Jordan Peterson_ Nietzsche_ Hitler_ God_ Psychopathy_ Suffering _ Meaning _ Lex Fridman Podcast _448(M4A_128K)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The following is a conversation with Jordan Peterson, his second
time on this the Lex Friedman Podcast. You have given
a set of lectures on Nietzsche as part of the
New Peterson Academy, and the lectures were powerful. There's some
element of the contradictions, the tensions, the drama, the way
you like lock in on an idea but then are

(00:22):
struggling with that idea, all of that that feels like
it's a It's a Nietzsche And.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yeah, well, here's a big influence on me stylistically and
like in terms of the way I approached writing, and
also many of the people that were other influences of
mine were very influenced by him. So I was blown
away when I first came across his writings. They're so

(00:46):
they're so intellectually dense that I don't know if there's
anything that approximates that. Dostoevsky maybe, although he's much more wordy.
Nietzsche is very succinct, partly because he was so ill,
because he would think all day, he couldn't spend a
lot of time writing, and he condensed his writings into
very short while this aphoristic style he had and it's

(01:08):
really something to strive for. And then he's also an
exciting writer like Dostoevsky and dynamic and romantic in that
emotional way, and so it's really something and I really
enjoyed doing that. I did that lecture that you described.
That lecture series is on the first half of Beyond
Good and Evil, which is a stunning book, and that

(01:31):
was really fun to take pieces of it and then
to describe what they mean and how they've echoed across
the decades since he wrote them. And yeah, it's been.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
Great taking each sentence seriously and deconstructing it and really
struggling with it. I think underpinning that approach to writing
requires deep respect for the person. I think if we
approach writing with that kind of respect, you can take
or well, you can take a lot of writers and
really dig again on singular sense.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
Yeah, well those are the great writers, Because the greatest
writers virtually everything they wrote is worth attending to know.
And I think Nietzsche is in some ways the ultimate
exemplar of that, because often when I read a book,
I'll mark one way or another. I often fold the
corner of the page over to indicate something that I've
found that's worth remembering. I couldn't do that with a

(02:24):
book like Beyond Good and Evil because every page ends
up marked, and and that's in marked contrast, so to
speak to many of the books I read now, where
it's it's quite frequently now that I'll read a book
and there won't be an idea that I haven't come
across before. And with a thinker like Nietzsche, that's just

(02:45):
not the case at the sentence level. And I don't
think there's anyone that I know of who did that
to a greater extent than he did. So there's other
people who who'se thought is of equivalent value. I've returned
recently and I'm going to do a course on to
the work of this Romanian historian of religions, Merche Iliada,
who's not nearly as well known as he should be,

(03:06):
and whose work, by the way, is a real antidote
to the postmodern nihilistic Marxist stream of literary interpretation at
the universities as a whole have adopted. And Iliad is
like that too. I used this book called The Sacred
and the Profane quite extensively in a book that I'm
releasing in mid November, we who wrestle with God, And

(03:30):
it's of the same sort. It's endlessly analyzable. Iliada walked
through the whole history of religious ideas and he had
the intellect that enabled him to do that. And everything
he wrote is dreamlike in its density. So every sentence
or paragraph is evocative in an image rich manner. And

(03:54):
that also, what would you say, deepens and broadens the scope.
And that's part of often what distinguishes writing that has
a literary end from writing that's more merely technical. Like
the literary writings have this imagistic and dreamlike reference space
around them, and it takes a long time to turn

(04:16):
a complex image into something semantic. And so if you're
writing evokes deep imagery, it has a depth that can't
be captured merely in words. And the great romantic poetic philosophers.
Nietzsche is a very good example. Dostoevsky's a good example,
so is Murchie Aliata. They have that quality, and it's
a good way of thinking about it, you know, it's

(04:37):
kind of interesting from the perspective of technical analysis of intelligence.
There's a good book called The User Illusion, which is
the best book on consciousness that I ever read, it
explains the manner in which our communication is understandable. In
this manner, so imagine that when you're communicate something, you're
trying to change the way that your target audience perceives

(04:59):
an apt in the world. So that's an embodied issue.
But you're using words which aren't when obviously you aren't
equivalent to the actions themselves. Can imagine that the words
are surrounded by a cloud of images that they evoke,
and that the images can be translated into actions. Yeah,

(05:19):
and the greatest writing uses words in a manner that
evokes images that profoundly affects perception and action. And that's
the So I would take the manner in which I
act and behave, I would translate that into a set
of images. My dreams do that for me, for example.
Then I compress them into words. I toss you the words,

(05:40):
you decompose them, decompress them into the images and then
into the actions. And that's what happens in a meaningful conversation.
It's a very good way of understanding how we communicate linguistically.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
So if the words spring to the visual, full visual complexity,
and then that can then transform itself into actions.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
And change in perception enter because well, those are both relevant,
and it's an important thing to understand because the classic
empiricists make the presumption, and it's an erroneous presumption, that
perception is a value free enterprise, and they assume that
partly because they think of perception as something passive. You know,

(06:20):
you just turn your head and you look at the world,
and there it is. It's like, perception is not passive.
There is no perception without action ever, ever, And that's
a weird thing to understand because even when you're looking
at something like your eyes are moving back and forth.
If they ever stop moving for a tenth of a second,
you stop being able to see. So your eyes are
jiggling back and forth just to keep them active, and

(06:41):
then there's involuntary movements of your eyes, and then there's
voluntary movements of your eyes. Like what you're doing with
your eyes is very much like what a blind person
would do if they were feeling out the contours of
an object. You're sampling, and you're only sampling a small
element of the space that's in front of you, and
the element that you choose to sample is dependent on

(07:03):
your aims and your goal, So it's value saturated, and
so all your perceptions are action predicated. And partly what
you're doing when you're communicating is therefore not only changing
people's actions, let's say, but you're also changing the strategy
that they use to perceive, and so you change the
way the world reveals itself for them. See. This is

(07:23):
why it's such a profound experience to read a particularly
deep thinker, because you could also think of your perceptions
as the axioms of your thought. That's a good way
of thinking about it. A perception is like a what
would you say? It's a thought that's so set in
concrete that you now see it rather than conceptualize it.
A really profound thinker changes the way you perceive the world.

(07:45):
That's way deeper than just how you think about it
or how you feel about it.

Speaker 1 (07:49):
What about not just profound thinkers, but thinkers that deliver
a powerful idea, for example, utopian ideas of Marx or
utopian ideas you could say, dystoping ideas of Hitler. Those
ideas are powerful and they can saturate all your perception
with values, and they focus you in a way where

(08:14):
there's only a certain set of actions.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah, right, even a certain set of emotions as well.

Speaker 1 (08:19):
And it's intense and it's direct, and they're so powerful
that they completely alter the perception and the words spring
to life.

Speaker 2 (08:27):
Yeah, it's like a form of possession. So there's two
things you need to understand to make that clear. The
first issue is that, as we suggested or implied, that
perception is action predicated, but action is goal predicated. Right,
THEAHT towards goal and these propagandistic thinkers that you described,

(08:50):
they attempt to unify all possible goals into a coherent singularity.
And there's advantages of that. There's the advantage of simplicity,
for example, which is a major advantage. And there's also
the advantage of motivation. Right, So if you provide people
with a simple manner of integrating all their actions, you
decrease their anxiety and you increase their motivation. That can

(09:13):
be a good thing. If the unifying idea that you
put forward is valid, but it's the worst of all
possible ideas. If you put forward an invalid unifying idea,
and then you might say, well, how do you distinguish
between a valid unifying idea and an invalid unifying idea? Now,
Nietzsche was very interested in that, and I don't think
he got that exactly right. But the postmodernists, for example,

(09:36):
especially the ones, and this is most of them with
the neo Marxist bent, their presumption is that the fundamental
unifying idea is power, that everything's about compulsion and force essentially,
and that that's the only true unifying ethos of mankind,
which is, I don't know if there's a worse idea
than that. I mean, there are ideas that are potentially

(09:58):
as dangerous. The nihilist idea is pretty dangerous, although it's
more of a disintegrating notion than a unifying idea. The
hedonistic idea that you live for pleasure, for example, that's
also very dangerous. But if you wanted to go for
sheer pathology, the notion that and this is thru Co
in a nutshell and marks for that matter, that power
rules everything. Not only is that a terrible unifying idea,

(10:22):
but it fully justifies your own use of power. And
I don't mean the power Nietzsche talks about. His will
to power was more his insistence that a human being
is an expression of will rather than a mechanism of
self protection and security. Like he thought of the life
force and human beings as something that strived not to

(10:44):
protect itself, but to exhaust itself in being and becoming.
It's like an upward oriented motivational drive, even towards meaning.
Now he called it the will to power, and that
had some unfortunate consequences, at least that's how it's translated.
But he didn't mean the power motivation that people like
Fuco or Marx was became so hung up on.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
So it's not power like you're trying to destroy the other.
It's power full flourishing of a human being, the creative
force of a human Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
Yeah, well you can imagine that, and you should. You
could imagine that you could segregate competence and ability. I
imagine that you and I were going to work on
a project. We could organize our project in relationship to
the ambition that we wanted to attain, and we can
organize an agreement so that you were committed to the

(11:35):
project voluntarily and so that I was committed to the
project voluntarily. So that means that we would actually be
united in our perceptions and our actions by the motivation
of something approximating voluntary play. Now you could also imagine
another situation where I said, here's our goal and you
better help me, or I'm going to kill your family. Well,

(11:58):
the probability is that you would be quite motivated to
undertake my bidding, and so then you might say, well,
that's how the world works. It's power and compulsion. But
the truth of the matter is that you can force
people to see things your way, let's say, but it's
nowhere near as good as strategy, even practically, than the

(12:21):
strategy that would be associated with something like voluntary, voluntary
joint agreement of a pattern of movement strategy towards a goal. See,
this is such an important thing to understand because it
it helps you start to understand the distinction between a
unifying force that's based on power and compulsion and one

(12:42):
that is much more in keeping. I would say, with
the ethos that governs Western societies, free Western societies. There's
really a qualitative difference, and it's not some morally relativistic illusion.

Speaker 1 (12:54):
So if we just look at the nuance of Nietzsche's thought,
the idea he first introduced and thus spoke Zarathustra of
the ubermensh. Yeah, that's another one that's very easy to
misinterpret because it sounds awfully a lot like it's about power.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
Yeah. Right.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
For example, in the twentieth century, it was misrepresented and
co opted by Hitler to advocate for the extermination of
the inferior non Aryan races.

Speaker 2 (13:24):
Yeah, and the dominion of the superior arians. Yeah and yeah.
Well that was partly because Nietzsche's work also was misrepresented
by his sister after his death, but definitely. But I
also think that there's a fundamental flaw in that Nietzsche
and conceptualization. So Nietzsche, of course famously announced the death
of God, but he did that in a manner that

(13:44):
was accompanied by dire warnings, like Nietzscha said, because people
tend to think of that as a triumphalist statement. But
Nietzsche actually said that. He really said something like, the
unifying ethos under which we've organized our selves psychologically and
socially has now been fatally undermined by well by the

(14:06):
rationalist proclivity, by the empiricist empiricist proclivity. There's a variety
of reasons. Mostly it was conflict between the Enlightenment view,
let's say, in the classic religious view, and that there
will be dire consequences for that in Nietzsche knew like
Dostoevsky knew that will see, there's a proclivity for the
human psyche and for human societies to move towards something

(14:28):
approximating a unity, because the cost of disunity is high
fractionation of your goals, so that means you're less motivated
to move forward than you might be because there's many
things competing for your attention. And also anxiety, because anxiety
actually signals something like goal conflict. So there's an inescapable
proclivity of value systems to unite. Now, if you kill

(14:51):
the thing that's uniting them, that's the death of God.
They either fractionate and you get confusion, anxiety, and hopelessness,
or you get social disunity and you get social disunity,
or something else arises out of the abyss to constitute
that unifying force. And Nietzsche said specifically that he believed

(15:15):
that one of those manifestations would be that of communism,
and that that would kill He said this in Will
to Power, that that would kill tens of millions of
people in the upcoming twentieth century. I keep he could
see that coming fifty years earlier. And Dostoevsky did the
same thing in his book The Demons. So this is

(15:35):
the thing that the a religious have to contend with.
It's a real conundrum because, I mean, you could dispute
the idea that our value systems tend towards a unity
and society does as well, because otherwise we're disunified. But
the cost of that disunity, as I said, is goal, confusion, anxiety,
and hopelessness. So it's like a real cost. So you

(15:57):
could dispense with the notion of unity altogether. And the
postmodernists did that to some degree, but they pulled off
a sleight of hand too, where they replaced it by power.
Now Nietzsche did. He's responsible for that to some degree
because Nietzsche said, with his conception of the over man,
let's say, is that human beings would have to create
their own values because the value structure that had descended

(16:20):
from on high was now shunted aside. But there's a
major problem with that, many major problems. The psychoanalysts were
the first people who really figured this out after Nietzsche,
because imagine that we don't have a relationship with the
transcendental anymore. That orients this Okay, now we have to

(16:40):
turn to ourselves. Okay, Now, if we were a unity,
a clear unity within ourselves, let's say, then we could
turn to ourselves for that discovery. But if we're a
fractionated plurality internally, then when we turned to ourselves, we
turned to a fractionated plurality. Well, that was Freud's observation.
It's like, well, how can you make your own values

(17:02):
when you're not the master in your own house, Like
you're a war of competing motivations, or maybe you're someone
who's dominated by the will to force in compulsion, And
so why do you think that you can rely on
yourself as the source of values? And why do you
think you're wise enough to consult with yourself to find
out what those values are or what they should be, say,

(17:23):
in the course of a single life. I mean, you know,
it's difficult to organize your own personal relationship, like one
relationship in the course of your life, let alone to
try to imagine that out of whole cloth you could
construct an ethos that would be psychologically and socially stabilizing
and last over the long run. It's like, and of
course marks people like that, the people who reduce human

(17:47):
motivation to a single axis. They had the intellectual hubris
to imagine that they could do that. Postmodernists are a
good example of that as well.

