#335： Exploring Archetypes With Jordan B. Peterson
Episode Stats
Summary
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto. He has spent his career studying human myths and archetypes, and how they can provide meaning in a world of tragedy and frustration. In this episode, Dr. Peterson discusses why ignoring or disregarding these ancient myths led to the rise of extreme political ideologies in the early 20th century, as well as the resurgence today.
Transcript
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Brad McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. The Epic of
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Gilgamesh, the Genesis creation story, the Bhagavad Gita. These are just a few examples
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of the myths and stories that explain human existence. Individuals like Carl Jung and
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Joseph Campbell have argued that while these myths sprang from different cultures, they all share
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similar archetypes and metanarratives. My guest today has picked up where Jung and Campbell left
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off and is making an impassioned case that the way to save ourselves from increasing political
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polarization is to become acquainted with these ancient human myths once again. His name is
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Jordan B. Peterson and he's a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto. But unlike many
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clinical psychologists, Dr. Peterson has spent his career studying human myths and how they can
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provide meaning in a world of tragedy and frustration. Today on the show, Jordan provides
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an introduction to the world of myths and archetypes. We begin our discussion talking about some of the
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big archetypes we see over and over again in stories across cultures and time and why they show up
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everywhere. We then discuss feminine and masculine archetypes in detail, how the hero archetype is the
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link between the two and the examples and examples of the hero archetype from around the world. Jordan
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argues also that disregarding or ignoring these ancient myths led to the rise of extreme political
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ideologies in the early 20th century, as well as the resurgence today. We enter a conversation
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discussing how these myths can help young men journey into noble manhood and talk about some
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of the books Jordan recommends young men read to learn more about them. While the subject may seem
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heady, this is an accessible and fun conversation filled with insights about how to live a flourishing,
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meaningful life. You'll definitely be thinking about these ideas after the show is over. So when the show
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is over and when you start thinking about those ideas, make sure to check out our show notes at
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aom.is slash Peterson. Jordan B. Peterson, welcome to the show.
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So I've had, you've been one of my most requested guests from my podcast listeners, and I've been
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following your work online, watching your YouTube videos, your lectures, listening to your podcast,
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because it's, you focus on an area that has fascinated for a long time, union psychology,
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psychology, archetypes, things like that. But I'm curious, like, what would you describe what you
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do? Because you're a clinical psychologist, but your work lately seems much more philosophical,
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existential. So if someone were to ask you, you know, at a cocktail party, what exactly do you do?
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That's a good question. I mean, I'd usually start with my professional identity. You know,
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I'm a professor at the University of Toronto. I'd tell them I was a clinical psychologist,
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psychologist. But what am I trying to do, I suppose? For a very long time, I've been trying
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to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make
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their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings. That's central to the clinical
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practice, of course, because when you see people clinically, they're often suffering from serious
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problems in their lives less frequently than you might think a consequence of mental illness and
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more often a consequence of the fact that things can go very badly in people's lives. And we needed
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positive meaning to offset that. And so I'm very curious about what positive meanings might exist to
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offset that. And I don't believe that ideologies are the correct answer.
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Right, yeah. And so what you've done, and we'll get into this bit about ideology not being the correct
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answer and why that is. You have been exploring myths that have been around in human history for
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tens of thousands of years, some of them, and trying to find out how we can extract meaning
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from them, what even us modern individuals can learn from these myths. So did this interest in
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myths and archetypes and things, did that start before your work as a clinical psychologist or did
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you work as a clinical psychologist seeing the problems that people have sort of existential?
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It really started, it started about the same time that I started doing my clinical training, although
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perhaps even a bit earlier when I was doing my undergraduate degree in psychology, I started to
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read while the great clinicians, you know, Freud and Rogers and Carl Jung and Abraham Maslow and people
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like that, the great 20th century clinicians. And I started to study Carl Jung and his ideas of
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archetypes. And the notion that people inhabit stories was very striking to me and that these stories have a
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structure and that there are great stories that elucidate that structure profoundly and clearly.
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And I found that very useful from a personal perspective, but also with regards to my clinical
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work. And then also theoretically, especially as I started to understand more about how the brain
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worked, I suppose. So it's a longstanding interest. It's tangled up too with the issue of ideology,
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because when I was doing my clinical training to begin with, I was also simultaneously working on a book
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I published in 1999 called Maps of Meaning. And Maps of Meaning was in part to an attempt to
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understand the relationship between people's belief systems and their capacity to regulate their own
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emotion, both positive and negative emotion, because those are separate circuits. And so all of those
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things were tangled together in my initial investigations into, let's say, narrative, and then deeper into the
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Right. Well, I think for people to understand what you do and kind of set the foundation for the rest of our
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conversation here, as you said, your work really has grown off of the work of Carl Jung. And you mentioned that
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Carl Jung had this idea of sort of these narratives, the meta-narratives that we all live out in some way and that
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they've been distilled into these stories that you see in antiquity, the Sumerians, the Old Testament, even in
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So for those who aren't familiar with Jung, I mean, I guess his big idea is that these narratives exist,
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but how did these narratives come into place? What was his idea? Like, why is it that all these
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cultures share these same stories, no matter where you go and no matter what time you're in?
