):
the democrat perspective are all the radical progressives. The moderates
hardly say anything. It's like things can get warped badly
when people by small minorities of people, when individuals aren't
awake to the possibility of that occurring. More questions. After
the break, my friend, legendary hedge fund founder Ray Dally
(29:22):
wrote an excellent article helping us all understand our nations,
in fact, the world's financial challenges under a capitalistic society. Now,
the research that he quoted was Startling'll give you just
a little bit of it. The income gap is about
as high as it has ever been, and the wealth
gap is the largest since in the thirties, when has
a lot of bad things happened around the world, including
the Second World War and the Great Depression. The wealth
(29:44):
of the top one percent of the population. To give
you a specific number, is more than the bottom of
the population combined. That's how big difference there is. Prime
age workers, folks at their prime and the bottom sixty
percent of the population in terms of income have had
no real income growth since night. In the same forty years,
incomes for the top ten pc of urge of earners
(30:06):
have doubled, and those are the top one percent have tripled.
In the face of these scary statistics, many argue for
seismic shifts to our current economic system. These disparities, unfortunately,
can cause violence. So Dr Pearson, as a psychologist, has
spent a lot of time on this. Let's start off
with where humans historically have been with this issue of
(30:28):
growing financial inequalities, because it has happened for all known histories. Well,
the first thing we should do is to be very
clear that this isn't something that you can lay at
the feet of capitalism, right, this is something that you
can lay at the feet of hierarchical structures. And hierarchical
structures are, as far as I'm concerned, inevitable. That doesn't
mean they're all good. If you imagine that there's a
(30:49):
complex problem that needs to be solved, I think we
can all agree that there are complex problems that need
to be solved, and then imagine that we have to
solve them cooperatively and competitively, so we organize ourselves into groups.
And then if we're aimed at solving the problem, what
we try to do is organize ourselves into a hierarchy,
so the people who are most competent at solving the
problem root rise to the top of the hierarchy. And
(31:13):
then maybe we set up reward structures so that we
incentivize them to the degree that's possible to extract out
the maximum value from their competence. Now, the problem with
that is that hierarchies, once set up, even if they're
set up to solve problems, can become corrupt and they
can be dominated by people who are only after power
and who will exploit the resources of the hierarchy. And
(31:34):
we have to be always awake to that. That's that's
the danger of that's the ever present danger of tyranny
at every level of bureaucratic organization. And that can happen
within a capitalist system just like every other system. But
the inequality problem is much deeper, because when you structure
a hierarchy, you get winners and you get losers, and
that can get really steep, so the winners take all
(31:55):
and the losers have nothing. Now, a complex society has
a variety of ways of dealing with that sets up
multiple hierarchies, for example, so that if you fail in one,
you might be able to succeed in another. It tries
to make the hierarchies open so that if you are competent,
you have the possibility of rising. And that's one of
the things that can take the edge off the inequality. Like,
one of the reasons that Americans have been able to
(32:16):
deal with inequality quite appropriately throughout their entire history is
that those at the bottom believed that with sufficient sacrifice,
they had some probability, even if it was a multi
generational probability, of moving up the ladder. And it's it's
the loss of that, it's the loss of hope that
I think is even more important than the rising inequality. Now,
(32:37):
with regards to seismic shifts, it's like, well that to me,
it's like, okay, fair enough, but seismic shifts are dangerous.
And what makes you think that, you know what, seismic
shifts are going to repair inequality? Because inequality is very,
very difficult to deal with. This is one of the
things that annoys me about the Marxists is that there
(32:58):
they blame inequality capitalism, and inequality has its terrible consequences.
It puts people at zero where it's hard for them
to get moving, you know, and and and it can
destabilized societies if it if it becomes steep enough. But
the idea that that's something that's unique to capitalism is
there's no evidence for that whatsoever. There's less inequality um
(33:20):
statistically speaking, in the European countries, you know, I'm including
North America and Australia, and that then there is in
non European countries inequalities very difficult to get rid of,
and and we don't know how to do it. That's
the other thing. Let's let's talk to this a little bit.