Speaker 1 (17:55):
Okay, but if we lay on the table religion, communism, Nazism,
they are all unifying ethos, they're unifying ideas, but they're
also horribly dividing ideas. They both unify and divide. Religion
has also divided people because in the nuances of how

(18:20):
the different peoples wrestle with God, they have come to
different conclusions, and then they use those conclusions that perhaps
the people in power use those conclusions to then start wars,
to start hatred, to divide.

Speaker 2 (18:32):
Yeah. Well, it's one of the key sub themes in
the Gospels is the sub theme of the Pharisees. And
so the fundamental enemies of Christ in the Gospels are
the Pharisees and the scribes and the lawyers. So what
does that mean. The Pharisees are religious hypocrites, the scribes
are academics who worship their own intellect, and the lawyers

(18:56):
are the legal minds who use the law as a weapon,
and so they're the enemy of the redeemer. That's a
subplot in the gospel stories, and that actually all means something.
The pharisaic problem is that the best of all possible
ideas can be used by the worst actors in the

(19:17):
worst possible way. And maybe this is an existential conundrum,
is that the most evil people use the best possible
ideas to the worst possible ends, And then you have
the conundrum of how do you separate out, let's say,
the genuine religious people from those who use the religious
enterprise only for their own machinations. We're seeing this happen online.

(19:39):
Like one of the things that you're seeing happening online,
I'm sure you've noticed this, especially on the right wing
troll right wing, psychopathic troll side of the distribution, is
the weaponization of a certain form of Christian ideation, and
that's often marked, at least online, by the presence of
what would you say, cliches like Christ is King, which

(20:00):
has a certain religious meaning, but a completely different meaning
in this sphere of emerging right wing pathology. Right wing
the political dimension isn't the right dimension of analysis, but
it's definitely the case that the best possible ideas can
be used for the worst possible purposes, and that also
brings up another specter, which is like, well, is there
any reliable and valid way of distinguishing truly beneficial, unifying

(20:26):
ideas from those that are pathological? And so that's another
thing that I tried to detail out in these lectures,
but also in this new book. It's like, how do
you tell the good actors from the bad actors at
the most fundamental level of analysis.

Speaker 1 (20:39):
And good ideas from the bad ideas? And you'll lecture
on truth they needs you also struggled with, so how
do you know how do you know that communism is
a bad idea versus it's a good idea implemented by
bad actors?

Speaker 2 (20:55):
Right, Right, That's a more subtle variant of the religious problem.
And that's what the common I mean to say all
the time the modern day communists, like real communism has
never been tried, And you could say, I suppose, with
some justification, you could say that real Christianity has never
been tried because we always fall short of the ideal mark.
And so I mean, my rejoinder to the communists is

(21:20):
something like, every single time it's been implemented wherever it's
been implemented, regardless of the culture and the background, of
the people who've implemented it, it's had exactly the same
catastrophic consequences. It's like, I don't know how many examples
you need of that, but I believe we've generated sufficient
examples so that that case is basically resolved. Now. The

(21:44):
general rejoinder to that is it's really something like, well,
if I was in charge of the communist enterprise, the
utopia would have come about, right, But that's also a
form of dangerous pretense. Part of the way, see, that
problem is actually resolved to some degree in the notion
of in the developing notion of sacrifice that emerges in

(22:05):
the Western canon over thousands and thousands of years. So
one of the suggestions, for example, and this is something
exemplified in the Passion story, is that you can tell
the valid holder of an idea because that holder will
take the responsibility for the consequences of his idea onto himself.
And that's why, for example, you see one way of

(22:27):
conceptualizing Christ in the Gospel story is as the ultimate
sacrifice to God. So you might ask, well, what's the
ultimate sacrifice? And there are variants of answer to that.
One form of ultimate sacrifices the sacrifice of a child,
the offering of a child, and the other is the
offering of the self. And the story of Christ brings
both of those together because he's the son of God

(22:51):
that's offered to God. And so it's a marketypal resolution
of that tension between ultimate sacrifice ultimate because once you're
a parent, most parents would rather sacrifice themselves than their children. Right,
so you have something that becomes of even more value
than yourself. But the sacrifice of self is also a

(23:13):
very high order level of sacrifice. Christ is an archetype
of the pattern of being that's predicated on the decision
to take to offer everything up to the highest value, right,
that pattern of self sacrifice. And I think part of
the reason that's valid is because the person who undertakes
to do that pays the price themselves. It's not externalized.

(23:36):
They're not trying to change anyone else except maybe by example.
It's your problem. Like Sojiannitzen pointed that out too when
he was struggling with the idea of good versus evil.
And you see this in more sophisticated literature, you know,
in really unsophisticated literature or drama, there's a good guy

(23:57):
and the bad guy, and the good guy's all good,
the bad guys all bad, and in more sophisticated literature,
the good and bad are abstracted. You can think of
them as spirits, and then those spirits possess all the
characters in the complex drama to a late greater or

(24:17):
lesser degree, and that battle is fought out both socially
and internally. In the high order religious conceptualizations in the West,
if they culminate, let's say, in the Christian story, the
notion is that battle between good and evil is fundamentally
played out as an internal drama.

Speaker 1 (24:35):
Yeah, so the for a religious ethos, the battle between
good and evil is fought within each individual human heart.

Speaker 2 (24:44):
Right, it's your moral duty to constrain it, to constrain
evil within yourself. And well, there's more to it than that,
because there's also the insistence that if you do that,
that makes you the more most effective possible, like warrior,
let's say, against evil itself in the social world, that
you start with the battle that occurs within you in

(25:06):
the soul. Let's say, the soul becomes the battleground between
the forces of good and evil. The idea that there's
an idea there too, which is, if that battle is
undertaken successfully, then it doesn't have to be played out
in the social world as actual conflict. Right, you can
rectify the conflict internally without it having to be played

(25:26):
out as fate as Young put it.

Speaker 1 (25:28):
So, what would you say to Nietzsche who called Christianity
the slave morality and his critique of religion in that
way was slave morality versus master morality, And then you
put an Umaran into that.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
See, I would say that the woke phenomenon is the
manifestation of the slave morality that Nietzsche criticized, and that
there are elements of Christianity that can be jerrymandered to
support that mode of perception and conception. But I think

(26:04):
he was wrong, and he was wrong in his essential
criticism of Christianity in that regard. Now it's complicated with
Nietzsche because Nietzsche never criticizes the Gospel stories directly. What
he basically criticizes is something like the pathologies of institutionalized religion.
And I would say, most particularly of the what would

(26:28):
you say of the sort of casually too nice Protestant form?
You know that's a thumbnail sketch and perhaps somewhat unfair,
but given the alignment, let's say, of the more mainstream
Protestant movements with the woke mob, I don't think it's
an absurd criticism. And it's something like the degeneration of

(26:50):
Christianity into the notion that good and harmless are the
same thing, or good and empathic are the same thing,
which is simply not true and far too simplified. And
so and I also think Nietzsche was extremely wrong in
his presumption that human beings should take it to themselves
to construct their own values. I think he made a

(27:12):
colossal error in that presumption.

Speaker 1 (27:13):
And that is the idea they were mentioned, that the
great individual, the best of us, yeah, should create our
own value.

Speaker 2 (27:20):
Well, and I think the reason that he was wrong
about that is that so when God gives instructions Statam
and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he basically tells
them that they can do anything they want in the
walled garden. So that's the kind of balance between order
and nature that makes up the human environment. Human beings
have the freedom vouchsafe to them by God to do

(27:42):
anything they want in the garden, except to mess with
the most fundamental rules. So God says to people, you're
not to eat of the fruit of the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil, which fundamentally means there
is an implicit moral order and you're to abide by it.
Your freedom stops at the foundation, and you can think
about that. I'd be interested even in your ideas about

(28:05):
this as an engineer. Let's say is that there is
an ethos that's implicit in being itself, and your ethos
has to be a reflection of that, and that isn't
under your control. You can't gerrymander the foundation because your
foundational beliefs have to put you in harmony, like musical harmony,

(28:27):
with the actual structure of reality as such. So I
can give you an example of that. So our goal,
insofar as we're conducting ourselves properly, is to have the
kind of interest and conversation that allows both of us
to express ourselves in a manner that enables us to
learn and grow such that we can share that with

(28:47):
everyone who's listening. And if our aim is true and upward,
then that's what we're doing. Well. That means that we're
going to have to match ourselves to a pattern of interaction,
and that's marked for us emotionally, Like you and I
both know this. If we're doing this right, we're gonna
be interested in the conversation. We're not gonna be looking
at or watch, We're not gonna be thinking about what

(29:08):
we're aiming at. We're just gonna communicate. Now, the religious
interpretation of that would be that we were doing something
like making the redemptive logos manifest between us in dialogue,
and that's something that can be shared. To do that,
we have to align with that pattern. I can't decide
that there's some arbitrary way that I'm gonna play you.

(29:29):
I mean, I could do that if I was a
psychopathic manipulator, But to do that optimally, I'm not going
to impose a certain mode of a certain a priori aim,
let's say, on our communication, and manipate and manipulate you
into that. So the constraints on my ethos reflect the

(29:51):
actual structure of the world. And I can't This is
this is the communist presumption. It's like we're gonna burn
everything down and we're gonna start scratch, and we've got
these axiomatic presumptions and we're gonna put them into a
place and we're gonna socialize people, so they now think
and live like communists from day one, And human beings

(30:11):
are infinitely malleable, and we can use a rational set
of presuppositions to decide what sort of beings they should be.
The transhumanists are doing this too. It's like, no, there's
a pattern of being that you have to fall into
alignment with. And I think it's the pattern of being
by the way that if you fall into alignment with,
it gives you hope, it protects you from anxiety, and

(30:34):
it gives you a sense of harmony with your surroundings
with other people. And none of that's arbitrary.

Speaker 1 (30:39):
But don't you think we both arrived to this conversation
with rigid axioms that we have. Maybe we're blind to them,
but in the same way that the Marxists came with
very rigid axioms about the way the world is in
the way it should be, aren't we calling to that?

Speaker 2 (30:54):
We definitely come to the conversation with a hierarchy of
foundational axioms, right, And I would say the more sophisticated
you are as a thinker, the deeper the level at
which you're willing to play. So imagine first that you
have presumptions of different depth, there's more predicated on the
more fundamental axioms, and then that there's a space of

(31:16):
play around those, and that space of play is going
to depend on the sophistication of the player. Obviously, but
those who are capable of engaging in deeper conversations talk
about more fundamental things with more play. Now we have
to come to the conversation with a certain degree of structure,
because we wouldn't be able to understand each other communicate

(31:37):
if if a lot of things weren't already assumed or
taken for granted.

Speaker 1 (31:43):
How rigid is the hierarchy of axioms that religion provides.
This is what I'm trying to understand. The rigidity of
that hargid is play well. Play is not rigid at all.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
No, no, no, no, no, no, it's got to rigid
some constraints. It took me about forty years to figure
out the answer to that question, So it wasn't I'm
serious about that, So it was it wasn't a random answer.
So play is very rigid in some ways. So like
if you and I go out to play basketball or chess,
like there are rules and you can't break the rules
because then you're no longer in the game. But then

(32:16):
there's a dynamism within those rules. That's well. With chess,
it's virtually infinite. I mean, I think, what is that
there's more patterns of potential games on a chessboard than
there are sub atomic particles in the observable universe. Like
it's in insane space. So it's not like there's not
freedom within it, but by the it's it's a weird
paradox in a way, isn't it, Because music is like

(32:38):
this too, is that there are definitely rules and so,
and there are things. You can't throw a basketball into
a chess board and still be playing chess. But weirdly enough,
if you adhere to the rules, the realm of freedom
increases rather than decreasing. And I think you can make
the same case for a playful conversation. It's like we're
playing by certain rules in a lot of them are implicit,

(33:01):
but that doesn't mean that it might mean the reverse
of constraint. You know, because in this seminar, for example,
that I was referring to the Exodus seminar and then
the Gospel seminar, everybody in the seminar, there's about eight
of us played fair. Nobody used power, Nobody tried to
prove they were right. They put forward their points, but
they were like, here's a way of looking at that.

(33:24):
Assess it, and they were also doing it genuinely. It's like,
this is what I've concluded about say this story, and
I'm going to make a case for it, but I'd
like to hear what you have to say, because maybe
you can change it, you can extend it, you can
find a flaw in it, and that's well, that's a
conversation that has flow and that's engaging and that other
people will listen to as well, and that's also a see.

(33:47):
I think that one of the things that we can
conclude now, and we can do this even from a
neuroscientific basis, is that that sense of engaged meaning is
a marker not only for the emergence of harmony between
you and your environment, but for the emergence of that
harmony in a way that is developmentally rich, that moves
you upward towards what would you say, well, I think

(34:11):
towards a more effective entropic state. That's actually the technical
answer to that, but it makes you more than you are,
and there's a directionality in that.

Speaker 1 (34:19):
Well, I would like to sort of the reason I
like talking about communism because it has clearly been shown
as a set of ideas to be destructive to humanity.
But I would like to understand from an engineering perspective
the characteristics of communism versus religion, where you could identify

(34:41):
religious thought is going to lead to a better human being,
a better society and communist Marxist thoughts. Yeah, right, not
because there's ambiguity. There's room for play in communism and Marxism,
because I kind of had a utopian sense of where
everybody's headed. Don't know how it's going to happen. Maybe
revolutionism qua, but after the revolution is done, we'll figure

(35:03):
it out. And there's an underlying assumption that maybe human
beings are good and they'll figure it out when once
you remove the oppressor. Yeah, I mean, all these ideas
kind of until you put them into practice, you could
they can be quite convincing, very in the nineteenth century
if I was reading, which is kind of fascinating. The
nineteenth century produced such powerful ideas Marks and Nietzsche.

Speaker 2 (35:28):
Oh, fascism too, for that matter.

Speaker 1 (35:30):
Fascism so you know, if I was sitting there, like,
especially if I'm feeling shitty about myself, a lot of
these ideas are pretty powerful as a way to plug
the nihilist hole.