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Well, Jung wasn't particularly clear about how they emerged. He made various attempts in his life to come up
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with a causal explanation. I mean, he attributed them to the existence of something he called the
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collective unconscious, which would be the deep structure of the mind that is shared by every human
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being. And you could think about that most usefully, I suppose, from a biological perspective, although
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it's somewhat confusing because it often seems as if what Jung was doing was hypothesizing the
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existence of inherited memory content. And he never is really clear, all that clear about how he
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formulates the concept of the collective unconscious, except to say that because we're all human and
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because we, and I'm paraphrasing, I suppose, because we're all human and because we all share the same
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biological platform, I mean, a platform that we share even with animals to a large degree, we tend to
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interpret the world in very similar ways. And those interpretations are often expressed in stories.
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Stories are descriptions about how human beings act, and our fundamental problem in the world is how to act.
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And so one of the most fundamental stories, for example, is the hero archetype. And the hero in the
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archetypal story essentially goes out and confronts chaos, and that's the indeterminate world. That's
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the world, the confusing, uncertain world, full of unexpected occurrences, dangerous, threatening, and
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also promising. The hero is the person who voluntarily confronts that and makes sense out of it and
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establishes habitable territory, let's say, a safe domain, a safe and productive domain. And in that
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pursuit, especially if it's done voluntarily, it's possible to find deep meaning. And that meaning is
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an expression of the instinct that guides us out into the unknown so that we can conquer it, let's say,
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and prevail. And I suppose part of that, there's an existential element to that, which is that in order
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for people to find the meaning in life that sustains them through the tragedies of life, they have to
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undertake a courageous and noble adventure, let's say, because there's nothing that gives life enough
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significance to justify it in the absence of that sort of adventure. And you might say, well, where did
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these stories come from? And I would say the answer to that is that because human beings are self
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conscious, and that's something that really distinguishes us quite substantively from other
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animals, we've been watching ourselves behave for a very long time and trying to understand what it is
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that we're doing, both when we're successful and when we're unsuccessful. We've created stories,
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extracted stories or derived stories over 1000s or 10s of 1000s of years that describe both the
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fundamental pattern of success and the fundamental pattern of failure. And those stories are encoded in
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great stories and myths, essentially, you know, so that the successful person is the successful hero who
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establishes order in the midst of chaos and sets up a domain in which he and his family, let's say,
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and the community can survive and thrive. And the unsuccessful is someone who fails at that and
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then perhaps even worse becomes embittered by that failure and turns against life and begins to act in a
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malevolent manner and a destructive manner. So the fundamental narrative landscape in some sense is good
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versus evil in the world of chaos versus order. It's something like that. And you see that expressed
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very frequently, for example, in video game structures. So because games and stories share a
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So as you were talking, it sounds like these narratives or these meta narratives or these archetypes,
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there's sort of a Darwinian thing going on, you talk a lot about survival and failure,
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and the stories that are useful for people to thrive in this world. Those are the ones that survived.
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And we still have them today because they are strange.
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Yeah, well, that's, I would say that that's part of what I've added to the Jungian corpus of
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thinking is I've tried to place the idea of the functional myth in a Darwinian context and take
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seriously the idea that our fundamental religious narratives, which are associated with these great
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myths, are actually evolved structures. And they've evolved at multiple levels. First of all,
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they're expressions of our physiological being, because we act in certain ways in the world as a
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consequence of the manner in which we're constituted physiologically. And our physiological
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constitution is obviously a product of Darwinian processes, like insofar as you buy the,
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the, by evolutionary theory as a generative, you know, as an account of the mechanism that generated
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us. So our physiology evolved, our behaviors evolved, then our accounts of those behaviors,
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both successful and unsuccessful, evolved. And as those accounts evolved, and we shared them,
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we also changed the landscape in which we were being selected. And so all of these things
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tangled together, but they tangled together in a way that, that embeds these great stories deeply
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within us, I would say, both physiologically and psychologically. But yeah, I think about it as a
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Darwin, deeply Darwinian process. Now, to me, the idea that the, that the world of experience,
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which is the world in which you act, let's say, not the world that you construe objectively,
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but the world in which you act, that's best considered as a battle between good and evil
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in a domain of chaos and order. And the individual is best conceived as the person who mediates between
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chaos and order. And we're doing that all the time. Whenever you're confused, you can, you confront
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chaos. And, and that's, that's a, it's a different way of looking at the world to think of chaos as,
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as a constituent element of experience. But it's very, very helpful because it helps orient you when
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you're in a state of confusion and when you're in a state of crisis, which is very common for people.
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And there's guidelines for that, you know, I mean, the great ethical guidelines are,
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well, they, they, you might say that you're entreated to act nobly, act with humility,
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act honestly, pursue beauty, pursue your vision, a vision of the future that would make things better
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for you and for the people around you. I mean, it's all a call, I would say, in some sense to noble
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action. And people are somewhat cynical about such things today, because they think of that as
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they try to reduce it to a set of rules and, and also think about it as arbitrary, but it's not
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arbitrary at all. It's the attempt of, of humanity to determine the appropriate path through the
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crises of life. And everyone needs to know that path, because everyone's life is rife with crises.
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So it's very, very practical. It's not abstract at all. I mean, part of the reason there's an
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injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you're in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty,
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your best weapon, let's say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps
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things simpler. And that's often extremely necessary. And it keeps your eyes clear, because if you exist
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in a deceitful relationship with the world, then you start to perceive it improperly and, and you warp
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your reputation and you damage your capacity to think because you've, you're not existing in an
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authentic relationship with yourself in the world. How could that possibly work? Assuming that there's
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such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything
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but fail? Now, you know, people think that they can use deceit, for example, and warp the structure
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of reality, because now and then they get away with it in the short term. And that enables them to
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generate the presupposition that that's an effective strategy. But, but it's not because things come
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back to bite you, always. So, partly what I've been doing is trying to extract out from these great
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stories and, and from the biological context in which they're embedded, very, very concrete,
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what would you say, suggestions about how people should conduct themselves in the world. And, and to
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try to emphasize how practical this is. You know, I just finished a series of lectures on the, on the
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biblical stories in Genesis. And for example, I spent a fair bit of time talking about the flood,
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which is a very common mythological story, the idea that there is a flood and that the creator of,
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of everything determines that from time to time to wipe things out. And that that's appropriately read
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as a description of the conditions of existence. You know, no matter who you are, as you walk through
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life, you're going to be confronted by catastrophes that have the possibility of washing you away.
