Jordan Peterson, the world-renowned clinical psychologist and best-selling author, is here with us today to discuss censorship, the culture wars, the success of Sound of Freedom, and the role of the trickster in order to maintain order in a time where authority is melting, authenticity seems to be in decline, and people appear to be demanding new systems and their faith in the old answers and systems appears to be waning. In Here's the News, we talk to Jordan Peterson about censorship, Trump's charges and corruption, and more broadly, but we ve got a very special guest, too. Jordan Peterson joins us to talk about his new book, "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fucking Fck: How to Deal with Censorship in the 21st Century," which is out now, and it's a must-listen. Jordan Peterson's book is available in Kindle, iBook, Paperback, Hardcover, Audio Book, and Audio Book format. You can also get a copy of the book for free at Amazon, or download it for free on the Apple App Store or Podchaser, or wherever else you get your hardcover copy of The Hardcover edition, for $99.99.00. Here s the News: In This Episode: Here's The News: Jordan Peterson on censorship, Censored, Not Given a Fcking Book: How To Deal With Censoring, Not Giving A Fucking Deal by Jordan Peterson, Kindle $9.99, or buy it for $19.95, or use the Kindle $49, or Audible $99, and Audible 4999, Audible Free, or get an Audible membership for 49p for 49r99,99, Pizzazz for 49c, or 49r9599, Caff .99, RRP $99 or GIVE A FRIENDSHIP $49.99 & Audible is Free on Audible, or GOOGLECRY FREE Subscribe to Mysterious $99 and get a 2-piece of Audible for 4GB PODCAST only $99 + Audible 4GBR4R4V4R5RMSRP $49RRPRPRP is also available for 4 GBR4RPRP4RP4R8RRP 4RRP5RRP4FM4RRP3R4RLRP4S5R4S4R3R3S4S3R8V5R1V4S1R1R3V3R5S5S4A4R1P5R5P5S2R1A5R8A5S3S1S4C1AQR4A3S5A4S2S1A3R1S5C1S2A4A5A5P1S3A4C3S3C1V3S2C3A3AQC4AQS4QR5A3P5A6A4P3S6A5C5A1A4QP5P4S6S4V3C5S1QC1F1A7S4G3A6S3P4A6C1R8S4P5C3R9A4F1S1C1QS5P3A5QR8QP4QA4G1A6QS3QR3A7A3QS1G3R6A3C3E3R7S3G3S8A4E3A2A6R1QP3C4S
00:00:32.000I see that you have adorned yourself in the accoutrements of the harlequin.
00:00:36.000Is the role of the trickster necessary and integral at a time where authority appears to be melting, authenticity seems to be in decline, and people appear to be demanding new systems and their faith in the old answers and systems appears to be Waning.
00:00:56.000Are you unconsciously indicating something to us or very deliberately indicating something to us?
00:01:02.000Well, I don't know how much is play conscious and how much is it just something that automatically happens if you're conducting yourself properly.
00:01:12.000These crazy people at LGFG have made me all sorts of suits.
00:01:16.000And this one has a wooden tie, by the way, just so you know.
00:01:20.000And it's supposed to be symbolic of the Native American art that I've been collecting.
00:01:26.000These are like totem pole patches, essentially.
00:01:29.000And so I don't know, they make me these crazy suits, Russell, and it turns out I like them.
00:01:38.000JP, it's very curious that you have become, over the last five, ten years, one of the most, it appears, divisive figures in our culture.
00:01:48.000Certainly that's how your icon and image is utilised.
00:01:52.000And yet it appears to me that in numerous communities you are regarded as an elder.
00:01:57.000I feel like I've seen you talk about being called a rabbi.
00:01:59.000I know that you have interesting relationships with indigenous Canadian folk, or in the territory now known as Canada.
00:02:06.000Do you think that what we're striving for is a kind of morality, a set of principles that is transcendent of the current cultural divisions that appear to be defining our time?
00:02:17.000Do we need to find something akin to universalism to reorganize and reorientate our cultural conversations?
00:02:26.000Are we in danger of arriving at a time of such enormous fragmentation and divisiveness But it almost makes it impossible to establish systems of governance and consensus even.
00:02:38.000Well, the alternative to unity is conflict.
00:02:44.000Now, unity can become so tight that it turns into tyranny, and obviously that's not acceptable.
00:02:51.000But the problem with the continual emphasis on diversity that we hear is that it isn't accompanied by the obvious fact that if people aren't united by a vision, let's say, which is how you unite people properly, then they're divided, and divided people can't cooperate or compete peacefully, and their interests run afoul of one another.
00:03:13.000Now, what's happening on the Unity front, as far as I can tell, is that There is a clamor for unity, particularly on the side of the people who are fear-mongering with the apocalypse, and they're trying to compel a unity with terror.
00:03:32.000And to me, that's a hallmark of tyranny.
00:03:34.000I think tyrants always use fear to compel unity.
00:03:38.000What you need to do instead is to provide a unifying vision that people can adopt voluntarily.
00:03:43.000You know, when you said, when you posed that question, that I'm a divisive figure, but I actually don't think that's true, Russell.
00:03:52.000I'm a divisive figure online, but it doesn't seem to be the case in the actual world, because all the interactions I have with people in my actual life, in public, they're uniformly highly positive.
00:04:05.000And so I don't think simulacrum of the real world.
00:04:08.000In fact, I think it's dangerously demented in many ways.
00:04:11.000And it's giving us a false sense of reality.
00:04:15.000You know, it's a new sensory system, right?