Speaker 2 (35:42):
Yeah, right, absolutely well, and some of them may actually
have an appropriate scope of application. It could be that
some of the foundational oxioms of communism socialism slash communism
are actually functional in a sufficiently small social group, maybe
a tribal group. Even like I also have a I'm
not sure this is correct, but I have a suspicion

(36:03):
that the pervasive attractiveness of some of the radical left
ideas that we're talking about are pervasive precisely because they
are functional within say, families, but also within the small
tribal groups that people might have originally evolved into, and
that once we become civilized, so we produce societies that

(36:24):
are united even among people who don't know one another.
Different principles have to apply as a consequence of scale.
So that's that's partly an engineering response. But I think
there's a deeper way of going after the communist problem.
So I think part of the communists, the problem, fundamental
problem with the communist axioms is the notion that the

(36:47):
world of complex social interactions can be simplified sufficiently so
that centralized planning authorities can deal with it. And I
think the best way to think about the free exchange
rejoinder to that presumption is no, the sum total of
human interactions in a large civilization are so immense that
you need a distributed network of cognition in order to

(37:08):
compute the proper way forward. And so what you do
is you give each actor their domain of individual choice
so that they can maximize their own movement forward, and
you allow the aggregate direction to emerge from that, rather
than trying to impose it from the top down, which
I think is computationally impossible. So that might be one
engineering reason why the communist solution doesn't work. Like I

(37:31):
read in soci Nitzen, for example, that the central Soviet
authorities often had to make two hundred pricing decisions a day. Now,
if you've ever started a business or created a product
and had to wrestle with the problem of pricing, you'd
become aware of just how intractable that is, Like, how

(37:52):
do you calculate worth? Well, there's the central existential problem
of life. How do you calculate worth. It's not something
like a central authority can sit down and just manage.
And there is a lot of inputs that go into
a pricing decision. And the free market answer to that
is something like, well, if you get the price right,

(38:12):
people will buy it and you'll survive.

Speaker 1 (38:14):
This is a fascinating way to describe how ideas fail.
So communism perhaps fails because just like with people believe
the earth is flat, when you look outside, it looks flat,
but you can't see beyond the horizon, I guess, yeah,
in the same way with communism. Communism seems like a
great idea in my family and my people I love,

(38:35):
but it doesn't scale, and.

Speaker 2 (38:37):
It doesn't iterate. It does, and that's a form of
scaling too.

Speaker 1 (38:41):
Right, Well, I mean whatever ways it breaks down, it
doesn't scale. And you're saying religious thought it is a
thing that might scale.

Speaker 2 (38:49):
I would say religious thought is the record of those
ideas that have in fact scaled right and iterated well
and iterated. Does religious thought iterate?

Speaker 1 (39:00):
So, I mean there's a fundament of conservative aspect of
religious thoughts. Yeah, tradition.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
Yeah, this is why like mirche Eliada, for example, who
I referred to earlier one of the things Eliada did
and very effectively, And people like Joseph Campbell, who in
some ways were popularizers of Joseph of Iliada's ideas and
Carl Jung's, what they really did was devote themselves to
an analysis of those ideals, ideas that scaled and iterated

(39:25):
across the largest possible spans of time. And so Iliad
and Yung, Eric Neuman they were looking, and Campbell they
were looking at patterns of narrative that were common across
religious traditions that had spanned millennia and found many patterns.
The heroes myth, for example, is one of those patterns,
and it's I think the evidence that it has its
reflection in human neurophysiology and neuropsychology is incontrovertible. And so

(39:49):
these foundational narratives, they last, they're common across multiple religious traditions,
they unite, they work psychologically, but they also reflect the
underlying neurophysiological architecture. So I can give you example of that.
So the hero myth is really a quest myth, and
a quest myth is really a story of exploration and

(40:10):
expansion of adaptation. Right, So Bilbo, the hobbit. He's kind
of an ordinary every man. He lives in a very
constrained and orderly and secure world, and then the quest
call comes and he goes out and he expands his
personality and develops his wisdom. And that's reflected in human
neuropsychological architecture at a very low level, way below cognition.

(40:32):
So one of the most fundamental elements of the mammalian
brain and even in lower animal forms, is the hypothalamus.
It's sort of the root of primary motivation. So it
governs lust, and it regulates your breathing, and it regulates
your hunger, and it regulates your thirst, and it regulates
your temperature. Like really low level biological necessities are regulated

(40:55):
by the hypothelmis. When you get hungry, it's the hypothelmus.
When you're activated in a defensively aggressive manner, that's the hypothalmus.
Half the hypothalmus is the origin of the dopaminergic tracts,
and they subsume exploration. And so you could think of
the human motivational reality as a domain that's governed by

(41:17):
axiomatic motivational states love, sex, defensive aggression, hunger, and another
domain that's governed by exploration, and the rule would be
something like, when your basic motivational states are sated, explore
well then And that's not cognitive. Like I said, this
is deep, deep brain architecture. It's extraordinarily ancient. And the

(41:40):
exploration story is something like, go out into the unknown
and take the risks, because the information that you discover
and the skills you develop will be worthwhile even in
saving the basic motivational drives. And then you want to
learn to do that in a iterative manner, so it's
across time, and you want to do it in a

(42:01):
way that unites you with other people. And there's a
pattern to that, and I do think that's the pattern
that we strive to encapsulate in our deep religious narratives.
And I think that in many ways we've done that successfully.

Speaker 1 (42:13):
What is the belief in God? How does that fit in?
What does it mean to believe in God?

Speaker 2 (42:20):
Okay, So, in one of the stories that I cover
in We Who Wrestle with God, which I've only recently
begun to take a part, say, in the last two years,
is the story of Abraham. It's a very cool story
and it's also related by the way to your question
about what makes communism wrong, and Dostoevsky knew this, not
precisely the Abraham story, but the same reason. In Notes

(42:43):
from Underground, Dostoevsky made a very telling observation. So he
speaks in the voice of a cynical, nihilistic and bitter
bureaucrat who's been a failure, who's talking cynically about the
nature of human beings, but also very accurately. And one
of the things he points out with regards to modern
utopianism is that human beings are very strange creatures and

(43:04):
that if you gave them what the socialist utopians want
to give them, So let's say all your needs are
taken care of, all your material needs are taken care of,
and even indefinitely. Dostoevsky's claim was you don't understand human
beings very well, because if you put them in an
environment that was that comfortable, they would purposefully go in,
saying just to break it into bits, just so something

(43:27):
interesting would happen, right, And he says it's the human
proclivity to curse and complain, And he says this in
quite a cynic and caustic manner, but he's pointing to
something deep, which is that we're not built for comfort
and security, we're not infants, we're not after satiation. So
then you might ask, well, what the hell are we after?

(43:47):
Then that's what the Abraham's story addresses. And Abraham is
the first true individual in the Biblical narrative, so you
could think about his story as the archetypal story of
the developing individual. So you said, well, what's God? Well,
in the Abraham story, God has characterized a lot of
different ways. In the classic religious texts, like the Bible,

(44:08):
is actually a compilation of different characterizations of the Divine,
with the insistence that they reflect an underlying unity. In
the story of Abraham, the divine is the call to adventure.
So Abraham has the socialist utopia at hand. He's from
a wealthy family, and he has everything he needs, and

(44:30):
he actually doesn't do anything until he's in his seventies. Now, hypothetically,
people in those times lived much longer. But a voice
comes to Abraham and it tells him something very specific.
It says, leave your zone of comfort, leave your parents,
leave your tent, leave your community, leave your tribe, leave
your land, go out into the world. And Abraham thinks, well,

(44:53):
why I've got naked slave girls peeling grapes and feeding
them to me. It's like, what do I I need
an adventure for? And God tells them, and this is
the covenant, by the way, part of the covenant that
the God of the Israelites makes with his people. It's
very very specific, it's very brilliant. He says, if you
follow the voice of adventure, you'll become a blessing to yourself.

(45:18):
So that's a good deal because people generally live at
odds with themselves. And he says, God says, that's not all.
You'll become a blessing to yourself in a way that
furthers your reputation among people and validly, so that you'll
accomplish things that were real and people will know it
and you'll be held high in their esteem and that

(45:39):
will be valid. So that's a pretty good deal because
social people would like to be regarded as of utility
and worth by others, and so that's a good deal.
And God says that's not all. You'll establish something of lasting,
permanent and deep value. That's why Abraham becomes the father
of nations. And finally he caps it off and he says,

(46:02):
there's a better element even to it. There's a capstone.
You'll do all three of those things in a way
that's maximally beneficial to everyone else. And so the divinity
in the Abrahamic story is making a claim. He says,
first of all, there's a drive that you should attend to,
so the spirit of adventure that calls you out of
your zone of comfort. Now, if you attend to that

(46:25):
and you make the sacrifices necessary to follow that path,
then the following benefits will accrue to you. Your life
will be a blessing. Everyone will hold you in high esteem.
You'll establish something of permanent value, and you'll do it
in a way that's maximally beneficial to everyone else. And
so think about what this means biologically or from an
engineering standpoint. It means that the instinct to develop that

(46:48):
characterizes outward moving children, let's say, or adults, is the
same instinct that allows for psychological stability, that allows for
movement upward in a social hierarchy, that is, establishes something iterable,
and that does that in a manner that allows everyone
else to partake in the same process. Well, you know

(47:08):
that's a good deal, and I can't see how it
cannot be true, because the alternative hypothesis would be that
the spirit that moves you beyond yourself to develop the
spirit of a curious child. Let's say, what is that
antithetical to your own esteem? Is that antithetical to other
people's best interest? Is it not the thing that increases

(47:29):
the probability that you'll do something permanent? That's a stupid theory.

Speaker 1 (47:33):
So God is a call to adventure with some constraints.

Speaker 2 (47:38):
A call to true adventure, true adventure. Yeah, and then
that's a good observation because that begs the question what
constitutes the most true adventure. Well, that's not fully fleshed
out until at least from the Christian perspective. Let's say
that's not fully fleshed out until the Gospels. Because the
Passion of Christ is the you could say, this is

(48:01):
the perfectly reasonable way of looking at it. The Passion
of Christ is the truest adventure of Abraham. That's a
terrible thing, ah, because it's a it's a The Passion
story is a catastrophic tragedy, although it obviously has its
redemptive elements. But one of the things that's implied there
is that there's no distinction between the true adventure of

(48:23):
life and taking on the pathway of maximal responsibility and burden.
And I can't see how that cannot be true, like,
because the counter hypothesis is, well, lex the best thing
for you to do in your life is to shrink
from all challenge and hide right, to remain infantile, to
remain secure, not to ever push yourself beyond your limits,

(48:44):
not to take any risks. Well, no one thinks that's true.

Speaker 1 (48:48):
So basically, the maximally worthwhile adventure could possibly be highly
correlated with the hardest possible available adventure.

Speaker 2 (48:58):
The hardest possible available adventure voluntarily undertaken.

Speaker 1 (49:03):
Does it have? It has to be absolutely How do
you define voluntarily?

Speaker 2 (49:06):
Well, here's an here's an example of that. That's that's
that's a good question too. When Christ is the night
before the Crucifixion, which in principle he knows is coming,
he asks God to relieve him of his burden, and
understandably so, I mean that's the scene famously in which
he's sweating, literally sweating blood because he knows what's coming.

(49:28):
And the Romans designed crucifixion to be the most agonizing
and humiliating, possible agonizing, humiliating and disgusting, possible death right.
So there is every reason to be apprehensive about that.
And you might say, well, could you undertake that voluntarily
as an adventure? And the answer to that is something like, well,
what's your relationship with death? Like that's a problem you

(49:51):
have to solve, and you could fight it and you
could be bitter about it, and there's reasons for that,
especially if it's painful and degrading. But but the alternative
is something like, well, that's what's fleshed out in religious imagery.
Always it's very difficult to cast into words. It's like, no,
you welcome, you welcome the struggle. That's why I called

(50:15):
the book We Who Wrestle with God. You welcome the struggle,
and lex I don't see how you can come to
terms with life without construing it something like construing it
as something like bring it on, welcome the struggle. And
I can't say that there's a limit to that. It's like, well,
I welcome the struggle until it gets difficult.

Speaker 1 (50:36):
Well, so there's not a bell curve like the struggle
of moderation. Basically, you have to welcome whatever as hard
as it gets, and the Crucifixion in that way is
a symbol of that.

Speaker 2 (50:49):
Well, and well, it's worse than that in some ways,
because the crucifixion exemplifies the worst possible death. But that
isn't the only element of the strugg because mythologically, classically,
after Christ's death, the heroes hell and what that means,
as far as I can tell, psychologically, is that you're

(51:09):
not only required, let's say, to take on the full
existential burden of life and to welcome it, regardless of
what it is, and to maintain your upward aim despite
all temptations to the contrary, but you also have to
confront the root of malevolence itself. So it's not merely tragedy.
And I think the malevolence is actually worse. And the

(51:31):
reason I think that is because I know the literature
on post traumatic stress disorder, and most people who encounter,
let's say, a challenge that's so brutal that it fragments them.
It isn't mere suffering that does that to people. It's
an encounter with malevolence that does that to people their
own sometimes often by the way soldier will go out

(51:51):
into a battlefield and find out that there's a part
of him that really enjoys the mayhem, and that conceptualization
doesn't fit in well with everything he thinks he knows
about himself and humanity. And after that contact with that
dark part of himself, he never recovers. That happens to people,
and it happens to people who encounter bad actors in

(52:14):
the world too. If you're a naive person and the
right narcissistic psychopath comes your way, you are in mortal
trouble because you might die. But that's not where the
trouble ends.

Speaker 1 (52:25):
If there's a young man in their twenties listening to this,
how do they escape the pull of Dostoyevski's nose from
underground with the eyes open to the world? How do
they select the adventure?

Speaker 2 (52:39):
So there's other characterizations of the divine, say in the
Old Testament story. So one pattern of characterization that I
think is really relevant to that question is the conception
of God as calling and conscience. Okay, so what does
it mean. It's a description of the manner in which
your destiny announced is itself to you. And I'm using

(53:02):
that terminology, and it's distinguishable, say from Nietsche's notion that
you create your own values. It's like, part of the
way you can tell that that's wrong is that you
can't voluntarily gerrymander your own interests. Right, Like, you find
some things interesting and that seems natural and autonomous, and

(53:23):
other things you don't find interesting and you can't really
force yourself to be interested in them. Now, so what
is the domain of interest that makes itself manifest to you? Well,
it's like an autonomous spirit. It's like certain things in
your field of perception are illuminated to you think, oh,
that that's interesting, that's compelling, that's gripping. Rudolph Auto, who

(53:45):
studied the phenomenology of religious experience, describe that as numinous
thing grips you because you're compelled by it, and maybe
it's also somewhat anxiety provoking. It's the same reaction that
like a cat has to ad when the cat's hair
stands on end. That's an awe response. And so there's
going to be things in your phenomenological field that pull

(54:08):
you forward, compel you. That's like the voice of positive
emotion and enthusiasm. Things draw you into the world. Might
be love, might be esthetic interest, it might be friendship,
it might be social status, it might be duty and industriousness.
Like there's various domains of interest that shine for people.