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And you need to know how to conduct yourself in order to prevail when that happens. I mean,
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that can happen to you personally, you can get very ill, or it can happen to you in your family when
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a family member breaks down or, or dies or, or has something terrible happen to them, or there's an
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economic catastrophe in your family, and it can happen socially. And not only can it happen, it will
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happen. No one in the injunction to Noah, for example, or the description of Noah, because he's the
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person that builds an ark is that he walks with God. And that means that he has his moral house in order,
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and that his generations are perfect, which means that he has his family in order. And what that
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means is that when the crisis comes, he's prepared to deal with it, and can prevail. And that's what
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people need to know. They need to know how to do that, because the crisis is always coming. That's
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why the apocalypse, the idea of the apocalypse and the end of the world is also archetypal. It's because
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our worlds come to an end continually, in small ways, and sometimes in large ways. And so,
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in some sense, it's necessary to be constantly preparing for the apocalypse, because you're going
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to go through experiences in your life that will throw you for a loop and force you to either radically
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change or to, or to fail, and perhaps to die. So, it's, it's very serious business.
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Right. So, these archetypes, these, these apocalypses, they could be like losing a job,
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Yeah, well, yes, all three of those will, or, or you have a terrible divorce, or,
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yeah, it's those experiences in life where the fundamental constants that keep you oriented
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shift, and then you fall into the unknown. That's the underworld of mythology. You fall into the
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unknown and into the underworld, and part of that underworld can be hell. Now, hell is the part of
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the underworld that emerges when you're embittered by your failure, and you turn towards
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the desire to destroy. And everyone who thinks about this can, can appreciate that, because
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most people, at least if they reflect on their own experience, can understand full well,
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the negative psychological consequences of, of falling flat on your face. It's, it's not only
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that you fail, it's that you become bitter and turn against the world. That's a trip to hell for all
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That's for sure. Wailing and gnashing of teeth. Exactly. You know, and we, the, the fundamentalist,
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types tend to read those things very concretely, and to only project that out into an afterlife,
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say, or, or a purely spiritual world. And I'm not making any claims about, at the moment, about
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metaphysics or, or post-life existence. I'm saying that these descriptions pertain to psychological
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conditions that are always around us, right here and now. And that the mythological landscape is the
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landscape of human experience. It's not the objective world. And the landscape of human
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experience and the objective world aren't the same thing. There's no pain. Pain is not an objective
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thing. It's part of the subjective world of human experience. But it's, but it's, it's reality is,
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is undeniable from an experiential perspective. So, our, our materialist outlook doesn't do a good job
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of orienting us in the world because it doesn't tell us how to behave. And it can't. You know,
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it's the famous conundrum put forward by David Hume, that just, which is, you can't derive an
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ought from an is, which means no matter how much factual information you extract from the world,
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you're not going to derive from that an unerring guide to how you should act. And so, you might say,
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well, there's an endless number of answers to the question how you should act, but that's not helpful
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Yeah, that, well, that's what, yeah, you're right. A lot of what we're trying to do,
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and I feel like in our modern world, and in the world of psychology, particularly, the field of
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psychology, you have these individuals who are trying to show what the brain is like, and then
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from that, deriving oughts, right? Well, the brain does this, so therefore you should do this so you
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live a happy, flourishing life. And you're saying that that might not be that useful.
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Well, I'm saying generally that it's a technical problem in some sense that
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there's an endless number of pathways that can be derived from any set of empirical facts.
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And so, I mean, here's an example. I mean, should you spend more money on discovering a cure for
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cancer or on educating university students? Well, in some sense, the question is so complex that no
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matter how many facts you gather, you're never going to get an answer to it, because the answer
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depends on how many variables you're willing to put in the equation. And there's an endless number of
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them. And most decisions in life are like that. And so, you can't rely on facts to guide you. It
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doesn't mean you should ignore them. They set parameters. But in my estimation, there's a domain
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of factual knowledge, and that would be the domain of the objective world that's studied empirically.
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And there's a domain of moral knowledge, and that's knowledge about how to conduct yourself in the
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world. And that's the world of value. And it's in that world. That world includes emotions and
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motivations and the subjective states that characterize our existence. And in that world,
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those things are the fundamental realities. Like, from the perspective of the mythological,
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I would say there's nothing more real than pain. You know, from the material perspective,
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there's nothing more real than matter. But pain is what matters most. And even the word matter is an
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interesting word, because you have, on the one hand, the matter that everything is made of. And then,
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on the other hand, you have what matters, and how it matters. And that's the world of what's
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important. And that's different, but it still matter. And in the mythological world, what matters
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is what's important. The world is made out of what matters, not out of matter. It requires a very
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different orientation. It requires an orientation that also starts with the assumption that meaning
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is primary, rather than matter. So, this is where phenomenology comes in, right?
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That's what phenomenology is the study of, what matters.
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Yes, exactly. And I would say the viewpoint that I've been developing, although it has parallels with
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that work of Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, although I came across Heidegger well into the development of
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these ideas, but the parallelism is quite striking. Heidegger was also interested in trying to
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lay out a map for the world of human experience.