00:04:17.000The whole net and our new means of communication.
00:04:21.000It's a whole new sensory and social system.
00:04:23.000And there's no reason to assume that it's actually providing a valid representation of the actual world, especially because it also seems to be highly gameable by narcissists and psychopaths.
00:04:38.000Plainly, it is being used to leverage, engineer and amplify division.
00:04:46.000There's no reason to imagine that part of the natural course of a free internet would be new confederacies, decentralisation of power, an end to the kind of gargantuan and centralist institutions, both state and corporate, that dominate our systems of power currently.
00:05:09.000I wonder, before we delve into this subject, which I know is extremely significant and important to you, if you might for a moment comment on the current attempt to indict Donald Trump and what he continues to represent for, you might say, marginalised people, but he's an incredibly popular and populist figure.
00:05:28.000Those of you watching this on YouTube now, we'll be on for about another five minutes and then we'll be exclusively available on Rumble.
00:05:35.000If you're watching this on Rumble, click the red button now and you can join us over on Locals.
00:05:39.000And again, Dr. Peterson, what do you think is the significance of Trump and his ongoing persecution?
00:05:44.000Do you think he legitimately is an insurrectionist and a criminal in the numerous ways that have been alleged?
00:05:49.000Or do you consider this to be a kind of distraction and an attempt to foreclose on the possibility of a legitimate and a powerful opponent facing Biden in
00:05:59.000Well, I read Victor Davis Hanson's book, The Case for Trump, which I would highly recommend
00:06:06.000to anyone who's interested in Trump as a phenomenon.
00:06:10.000And he pointed out, and I think quite rightly, and this is something for those who are sensible on the left to give some consideration to, that the Democrats, especially under Clinton, but it started with Obama, abandoned the American working class, regarded them essentially as deplorables, which is exactly the same thing that happened in Canada under Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh.
00:06:33.000And it's not as if people don't understand that Trump is a bull in a china shop, and I think Robert F. Kennedy is in some ways the same sort of character, but they're actually calling for a bull in the china shop because increasingly people don't trust the centralized, the overarching centralized Institutions that have become too gigantic.
00:06:56.000You made reference earlier to the fact that there's no necessary reason for us to assume that the internet communication system and information exchange system that we've set up would necessarily tilt towards decentralization and universalization.
00:07:24.000You know, we've seen that with online games.
00:07:26.000You know, some of those massive online games degenerated into absolute chaos because the rules by which they were constituted turned out not to engender a playable game.
00:07:37.000And we have no idea if the internet communication system we've set up is actually a playable game.
00:07:43.000Like, look, already we do know some things.
00:07:47.000About 35% of internet traffic is pornographic.
00:07:51.000And if you don't think that that's under the control of psychopathic criminals, you're a fool.
00:07:55.000And then there's absolute, what would you say, lawless West activity on the criminal financial fraud front.
00:08:04.000I don't think there's an older person in the Western world who isn't targeted once a week by criminals trying to steal their bank accounts.
00:08:12.000And then, so that's direct criminal activity of the obvious type.
00:08:17.000Then there's all the online trolls who do nothing but cause trouble and sow divisiveness in their cowardly manner and with their LOL culture, trying to do nothing but cause trouble.
00:08:28.000And we know from the psychological research that those people are much likely to have dark tetrad characteristics.
00:08:35.000They're Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and, because that wasn't good enough, sadistic.
00:08:42.000And we have no control mechanisms for their proliferation online, right?
00:08:47.000Face-to-face, people like that get shut down right away, but they have absolutely free reign on the net.
00:08:53.000And I think not only does that poison the public square in a terrible manner, but it also indicates to people falsely that we're much more divided than we are.
00:09:07.000Yes, it appears to me sometimes, Jordan, that anthropology and ethnographics suggest that we all live in manageable communities, where the kind of narcissism and sadism that you describe cannot thrive because of the way that relationships break down when you encounter personalities of that type.
00:09:33.000There is no ability to regulate a culture at this kind of scale.
00:09:38.000And I know that what you believe in, it seems at least to me, that you believe in new ways of decentralising power, both corporate and state.
00:09:48.000I wonder, are you saying something as significant as the The Nation Project has had its half, demi-millennia, and that it's time to review even the findings and the treasures of the Westphalian Treaty.
00:10:05.000Is this a time where we review the way that we organise cultures and society?
00:10:09.000Because it appears to me that the reason that we have these great gargoyles and demons occupying the public stage, vivid caricatures, A vile, lurid, and pornographic language, even outside of the erotic, is precisely because we are living in some outgrowth, in some exaggeration, in some unbearable amplification of the type of systems that we might live by.
00:10:36.000Industrialization, it seems, ultimately introduced a great deal of tyranny, as well as the miracles it delivered.
00:10:42.000Agriculture, perhaps the same could be said, but we have no contingency for the problems of scale that have been created by this new type of technology.
00:10:50.000And it seems to me that unless we introduce real measures, as you say, control mechanisms, that tyranny now is appearing to be inevitable without significant and organized opposition.
00:11:02.000So one of the things you said at the beginning of that was that when you extract relationships out of their local environment, You lose a regulatory function.
00:11:14.000You lose an implicit regulatory function.
00:11:16.000So imagine that, you know, you and I have had multiple opportunities to communicate.
00:11:21.000And one of the things, and we want to sustain that.
00:11:24.000So one of the things that we do while we're communicating, we might be trying to make our individual points for our own particular purposes.