(54:31):
That's sort of on the positive side. God is calling, right,
that would be akin to the spirit of adventure for Abraham.
But there's also God is conscience, and this is a
useful thing to know too. Certain things bother you. They
they take root within you, and they they turn your

(54:52):
thoughts towards certain issues, like there are things you're interested
in that you've pursued your whole life. There are things
I'm interested in that that I felt as moral compulsion,
and so you could think, and I think the way
you can think about it technically is that something pulls
you forward so that you move ahead and you develop.
And then another voice, this is a voice of negative emotion, says,

(55:15):
while you're moving forward, stay on this narrow pathway right,
and it'll mark deviations, and it marks deviations with shame
and guilt and anxiety regret, and that actually has a voice.
Don't do that, well, why not while you're wandering off
the straight and narrow paths. So the divine marks the
pathway forward and reveals it, but then puts up the

(55:37):
constraints of conscience, and the divine in the Old Testament
is portrayed not least as the dynamic between calling and conscience.

Speaker 1 (55:46):
What do you do with the negative emotions you didn't mention? Envy?
There's some really dark ones that can really pull you
into some bad places.

Speaker 2 (55:53):
Envy, fear, Yeah, envy is a really bad one. Pride
and envy or among the worst. Those are the sins
of k By the way, in the story of Cain
and Abel, because Cain fails because his sacrifices are insufficient.
He doesn't offer his best, and so he's rejected and
that makes him bitter and unhappy, and he goes to
complain to God, and God says to him two things.

(56:16):
He said, if God tells him, if your sacrifices were appropriate,
you'd be accepted. It's a brutal thing. It's a brutal rejoinder.
And he also says, you can't blame your misery on
your failure. You could learn from your failure. When you failed,
you invited in the spirit of envy and resentment and
you allowed it to possess you, and that's why you're miserable.

(56:37):
And so Cain is embittered by that response, and that's
when he kills Abel. And so you might say, well,
how do you fortify yourself against that pathway of resentment?
And part of classic religious practice is aimed to do
that precisely. What's the antithesis of envy? Gratitude? That's something

(56:58):
you can practice right now, I mean literally practice.

Speaker 1 (57:02):
I think envy is one of the biggest enemies for
a young person because basically, you're starting from nowhere. Life
is hard, You've achieved nothing, and you're striving, and you're
failing constantly because.

Speaker 2 (57:17):
And you see other people whom you think aren't having
the same problem.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
Yeah, and they succeeded, and they could be your neighbor,
they could be succeeding by a little bit, or somebody
on the internet succeeding by a lot. And I think
that that can really pull a person down. That kind
of envy can really destroy a person.

Speaker 2 (57:34):
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, the gratitude element would be something like, well, yeah,
you don't know anything and you're at the bottom, but
you're not eighty. You know. One of the best predictors
of wealth in the United States is age. So then
you might say, well, who's got it? Better the old

(57:56):
rich guy or the young poor guy. And I would
say most old rich guys would trade their wealth for youth.
So it's not exactly clear at all at any stage
who's got the upper hand, who's got the advantage. And
you know, you could say, well, I've got all these
burdens in front of me because I'm young, and oh
my god, or you could say every dragon has its treasure,

(58:18):
and that's actually a pattern of perception. You know. I'm
not saying that people don't have their challenges. They certainly do,
but discriminating between a challenge and an opportunity is very
very difficult, and learning to see a challenge as an
opportunity that's the beginning of wisdom.

Speaker 1 (58:37):
It's interesting. I don't know how it works. Maybe you
can elucidate, But when you have enery towards somebody, if
you just celebrate them so gratitude. Yeah, but actually as
opposed to sort of ignoring and being grateful for the
things you have, like literally celebrate that person. It transforms

(58:57):
it lights the way.

Speaker 2 (59:00):
I don't know why that is exactly the only reason
you're envious is because you see someone who has something
that you want. Okay, so think let's think about it. Well,
first of all, the fact that they have it means that,
in principle you could get it. At least someone has,
so that's a pretty good deal. And then you might say, well,

(59:20):
the fact that I'm envious of that person means that
I actually want something. And then you might think, well,
what am I envious of? I'm envious of their attractiveness
to women. It's like, okay, well, now you know something
about yourself. You know that one true motivation that's making
itself manifest to you is that you wish that you
would be the sort of person who is attractive to women. Now,

(59:42):
of course, that's an extremely common longing among men period,
but particularly among young men. It's like, well, what makes
you so sure you couldn't have that? Well, how about
here's an answer. You don't have enough faith in yourself.
And maybe you don't have enough faith in well, I
would say the divine. You don't believe that the world
is characterized by enough potentiality so that even miserable you

(01:00:06):
has a crack at the brass ring. And I talked
about this actually practically in one of my previous books,
because I wrote a chapter called Compare yourself to who
you are and not to someone else at the present time. Well,
why well, your best benchmark for tomorrow is you today,
and you might not be able to have what someone

(01:00:27):
else has on the particular axis you're comparing yourself with
them on, but you could make an incremental improvement over
your current state regardless of the direction that you're aiming.
And it is the case, and this is a law.
The return on incremental improvement is exponential or geometric and
not linear. So even if you start This is why

(01:00:50):
the hero is always born in a lowly place. Mythologically right,
Christ who redeems the world is born in a manger
with the animals, to poverty stricken parents, in the middle
of a god forsaken desert, in a nondescript time and
place isolated. Well, why well, because everyone young struggles with

(01:01:12):
their insufficiency. But that doesn't mean that great things can't
make themselves manifest. And part of the insistence in the
Biblical text, for example, is that it's incumbent on you
to have the courage to have faith in yourself and
in the spirit of reality, the essence of reality, regardless

(01:01:33):
of how you construe the evidence at hand. Right, look
at me. I'm so useless. I don't know anything. I
don't have anything. It's hopeless. I don't have it within me.
The world couldn't offer me that possibility. Well, what the
hell do you know about that? This is what Job
figures out in the midst of his suffering in the
Book of Job, because Job is tortured terribly by God,

(01:01:55):
who makes a bet with Satan himself to bring him down.
And Joe Robe's decision in the face of his intense
suffering is I'm not going to lose faith in my
essential goodness, and I'm not going to lose faith in
the essential goodness of being itself, regardless of how terrible
the face it's showing to me at the moment happens
to be. And I think, okay, what do you make

(01:02:20):
of that claim? Well, let's look at it practically. You're
being tortured by the arbitrariness of life. That's horrible. Now
you lose faith in yourself and you become cynical about being,
So are you infinitely worse off instantly? And then you
might say, well, yeah, but it's really asking a lot
of people that they maintain faith, even even in their

(01:02:44):
darkest hours. It's like, yeah, that's that might be asking
everything from people. But then you also might ask, this
is a very strange question, is if you were brought
into being by something that was essentially good, wouldn't that
thing that brought you into being demand that you make

(01:03:04):
the best in yourself manifest And wouldn't it be precisely
when you most need that that it would be that
you'd be desperate enough to risk what it would take
to let it emerge.

Speaker 1 (01:03:17):
So you kind of make it seem that reason could
be the thing that takes you out of a place
of darkness, So finding that calling through reason, I think
it's also possible when reason fails you to just take
the leap, navigate not by reason, but by finding the
thing that scares you the risk, to take the risk,

(01:03:40):
take the leap, and then figure it out while you're
in the air.

Speaker 2 (01:03:44):
Yeah. Well, I think that's always part of a heroic adventure,
you know, is that ability to cut the Gordian knot.
But you could also ask, from an engineering perspective, Okay,
what are the oxioms that make a decision like that possible?
And the answer would be something like, I'm going to
make the presumption that if I move forward in good faith,
whatever happens to me will be the best thing that

(01:04:04):
could possibly happen, no matter what it is. And I
think that's actually how you make an alliance with truth.
And I also think that truth is an adventure. And
the way you make an alliance with truth is by
assuming that whatever happens to you, if you're living in truth,

(01:04:24):
is the best thing that could happen, even if you
can't see that at any given moment, because otherwise you'd
say that truth would be just the handmaiden of advantage. Well,
I'm going to say something truthful and I pay a price. Well,
that means I shouldn't have said it. Well, that possibly,
but that's not the only possible standard of evaluation you

(01:04:45):
can because what you're doing is you're making the outcome
your deity, right, while I just reverse that and say no, no,
truth is the deity. The outcome is variable. But that
doesn't eradicate the initial axiom. Where's the ca constant? Right?
Where's what's the constant? He?

Speaker 1 (01:05:03):
Maybe when you said Abraham was being fed by naked ladies.

Speaker 2 (01:05:10):
That's an interpolation obviously, but would have been out of
keeping for the times.

Speaker 1 (01:05:14):
But it does make me think, sort of in star
contrast in each his own life, that perhaps getting laid
early on in life is a useful starter. Uh, step one,
get laid and then go for adventure. There's some basic
recomists association of.

Speaker 2 (01:05:32):
I think it's perfectly reasonable to bring the sexual element
in because it's a powerful motivating force and it has
to be integrated. I don't think it's adventure, it's romantic
adventure right right.

Speaker 1 (01:05:42):
But the lack of basic interaction, sexual interaction, I feel like,
is the engine that drives towards that cynicism of the inside.

Speaker 2 (01:05:54):
In Justoyevsky's there's there's there's very little doubt about that.
We know perfectly well anthropologically that the most unstable social
situation you can generate is young men with no access
to women. That's not good, and they'll do anything anything
to reverse that situation. So that's very dangerous. But then

(01:06:15):
I would also say there's every suggestion that the pathway
of adventure itself is the best pathway to romantic attractiveness.
And we know this in some ways in a very
blunt manner. The Google boys, the engineers who are too
what would you say naively oriented towards empirical truth to

(01:06:36):
note when they're being politically incorrect. They wrote a great
book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts, which I really like.
It's a very good book. And it's engineers as psychologists,
and so they'll say all sorts of things that no
one with any sense would ever say that happened to
be true. And they studied the pattern of pornographic fantasy.
And women like pornographic stories, not images. So women's use

(01:06:58):
of porn pornograph is literary. Who are the main protagonists
in female pornographic fantasy? Pirates were wolves, vampires, surgeons and
billionaires Tony Stark, you know. And so the basic pornographic
narrative is beauty and the beast. Those five categories terrible, aggressive, male,

(01:07:22):
tamable by the right relationship, hot, erotic attraction. And so
I would say to the young man who and I
have many times to the young men who are locked
in isolation, it's first of all, join the bloody club.
Because the default value of a fifteen year old male
on the mating market is zero. And there's reason for that,

(01:07:42):
you know. And zero is a bit of an exaggeration,
but not much. And the reason for that is, well,
what the hell do you know? Like you're not good
for anything? Yep, you have potential and maybe plenty, and
hopefully that'll be made manifest. But you shouldn't be all
upset because you're the same loser as everyone else. Your
age has always been since the beginning of time. But

(01:08:03):
then you might ask, well, what should I do about it?
The answer is get yourself together, you know, stand up straight,
with your shoulders back, take on some adventure, find your calling,
abide by your conscience, put yourself together, and you'll become attractive.
And we know this is Look, we know this is true.
The correlation between male sexual opportunity and relative masculine status

(01:08:30):
is abouto point six. That's higher than the correlation between
intelligence and academic achievement. I don't think that there's a
larger correlation between two independent phenomena in the entire social
science and health literature than the correlation between relative male
social status and reproductive success. It's by far the most

(01:08:51):
fundamental determinant.

Speaker 1 (01:08:52):
Well, what's the cause and effect there?

Speaker 2 (01:08:54):
So loop, Men are motivated to attain social status because
it confers upon them reproductive success. And that's not only
cognitively but biologically. I'll give you an example of this.
There's a documentary I watched from time to time which
I think is the most brilliant documentary I've ever seen.
It's called Crumb, and it's the story of this underground
cartoonist Robert Crumb, who was in high school, was in

(01:09:16):
the category of males for whom a date was not
only not likely but in unimaginable. So he was at
the bottom of the bottom rung. And almost all the
reactions he got from females wasn't just no, it was like,
are you out of your mind? Right? With that contempt? Right?

(01:09:40):
And then he became successful, and so the documentary is
super interesting because it tracks the utter pathology of sexual fantasies,
because he was bitter and resentful. And if you want
to understand the psychology of serial sexual killers and the like,
and you watch Crumb, you'll find out a lot more
about that than anybody with any sense would want to know.

(01:10:01):
But then he makes this transition, and partly because he
does take the heroic adventure path and he actually has
a family and children, and he's actually a pretty functional
person as opposed to his brothers. One of whom commits suicide,
and one of whom is literally a repeat sexual offender.
It's a brutal documentary, but he what he did in

(01:10:22):
his adolescence after being rejected, was he found what he
was interested in is a very good artist. He was
very interested in music, and he started to pursue those
sort of single mindedly, and he became successful. And as
soon as he became successful, and the documentary tracks this beautifully,
he's immediately attractive to women. And then you might ask too,
even if you're cynical, it's like, well, why do women?

(01:10:43):
Why do I have to perform for women? And the
answer to that is something like, why the hell should
they have anything to do with you. If you're useless,
They're gonna have infants. They don't need another one right.
Partly the reason that women are hypergamous, lest they want
males who are of higher status than they are, is
because they're trying to address the reproductive burden. And it's substantial.

(01:11:03):
I mean, the female of any species is the sex
that devotes more to the reproductive function. That's a more fundamental,
different definition than chromosomal differentiation, and that's taken to its
ultimate extreme with humans and so of course women are
going to want someone around that's useful because the cost
of sex for them is an eighteen year old period

(01:11:26):
of dependency with an infant. So so I think the
adventure comes first.

Speaker 1 (01:11:32):
Heroic adventure comes well first.