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So, you mentioned some of these big archetypes that we see throughout history. There's chaos,
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and then there's order. And then in between, you mentioned there's the hero who…
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The individual, anyways. And yeah, so the chaotic domain has two elements. There's a positive element
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and a negative element. That's usually symbolized using female iconography and representations. And
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it's because new things come out of the unknown. And so, there's an inappropriate analogous,
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there's an appropriate analogy at work there. It's the defining characteristic of the feminine is
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that the feminine is that out of which new forms arise. And the unknown is like that. And that's why
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we have Mother Nature, for example. You know, Mother Nature is what you go to investigate to discover
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new things. And it's Mother Nature because Mother Nature gives rise to new things. And there's a terrible
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element of chaos and the unknown, and that's the part of the unknown that will kill you or hurt you.
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And there's a benevolent element, and that's the part that will provide you with new information
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and new life if you're fortunate enough to… Well, if you're fortunate enough to begin with,
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but also if you're brave and honest and courageous enough to confront the unknown properly.
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And then in the orderly domain, there's two elements too, and that's usually masculine. That's the
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great father, the tyrant, and the wise king. And the tyrant is that part of the social world,
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the patriarchy, let's say, that oppresses and crushes you while it simultaneously develops
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and protects you. And you're subject to both of those elements continually. And part of your
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existential problem is how do you transform the tyranny into benevolent protection? Or how do you
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transform the terror of nature into the benevolence of the natural world and the unknown? And that's
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the goal of the hero is to do that, to figure out how to balance those constituent elements of
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experience. And is this hero archetype, is it also masculine? It's masculine, but that doesn't make
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it male. Right. Because it's a symbolic language, you know, and it's hard to say precisely why it's
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masculine. I would say it's likely masculine because the feminine archetype is associated with
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birth. And it's such a dominant, you know, birth and new life is, and destruction for that matter is
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such a dominant element of that archetypal representation that something had to be
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formulated as its opposite. It seems like the hero is kind of a way, it's also a sort of a masculine
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mother, right? Because like you go into the chaos to birth something new oftentimes. I don't know.
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Yeah, well, it's you, it, you, I would say that's not, it's not feminine because when you go in,
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you go in as an active agent, as a fertilizing agent, let's say, because let's say that when you
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encounter something unknown, it's, it's the a priori structures that you bring to bear on that, that
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give rise to the new thing. So, I mean, if you look at, look at the movie Sleeping Beauty, for example,
00:23:25.220
so the female, the feminine is unconscious in that movie, that's Sleeping Beauty, and
00:23:31.540
she's unconscious because she couldn't tolerate the trauma of puberty and sexual development,
00:23:36.700
essentially. And that's, the reason for that is because her parents overprotected her, right?
00:23:41.120
If you remember at the beginning of Sleeping Beauty, the king and queen who've been waiting a
00:23:45.060
long time for their daughter decide not to invite Maleficent to the christening. And Maleficent is
00:23:50.460
the evil queen, right? She's the negative element of nature and the world. And if you don't
00:23:54.940
invite the negative, if you don't allow the negative element of life in the world into
00:23:58.620
your child's environment, then you overprotect them and make them weak. And then when they
00:24:02.700
grow up and face the inevitable confrontations of adolescence and adulthood, they deeply desire
00:24:10.080
to remain unconscious or to become unconscious again. That can manifest itself as in suicidal
00:24:15.640
ideation, for example. So, Sleeping Beauty falls unconscious when she's pricked by, when blood
00:24:21.080
emerges when she's pricked. And it's just after she, you know, she falls in love naively with the
00:24:26.040
prince and then that collapses and she can't tolerate the catastrophe of existence. So, she
00:24:31.300
falls unconscious and something has to rescue her. And it's the hero, it's the prince. Now, you can read
00:24:37.420
that as an external prince because to some degree in a woman's life, the adult feminine in her is
00:24:44.240
awakened by the man that she chooses. So, you can read it as a love story, but you can also read it
00:24:50.460
as a story of individual development because what the woman is going to use to call herself out of
00:24:55.760
unconsciousness is her own masculine propensity to develop her consciousness and to move forthrightly
00:25:01.960
out into the world. I mean, these archetypal stories can generally be read at multiple levels
00:25:07.180
of analysis simultaneously. They apply across multiple domains. So...
00:25:11.240
So, that's why you have to, you mentioned, I think, in Maps and Meaning, you have to
00:25:14.840
take a Jungian circumambulation around these stories, right? You just kind of walk around
00:25:20.340
and around and around them because you can get different perspectives depending on where you're
00:25:25.000
Yeah. So, well, and you have to do that in the world as well. You want to push yourself out
00:25:28.600
against the world in as many ways as you can because that forces you to develop, you know? And
00:25:32.960
there's, that's partly because as you push yourself out against the world and learn new things,
00:25:38.880
you become more and more informed, right? By the information that you're generating in your
00:25:45.340
active encounter with the world. But also, we know that when you put yourself in new situations,
00:25:51.520
new genes turn on in your nervous system and they code for new proteins. And so,
00:25:56.580
you exist a lot in potential and the way that, and you need to actualize that potential in order to
00:26:02.400
become all that you need to be in order to prevail in the world. And the way that you do that is by
00:26:07.700
pushing yourself out against new unknown things and forcing your own transformation in the face of
00:26:14.440
those challenges. And the idea is that if you do that, let's say, religiously, then you can turn
00:26:20.620
yourself into a character that has enough power and strength to prevail in the tragic conditions of
00:26:27.060
life without becoming embittered and cruel and malevolent. And I mean, again, to me, this,
00:26:34.540
the longer I study this, I suppose, the more self-evident it seems to me. Life is very difficult.