You've offered some ideas that I think we can all
benefit from. In the thirties, when we had similar numbers
we were talking about now, we did some things. We
(33:41):
started to believe in philo political philosophies. We followed leaders
like Hitler and Mussolini, Toto Toto and others that that
took us some places that we didn't want to go,
and then there were subsequent horror stories of tens of
millions of of humans killed because we followed these ideologies.
What did we do wrong back then? What do we
(34:02):
not want to repeat now? And by forgetting what happened
back then, what mistakes we make? And I don't want
the capitalism off the hook yet, because capitalism is very
very good at creating value. Yes, it's not part of
the essence of capitalism to distribute its you No, although
it does distribute it, I would say, and its defense
is that it, like all systems we know of, produce
(34:22):
hierarchies of inequality, but very few also produce wealth. And
capitalism at least produces wealth, and a fair bit of
that goes to the poorest people. So, for example, between
the year two thousand and the year two thousand and twelve,
the number of people in the world in abject poverty
fell by and by u n current projections, there won't
be anybody living underneath the abject poverty marked by the year.
(34:45):
So despite the fact that inequality is growing in the
way that we just described, absolute wealth is growing as well,
and a fair bit of that is lifting up the
poorest people in the world too. To the point where
they might be able to start to actually get away
from zero and to have a life, and that that's
a big deal. In the socialistic settings philosophies, you still
(35:08):
have a hierarchical issue, right, So what makes those soul
luring to some folks? What's the promise that people? Well,
no one, no one, no one likes the the negative
consequences of hierarchical structures, especially when they start to become
corrupted by by power seeking. You know, if you walk
down the street, if you're a well off person, you
(35:29):
walk down the streets in Manhattan and you see a ruined, alcoholic,
homeless person on the street, it's not like you're dancing
in delight because you're in your position and he's in his.
It's painful, you know, and you think, well, wouldn't it
be lovely if our system could be set up so
that that kind of suffering could be alleviated by adjustments
to the social structure. And that's associated with compassion, which
(35:51):
is a fundamental trait, and it's an egalitarian trait, and
it characterizes, for example, it's one of the predictors of
political correct belief is can passion and the idea that, well,
we should equalize things so that everybody has a fair
shake and maybe even a fair outcome. But how did
they how did humans historically deal with this? I mean,
these higher coal structures do become unstable after a while,
(36:13):
whether it's because of capitalism or socialism or communism, whatever
the cause of it is, any group of humans work together,
has it. So what's to solve How do but what
role of for example, has faith placed in widening that
hierarchy so more people have flexibility? Well? What what we
hope is that we solve it through negotiation, you know,
And that's another issue that's relevant to free speech. You know,
(36:35):
it's not like the billionaires. It's not like the American
billionaires are sitting at home with their mattress stuffed with money. First,
their money is out there in the world doing all
sorts of things, and there's many of them who are
banding together for all sorts of philanthropic purposes. And I
would say that one of the things that has to
be built into capitalism is this notion of a higher
(36:56):
moral purpose. It's like, well, it isn't how much money
you have, is what decide to do with it? And
that money opens up the possibility of solving, possibly of
addressing at least very very complex problems, problems for everyone,
And so the money can be used wisely. I would
say that what you have if you're rich, is not
so much a responsibility to flatten the economic distribution as
(37:18):
it is to use your money in the most appropriate
possible way to alleviate the problems that disturb your conscience
about the structure of the world. You have to do
that carefully. So let's say, along with the wealth comes
in attendant responsibility, you know, you credit. We criticize the
wealthy because we think, at least in part of their
(37:39):
um excessive lifestyle, let's say, their excessive reliance on luxury
and and and decadence. Yeah, and you know, and that
characterizes a certain proportion of rich people, but also a
certain proportion of middle class and poor people. It's not
a sin that's unique to the rich. But what's required
(38:01):
of the rich in a society that's functioning appropriately morally
is that they use their money wisely. That's that's the
responsibility that goes along with having that access to that power.