Speaker 2 (01:11:34):
It's complex because the other problem, let's say with the crumbboys,
is that their mother was extremely pathological and they didn't
get a lot of genuine feminine nurturance and affection.

Speaker 1 (01:11:43):
Of course, so the family and society are not going
to help you most of the time with the heroic adventure, right,
They're going to be a barrier.

Speaker 2 (01:11:53):
And good families they're both because they put up constraints
on your behavior, but they like I've interviewed a lot
of success for people about their calling, let's say, because
that's I do that with all my podcast guests. How
how did the path that you took to success make
itself manifest? And it's very the patterns very typical. Almost

(01:12:15):
all the people that I've interviewed had a mother and
a father. Now it's not invariant, but I'd say it's
there in ninety nine percent of the time. It's really
high and both of the parents or at least one
of them but often both were very encouraging of the
person's interests and pathway to development.

Speaker 1 (01:12:34):
That's fascinating. I've heard you analyze it that way before,
and I had a reaction to that idea because you
focus on the positive of the parents. Yeah, I feel
like it was the Maybe I see biographies differently, but
it feels like the struggle within the family was the
catalyst for greatness in a lot of biographies. Maybe I'm

(01:12:56):
misinterpreting it. No, but I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:12:58):
I don't think you. I think that that's a reflection.
Maybe correct me if I'm wrong. I think that's a
reflection of that dynamic between positive and negative emotion. Like
my son, for example, who's doing just fine. He's firing
on all cylinders as far as I'm concerned. He has
a nice family, he gets along with his wife. He's
a really good musician, he's got a company's running well.

(01:13:19):
He's a delight to be around. He was a relatively
disagreeable infant. He was tough minded and so and he
didn't take no for an answer, and so there was
some tussle in regulating his behavior. He spent a lot
of time when he was two sitting on the steps,
trying to get his act together, and so that was

(01:13:40):
the constraint, but that wasn't that wasn't something that was
it's an opposition to him away because it was in
opposition to the immediate manifestation of his hedonistic desires, but
it was also an impetus to further development. The rule
for me when he was on the stairs was as
soon as you're willing to be a civilized human being,

(01:14:02):
you can get off the stairs. And you might think, well,
that's nothing but arbitrary, super ego, patriarchal, oppressive constraint, or
you could say, well, no, what I'm actually doing is
facilitating its cortical maturation, because when a child misbehaves, it's
usually because they're under the domination of some primordial emotional
or motivational impulse. They're angry, they're over enthusiastic, they're upset,

(01:14:27):
they're selfish. Like it's narrow, self centeredness expressed in an
immature manner.

Speaker 1 (01:14:34):
But see, okay, tell me if I'm wrong, But it
feels like the engine of greatness, at least on the
male side of things, has often been trying to prove
the father wrong or trying to gain the acceptance of
the father, So that tension where the parent is not
encouraging like you mentioned, but is basically saying no, you

(01:14:57):
won't be able to do it.

Speaker 2 (01:14:58):
Okay. So my observation as a psychologist has been that
it's very, very difficult for someone to get their act
together unless they have at least one figure in their
life that's encouraging and shows them the pathway forward. So
you can have a lot of adversity in your life,
and if you have one person around who's a good

(01:15:18):
model and you're neurologically intact, you can latch onto that model. Now,
you can also find that model in books, and people
do that sometimes, Like I've interviewed people who had pretty
fragmented childhoods who turned to books and found the pattern
that guided them in like let's say the Adventures of
the Heroes of the Past, because that's a good way

(01:15:39):
of thinking about it. And I read a book called
Angela's Ashes that was written by an Irish author, Frank
McCourt's fantastic book, beautiful book. And his father was an
alcoholic of gargantuan proportions. He just an Irish drinker who
drank every cent that came into the family and many
of whose children eyed in poverty. And what Frank did

(01:16:04):
as a testament to the human spirit is he sort
of divided his father conceptually into two elements. There was sober,
mourning father, who was encouraging and with whom he had
a relationship, and then there was drunk and useless later
afternoon an evening father. And he rejected the negative and
he amplified his relationship with the positive. Now like he

(01:16:27):
had other he had other things going for him. But he,
you know, he did a very good job of discriminating.
And and I mean partly the question that you're raising
is to what degree is it useful to have a
beneficial adversary? Yeah, and I mean struggle free progress is
not possible. And I think there are situations under which

(01:16:51):
where you know, you might be motivated to prove someone
in your immediate circle wrong. But then that also implies
that at some level, for some reason, you actually care
about their judgment. You know, you just didn't write them
off completely.

Speaker 1 (01:17:08):
Well, I mean that's why I say there's an archetype
of a young man trying to gain the approval of
his father, and I think that repeats itself in a
bunch of biographies that I've read. I don't know. There
must have been an engine somewhere that they found of approval,
of encouragement, maybe in books, maybe in the mother, or

(01:17:32):
maybe the role of the parents has flipped.

Speaker 2 (01:17:34):
Well, my father was hard to please, very Did you
ever succeed Yes, but it wasn't easy. Ever.

Speaker 1 (01:17:42):
When was the moment when you succeeded?

Speaker 2 (01:17:46):
Late? Pretty late, like forty maybe later?

Speaker 1 (01:17:51):
Was it a gradual or a definitive moment when a
shift happened?

Speaker 2 (01:18:00):
My father always was always willing to approve of the
things I did that were good, although he was not
effusive by any stretch of the imagination, and the standards
were very high. Now, I was probably fortunate for me,
you know now. And it does bear on the question
you're asking, is like, if you want someone to motivate

(01:18:20):
you optimally, God, it's complicated because there has to be
a temperamental dance between the two people. Like, what you
really want is for someone to apply the highest possible
standards to you that you're capable of reaching, right, And
that's a vicious dance because you have to have a

(01:18:43):
relationship with your child to do that properly. You know,
because you want to. If you want to be optimally
motivating as a father, you keep your children on the edge.
It's like you might not reward something in your child
that you would think would be good in someone else
because you think they could do better. And so my
father was pretty clear about the idea that he always

(01:19:03):
expected me to do better. And was that troublesome. It
was like I felt often when I was young that
there was no pleasing him. But I also knew that
that wasn't I knew that that wasn't right. See, I
actually knew that wasn't right because I could remember, especially

(01:19:24):
I think when I was very young, that I did
things that he was pleased about. I knew that was possible.
So it wasn't It wasn't unpredictable and arbitrary. It was
just difficult.

Speaker 1 (01:19:36):
It sounds like he's hit a pretty good optimal, but
it's for each individual human that optimal differs.

Speaker 2 (01:19:43):
Well, that's why you have to have a relationship with
your children. You have to know them and well with
yourself too and with your wife. You you can't hit
that optimal. That optimal is probably love. That's because love
isn't just acceptance. Love is acceptance and encouragement. And it's

(01:20:05):
not just that either, it's also no, don't do that
that's beneath you. You're capable of more, And how harsh
should that be? It's like, that's a really hard question,
you know, Like, if you really love someone, you're not
going to put up with their stupidity. Don't do that.
You know. One of the rules I had with my
little kids was don't do anything that makes you look

(01:20:26):
like an idiot in public. Why because I don't want
you disgracing yourself. Why not because I like you. I
think you're great, and you're not going to act like
a bloody fool in public so that people get the
wrong idea about you.

Speaker 1 (01:20:39):
No, what about inside a relationship, how a successful relationship,
how much challenge? How much peace? Is a successful relationship
one that is easy, one that is challenging, I would say,
to some degree.

Speaker 2 (01:20:58):
That depends on your temperament. My wife is quite a
provocative person, and there are times when I, I suppose,
do I wish that There are times when I casually
wish that she was easier to get along with. But
as soon as I think about it, I don't think that. Yeah,
because I've always liked her. We were friends ever since

(01:21:19):
we were little kids, and she's she plays rough and
I like that. As it turns out, now that doesn't
mean it isn't a pain from time to time, but
you know, and that is going to be a temperamental
issue to some degree and an issue of negotiation, Like
she plays rough but fair, and the fair part has

(01:21:40):
been establishing that. It's been part of our ongoing negotiation.

Speaker 1 (01:21:44):
And part of it is in the play, you get
to find out about yourself or what your temperament is,
because I don't think that that's clear until it's tested.

Speaker 2 (01:21:52):
Oh definitely not, definitely not. You find out all sorts
of things about yourself in a relationship, that's for sure. Well,
And partly the reason that there is provocativeness, especially from
women in relationship to men, is they want to test
them out. It's like, can you hold your temper when
someone's bothering you? Well, why would a woman want to
know that? Well, maybe she doesn't want you to uh

(01:22:13):
snap and hurt her kids, and so how is she
going to find that out? Ask you? Well, you're gonna say, well,
I'd never do that. It's like never, Ah, let's find
out if it's never So we don't know how people
test each other out in relationships, but or why exactly,
but it's intense and necessary.

Speaker 1 (01:22:34):
What's your and what's in general should a man's relationship
with temper bee?

Speaker 2 (01:22:39):
You should have one, and you should be able to
regulate it. Like that's part of that attractiveness of the
monstrous that characterizes women's fantasies, right because a Nietscha pointed
this out too, You go back to Nietzsche, you know Nietzsche.
One of Nietzsche's claims was that most of what passes
for morality is nothing but cowardice. You know, I'd never

(01:22:59):
cheat on my wife. It's like, is there anybody asking
you to that you actually find attractive? Or are there
dozens of people asking you too that you find attractive?
It's like, well, I would never cheat. It's like, no,
you just don't have the opportunity, now, don't. I'm not
saying that everyone's in that position you know that they
would cheat even if they had the opportunity, because that's

(01:23:19):
not true. And it's the same with regards to I'm
a peaceful man. It's like, no, you're not. You're just
a weak coward. You wouldn't dare have it to have
a confrontation physical or metaphysical, And you're passing it off
as morality because you don't want to come to terms
with the fact of your own weakness and cowardice. And
part of the that, what I would say, is twisted

(01:23:42):
pseudo Christian morality that Nietzsche was criticizing was exactly of
that sort, and it tied into resentment and envy. And
he tied that in explicitly said that failure in life
masked by the morality that's nothing but weak cowardice, turned
to the resentment that undermines and destroys everything, and that

(01:24:03):
does that purposefully.

Speaker 1 (01:24:05):
Yeah, I think it was criticizing if under the facade
of niceness there's an ocean of resentment.

Speaker 2 (01:24:10):
Yeah, that's for sure. That's for sure. That's also the
danger of being too forthcoming with people. See this is
another thing. Let's say about my wife who's not particularly agreeable.
It's like she's not particularly agreeable, but she's not resentful,
and that's because she doesn't give things away that she
isn't willing to. And if you're agreeable and nice and

(01:24:32):
you're conflict avoidant, you'll push yourself too far to please
the other person, and then that makes you bitter and resentful.
So that's not helpful.

Speaker 1 (01:24:41):
Do you think you'll be in trouble for saying this
on a podcast later?

Speaker 2 (01:24:45):
No? No, we know each other pretty well, and like
I said, it's a trait that I find it admirable.
It's provocative and.

Speaker 1 (01:24:54):
Challenging, and it seems to work well.

Speaker 2 (01:24:57):
We've been together fifty years.

Speaker 1 (01:24:59):
So quick pause, bath break. If we can descend from
the realm of ideas down to history and reality, I
would say the time between World War One and World
War Two was one of history's biggest testing of ideas

(01:25:19):
and really the most dramatic kinds of ideas that helped
us understand the nature of good and evil. I just
want to ask you sort of a question about good
and evil. Churchill, in many ways was not a good man. Stalin,

(01:25:42):
as you've documented extensively, was a horrible man. But you
can make the case that both were necessary for stopping
and even worse human being in Hitler. So to what
degree do you need months theres to fight monsters? Do

(01:26:03):
you need bad men to be able to fight off
greater evils?

Speaker 2 (01:26:12):
It's everything in its proper place is the answer to that.
You know, we might think that our life would be
easier without fear. Let's say, we might say that our
life would be easier without anger or pain. But the
truth of the matter is is that those things are beneficial,
even though they can cause great suffering. But they have
to be in their proper place. And that capacity that

(01:26:33):
could in one context be a terrible force for evil,
can in the proper context be the most potent force
for good. A good man has to be formidable, and
partly what that means, as far as I can tell,
is that you have to be able to say no.
And no means like I thought a lot about no

(01:26:54):
working as a clinician, because I did a lot of
strategic counseling with my clients, a lot of extremely different
called situations, and I learned to take a part what
no men, and also when dealing with my own children,
because I used no sparingly because it's a powerful weapon,
let's say, but I meant it, and with my kids,
what it meant was, if you continue that pattern of behavior,

(01:27:16):
something you do not like will happen to you with
one hundred percent certainty. And when that's the case, and
you're willing to implement it, you don't have to do
it very often with regards to monstrosity. It's like weak
men aren't good, They're just weak. That's Nietzsche's observation. That's
partly again why he was tempted to place the will

(01:27:40):
to power, let's say, and to deal with that notion
in a manner that, when it was tied with the
revaluation of all values, was counterproductive and counterproductive in the
final analysis. It's not like he not like there wasn't
something to what he was driving at. You know, formidable
men are admirable, you know, don't mess with them. Douglas

(01:28:02):
Murray is a good example of that. He's, you know,
he's a rather slight guy, but he's got a spine
of steel and there's more than a bit of what's
a monstrous in him. And Jocko Willink is like that,
and Joe Rogan is like that, and you're like that.

Speaker 1 (01:28:17):
But there's a different level. I mean, if you look
to me, Churchill might represent the thing you're talking about.
But World War two Hitler would not be stopped without Stalin.

Speaker 2 (01:28:31):
Well, I wonder, yes, yes.

Speaker 1 (01:28:34):
And if I may insert into this picture of complexity.
Hitler would have not stopped until he enslaved and exterminated
the entirety of the Slavic people, the Jewish people, the
Slavic people, the Gypsies, the everybody who's not area. But
then Stalin in the mass rape of German women by

(01:28:55):
the Red Army as they marched towards Berlin, is a
kind of manifestation the full monstrosity that a person can be.