00:26:40.420
It will challenge you to your core. You need to be able to withstand that challenge or you'll
00:26:46.400
warp and deteriorate. How do you develop yourself to withstand that challenge? You take on
00:26:54.340
responsibilities and challenges voluntarily and strengthen yourself. How else could you possibly
00:27:00.920
do it? I mean, you could hide, but there's no hiding. You can't hide from illness and death.
00:27:06.720
You can't hide from loneliness or pain. It's not possible. And if you retreat, then the things that
00:27:13.580
chase you just grow larger. So you have to put yourself together. And you do that by seeing what's
00:27:22.480
right in front of you, regardless of whether or not you like it, and encouraging yourself to master
00:27:29.560
what you see voluntarily and to extend yourself and to stretch yourself out constantly. And you do that
00:27:35.960
with your eyes open. And you do that with your speech and thinking carefully monitored and regulated
00:27:43.060
so that you don't corrupt yourself with unnecessary ignorance and delusion, because that will just
00:27:52.420
So this is why these, and then it goes back to why these meta-narratives, these archetypes
00:27:56.820
exist. They instruct us on how to do just that, right? How to face chaos, how to face tragedy,
00:28:05.320
because they provide examples. They set the pattern, right?
00:28:08.220
Yeah, they set the pattern. Yeah. And the issue is how do you manifest the pattern in your own life?
00:28:13.720
That's the crucial issue, is how do you realize the archetype in your own life? And you do that in part by
00:28:20.880
accepting the struggles of your being, or perhaps even welcoming them, and subjugating yourself to them,
00:28:30.860
and opening yourself up to the possibility of radical transformation in the face of your errors and
00:28:41.420
false. That's humility, I suppose. You're not all that you could be. Well, you might say,
00:28:48.760
well, why does that matter? Well, that's, it's easy to answer that. If you're not all that you can be,
00:28:54.820
you will suffer more than you have to, and so will the people around you. And you might say,
00:28:59.420
well, I don't care about that. It's like, well, that's unlikely, because virtually everyone cares
00:29:05.240
about their own pain. But even if you have got to the point where you don't care about that,
00:29:10.300
that's certainly nothing to be happy about or proud of. It's a catastrophe.
00:29:15.400
You have to become who you are, right? According to Pindar, quoted by Nietzsche.
00:29:20.360
Well, that's associated with Jung's idea of the self, is that, and that, one of the ways to
00:29:26.760
understand that, because it seems like a very strange pronouncement, is that you are what you are,
00:29:33.360
but you're also what you could be, which is a strange thing, right? Because that's no more than
00:29:38.900
to say that you are characterized by an indefinite amount of potential. So you are what you are, and
00:29:45.300
you are the potential that you are. That's a very paradoxical statement, because it's not obvious
00:29:52.240
how you can be something that's potential. Because potential isn't being, it's the possibility of
00:29:58.440
becoming, but be that as it may. We're stuck with it. It's a paradox, but we're stuck with it.
00:30:06.000
The goal of authenticity, from an existential perspective, is to pursue that which you could be,
00:30:12.000
so that you can flesh yourself out, so you can burn off what about you is dead and outdated,
00:30:18.000
and so that you can allow what could be to come to life. And the deep archetypal idea is that,
00:30:25.980
to the degree that you do that, you redeem yourself and you redeem the world around you.
00:30:30.760
And I believe that that's, again, I don't think that that's metaphysics. It seems to be the most
00:30:36.900
practical of truths. And the archetype, for example, the hero archetype is, you could say what it is,
00:30:44.220
is the, it's that which you find admirable. That which you find spontaneously admirable
00:30:50.980
is the pathway to the archetype. And you see, so people might tell stories about interesting and
00:30:59.260
admirable people. And the reason they tell them is because they admire those people. And when they
00:31:04.480
talk about them, other people listen. And so then you could imagine, well, if you distilled what people
00:31:10.100
find most interesting and admirable about others, what you would end up at the end of the process of
00:31:16.660
distillation would be something like an archetypal story. It would be something like the story of
00:31:20.820
Buddha, or it would be something like the story of Christ.
00:31:23.940
Yeah. The other one that came to mind was the Gita, the Bhagad Gita. I'm reading that lately. And
00:31:27.900
that's sort of the main, the main message of that. It's like, you can only be who you are and you're
00:31:32.160
to live, to have, what's it, Dharma, you have to become who you are.
00:31:37.160
What have you learned about that concretely? What, that's changed the way that you're acting?
00:31:42.000
Oh man, changed the way that, I don't know. It's definitely had an impact on me. I don't
00:31:46.460
know if it's gotten to the point where it's changed the way I'm acting. Maybe not being
00:31:50.160
afraid of, you know, following that inner voice, right? I mean, kind of what Thoreau or Emerson
00:31:57.780
would say, because they were, they were kind of Jungian in a way, be proto-Jungians.
00:32:04.200
Well, I guess it's, you can be afraid, but you can't stop.