00:11:31.000Hopefully we're trying to do something like investigate the truth, you know, mutually.
00:11:36.000But in any case, even if our own personal interests did creep into that, If we had any sense, our exchanges would be bounded by the realization that we're going to interact repeatedly for an indefinite amount of time into the future, right?
00:11:50.000And so that makes us instantly, the dyad that we form, that makes us instantly into an interacting and iterative community.
00:11:58.000Now, I believe that it's out of iterative interactions that fundamental morality emerges, and there's plenty of game theory that indicates precisely that.
00:12:06.000Now, see, what happens to psychopaths and predators and parasites is that they sacrifice the possibility of a long-term relationship for immediate gratification.
00:12:18.000And that's not good for them, by the way, because they tend to be very unsuccessful people, and they have to move from victim to victim very rapidly because people caught on to their games.
00:12:27.000But they're not bounded by that necessity of responsible, iterated interaction.
00:12:31.000You know, the same necessity that would govern you if you were in a long-term committed relationship, or the relationship that you have with your children.
00:12:38.000And it's out of that that morality springs.
00:12:40.000Now, if you eradicate that necessity, you disinhibit the psychopaths, and the predators, and the parasites.
00:12:48.000Now, here's why this is such a major problem, and it might be a deadly problem.
00:12:56.000The biological struggle is an arms race between parasites and hosts, and always has been, and it's such a profound race that that's why sex evolved.
00:13:07.000Sex evolved because there are creatures that replicate, even some lizards, that can replicate essentially by cloning themselves.
00:13:15.000So they produce identical duplicates of themselves.
00:13:17.000But what happens is the parasites can optimize for their physiology and take them out.
00:13:24.000Okay, so the reason I'm saying that is because the parasite problem is so deep and so profound that sex itself evolved as the method of replication to deal with it.
00:13:35.000Now, the online communication systems facilitate the parasites, and you don't need that many of them to take a society down, you know?
00:13:45.000Like, the real radical types who would rather dance around in the chaos and who are in it only for their immediate self-gratification, they're a very small percentage of the population.
00:14:07.000That is pretty powerful stuff, Jordan Peterson.
00:14:10.000Sex emerges as a solution to parasitic entities to introduce a new level of complexity that can outrun this parasitic mentality.
00:14:21.000But I have a question for you, sir, and it is this.
00:14:24.000What if more than enabling that 3% of the population that's psychopathic, we enable an archetype?
00:14:30.000A deep psychopathy, latent in our species, unable to access the mainframe because of the way that our societies have previously functioned.
00:14:39.000I know as a young Ian, you will be aware of these potent lurking psychological archetypes for which we are just utility, for which we are just vessels.
00:14:48.000And it has been said, when you merge with an archetype, you merge with an archetype the same way you merge with a tiger.
00:15:36.000Perhaps the problem is even larger than enabling narcissistic, predatory and parasitic individuals.
00:15:41.000Perhaps it somehow enables an archetype to function.
00:15:45.000For example, the rather hacky analysis that a corporation behaves like a psychopath because it doesn't have individual culpability or the kind of morality that would evolve in an individual.
00:15:53.000What happens if that is further charged by the type of technology that we're discussing?
00:15:58.000What if it unlocks something even more powerful than individual psychopathy?
00:16:04.000Well, you always ask the hardest questions, Russell, I would say, and that's very interesting.
00:16:10.000Look, one of the things that's characteristic of the biblical corpus, and the biblical corpus is the narrative that lies at the bottom of all our narratives, one of the things it insists upon is an archetypal battle between what's known in this symbolic world, let's say, as the hostile brothers.
00:16:28.000And the original Hostile Brothers are Cain and Abel, and they're magnified up into Christ and Satan as the symbolic narrative progresses.
00:16:37.000And you see this reflected in all sorts of popular culture tropes.
00:16:41.000You know, every superhero has his associated super villain.
00:16:45.000And those are all—you see that with Thor and Loki, and of course their gods as well.
00:16:48.000And you see this reflected constantly, say, with Batman and the Joker and Superman and Lex Luthor.
00:16:56.000James Bond always fights some supervillain, and often nested in a whole pit of supervillains.
00:17:01.000And there is a notion that's relevant to what you described, that there's a battle on the spiritual level—so you could think of that as the level of abstraction—between the spirit of Cain and the spirit of Abel.
00:17:14.000And the spirit of Cain, Cain is the man whose sacrifices are rejected.
00:17:19.000And there's an implication in the text that they're rejected because they're of second-rate quality.
00:17:24.000It's never made quite clear, but you know, everybody's sacrifices are rejected from time to time.
00:17:29.000You work hard, you do what you think you have to do, and fate doesn't deliver to you what you think you deserve.
00:17:36.000Now, you have two choices under those conditions, and one choice is to take a good look at yourself, check your presuppositions, reformulate yourself, allow part of yourself to die and be reborn, regenerate yourself and try again, or to shake your fist at the sky and curse God and become bitter and resentful and then murderous and then genocidal.
00:18:02.000That's the dual pathways that have laid themselves forward to human beings since the beginning of time.
00:18:08.000Now you asked if There's something archetypal going on under the surface that we're seeing the reflection of, and I would say, well, there's always been something archetypal going on.
00:18:19.000There's always been a battle between these two modes of existence.
00:18:22.000But what happens in the midst of a technological revolution like the one we're in now is that it happens way faster and at a much larger scale, and maybe the outlines even become clearer.
00:18:34.000People are inclined at the moment to think conspiratorially, you know, they say it's as if there's a cabal behind the scenes maneuvering in a particular direction.