Speaker 2 (01:29:02):
You can easily be in a situation. You can easily
and unfortunately, find yourself in a situation where all you
have in front of you are a variety of bad options.
You know, that's partly why, if you have any sense,
you try to conduct yourself very carefully in life, because
you don't want to be in a position where you've
made so many mistakes that all the options left to

(01:29:24):
you are terrible. And so you said, well, was it
necessary to ally with Stalin? It's like, well, it's very
difficult to second guess the trajectory of something as complex
as World War Two, but we could say casually, at least,
as Westerners have in general, that that alliance was necessary. Now,
I think the mistake that the West made in the

(01:29:45):
aftermath of World War Two was in not dealing as
forthrightly with the catastrophes of communism as an ideology as
we did with fascism. And that's especially true of the
intellectuals and the universities. I mean it was. It's very
common when I was teaching both at Harvard and at
the University of Toronto, for the students in my personality

(01:30:06):
class where we studied Solshnitzen, who's actually an existential psychologist
in many ways and a deep one, none of them
knew anything about the Soviet atrocities. None of them knew
anything about what happened in Ukraine and the death of
six million productive people. Had no idea that the communists
killed tens of millions of people in the aftermath of

(01:30:28):
the Russian Revolution.

Speaker 1 (01:30:30):
They know even less about MAO and the Great.

Speaker 2 (01:30:32):
Yeah, right right, which some estimates are one hundred million people.
Now you know, when your error bars are in the
tens of millions, well, that's a real indication of a cataclysm.
And nobody knows how many people died from direct oppression
or indirect in the Soviet Union. Twenty million, it seems
like a reasonable estimate. Soulschnitzen's upper bound was higher than that.

Speaker 1 (01:30:54):
And how do you measure the intellectual output that was
suppressed and killed off? The number of intellectuals, artists and
writers that were put.

Speaker 2 (01:31:05):
In well in deductive farmers for that matter, and anyone
who was willing to tell the truth right, absolutely, so, yeah, catastrophic.
And so I think the West's failure wasn't so much
allying with Stalin. I mean, it was Douglas MacArthur who
wanted to continue. He thought we should just take the
Soviets out after the Second World War, and they removed

(01:31:29):
him from any position of authority where such a thing
might be made possible. And people were tired. But was
MacArthur wrong, Well, he certainly wasn't wrong in his insistence
that Stalin was as big a monster as Hitler or bigger.
So the valorization of the leftist proclivity, the radical leftist proclivity,

(01:31:54):
is the sin of the West, I think more intensely
than allying with Stalin.

Speaker 1 (01:32:00):
Nuanced topic. But if you look at the modern day
and the threat of communism Marxism in the United States,
to me, it's disrespectful to the atrocities of the twentieth
century to call somebody like Kamala Harris a communist. But
I see the sort of escalation of the extremness of

(01:32:23):
language being used. When you call somebody like Donald Trump
a fascist, then it makes total sense to them use
similar extreme terminology for somebody like Kamala Harris. But maybe
I could ask your evaluation if you look at the
political landscape today somebody like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris.

Speaker 2 (01:32:41):
Well, the first thing I would say is that I
think that viewing the political landscape of today as a
political landscape is actually wrong. I think it's not the
right frame of reference because what I see happening are
a very small percentage of dark tech trad personality types,
so machiavelian, manipulative, narcissistic, wanting undeserved attention, psychopathic. That makes

(01:33:08):
them predatory, parasites, and sadistic because that goes along with
the other three. That's about in the serious manifestation. That's
probably three to five percent of the population, and they're
generally kept under pretty decent control by civilized people and
stable social interactions. I think that their machinations are disinhibited

(01:33:34):
by cost free social media communication, so they gain disproportionate influence.
Now These people want undeserved recognition and social status and
everything that goes along with it, and they don't care
how they get it, because when I say they want that,
I mean that's all they want.

Speaker 1 (01:33:56):
So in the realm of social media you mentioned, yes,
But are you also suggesting that they're overrepresented in the
realm of politics, politicians and so on.

Speaker 2 (01:34:06):
They're over represented in the realm of fractious political discourse
because they can use ideas. First of all, they can
use let's say, the benevolent ideas of the right and
the benevolent ideas of the left, either one, and switch
back and forth for that matter, as a camouflage for
what they're actually up to.

Speaker 1 (01:34:26):
So how do you You've interviewed a lot of people,
and you have really powerful mind, You have a good
read on people. So how do you know when you're
sitting across on a psychopathe.

Speaker 2 (01:34:34):
I wouldn't say that. I do know. In normal social circumstances,
we have evolved mechanisms to keep people like that under control.
Let's say that you and I have a series of
interactions and you screw me over once. I'm not going
to forget that. Now I might not write you off
because of the one time, But if it happens three times,
it's like we're not going to play together anymore. And

(01:34:54):
in normal times, most of our social networks are and interacting.
So like, if you rip me off three times and
I noted that, I'm going to tell everybody I know,
and they're going to tell everybody they know, and soon
everyone will know and that's the end of your tricks.

(01:35:15):
But that assumes that we know who you are and
we're in continual communication. Well all of that's gone online.
So anonymity does that, and so does the amplification of
emotional intensity by the social media platforms and their algorithms.

(01:35:35):
I think what we're doing, this is happening on Twitter continually,
is we're giving the five percent of psychopaths a radically
disproportionate voice. And what they're doing is there's a bunch
of them on the left and they're all, we're so compassionate,
and there's a bunch of them on the right and
at the moment they're all, we're so Christian and free
speech orient it's like, no, you're not. You're in narcissistic

(01:35:57):
psychopaths and that's your camouflage, and you hide behind your anonymity,
and you use fractious and divisive language to attract fools
and to elevate your social status and your clout, and
not only that, to gain what would you say, satisfaction
for your sadistic impulses.

Speaker 1 (01:36:19):
See, the problem is it's hard to tell who is
the psychopath and who is a heterodox truth seeker.

Speaker 2 (01:36:30):
Yeah. Well, if you were charitable about Tucker Carlson's recent interview,
you'd say that was exactly the conundrum he faced. And
it is hard. Like I've thought about, for example, interviewing
Andrew Tate, and I thought, I don't think so, And
then I thought why. I figured it's not obvious to
me at all that he wouldn't charm me. So I

(01:36:51):
knew this guy. Robert Hare. Robert Hare was the world's
foremost authority on psychopathy. He established the field of clinical
analysis of psychopathic behavior. And Hair was a pretty agreeable guy,
so you know, he would give people the benefit of
the doubt. And he interviewed hundreds of serious psychopaths, like

(01:37:11):
imprisoned violent offenders. And he told me in one of
our conversations that every time he sat down with a
violent offender psychopath and he had a measure for psychopathy
that was a clinical checklist, so he could identify the
psychopaths from just the say, run of the mill criminals.
Every time he sat down with them, they pulled the

(01:37:32):
wool over his eyes, and it wasn't he videotaped the interviews,
and it wasn't until later when he was reviewing the
videos that he could see what they were doing. But
in person, their tricks were more sophisticated than his detection ability.

Speaker 1 (01:37:47):
Well, okay, this is fascinating because again, you're a great interviewer. Well,
I would love it if you interviewed somebody like Putin.
So this idea that you are a fool in the
face of psychopathy just doesn't jab with me.

Speaker 2 (01:38:00):
I'm an agreeable guy, that's the problem. I'll give people
the benefit of the doubt, right right.

Speaker 1 (01:38:04):
But that's good because the way you reveal psychopathy is
by being agreeable, not weak, but seeking with empathy to
understand the other person, and in the details, in the
little nuanced ways that they struggle with questions, the psychopathy

(01:38:25):
is revealed. So from a we're kind of just to
separate the two things. So one overrepresentation of psychopathy online
with anonymity. That's a serious, fascinating problem. But in the
interview one on one, I don't know if the job
of a human being in conversation is to not talk
to psychopaths, but to talk I mean, like, how would

(01:38:48):
you interview Hitler?

Speaker 2 (01:38:49):
Well, I've you know, I've had very difficult clinical interviews
with people in my clinical practice, and.

Speaker 1 (01:38:55):
So what do you how do you how do you
approach that?

Speaker 2 (01:38:57):
Well? I really probably approach that the way I approach
most conversations, and it's something like, I'm going to assume
that you're playing a straight game, but I'm going to
watch and if you throw it the odd crooked move maneuver,
and then I'll note it, and after you do it
three times, I'll think, Okay, I see I thought we

(01:39:19):
were playing one game, but we're actually playing another one.
And if I'm smart enough to pick that up, that
usually works out quite successfully for me. But I'm not
always smart enough to pick that up.

Speaker 1 (01:39:30):
But see, here's the nice thing this, the one on
one conversation that's not recorded is different than the one
that's listened by a lot of people, because I would
venture to I trust the intelligence of the view and
the listener Yeah, to detect even better than you.

Speaker 2 (01:39:45):
Yes, And I think that's true.

Speaker 1 (01:39:46):
By the way, to detect the p sychopathy.

Speaker 2 (01:39:48):
I've had the odd interview with people that I wasn't
happy with having organized because I felt that I had
brought their ideas to a wider audience than might have
been appropriate. But my conclusion and the conclusion of my
producers and the people I talked to, was that we
could run the interview, the discussion, and let the audience

(01:40:10):
sort it out. And I would say they do so
I think as a general rule of thumb, that's true.
And I also think that the long form interviews are
particularly good at that because it's not that easy to
maintain a manipulative stance, especially if you're empty for like
two and a half hours. Yes, so you get tired,

(01:40:31):
you get irritable, you show that you lose the track,
You're going to start leaking out your mistakes and so.

Speaker 1 (01:40:38):
And that actually is the case for all the world leaders.
I would say one hour is too short, and something
happens with like two hour plus mark where you start
to leak and I trusting the intelligence of the of
the listener to sort of to detect that.

Speaker 2 (01:40:56):
Yeah, and it might be the intelligence of the distributed crowd,
And I mean that is what I've seen with the
YouTube interviews, is that it's hard to fool people as
such over a protracted period of time. And I guess
it's partly because everybody brings a different, slightly different set
of falsehood detectors to the table, and if you aggregate that,

(01:41:19):
it's pretty damn accurate.

Speaker 1 (01:41:21):
But of course, you know it's complicated because ideas of
Nazi ideology spread in the twenties. There was a real
battle between Marxism and Nazism. Oh yeah, and I believe
there's some attempts at censorship of Nazi ideology. Censorship very
often does the opposite. It gives the fringe ideologies power

(01:41:44):
if they're being censored, because that's an indication that the
man in power doesn't want the truth to be hurt
this kind of idea, and that just puts fuel to
the fire and.

Speaker 2 (01:41:57):
Also motivates the paranoid types because one of the reasons
that paranoia spirals out of control is because paranoid people
almost inevitably end up being persecuted because they're so touchy
and so suspicious that people start to walk on eggshells
around them, as if there are things going on behind
the scenes, and so then they get more distrustful and

(01:42:19):
more paranoid, and eventually they start misbehaving so badly that
they are actually persecuted, often by legal authorities, and you know,
it's down the rabbit hole they go. And so you know,
Musk is betting on that to some degree, right, he
believes that free expression on Twitter x will sort itself
out and be of net benefit. And I follow a

(01:42:42):
lot of really bad accounts on X because I like
to keep an eye on the pathology of the left,
let's say, and the pathology of the right, thinking, at
least in my clinical way that I'm watching the psychopaths
dance around and try to do what they're subversion. And
it's an ugly place to inhabit, that's for sure. But
it's also the case that a very tiny minority of

(01:43:04):
seriously bad actors can have a disproportionate influence. And one
of the things I've always hoped for for social media
channels is that they separate the anonymous accounts from the
verified accounts. They should just be in different categories. People
who will say what they think and take the hits
to their reputation anonymous types. If you want to see

(01:43:26):
what the anonymous types say, you can see it. But
don't be confusing them with actual people, because they're not
the same. We know that people are, We know that
people behave more badly when they're anonymous. That's a very
well established psychological finding. Will and I think the danger
to our culture is substantive. I think the reason that everything,
perhaps the reason that everything started to go sideways pretty

(01:43:47):
seriously around twenty fifteen, is because we invented these new
modes of communication, we have no idea how to police them,
and so the psychopathic manipulators they have free reign. About
thirty percent sent to the Internet is pornography. A huge
amount of Internet traffic is outright criminal, and there's a
p number around that that's you know, psychopathic, narcissistic, troublemaking trolls,

(01:44:11):
and that might constitute the bulk of the interactions online.
And it's partly because people can't be held responsible, so
the free riders have free reign.

Speaker 1 (01:44:19):
It's a fascinating technical challenge of how to make our
society resilient to the psychopaths and the left and the right.

Speaker 2 (01:44:28):
It might be the fundamental problem of the age, given
the amplification of communication by our social by our social networks.

Speaker 1 (01:44:36):
And so to generalize across psychopaths, you could also think
about bots, yeah, which behaves similar to psychopaths in their
certainty and not caring. They're maximizing some function they're not
carrying by anything else.

Speaker 2 (01:44:49):
Attention yet yeah, yeah, short term attention even worse. Yeah,
because you might you know, that's another problem. Ade like,
if the algorithms are maximizing for the grip of short
term attention, they're acting like immature agents of attention, right,
And so then imagine the worst case scenario is negative
emotion garners more attention, and short term gratification garners more attention.

(01:45:13):
So then you're maximizing for the grip of short term
attention by negative emotion. I mean, that's not going to
be a principle. If we were talking earlier about you know,
unsustainable unifying axioms, that's definitely that's definitely one of them.
Maximize for the spread of negative attention, negative emotion that

(01:45:35):
garners short term attention. Jesus brutal I just.

Speaker 1 (01:45:41):
I tend to not think there's that many psychopaths. So
maybe to push back a little bit, it feels like
there's a small number of psychopaths.

Speaker 2 (01:45:50):
Three to five percent is the is the estimate worldwide.

Speaker 1 (01:45:54):
In terms of humans, sure, but in terms of the
pattern of stuff we see online. My whole is that
a lot of people on the extreme left and extreme right,
or just the trolls in general, are just young people
kind of going through the similar stuff that we've been
talking about, trying on the cynicism and the resentment. There

(01:46:15):
is there's a drug aspect to it. There's a pull
to that to talk shit about somebody, to take somebody down.
I mean, there is some pleasure in that. There's a
dark pull towards that, and I think that's the statistic
pot and I think a lot of people, I mean,
you see when you say sadistic, it makes it sound

(01:46:35):
like some kind is a pathology.