00:32:08.660
That's the thing, because the fear is justifiable, but it's not, that doesn't make it a sufficient
00:32:17.900
reason to retreat and stop. There's no retreat in life. That's the thing. There might be periods
00:32:24.920
that, where you can pull back and rest, but because we're surrounded by the unknown and the
00:32:32.320
unexpected, and because we're characterized by the consequences of our ultimate ignorance,
00:32:39.060
and because we're finite, there's no stepping back. You either move forward voluntarily or
00:32:47.880
degenerate. Those are your options, and the degeneration process is, what we said already,
00:32:53.320
it's, in its worst aspects, it's a voyage to hell. And you see the consequences of that,
00:33:02.400
because people who have become particularly embittered by life, also become, often become
00:33:11.540
very cruel, and do everything they can to make whatever could be good, bad, merely for the sake
00:33:19.040
of spite and revenge. To me, that's in large part the story of the 20th century. I mean, we had these
00:33:25.440
great ideological battles in the 20th century, and terrible catastrophes as a consequence of the
00:33:34.660
formation of a variety of different ideological stances. But even those ideologies were turned
00:33:41.620
into something immensely destructive by the malevolent actions and the cowardly inactions of the people
00:33:54.480
who held the ideologies. Well, let's tie how your study of ideology goes into this. So, does ideology
00:34:03.780
rise up when people either ignore or reject these meta-narratives you've been talking about?
00:34:10.480
Yes, because the ideologies are parasites on the underlying religious structure. They tell you
00:34:16.000
part of the archetypal story, but not all of it. They just tell you enough of it to grip you if you're
00:34:23.360
not situated properly in the metaphysical landscape. It's like an occult indoctrination. And they tell
00:34:33.640
enough of the story so that the telling has religious power, it has religiously compelling power.
00:34:40.480
And that pulls people into the ideology. But what also pulls them into it is the desire for them to
00:34:45.940
escape their own individual responsibility. Because if you adopt an ideology, then you're part of a
00:34:51.620
group, and the group becomes responsible, not you. And that can be a great relief, because,
00:34:58.860
well, who wants the responsibility? Now, I mean, what I've learned from reading people like
00:35:04.300
Carl Jung and Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Viktor Frankl and people who wrote deeply about what
00:35:10.060
happened in the 20th century was that you are deeply responsible for the course of your life,
00:35:16.700
but also to an indeterminate degree for the course of the lives of the people around you,
00:35:21.760
your family, and then your broader community. That's on you, man. And that means that when you make a
00:35:27.920
moral error, the consequences of that error ripple out beyond you and add to the pathology,
00:35:35.140
well, of your family and your friends, but also of your society. And it's something that people want
00:35:40.780
to shrink away from, because it's bad enough to be responsible on your own for your mistakes,
00:35:45.560
but to also understand that your moral insufficiency corrupts the world. Well,
00:35:51.260
that's a hell of a thing to come to terms with. Right. And so, I mean, this is exactly what Nietzsche
00:35:58.360
predicted, what happened in the 20th century with the death of God. A lot of people misunderstand
00:36:03.720
Nietzsche, where he kind of celebrates the death of God. He's actually saying, no, this is actually
00:36:06.740
really terrible. Yeah, no, he wasn't celebrating it. That's for sure. This is terrible, because here's
00:36:11.360
what's going to happen. We'll never find enough water to wash away the blood. Right. And so, as you
00:36:15.800
said that these ideologies, what they often do is they'll, they tell half of the story of the
00:36:21.520
archetype. So, I'm guessing with, you know, in the 20th century, Nazism really focused on that
00:36:27.740
father archetype, but on the negative part, like extreme order. And then maybe communism was,
00:36:34.500
what was that possibly, the ideology? Well, with the Nazis, the basic archetype was the positive
00:36:41.640
father, right? But ignoring the tyrant. So, right, because the social world, you can characterize
00:36:50.800
as wise king and tyrant. And the Nazi call was, well, we'll be, join us and the wise father will
00:36:59.080
rule forever. Well, but there was no discussion of the tyrant. And there was no discussion of the
00:37:05.160
abdication of individual responsibility. And so, everything that was ignored played itself out.
00:37:12.560
Because it wasn't, you can't ignore the tyrant. And you can't give yourself over to the great father
00:37:18.260
without sacrificing your soul. And if you sacrifice your soul, then the probability that you'll become
00:37:24.200
corrupt is 100%. And once you're corrupt, you'll start to do terrible things.
00:37:28.640
And then with communism, because like that, you really focus a lot on that with, you know,
00:37:32.140
Solzhenitsyn talks a lot about that. And you really refer to his work. I mean,
00:37:35.520
what was going on there archetypically? Well, the original diagnosis with the,
00:37:39.540
with the, with the communist revolutionaries is that what they were confronting was only the
00:37:44.560
tyrannical father. You know, and that if you can just do away with the tyrannical father,
00:37:49.080
then everything, then people will all of a sudden be living in, you know, a harmonious utopia.
00:37:54.700
It's to blame everything on the tyrannical father, which is exactly what's happening.
00:37:59.080
That's exactly the message that the radical left is pushing forward,
00:38:02.000
in our society is that all the corruption of the world is a consequence of the tyrannical father,
00:38:07.540
but it's not true or it's half true. It's less than half true because there are other archetypes
00:38:13.820
that have to be considered. No, there's no gratitude in the radical left because the radical left says
00:38:18.800
the patriarchy is to blame for everything. It's like, well, you know, how about flush toilets?
00:38:25.480
How about central heating? How about clean water? How about reliable electricity? That's all part of
00:38:32.200
the tyranny, is it? They just take all that for granted. It's not a good idea to take all that for
00:38:39.760
granted. And then you can also say we're seeing that too with the radical right. It's kind of the
00:38:43.720
rebirth of the, focusing on the father, but ignoring the tyrant.