00:18:44.000And I would say there are micro cabals now and then acting out this archetypal pattern, but the The conspiracy itself is actually a network of associated ideas that have an animating spirit within them that possesses people en masse, and they act in accordance with its dictates.
00:19:03.000If you read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, for example, one of the great things he did that was probably the fundamental contribution of his work was to show that the horrors of the communist regimes weren't an anomaly consequential to the instantiation of a potentially valid system, but the inevitable consequence of a non-playable game.
00:19:26.000And so, the communist system laid itself out according to a certain set of animating principles, and that turned into this genocidal massacre.
00:19:37.000The question is, so I know now, I'm writing a new book about this, I know now that the structure through which we look at the world is a story.
00:19:47.000If you describe the structure through which we look at the world, that's what a story is.
00:19:50.000That's why we value stories, because we need to know how to look at the world.
00:19:54.000So the empiricists and the rationalists were wrong.
00:19:57.000We cannot derive a picture of the world through mere reference to the facts, because there's one fact per phenomenon, and there's too many phenomena.
00:20:14.000And once you know that, the next question obviously is, well, what's the correct story?
00:20:19.000And I would say we at least know that it's not the story of Cain.
00:20:23.000But plenty of people are playing that out.
00:20:25.000Bitter, resentful, nihilistic, chaotic, you know, angry at the structure of existence itself for the implicit suffering, turning against humanity, well and the cosmos for that matter, in their vengeful anger.
00:20:39.000And the problem with that, I can understand why that's justifiable because lots of people suffer, but the problem with that is that it makes a bad situation into hell.
00:20:48.000And that seems like a bad idea if what you're trying to avoid is hell.
00:20:53.000Yes, yes, that is what I'm trying to avoid.
00:20:56.000We know that order rests continually upon chaos.
00:21:02.000It's been a recurrent and defining theme of your work.
00:21:07.000When you get the sense that the culture is being, beyond curated, censored, Organized and controlled by bad actors, it seems that you have a duty to oppose those actions and that telos.
00:21:26.000It's extraordinary to me to think that when you emerged as a sort of gifted or a from the world of academia, doubtless At the inaugural point, an iconoclast, but nevertheless framed within a quite limited and liminal space that you would emerge and unfold with so many germane arguments.
00:21:51.000I suppose your particular phenomena will always be alloyed to that.
00:21:55.000That is, in fact, what your phenomena is.
00:21:58.000How do you feel now that you're operating in a space where Some perspectives are censored on the basis that they are too right-wing.
00:22:10.000Some perspectives are censored on the basis that they are not medically sound.
00:22:15.000How can we have a framing where Donald Trump can be subject to these indictments, RFK, you know, your video of RFK was taken down, where you can't speak freely about the events of the last three years, even when you're using as your basis demonstrable empirical facts.
00:22:33.000How are you going to continue to navigate this cancel culture and censorship when it appears that legislatively now significant moves are being made in the EU now to penalise social media companies, you're aware of that of course, and the Five Eyes Nations introducing comparable legislation to impose further censorship.
00:22:53.000What kind of challenges do you envisage that we will face over the coming years and how might we oppose them?
00:23:00.000Well, I think that we keep doing what we're doing.
00:23:04.000You know, you and I and a number of other people, and people on a smaller scale, many people on a smaller scale, are trying to use whatever communication techniques they have accessible to them to stay one jump ahead of the people who would just as soon shut down free discourse.
00:23:22.000Now, and it's possible as well that the free discourse that we're describing, fractious as though it may be, and offensive as though it may sometimes become, is part of the mechanism by which we keep the parasitic predators under control.
00:23:35.000It's also part of the mechanism whereby we solve difficult problems without having to, you know, engage in real conflict with one another.
00:23:42.000Difficult thought is the alternative to war.
00:23:55.000I try to stay on top of the changing social media environment so that I can dance ahead of the censors, let's say.
00:24:02.000And I tend also not to apologize for things I've said if I don't think they were wrong.
00:24:07.000And so far, so far, you know, there's reason for me to be optimistic because people, the sensorial types who are irritated at me, have been trying to take me out for seven years.
00:24:19.000And none of that's been, it's been dreadful in some ways, but it hasn't been successful.
00:24:25.000In fact, I think quite the contrary, you know, there's an injunction that In the Gospels that you should embrace your enemy.
00:24:33.000And you know what that means in part is even to regard enmity as an opportunity to dance with it, you know?
00:24:41.000And there's some real truth in that, if you can manage it, you know?
00:24:45.000I mean, one of the things my family has learned is if we are subject to a particularly grotesque attack, and I would say the most emblematic of those was the attempt to cast me as Red Skull in the Captain America comics, you know, it's preposterous to the point of surreality.
00:25:05.000But we turned it into a productive joke, and that's part of that trickster mentality, I suppose, on the positive side.
00:25:12.000And all that happened were positive things.
00:25:15.000You know, it was stressful as hell when it first broke and unfolded, but the longer-term consequences were very positive.
00:25:23.000And so I think, Russell, I think we all could be secure in the knowledge that if we faced enmity with truth, And with the true desire to aim up, that even the worst of adversarial situations could be transformed into something that would further the enterprise.
00:25:44.000You know, you see this in Goethe and Faust as well.
00:25:48.000When he characterizes Mephistopheles, who's a figure, a satanic figure, he's the figure to whom Faust sells his soul for infinite knowledge.