Speaker 2 (01:46:37):
It's pleasure in the suffering of others.

Speaker 1 (01:46:39):
Right, But I just think that all of us have
the capacity for that. All must have the capacity for that.

Speaker 2 (01:46:47):
Some more than others, but everyone to some degree.

Speaker 1 (01:46:49):
And when you're young, you don't understand the full implications
of that on your own self. So if you participate
in taking other people down. That's going to have a
cost on your own development as a human being, Like
it's going to take you towards the Dostoevsky's notes from
Underground in the Basement, cynical, all that kind of loan,
which is why a lot of young people try it out.

(01:47:10):
You know. The reason is you get older and older
you realize that that there's a huge cost of that,
so you don't do it. But there's young people that
so like I would, I would like to sort of
believe and hope that a large number of people who
are trolls are just trying out the derision, no doubt,
and then so they can be saved. They could be
they could be helped, They could they could be shown

(01:47:31):
that there is more growth, there's more flourishing to celebrating
other people and actually and criticizing ideas, but not in
the way of derision, lol, but by formulating your own
self in the world, by formulating your ideas in a strong,
powerful way, and also removing the cloak of anonymity and

(01:47:51):
just standing behind your ideas and carrying the responsibility of
those ideas.

Speaker 2 (01:47:55):
Yeah, I think all of that is right. I think
the idea that that's more like do occur among young people.
That's clear, people as they mature get more agreeable and conscientious.
So I actually know that that what you said is true. Technically,
it's definitely the case that there's an innate tilt towards
pleasure in that sort of behavior, and it's it is
associated to some degree with dominance striving, And I do

(01:48:17):
think it's true, as you pointed out, that many of
the people who are toying with that pattern can be
socialized out of it. In fact, maybe most most people,
even the repeat criminal types, tend to desist in their
late twenties. So imagine that so one percent of the
criminals commit sixty five percent of the crimes. So imagine

(01:48:39):
that that one percent are the people that you're already
concerned with. They often have stable patterns of offending that
emerged in very very young like even in infancy, and
have and continued through adolescence and into adulthood. If you
keep them in prison until they're in there in the
middle of their late twenties, most of them stop. And

(01:49:02):
that might be the easiest way to understand that might
just be delayed maturation. So are most people salvagable? Yes, definitely.
Is everyone salvagable, Well, at some point it becomes first
of all, they have to want to be salvaged. That's
a problem. But then it also becomes something like, well,

(01:49:26):
how much resources are you going to vote to that Like,
the farther down the rabbit hole you've gone, the more
energy it takes to haul you up. So there comes
a point where the probability that you'll be able to
get enough resources devoted to you to rescue you from
the pit of hell that you've dug is zero. And
that's a very sad thing. And it's very hard to

(01:49:47):
be around someone who's in that situation, very very hard.

Speaker 1 (01:49:50):
And it seems that it's more likely that the leaders
of movements are going to be psychopaths, and the followers
of movements are going to be the people that we're
mentioning that are kind of lost themselves to the ideology
of the movement.

Speaker 2 (01:50:05):
Well, we know that what you said is true, even
historically to a large degree, because Germany was successfully denazified,
and it's not like everybody who participated in every element
of the Nazi movement was brought to justice. Not in
the least. The same thing happened in Japan. So to

(01:50:27):
some degree, the same thing happened in South Africa, right
and so, And it's the case for example, also in
the stories that we were referring to earlier, the biblical stories,
the patriarchs of the Bible, most of them are pretty
bad people when they first start out. Jacob's a really
good Jacob is the one who becomes Israel. He's a
major player in the biblical narrative, and he's a pretty

(01:50:50):
bad actor when he first starts out. He's a mama's boy,
he's a liar, he steals from his own brother, and
in a major way, he deceives his father. He's a coward,
you know, and yet he turns his life around.

Speaker 1 (01:51:05):
So be careful the leaders you idolize and worship. But
then it's not always clear to know who is the
good and who's the evil. Yeah, that's hard. You have
been through some dark places in your mind over your life.
Oh what have been some of your darker hours and
how did you find the light?

Speaker 2 (01:51:27):
Well, I would say I started contending with the problem
of evil very young, thirteen or fourteen, and that's been
the main that was my main motivation of study for
thirty years. I guess something like that. At the end

(01:51:50):
of that thirty years, it became more and more I
became more and more interested in fleshing out the alternative.
Like once I became convinced that evil existed, and that
was very young. I always I always believe that if
you could understand something well enough, that you could formulate
a solution to it. But it turns out that seeing

(01:52:14):
evil and understanding that it exists is less complicated than
a technical description of its opposite, Like what is good?
You can say, well, it's not that for sure, It's
not Auschwitz. How about we start there. It's as far
from Auschwitz as you can get. It's as far from

(01:52:35):
enjoying being an Auschwitz campguard as you can get. Okay, well,
where are you when you're as far away from that
as you could possibly get? What does that mean? That?
And it does have something to do with play as
far as I'm concerned, Like I think the antithesis of
tyranny is play. So that took me a long time

(01:52:56):
to figure out that specifically, you know, and so that
it was very dark, Like I've spent a lot of
time studying the worst behaviors that I could discover, abstractly
in books, but also in my clinical practice and in
my observations of people, and so that's rough More recently,

(01:53:18):
I was very ill and in a tremendous amount of
pain like that lasted pretty much without any break for
three years. And what was particularly useful to me then
was the strength of my relationships, my immediate relationships, my friendships,
also the relationships that I had established more broadly with people,

(01:53:42):
you know, because by the time I became ill, I
was reasonably well known and people were very supportive when
I was having trouble, and that was very helpful. But
it's certainly the case that it was the connections I had,
particularly with my family but also with my friends that

(01:54:02):
were the saving grace. And that's something to know, you know.
I mean, it's necessary to bear the burdens of the
world on your own shoulders, that's for sure, the burdens
of your own existence and whatever other responsibilities you can mount,
but that by no means means that you can or
should do it alone. And so you know, you might say, well,

(01:54:24):
welcoming the adversity of life as a redemptive challenge is
a task that's beyond the ability of the typical person,
or even maybe of anyone. But then when you think,
while you're not alone, maybe you're not alone socially, you're
not alone familial, maybe you're not alone metaphysically as well.

(01:54:45):
You know, there's an insistence, and I think it's true.
There's an insistence, for example, in the Old and the
New Testament alight that the more darkness you're willing to
voluntarily encounter, the more likely it is that the spirit
of Abraham and the patriarchs will walk with you. And
I think that's right. I think it's sort of technically

(01:55:06):
true in that the best parts of yourself make themselves manifest,
if you want to think about it that way. The
best parts of yourself, whatever that means, make themselves manifest
when you're contending actively and voluntarily with the most difficult challenges.
Why wouldn't it be that way? And then you could think, well,
that's yourself. It's like, well, are the best unrevealed parts

(01:55:29):
of you yourself? Well, no, there are kind of metaphysical reality.
They're not yet manifest. They only exist in potential. They
transcend anything you're currently capable of, but they have an
existence you could call that yourself. But like It was
Jung's contention, for example, with regards to such terminology, that

(01:55:50):
the reason we use the term self instead of God
is because when God was dispensed with, let's say, by
the processes needts you described, we just found the same
thing deep within the instinctive realm. Let's say we've founded
at the bottom of the things instead of at the top.
It's like it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter fundamentally. What

(01:56:10):
matters is whether or not that's a reality. And I
think it's the fundamental reality, because I do think that
the deeper you delve into things. This is what happens
to Moses when he encounters the burning bush. So Moses
is just going about his life. He's a shepherd, he's
an adult, he has wives, he has children, he has responsibilities.

(01:56:34):
He's left his home and he's established himself, and so
things are pretty good for Moses. And then he's out
by Mount Horeb in that story. But it's the central
mountain of the world. It's the same mountain as Sinai,
which is the place where Heaven and Earth touch, and
he sees something that grabs his attention. Right, that's the
burning bush, and bush is a tree that's life. That's

(01:56:56):
the tree of life, and the fact that it's on
fire is that's life exaggerated, because everything that's alive is
on fire. And so what calls to Moses is like
the spirit of being itself and it tracks him off
the beaten track and he decides to go investigate. So
Moses is everyone who goes off the beaten track to investigate.

(01:57:16):
And so as he investigates, he delves more and more
deeply until he starts to understand that he's now walking
on sacred ground. So he takes off his shoes, and
that's a symbolic reference of identity transformation. He's no longer
walking the same path, he no longer has the same identity.

(01:57:37):
He's in a state of flux. And that's when what
happens is that he continues to interact with this calling,
and Moses asks what it is that's being revealed, and
God says, I'm the spirit of being itself. That's basically
the answer. I am what I am. It's a more
complex utterance than that, I am what I will be,

(01:57:59):
I am what was becoming. It's all of that at
the same time. It's the spirit of being that's speaking
to him the spirit of being and becoming, and it
tells Moses that he now because he's delved so deeply
into something so compelling, his identity is transformed and he's
become the leader who can speak truth to power. And
so he allies himself with his brother Aaron, who's the

(01:58:20):
political arm and who can communicate, and he goes back
to Egypt to confront the tyrant. And that's an indication
of that idea that if you wrestle with life properly,
that the spirit of being and becoming walks with you.
And it's like, how can that not be true, because

(01:58:41):
the contrary would be that there would be no growth
in challenge. Well, that's you have to be infinitely nihilistic
to believe that.

Speaker 1 (01:58:51):
It's obvious. But it's also just fascinating that hardship is
the thing that is of being the catalyst for delving deeply.

Speaker 2 (01:59:02):
It's hardship voluntarily undertaken well, and it's crucially true. Look,
if you bring someone into therapy, let's say they're afraid
of elevators, and you trick them into getting near an elevator,
you'll make them worse. But if you negotiate with them
so that they voluntarily move towards the elevator on their

(01:59:23):
own recognizance, they'll overcome their fear and they become generally braver.
But it has to be voluntary.

Speaker 1 (01:59:31):
See, I got to push back and explore with you
the question of voluntarily. Let's look at nietzscheir Yeah, he
suffered through several health issues throughout his life, migrains, eyesight issues,
digestive problems, depressional suicidal thoughts, and yet he is one
of the greatest minds in the history of humanity. So

(01:59:51):
were these problems that he was suffering, arguably and involuntarily
a feature or a bug.

Speaker 2 (01:59:58):
That's a good question to say. Thing happens in the
story of Job because Job is a good man. God
himself admits it, and that Satan comes along and says
to God, I see you're pretty proud of your your
man there, Job. God says, yeah, he's doing pretty well,
and Satan says, I think it's just because things are
easy for him. Let me have a crack at him

(02:00:19):
and see what happens. And God says, yeah, I think
you're wrong. Do your worst right. And that's how people
feel when those slings and arrows come at them. Let's say,
like Nietzsche, well, Job's response to that. Now, the story
is set up so that what befalls Job is actually
quite arbitrary, right, these catastrophes that you're describing. The volunteerism
in Job is his refusal to despair even in the

(02:00:41):
face of that adversity, and that seems like something like
an expression of voluntary free will. He refuses to lose faith.
And the way the story ends is that Job gets
everything back and more. And you know, so that's a
dissent and assets story, and a cynic might say, well,
the ends don't justify the means, and I would say

(02:01:01):
fair enough, But that's a pretty shallow interpretation of the story.
What it indicates instead is that if you're fortunate, because
let's not forget that, and you optimize your attitude even
in the face of adversity, that it's not infrequently the
case that your fortunes will reverse, you know, And I've

(02:01:22):
found that in many situations, the journalists whose whose goal
was most malicious in relationship to me, who were most
concerned with improving their own what would you say, fostering

(02:01:43):
their own notoriety and gaining social status at my expense.
Were the ones who did me the greatest favor. Those
were the interviews that went viral, and so that's interesting,
you know, because they were definitely the places where the
most disaster was at hand. And I felt that in
the aftermath every time that happened, my whole family was

(02:02:05):
destabilized for like two months because things. It wasn't obvious
at all which way the dice.

Speaker 1 (02:02:12):
Were gonna roll, but you leaned into that. So in
a sense that there's this kind of transformation from the
involuntary to the voluntary, basically saying bring it on. That
act of bring it on turns the hardship involuntary hardship
into voluntary hardship.

Speaker 2 (02:02:29):
Well, not necessarily, let's say, but you could say that's
your best bet. Well, you know, I'm never going to
say that you can transcend all catastrophe with the right attitude,
because that's just too much to say. But I could
say that in a dire situation, there's always an element

(02:02:53):
of choice, and if you make the right choices, you
improve the degree you improve your chances of success to
the maximal possible degree.

Speaker 1 (02:03:05):
It might be too much to say, but nevertheless could
be true. Victor Frankel Marcus Aurelius.

Speaker 2 (02:03:14):
Well, that's what the resurrection story proclaims, is that you know,
even under the darkest imaginable circumstances, the fundamental finale is
the victory of the good, and that seems to me
to be true.

Speaker 1 (02:03:33):
Do you ever regrets when you look back at your
life in the full analysis of it.

Speaker 2 (02:03:40):
Well, as I said, I was very ill for about
three years, and it was seriously brutal, like every this
is no lie, Every single minute of that three years
was worse than any single time I'd ever experienced in
my entire life up to that.

Speaker 1 (02:03:55):
So that was rough, was the roughest. The physical psychological pain,
just little pain, yep. Yeah, I was walking like ten
to twelve miles a day, rain or shine, winter, didn't matter,

(02:04:16):
not good. And it was worse than.

Speaker 2 (02:04:20):
That because as the day progressed, my pain levels would
fall until by ten eleven at night, when I was
starting to get tired, I was approaching what would you say,

(02:04:40):
I was approaching something like an ordinary bad day. But
as soon as I went to sleep, then the clock
was reset and all the pain came back. And so
it wasn't just that I was in pain, it was
that sleep itself became an enemy. And that's really rough, man,
because sleep is where you take refuge. You know, you're

(02:05:02):
worn out, you're tired, and you go to sleep and
you wake up, and it's generally it's something approximating a
new day. This was like scizifus on steroids, and that
it was very difficult to maintain hope in that, because
I would do what I could, Like there were times
when it took me like an hour and a half
in the morning to stand up, and so I do

(02:05:24):
all that and more or less put myself back into
something remotely resembling human by the end of the day,
and then I knew perfectly well exhausted, if I fell asleep,
that I was going to be right at the bottom
of the bloody hill again. And so after a couple
of years of that, it was definitely the fact that
I had a family that carried me through that.