00:38:50.320
You know, you could say the radical left says the great father's all bad and the radical right says
00:38:54.480
the great father's all good because they can't tolerate the conflict. The fact that
00:39:00.520
both elements have to be considered simultaneously and they're both equally desirous of abandoning
00:39:09.900
individual responsibility, which is the under, you know, that's the real underground motivation for
00:39:15.920
the polarization. Escape from individual responsibility.
00:39:23.540
Yeah. So what, I think what you're arguing then is that instead of, that the response to these
00:39:29.400
ideologies is embracing these meta-narratives or looking at them again, because they set the
00:39:35.700
pattern for us on how to live. But so here's the question, like, how do you make that case to a
00:39:41.400
post-secular world? Because like a lot of people just say, look at these stories like, you know,
00:39:45.260
Tiamat and Marduk or the, you know, the Christ story and the Bible stories and say, well, that's just,
00:39:51.640
you know, those are nice stories, but I'm not going to take it seriously. How do you, what's the case
00:39:58.300
Well, what are you going to take seriously then? You're going to take nothing seriously. Well,
00:40:02.040
good luck with that because serious things are coming your way. And so if you're not prepared
00:40:06.380
for them by an equal metaphysical seriousness, they will flatten you. So you can be dismissive
00:40:13.740
with regards to wisdom, but that doesn't protect you from the coming catastrophe. And the way I deal
00:40:19.800
with it on a one-to-one basis generally is to get people to talk about their lives. People know
00:40:25.040
perfectly well that they need meaning in their lives. And let's say the atheist skeptical types,
00:40:29.880
who I have a fair bit of, like, respect for, I understand where they're coming from, they can't
00:40:35.760
formulate a straightforward identification with, say, a religious creed because it conflicts with
00:40:40.740
their rationality. It's partly because the more fundamentalist types on the religious end
00:40:45.600
insist in their metaphysical ignorance that biblical stories are scientific theories,
00:40:51.160
which they're not. I would say, look, if your life is working out for you and it's richly meaningful
00:40:56.700
and you're well-oriented and all of that, well then, good for you. But if you're floundering and
00:41:02.320
uncertain and unable to tolerate the suffering that's part and parcel of your being, then you may
00:41:08.080
need to do some serious thinking about your metaphysical presuppositions. And life is a serious
00:41:13.520
business in my estimation. So, you have to be serious about what, how you think and what you
00:41:18.980
think and how you act. There's just no way around it. Right. Because if you ignore it, what you're
00:41:23.360
going to get are ideologies and that's just going to destroy you. Yeah, well, or nihilism.
00:41:27.460
Or nihilism, right. And, you know, as soon as, the problem with nihilism is, well, if everything's
00:41:33.280
cakes and roses, well, maybe you can tolerate it, but it's not going to see you through your father's
00:41:38.380
descent into Alzheimer's disease, I can tell you that. You have to be metaphysically situated
00:41:43.160
because life is a tragedy. And there's elements of malevolence to it as well, which is also
00:41:48.080
something that's well worth pointing out. You know, people may be cynical enough to say, well,
00:41:53.500
good is relative. And so, I'm not required to pursue any specific direction because all are as
00:41:59.720
good as any. It's like, well, you wait till someone comes along who has the increase of your suffering
00:42:05.420
firmly in mind. You'll be naked in front of them because metaphysical naivety provides you with
00:42:12.020
zero protection against malevolence. Like, it opens you up to tragedy. That's bad enough. But
00:42:17.540
malevolence is a whole different thing. And perhaps you'll be fortunate and get through your life without
00:42:21.900
feeling the dread touch of the truly malevolent, but it's highly unlikely. And unless you're prepared
00:42:28.200
metaphysically, when that touch comes, it will destroy you. It'll take you apart. It's one thing not to
00:42:35.240
believe in good. It's a lot more difficult not to believe in evil, especially when it makes itself
00:42:40.840
And I mean, I guess that going back to your clinical work, I mean, you mentioned earlier that a lot of
00:42:45.000
the problems you see with your patients isn't so much mental illness, you know, though some of them
00:42:50.700
have it, but it's just they don't have that metaphysical or existential bearing. So, they just go
00:42:56.320
through life feeling, I don't know, just an enemy or I don't know what people in the 19th century call it
00:43:03.800
Well, they've been hit, usually, you know, something terrible has happened to them in their
00:43:07.440
life. They've lost their job or their career or they're part of their family or they've had a
00:43:12.000
terrible divorce or they've been visited by illness or they've had a confrontation with someone who
00:43:17.340
truly wished them harm. So, they've had a confrontation with malevolence and, you know,
00:43:21.920
and that will exacerbate any proclivities they might have to a given physical or mental illness.
00:43:27.000
But often the problems are purely existential. It's like they're swamped by the reality of their
00:43:33.880
existence. And a lot of the clinical endeavor is the search for metaphysical foundations that are
00:43:40.160
firm enough so that in chaotic and in chaotic times when malevolence threatens, you can still stay
00:43:46.980
oriented and upright. A lot of that has to do with strengthening your own character. And you do that
00:43:51.760
by confronting the challenges that are there, by establishing your aims, by confronting the
00:43:56.580
challenges that present themselves, and by attempting to carefully and accurately and truthfully
00:44:05.540
You mentioned in several of your interviews and in your YouTube channel that about 80 to 90% of
00:44:09.740
your audience is male, which I thought was interesting.
00:44:13.880
Okay. Because it's interesting because psychology, I don't know, I mean, that's not even what you're
00:44:17.820
doing. Maybe that's why it is. Because like psychology typically attracts more women than men.