Why is it not happening now? The numbers that I
just quoted to you reveal the opposite is happening, that
(38:22):
it's seemingly anyway more of the fruits of capitalisms benefit
are accruing to the wealthiest Americans. Yeah, well, it's so
people who don't have that money are getting appropriately understandably angry,
afraid to afraid and you know and stresses a rich
man's word for fear. So well, there is some good
news on the horizon. I mean, unemployment rates have been
(38:44):
falling quite nicely, and there is some evidence that wages
are increasing and dependent of what's an actually happening that
if people have a lot can make a lot more
and more easily that people don't have a lot. What
is the structural solcition? What does the next generation of
advance look like in bit lists? I don't know. I
don't know. The hierarchical problem this is why the Marxists
(39:06):
bothered me. Part of it. The problem of hierarchical inequality
is unbelievably deep. I mean, people are really different, and
people range unbelievably widely in their talents, and you they're
the consequence of that is in the social environment that
you get incredible disparity no matter where you look. Ask
(39:27):
a leading question, then historically faith at least of values
that came from faith, and the faith doesn't have to
be a particular religion, just belief as something bigger than
you had some kind of a governor effect, limiting effect
on the extravagant playback you could that you that capitalism
could actually take the extremes that we could take, we
(39:47):
could go. If you don't have that cultural almost at
this point morality, then you begin to slip. That might
be reversing, that might be one of the ways we
start to deal with things. Well, well, one of the
things you pointed out is that if the hierarchical differentiation
(40:08):
gets too steep, then things start to destabilize. And so
that's so fear, at least fear of the negative consequences
can be one impetus towards change. But I would say
this is actually, in some sense, this is a problem
that's a political problem. It's like it's a natural it's
natural for hierarchies to produce dispossession and and in an
(40:30):
unequal distribution of assets whatever they happen to be. In
any creative domain, this happens to be the case. And
so we have a constant problem of what to do
with those who are dispossessed. And I would say that
the dialogue between the left and the right is a
continual attempt to solve that problem, because the right says, look,
we need these hierarchies, and here's why they're functional and
(40:50):
why they're efficient, and we need to reward the people
who are able and willing and competent and conscientious. And
the left says, yeah, but don't forget. These structures are siffy.
They become blind, and they start to serve the interests
of power, and then they leave people who have something
to contribute on the bottom, and that's to no one's benefit.
And both those positions are correct, and sometimes one is
(41:12):
more correct than the other, depending on the historical point
that we're in. You need a constant dialogue between the
reasonable right and the reasonable left so that you can
figure out how to maintain the hierarchies so that they
continue to perform their necessary functions and at the same
time distribute the resources in a way that enable people
who are at the bottom to have well, let's have
(41:33):
let's say, to have optimal equality of opportunity. And you
want everyone wants that, because you also want to be
able to benefit from the talent pool that's isolated at
the bottom of the hierarchy at zero and can't rise
up because all of those additional people could be adding
useful use of various sorts to the world. But I
think it's a political issue, and I think the dialogue
(41:56):
between the right and the left, that's really what it
focuses on. Two things. It focuses on that inequality, and
it focuses on borders. But it isn't obvious how to
rectify inequality. And to say that it's well, it's it's
due to capitalism and it's flaws. It's like, well, yes,
but it's a way, it's a way deeper problem than that.
(42:17):
And and we've tried solutions. We've tried We tried to
radically egalitarianized societies, you know, the Soviets tried that, and
the MAUIs tried that, and it was just an absolute
bloody disaster. And there's a certain amount of inequality that
everyone is going to have to live with because we
all come into the world with different talents and abilities
and we actually want that. So it's an unbelievably tricky question.
(42:40):
But again I would say from my perspective, the best
way to address that is to put your own house
in order. That means morally, means financially, to to use
your money wisely, not to use it to to chase
impulsive and reprehensible pleasures. It's also something that does your
reputation no good and destabilizes society because it makes the
(43:03):
rich look like parasites, and some are. Some people are parasitical,
but many aren't. And we don't want to put a
situation in place where people have their faith in the
entire economic system destabilized, because then they will look for
those radical solutions. And that's I don't see any evidence
that radical solutions produce anything but a lot of unnecessary
(43:27):
misery a comparion, Thank you very much,
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