00:25:58.000He describes himself as part of the process that always, what would you say, always aims at evil but ends up producing good.
00:26:07.000And so, I mean, that's a high level of moral standard, right, to embrace your enemy to that degree, to regard enmity itself as an opportunity to do good.
00:26:16.000But, well, if you're talking about archetypal realities, then you also end up talking about what constitutes the highest ideal.
00:26:23.000I mean, it's very hard to live like that.
00:26:25.000I mean, it's not like I don't get irritated, let's say, and sometimes worse than that, when these attacks occur.
00:26:35.000But you have to keep in mind what you're after.
00:26:40.000If one of these archetypal notions that we're attempting to understand is that behind apparent separateness there is a unitive force, and that it is benign, and that it is loving, Loving not, I don't mean that in an erotic sense, neither really in an emotional sense, but in that is the felt experience of unity.
00:27:07.000Then the idea that enmity, conflict and suffering represent the erosion of the edges that keep you from unity.
00:27:18.000And that in suffering there is sacrifice and there are, as you referenced earlier, deaths that have to be undertaken.
00:27:27.000Then I suppose this would represent a kind of embrace of the enemy.
00:27:32.000Do you sense in identity politics a further fetishisation of individualism that can no longer really be sustained.
00:27:42.000That rationalism has brought us to this point where all of our functions tend to be predicated on the service of our preferences and our aversions, that our individual likes and dislikes become our Qur'an, they become our religion.
00:28:00.000And do you feel, Jordan, that partly what you are trying to do is reintroduce Transcendent spiritual ideas to a cultural conversation that is bereft in them and is framed only really within the lexicon of materialism and the tropes of post-enlightenment philosophy that really doesn't embrace mysticism the way that perhaps it could.
00:28:24.000And within this idea around identity politics and it being a kind of the ultimate celebration of the individual that it has baked into it, kind of is preventative of unity almost in the way that it defines itself, Could you also touch upon this attack perhaps on nature, nature's self, and within that, masculinity?
00:28:45.000I know it's an idea you've talked about extensively, but in relation to identity politics in particular.
00:28:54.000One of the things that Carl Jung intimated near the end of the Second World War was that the fundamental danger of Protestantism as such was the continual fragmentation of the religious enterprise.
00:29:09.000And you see this with the multiplication of Protestant sects, let's say.
00:29:13.000And he thought that the ultimate extension of that would be that each individual, in some sense, would become their own church.
00:29:20.000And so when God identifies himself to Moses in Exodus, he says, I am that I am, or I am what I am.
00:29:27.000He identifies himself as the principle of being and becoming itself.
00:29:32.000Now, If you identify reality with your subjective experience only, you attribute to yourself that quality.
00:29:41.000I am the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes reality.
00:29:44.000But there's a weird twist in that, and it's one that I don't exactly understand, because The subjectivity to which all things are to be subordinated tends to be allied with an extremely narrow hedonism.
00:29:58.000And so the people who are pushing forward an identity politics seem to identify their own individuality with nothing more, let's say, than their immediate sexual desire.
00:30:08.000And I would say sexual particularly because so much of identity politics is about sexual attraction.
00:30:14.000And then you might say, well, it's a pretty strange theory of human existence that you are to be identified with one biological whim, let's say.
00:30:28.000And the unity that you're describing, I don't even think in some sense is metaphysical or transcendent.
00:30:33.000I think what it is, is the hammering into a higher order unity of the plethora of fundamental motivational and emotional systems that would otherwise manifest themselves as a pure local subjectivity.
00:30:48.000And if that happens, you run into the psychopath problem.
00:30:51.000Like, if you're only out, let's say you identify yourself with your desires, your immediate desires.
00:30:58.000Well, then you're going to treat everyone around you and yourself like a means to the gratification of those immediate desires.
00:31:05.000And what that will do is that'll destroy you in the future, because you're not giving your future self any allowance.
00:31:12.000You do terrible things now because they're pleasurable, regardless of consequences, and you treat everyone else as if they're lesser and subordinate to your whims.
00:31:23.000This higher unity, you know, it isn't less real than the subordinate whims.
00:32:59.000If sex has such an epochal role in the evolution of our entire species,
00:33:03.000surely then it is connected to this consciousness that is ulterior to manifestation and materialization.
00:33:10.000And therefore its role is almost archetypically significant.
00:33:15.000I also want to offer you this, if I may, regarding the Cain and Abel analysis.
00:33:21.000There has to be an ongoing tension between the assertion of our roles as individuals.
00:33:31.000I have to exist as Russell in the world.
00:33:33.000I have to know that it is Russell's mouth that I put food into.
00:33:37.000rather than the mouths of others on the most basic biological level, that I am indeed, that my entire reality is subjective, that is all I know of reality, and yet I am aware of my insignificance.
00:33:50.000Somewhere within us there is some fractal interface between our relative insignificance and our total omni-, if not omnipotent, omniscience, that all reality takes place within my consciousness, yet materially I'm borderline irrelevant.
00:34:07.000Perhaps there is something of this Cain and Abel tension here.
00:34:12.000I believe that if people don't have a felt and personal subjective experience of God, whether that's through Christ or the Prophet Muhammad or Buddha, or yogically, some sense of a self beyond self, or some sense of an entity beyond self, some felt experience of knowing that is not about what Russell wants and what Russell doesn't want, then we do become victim to this hedonism, A hedonic ideology that seems to assert itself in the absence of a more deliberate ideology.
00:34:44.000I've been thinking too of the distinction between bliss and ecstasy.