00:44:22.840
So, what do you think is going on there? Why do you think men are keyed in
00:44:26.460
to what you're doing, exploring these archetypes and these metanarratives?
00:44:29.940
Because I'm distinguishing between arbitrary power and competence, because I'm talking to
00:44:35.260
people about responsibility instead of rights. Like when men mature and become men, when young
00:44:40.520
men mature and become men, it isn't power that accrues to them, it's competence. And the problem
00:44:46.500
with the narrative that grips our culture at the moment is that we fail to make a distinction
00:44:50.380
between power and competence. Power is just that I can hurt you and therefore I dominate.
00:44:55.520
Competence is that I have status because I'm offering to myself and to other people something
00:44:59.900
that they voluntarily regard as with value, of value. And my invitation to young men is to become
00:45:07.860
competent, to forego power. Power is the tactic used by the incompetent to gain status. Competence is
00:45:14.540
the tool used by the morally oriented to accrue authority and do good things in the world.
00:45:21.220
Well, that's a noble call. And the only way out of the tragedy of existence is to follow the noble
00:45:28.240
call. And young men, they need to hear that because the alternative is something like hell. And I don't
00:45:34.540
say that lightly. I mean, we already went through the 20th century. We know where the ideologies end,
00:45:40.460
lead. We know where nihilism goes. And people say, well, I don't know how to stop being nihilistic.
00:45:46.320
Well, that's what I'm trying to help people understand. And nihilism is terrible. It's a
00:45:52.080
disease of the soul. And all it does is call forth compensatory ideologies. You know, you might say
00:45:58.000
better to be nihilistic than to be possessed by an ideology, but it's just, it's one feeds the other.
00:46:03.800
There has to be something, there has to be another way. And there is. The other way is to identify
00:46:09.220
with the mythological hero, to take up arms against the adversary who wishes that everything
00:46:15.340
would merely cease, and perhaps in the most horrible way possible, to struggle against the
00:46:20.720
tyranny of the state, to put protective walls up against the catastrophe of the natural world,
00:46:27.700
and to walk the proper line between chaos and order.
00:46:30.320
And that's where studying those myths can come in handy, because they've set the pattern for you.
00:46:35.540
That's what, that's the, that's the world they lay out. And everyone knows it. And we know it
00:46:40.340
because we go watch stories. We watch movies. We read novels. We play video games. They're all based,
00:46:46.120
they all have the same underlying phenomenological world at their heart.
00:46:50.560
Well, I'm curious, for those who are interested, they're like, this sounds great. I want to pursue
00:46:54.140
this more. Are there particular works that you recommend? Like, do you have like a reading list
00:46:58.780
I can send people to? Because I think a lot of-
00:47:00.440
Yeah, go to jordanbpeterson.com. There's a reading list there.
00:47:03.980
That's fantastic. Yeah, one of the things I've done in my own life is,
00:47:07.100
after listening to your lectures, you use St. George and the Dragon
00:47:10.940
quite a bit, refer to it. I bought a picture book for my son. We've been reading that. It's
00:47:20.380
Yeah, front the dragon, get the gold and the girl.
00:47:23.360
Right. And the other one he likes a lot is The Odyssey, which I think there's a ton of
00:47:29.040
myths and meta-narratives in there on how to live with chaos. So, he loves that one too.
00:47:38.600
Yeah, well, it's great. You've got a chance there to help him, to encourage him, which is
00:47:45.440
To encourage, not to empower, that pathological word. To encourage, to say, the world is a
00:47:51.980
terrible place, but you are enough to master it. That's what every young man needs to know.
00:47:58.060
And that's what a lot of men who probably never heard that as a young man need to know too.
00:48:02.320
Yeah, they're dying for it. And they're turning to terrible things as a substitute.
00:48:09.140
Yeah. Well, that's what beckons as a substitute.
00:48:12.400
Or the sad one is opioids, right? I think there's sort of an archetype going on there,
00:48:19.200
Yeah, well, that's the comforts of unconsciousness.
00:48:24.020
You can't do that. Well, Jordan, this has been a great conversation. There's so much
00:48:28.700
more we could talk about, but where can people go to learn? You mentioned Jordan B. Peterson.
00:48:32.620
Anywhere else people can learn more about what you're doing?
00:48:34.700
My YouTube channel. You know, I just finished a 12-part series on the psychological significance
00:48:40.380
of the biblical stories. I only got about two-thirds of the way through Genesis, but I think
00:48:45.160
people might find that useful. I have hundreds of lectures online. You can dive in anywhere,
00:48:50.500
really. If you're interested in this sort of thing, I see it as the alternative. I laid it out
00:48:55.660
originally when I started working on these ideas as the alternative to ideological possession. And
00:49:00.800
that's become even more crucial in recent years as the ideologies raise their ugly heads again,
00:49:07.840
Well, Jordan, thank you so much for your time. It's been an absolute pleasure.
00:49:12.540
My guest today was Jordan B. Peterson. He's a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto.
00:49:16.840
You can find all his work at jordanbpeterson.com. He has links to his YouTube lectures, his lectures
00:49:22.180
that he gave on the biblical myths. You can find information about his podcast there and also his
00:49:27.260
self-authoring program. It's pretty cool. You should check it out. Also check out our show notes
00:49:30.760
at aom.is slash Peterson, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this
00:49:45.220
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,
00:49:49.600
make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. If you enjoy the
00:49:53.180
show, have gotten something out of it while you've been listening, I'd appreciate if you take one minute
00:49:56.320
to give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher. It helps us out a lot. And thank you to everyone who has
00:49:59.700
given us a review already. As always, thank you for your continued support. Until next time,