Speaker 1 (02:05:45):
What did you learn about yourself, about yourself and about
the human mind from that? From all of those days.

Speaker 2 (02:05:55):
Well, I think I learned more gratitude for the people
I had around me, and I learned how fortunate I
was to have that and how crucial that was. My
wife learned something similar. She was diagnosed with a form
of cancer that, as far as we know, killed every
single person who ever had it except her. It's quite rare,

(02:06:19):
and her experience was that what really gave her hope
and played at least a role in saving her was
the realization of the depth of love that her son
in particular had for her. And that says nothing about
her relationship with Mikaela. With her daughter, it just so
happened that it was the revelation of that love that

(02:06:43):
made Tammy understand the value of her life in a
way that she wouldn't have realized of her own. Accord.
We're very, very there's no difference between ourselves and the
people that we love, and there might be no difference
between ourselves and everyone everywhere, but we can at least
realize that to begin with, in the form of the

(02:07:04):
people that we love. And I hope I'm better at
that than I was. I think I'm better at it
than I was. I'm a lot more grateful for just
ordinary ordinariness than I was, because when I first recovered,
I remember I was first started to recover. I was
standing in this pharmacy waiting for a prescription in a

(02:07:26):
little town, and they weren't being particularly efficient about it.
So I was in that standing in the aisle for
like twenty minutes, and I thought, I'm not on fire.
I could just stand here for like the rest of
my life, just not being in pain and enjoying that.
And you know, that would have been something that before
that would have been you know, I would have been

(02:07:47):
impatient and raring to go because I didn't have twenty
minutes to stand in the middle of an aisle. And
I thought, well, you know, if you're just standing there
and you're not on fire, things are a lot better
than they might be. And I certainly I know that,
and I think I remembered almost all the time.

Speaker 1 (02:08:04):
You gain a greater ability to appreciate the mundane moments
of life.

Speaker 2 (02:08:09):
Yeah, definitely the miracle of the mundane, right, Yeah. I
think Nietzsche had that because he was very ill, and
so I suspect he had it. You know, him, he
was regarded by the inhabitants of the village that he
lived in near the end of his life as something

(02:08:30):
approximating a saint. He apparently conducted himself very admirably despite
all his suffering.

Speaker 1 (02:08:37):
You know, but that still there's this tension, as there
is in much of Nietzsche's work, between the miracle of
the mundane, appreciating the miracle of the mundane versus fearing
the tyranny of the mediocre.

Speaker 2 (02:08:53):
It's more than mediocre and resentful.

Speaker 1 (02:08:55):
Yes, but that's you giving him a pass or.

Speaker 2 (02:08:59):
Seeing the bell fair enough.

Speaker 1 (02:09:01):
You don't know, there's a kind of I mean, the
tyranny of the mediocre. I always hated this idea that
some people are better than others, and I understand it,
but it's a dangerous idea.

Speaker 2 (02:09:12):
This is why I like the story of Cain and Abel.
I would say, because Cain is mediocre. But that's because
he refuses to do his best. It's not something intrinsic
to him. And I actually think that's the right formulation,
because you know, I had people in my clinical practice
who were They were lost in many dimensions from the

(02:09:35):
perspective of comparison. One woman I remember in particular, who man.
She had a lot to contend with. She was not educated,
she was not intelligent, She had a brutal family like
terrible history of psychiatric hospitalization, and when I met her

(02:09:59):
at a hospital, she was an outpatient from the psychiatric ward,
and she had been in there with people that she
thought were worse off than her, and they were and
that was a long way down. That was like Dante's
Inferno leveled down. It was a long term psychiatric inpatient ward.

(02:10:21):
Some of the people had been there for thirty years.
It made One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest look like
a romantic comedy. And she had come back to see
if she could take some of those people for a
walk and was trying to find out how to get
permission to do it. And so, you know, better than

(02:10:44):
other people. Some people are more intelligent, some people are
more beautiful, some people are more athletic. Maybe it's possible
for everyone at all levels of attainment to strive towards
the good. And maybe those talent that are given to
people unfairly don't privilege them in relationship to their moral conduct.

(02:11:05):
And I think that's true. There's no evidence, for example,
that there's any correlation whatsoever between intelligence and morality. You're
not better because you're smart, And what that also implies
is if you're smart, you can be a lot better
at being worse.

Speaker 1 (02:11:22):
I think for myself, I'm just afraid of dismissing people
because of my perception of them.

Speaker 2 (02:11:32):
Yeah, well, that's why we have that metaphysical presumption that
everybody's made in the image of God. Right, despite that
immense diversity of a parent ability, there's that underlying metaphysical
assumption that, yeah, we all vary in our perceived and
actual utility in relationship to any proximal goal. But all

(02:11:53):
of that's independent of the question of axiomatic worth, and
that preposterous is that no appears to be. It seems
to me that societies that accept it as a fundamental
axiomatic presumption are always the societies that you'd want to
live in if you had a choice, And that, to
me is an existence proof for the utility of the presumption.

(02:12:16):
And also, you know, if you treat people like that
in your life, every encounter you have, you make the
assumption that it's an assumption of what would it's radical
equality of worth despite individual variance and ability something like that. Man,
your interactions go way better. I mean, everyone wants to

(02:12:37):
be treated that way. Look, here's the developmental sequence for you,
naive and trusting, hurt and cynical. Okay, well, it's hurt
and cynical, better than naive and trusting. It's like, yeah,
probably is that where it ends? How about cynical and
trusting as step three? Right? And then the trust becomes courage.

(02:13:02):
It's like, yeah, I'll put my hand out for you,
but it's not because I'm a fool. And I think
that's right, because that's the reistantiation of that initial trust,
right that makes childhood magical and paradiseal. But it's the
admixture of that with wisdom. It's like, yeah, you know,
we could be we could walk together uphill, but that

(02:13:27):
doesn't mean and I'll presume that that's your aim, but
that doesn't mean that I'm not going to watch.

Speaker 1 (02:13:34):
What's a better life cynical and safe or hopeful and
vulnerable to be hurt?

Speaker 2 (02:13:42):
Oh, you can't dispense with vulnerable to be hurt. That's
the other realization. It's like, you're going to stake your
life on something. You could stake your life on security,
but it's not going to help. You don't have that option.

Speaker 1 (02:13:55):
So what do you do when you're betrayed ultimately by
some people you come across.

Speaker 2 (02:14:02):
Grieve and look elsewhere, do what you can to forgive
and not least so you lighten your own burden, maybe
do what you can to help the person who betrayed you.
And if that all proves impossible, then wash your hands

(02:14:23):
of it and move on to the next adventure.

Speaker 1 (02:14:27):
And do it again. Yeah, yeah, boy, this life something else.
So we've been talking about some heavy, difficult topics, and
you've talked about truth in your Nietzsche lectures and elsewhere.
When you think, when you write, when you speak, how
do you find what is true? You know? Hemingway said,

(02:14:48):
all you have to do is write one true sentence.
How do you do that?

Speaker 2 (02:14:53):
Well, I would say first that you practice that. It's
like that question is something and Hemingway knew this at
least to some degree, and he certainly wrote about it
is that you have to orient your life upward as
completely as you can, because otherwise you can't distinguish between
truth and falsehood. It has to be a practice. And and

(02:15:14):
for me, I started to become serious about that practice
when I realized that it was individual. It was the
immorality of the individual, the resentful, craven, deceitful immorality of
the individual that led to the terrible atrocities that humans
engage in that make us doubt even our own worth.

(02:15:35):
I became completely convinced of that, that the fundamental root
cause of evil, let's say, wasn't economic or sociological, that
it was spiritual, just psychological, and that if that was
the case, you had an existential responsibility to aim upward
and to tell the truth, and that everything depends on that.

(02:15:58):
And I became convinced of that. And so then look,
you set your path with your orientation. That's how your
perceptions work. As soon as you have a goal, a
pathway opens up to you and you can see it,
and the world divides itself into obstacles and things that
move you forward. And so the pathway that's in front

(02:16:19):
of you depends on your aim. The things you perceive
are concretizations of your aim. If your aim is untrue,
then you won't be able to tell the difference between
truth and falsehood. And you might say, well, how do
you know your aim is true? It's like, well, you
course correct continually and you can aim towards the ultimate.
Are you ever sure that your aim is the right direction?

(02:16:40):
You become increasingly accurate in your apprehension.

Speaker 1 (02:16:45):
Is it like part of the process to cross the
line to go outside over to window to dip a
toe outside the window for a bit.

Speaker 2 (02:16:52):
Of course, that's what you do in part and play.
I was at the Comedy Mothership and every single comedian
was like completely reprehensible. All they were doing was saying
things that you can't say well, but it was in play.
What I'm trying to do in my lectures is I'm
on the edge, like I have a question I'm trying
to address and I'm trying to figure out I don't

(02:17:13):
know where the conversation is going, truly, like it's an exploration.
And I think the reason that the audiences respond is
because they can feel that it's a high wire act,
you know, and I could fail, and you know, my
lectures have degrees of success. Sometimes I get real fortunate.
There's a perfect narrative arc. I have a question, I'm
investigating it. It comes to a punchline conclusion just at

(02:17:35):
the right time, and it's like the whole act is complete.
And sometimes it's more fragmented. But I can tell when
the audience is engaged because everyone's silent, you know, except
maybe when they're laughing.

Speaker 1 (02:17:47):
But there's the kind of sense that you're arguing with
yourself and you're lecturing, it's beautiful. It's really beautiful and
powerful to watch that. Nietzsche does the same. There's contradictions
in what you're saying. There's a struggle what you're saying.
But I do think that when you're doing the same
on the Internet that you get punished for the deviations.
You get punished for the exploration, especially when that explores
outside the over to the window.

Speaker 2 (02:18:08):
Look, if you're going to play hard in a conversation
to explore, you're gonna say things that costs, that are edgy, right,
that are going to cause trouble, and that might be wrong.
And that's another reason why free speech protection is so important.
You actually have to protect the right. Let's say, in
the optimal circumstance, you have to protect the right of
well meaning people to be wrong. Now you probably have

(02:18:30):
to go beyond that to truly protect it. You have
to even protect the right of people who aren't meaning
well to be wrong. You know, and we also need
that because we're not always well meaning. But I don't
you know, the alternative to that protection would be the
insistence that people only say what was one hundred percent
right all the time.

Speaker 1 (02:18:49):
I'm also I guess this is a call to our
fellow humans not to reduce a person to a particular statement.
This is what the internet to want to.

Speaker 2 (02:19:00):
Do, especially if it's the worst thing they ever said. Yeah, yeah,
because god, well, anyone judged by that standard is doomed
unless they're silent.

Speaker 1 (02:19:08):
But it also just makes you not want to play, yeah, right,
not want to uh, take sort of radical thought experiments
and carry out.

Speaker 2 (02:19:16):
So that's kind of the definition of a totalitarian state. Yes,
playing in a totalitarian state ever.

Speaker 1 (02:19:21):
But in this case it's an emergent one. Yeah, with
psychopaths roaming the landscape.

Speaker 2 (02:19:27):
Well, that that might be the general pattern of totalitarianism.

Speaker 1 (02:19:32):
Well, in totalitarianism there's usually want psychopath.

Speaker 2 (02:19:35):
Multi Yeah, but everyone well everyone else is complicit, at
least in their silence.

Speaker 1 (02:19:40):
Yeah. Does the study of the pathology of psychopaths online?
Where aren't you? Yes, definitely they will consider doing less
of that.

Speaker 2 (02:19:50):
Yes, yes, definitely, but you know, probably I experience most
of that on X But that's also where I find
most of my guests. That's also where I get a
sense of the zeitgeist, which is necessary. For example, if

(02:20:13):
you're going to be a podcast host, it's necessary for
me to make my lectures on pointing up to date,
to get a sampling of the current moment, you have
to be of the moment in many ways to function
at a high level. Is there a price? There's a
price to be paid for that, because you're you're exposed

(02:20:34):
to everything in the sense.

Speaker 1 (02:20:35):
And you can also oversample the darkness. Yeah, yeah, definitely,
and it can make you more and more cynical. Yeah,
well it's a danger.

Speaker 2 (02:20:43):
Yeah yeah. Well, Luckily for me, you know, I have
many things that counterbalance that. The familiar relationships we talked about,
the friendships, the and then also all of the public
things I do are positive. The lecture tours, for example,
which I'm on a lot, there are basically one hundred
percent positive. So I'm very well buttressed against that. That's

(02:21:09):
great archery element.

Speaker 1 (02:21:10):
As a fan in the arena watching the gladiators fight,
your mind is too important to be lost to the cynical,
to the to the battles with the with the abyss.

Speaker 2 (02:21:22):
Well, you have a moral obligation too to maintain a positive,
positive orientation. It's a moral obligation. The future is of
course rife with contradictory possibilities, and I suppose in some ways,
the more rapid the rate of transformation, the more possibility
for good and for evil is making itself manifest at

(02:21:44):
any moment. But it looks like the best way to
ensure that the future is everything we wish it would
be is to maintain faith that that is the direction
that will prevail. And I think that's a form of
moral commitment when it's not just naive optimism.

Speaker 1 (02:22:00):
Well, Jordan, thank you for being courageous and being the
light amid the darkness for many many people. And thank
you for once again talking today.

Speaker 2 (02:22:10):
Thanks very much for the invitation and for the conversations.
Much always a pleasure to see you. And you're doing
a pretty decent job yourself about their illuminating dark corners
and bringing people upward. I mean, you've got a remarkable
thing going with your podcast and you're very good at it.

Speaker 1 (02:22:29):
Thank you, Jan Thanks for listening to this conversation with
Jordan Peterson. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you
some words from Friedrich Nietzsche. I would like to learn
more and more to see us beautiful that which is
necessary in things. Then I shall be one of those

(02:22:50):
who make things beautiful. Thank you for listening, and hope
to see you next time.