00:34:49.000Bliss perhaps offers us the idea of fulfilment.
00:34:55.000Ecstasy offers us the idea that my cup runneth over, that boundaries are being burst.
00:35:00.000This seems to me relevant with your hedonic analysis.
00:35:04.000So I say that when we strip away God and the possibility of God, then that subjective experience becomes God.
00:35:11.000That becomes the higher principle around which we organise.
00:35:15.000So there does need to be some new way of introducing to politics The sacredness, the sacrament, the idea, somehow the representation of this tension, that we are part of the divine, that we have rights, but we are not only our rights, we are also our duties.
00:35:36.000I know that's not a question, but I also know you'll have things to say.
00:35:39.000Well, okay, so there is a gospel injunction as well to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's, and you mentioned a reintroduction of the sacred into the political, and what has happened, as you also intimated, is that the sacred has collapsed into the political, And that means there are now sacred cows in the political, which is why we can't discuss politics with each other.
00:36:04.000You need to separate the sacred and the political, and the political has to be subordinate to the sacred.
00:36:09.000I mean, this is one of the most remarkable and powerful discoveries of mankind as a whole, is that The principle of political sovereignty has to be subordinate to the principle of sacred sovereignty.
00:36:23.000And the Christian idea, and this develops out of the Jewish tradition, is that the fundamental principle of sovereignty is, what would you say, is voluntary.
00:36:37.000That's what's at the center of the community, and that the highest is properly devoted to serving the lowest.
00:36:43.000That's an inversion of the, let's say, the classical notion of power.
00:36:48.000Might makes right, if I can crush you.
00:36:50.000And if might isn't the principle of sovereignty, you have to ask yourself, well, what is?
00:36:54.000And you could say, well, nothing, in which case you have a kind of nihilistic chaos, and then hedonism rules.
00:37:00.000And if there's something sovereign above power, then you have to ask yourself what that is.
00:37:05.000And that is exactly what the biblical corpus, by the way, is trying to sort out.
00:37:10.000So you see prophets, for example, emerging repetitively in the Old Testament, and they are people who What would you say?
00:37:17.000The events faith that the fundamental structure of reality is good, and that if you live in truth, you can bring about a new reality that's even better.
00:37:29.000Then they'll confront, let's say, the tyrant or the catastrophes of the natural world with that banner in hand and revitalize.
00:37:38.000And the biblical narrative is predicated on the idea that the Christian savior is the ultimate expression of that Developing spirit, right?
00:37:46.000The manifestation of that, the embodied manifestation of that.
00:38:03.000See Sound of Freedom, what does this mean, the success of this movie?
00:38:06.000Does it mean that you can now bypass the typical and former establishment models of promo?
00:38:12.000Does it mean that people are interested in stories that have a sort of a plain sort of Christian ethos?
00:38:17.000What do you think is the significance of this film and its success, Jordan?
00:38:22.000Well, you know, I was just in Hollywood two weeks ago and I met some stars there and they were older and very well-established people trying to make their way forward appropriately to the best of their ability and doing that well, I would say.
00:38:39.000But I really got the sense, and it was from other things that happened in L.A.
00:38:46.000And I know from talking to my friends in LA, and you know, I can't be sure that this is 100% correct, but that the only star now, for example, who can ensure box office success is Tom Cruise.
00:38:56.000And interestingly, Cruise is also one of the stars who's completely dissociated himself from the political.
00:39:02.000I mean, I know he's involved with Scientologists, and that's neither here nor there for the moment, although it might have given him somewhere to put his religious enterprise, you know, and kept him out of the political.
00:39:13.000But then you see that also happening at the same time as the writer's strike.
00:39:18.000And my sense of the writer's strike is that no one cares.
00:39:23.000And I think that system has collapsed.
00:39:26.000Now, you look at what happened with The Sound of Freedom.
00:39:29.000Part of that is people saying, to hell with the woke entertainment mob.
00:39:35.000We'll go watch this just because we're being told not to.
00:39:38.000But part of it also is the desire for people The desire that people have for a truly archetypal story.
00:39:44.000And whatever else you might say about The Sound of Freedom, it's essentially a hero story.
00:39:48.000I mean, it has political connotations, and it's grounded in the events of the real world, let's say.
00:39:54.000But fundamentally, it's, you know, one lone guy, supported by his dutiful wife, who's motivated by higher order principles, to take on the worst of the predators and the parasites.
00:40:07.000And so yes, people are dying for that people have always died for that story, like psychologically and literally, because it's the it's the right story.
00:40:15.000The hero stands up against the tyrant, right?
00:40:18.000The hero leads people out of slavery, the hero confronts the dragon.
00:40:23.000That's our, that's our, that's the intrinsic pattern of our instinctual being.
00:40:28.000And the reason we find those stories meaningful is because meaning is the instinct that guides us on that on that on that revelatory and redemptive pathway.
00:40:38.000And you see, this is where the atheist types get it so wrong, you know, because they tend, like the more literal Protestants, to assume that what religious practice is is the mouthing of a set of propositions.
00:40:51.000It's like a theory of the world, and that's not the case.
00:40:55.000It's a manner of conducting yourself, directing your attention, and acting.
00:41:00.000And then there's representations of that in imagination and semantically, but the fundamental issue is the actual pattern of action.
00:41:08.000You know, that's why the highest level of religious devotion in the Christian tradition It's the same in Buddhism with regard to Buddha.
00:41:16.000It's the attempt to act out the archetype in the confines of your life.
00:41:21.000And the offering there is that this is a strange offering.
00:41:25.000The offering there is that that's possible.
00:41:27.000It's possible for each person to operate as a center of divinity in the world.
00:41:32.000And I believe that I don't believe that there is a more reliable truth than that.
00:41:37.000And I also think that's true scientifically, by the way.
00:41:39.000Yes, it's beautiful that the word conduct obviously has those connotations of being a carriage for energy or for heat that you can connect to the source through conduct.
00:41:53.000Regarding atheism, tell us a little of your recent challenge.
00:41:57.000We did a video on it to Richard Dawkins, who we've had on the show, I've had conversations with.
00:42:02.000Do you think that he's an example of the reductive atheism and deliberate straw man atheism?
00:42:42.000Now, what Dawkins does is the same thing that Harris does, is that they're very opposed to the totalitarian proclivity, and rightly so.
00:42:53.000But they identify the totalitarian proclivity with the religious enterprise.
00:43:00.000Now, there are totalitarian proclivities within the religious enterprise, right?
00:43:06.000Because the most psychopathic tyrants will use the highest principles to justify their own self-interest.
00:43:15.000So the worst totalitarians are likely the ones who subvert religion.
00:43:20.000And that's rightfully objected to, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
00:43:25.000Dawkins and Harris both underestimate the necessity of narrative, irreducible necessity of narrative, and they don't contend with the fact of religious phenomenology, the religious experience as such, the instinct of meaning.
00:43:40.000Now, Harris has moved in that direction because he is a devoted meditator, and so he admits in practice that there is a religious enterprise.
00:43:50.000He doesn't like to concretize it, but partly that's because Sam knows perfectly well at some level that if he concretized his relationship with the divine, his rational mind would tear it to shreds and leave him bereft.
00:44:05.000I have been in contact with Dawkins' representatives since you made that video, and since Richard, Dr. Dawkins, and I have been bandying back and forth on Twitter, and there is some possibility that we will meet and discuss these things.
00:44:20.000I would like it to be a discussion, because this is not simple, and I don't think it's not the place where you want to have a defeat.
00:44:28.000I understand where Dawkins is coming from, but I think that See, he's such an interesting person, because his notion of meme is right on the threshold of the notion of archetype.
00:44:40.000If he would have pursued that, he would have entered the Jungian world, because the ultimate memes are sacred stories.
00:44:47.000Now, then the question is, does the meme bear any relationship to reality?
00:44:51.000And the answer is, well, it depends on what you mean by reality.
00:44:54.000And I know that sounds like a cop-out, but it isn't, because Memes that survive.
00:45:00.000You can make a perfectly reasonable argument that the memes that survive over the longest spans of times are the ones that most effectively serve the purposes of reproduction.
00:45:11.000That's a Darwinian argument which Dawkins should support.
00:45:15.000And I would say that the memes that have guided us, let's say the memes that are part of the biblical tradition that have lasted for at least thousands and likely tens of thousands of years, are the memes that have been selected By two processes of reproduction, right?
00:45:29.000The transmission of information, so the propagation of information as reproduction, but that have also facilitated genuine reproduction itself.
00:45:38.000And so I don't understand, I don't see how someone who's Darwinian in their thinking can avoid that conclusion if they take their thinking right to the logical end.
00:45:49.000Successful memes have emerged as a consequence of Darwinian competition.
00:45:53.000And so why would you not say, then they're adapted to the world, then they're microcosms of the world.
00:45:59.000Dawkins himself said that an adapted organism, he said this explicitly in a brilliant paper, An adapted organism must be a microcosm of the world.
00:46:21.000And then the question is, well, what's the story?
00:46:23.000Well, we've been trying to figure that out for Since we've been able to communicate thousands, tens of thousands of years, and voluntary self-sacrifice, the dragon fight motif, the bearing of the cross, the voluntary bearing of the cross, that being the precondition for redemption and renewal.
00:46:42.000That's all part of that system of ideas, and I think it's inescapable.
00:46:47.000Yes, there would have to be some concomitant magnetism for a meme to land, for a meme to imprint.
00:46:56.000It can't sustain its own ongoing randomness and simultaneously narrativize.
00:47:04.000Those two things, there's a juxtaposition in that.
00:47:08.000Another way of looking at it, you're absolutely right.
00:47:45.000So one of the things I've learned, for example, is that The instinct of meaning itself.
00:47:50.000It's a reflection of something the Russian neuropsychologist called the orienting reflex, the orienting response, which is the response that orients you to the emergence of new information in the environment.
00:48:35.000And I see absolutely no evidence in the relevant neuropsychological literature that any of that is less than biologically accurate.
00:48:42.000And I know the great literature Jeffrey Gray's book, The Neuropsychology of Anxiety, in particular, and Jaak Panksepp's Affect of Neuroscience.
00:48:50.000I've talked to many neuroscientists, What's his name now?
00:48:55.000He's the most cited neuroscientist in the world.
00:48:59.000He wrote a lot about emotional responses and entropy.
00:49:02.000I asked him specifically—his name will come to me—whether or not object perception was a micro-narrative, and he said, necessarily, yes.
00:49:36.000Yes, I like that because it suggests that consciousness is the prima materia of our reality, that consciousness is the baseline, is the fundamental frequency from which secondary phenomena emerge, that this is Genesis, this is the point of origin, this is what precedes that molecular explosion that grants us all reality.
00:49:59.000Is this the way that you might conduct yourself at the Peterson Academy, bringing together a variety of subjects to create a multi-discipline education?
00:50:09.000Would you house debates between yourself and Dickie Dawkins?
00:50:13.000Would you find me in some cyber corridor, in a mortarboard, in a Hogwarts scarf?
00:50:20.000Will there be inter-house competitions and Quidditch matches?
00:50:29.000What's it going to be like at the Peterson Academy, JP?
00:50:33.000Well, I think all of that would be great fun, you know, and as you know, we've invited you to participate.
00:50:38.000We'll work out the details of that as we move along.
00:50:40.000What we're doing at the moment is we're trying to find people who are great communicators, who believe fervently in the integrity of their ideas, and then inviting them to produce eight hours of content pertaining to what they would love to teach most if the restrictions were stripped from them.
00:50:59.000So, you know, we're trying to produce a diverse range of courses.
00:51:02.000Our first goal is to produce a Bachelor of Arts for people, an online equivalent to a Bachelor of Arts.
00:51:07.000I don't think we'll accredit the university because we have to deal with the accrediting agencies and that's so much of a bureaucratic nightmare that it would be fundamentally counterproductive.
00:51:17.000But I think we'll be able to guarantee potential employers that our graduates will be accredited in a manner that truly indicates their ability to learn and their disciplined conscientiousness and their potential creativity.
00:51:32.000And we want to walk people through a corpus of courses that will What would you say?
00:51:39.000Enable them to think more clearly and make them sophisticated players so that if they want to be successful in whatever way they define success, they're going to be armed with the tools that enable them to do that.
00:51:51.000And we produced a writing app, too, called Essay, Essay.app, that teaches people to write.
00:51:57.000And, you know, a cynic might say, well, I don't have to write because I have ChatGPT.
00:52:02.000And the proper response to that is, and this might be the motto of our university, Think or die.
00:52:13.000You think so your thoughts can die instead of you.
00:52:16.000You engage in combative dialogue so your idiot notions can perish before you act them out and suffer.
00:52:23.000And the reason you think, and the reason you write, and the reason you don't cheat when you do that, because if you don't think, you suffer and die.
00:52:31.000And so we would like to arm people with the best of thoughts and also with the skills necessary to think so that they can make their way forward properly in the world.
00:53:20.000That's maybe why you're willing to give a university $250,000.
00:53:22.000And so we're trying to set up a social media platform around it that will enable people to communicate about what they're learning, to aggregate together in their local communities, and perhaps to figure out how to come together now and then on a larger scale so that they can have some more of the actual, you know, bricks-and-mortar university experience.
00:53:43.000And so, you know, we'll see if we can manage it.
00:53:46.000But so far, We have had enthusiastic participation from our lecturers, and that's also partly because we treat them nicely.
00:53:54.000You know, one of the things that's really struck me working with the Oxford and Cambridge professors, because we have a number of them, is that they are so grateful to be treated Decently, that it's really quite heartbreaking.
00:54:07.000You know, it's like, we make them a decent financial offer, but when they come to do their lectures, like, we're actually really happy they're there.
00:54:15.000And we're pleased that they're willing to share our knowledge with them, and we treat them like they're worthy of respect.
00:54:20.000And all of the people that we've had come to lecture have indicated their interest to repeat the experience.
00:54:26.000And so we want to bring people together who want to teach, and we want to leave them the hell alone.
00:54:49.000I'm beginning to experience that independent media conflates with independent politics almost organically because the issues that you cover are essentially political and unavoidably political.
00:55:05.000Adding education to that now triumvirate It appears necessary and essential and a significant part of your modality of decentralization and your desire for decentralized models.
00:55:23.000There are people all over the world that are clamoring for high quality education, not least in the West, but also everywhere else.
00:55:28.000And the new technologies of translation also may make it possible, at least in principle, to offer what we're offering in a multitude of languages.
00:55:37.000And you know, and the translations are very accurate and very high quality.
00:55:44.000We're very much looking forward to doing it.
00:55:46.000We figured the eight-hour format seems to be about right.
00:55:49.000You know, maybe we'll bundle like two eight-hour courses together to make a single university credit, something like that.
00:55:56.000But, you know, obviously people can tolerate a three-hour podcast, and those are educational content.
00:56:02.000I think 30 hours, which is a standard university course, is actually too long for online provision.
00:56:09.000There's no reason not to break that up and to not overwhelm people with, you know, content that would require a devotion of time that they might not be able to manage, especially when you can aggregate courses together anyways.
00:56:23.000And so four two-hour lectures seems to be Maybe the sweet spot for the electronic delivery of educational material.
00:56:33.000You know, we launched this Exodus seminar on YouTube, and it's 16 two-hour seminars devoted to an explication of the Exodus story, which was a remarkable thing to participate in, by the way.
00:56:46.000And people are responding very positively to that, as they did to my series on Genesis.
00:56:50.000So there's definitely a hunger for high-quality educational material.
00:56:55.000It's also lovely to be—one of the things that's been quite delightful in some ways about no longer being associated with the university, even though there's parts of it I miss, is that when I'm lecturing, I'm only teaching people who actually want to learn.
00:57:10.000And hopefully this Peterson Academy will be set up that way, too.
00:57:13.000We'll only have teachers who want to teach, and we'll only be teaching students who actually want to learn.
00:57:18.000So that's an optimized play situation, right?
00:57:21.000And so hopefully there can be some joy in it, and some playfulness.
00:57:24.000You know, you referred to that as a possibility, and that would be Well, that's the goal.
00:57:30.000I shall set about designing my lectures even now.