Best-selling author Jordan Peterson joins Ben to discuss his new book, 12 Rules for Life, and why the radical left is so angry about it. Ben also talks with Jordan about why so many people are angry about him, and why they think he s a racist, sexist, and misogynistic ideologue. Ben and Jordan also discuss why the left thinks Jordan s views are so dangerous, and how to deal with people who disagree with them, especially young, angry, white men. Thanks to our sponsor, Helix Sleep, for sponsoring this episode of the show. Sponsors! HelixSleep is a leading provider of high-performance memory foam and memory foam mattresses. They re the go-to mattress supplier for the elderly, the disabled, and the elderly in need of a good night s rest and relaxation. They also make the best pillow and pillow cases in the entire world. You ll get 100 nights of 5-star reviews and 100 nights to try them out for free, plus you get 100 free nights of free shipping on your next purchase. Get the Deal with BenGuest! Get the deal with Ben Guest and make sure you know that they know that you re getting the deal. Get 100 nights free when you book your first purchase of a new mattress from Helixsleep! and get up to 125 bucks toward your mattress order. Use coupon "Get the Deal With Ben Guest" at checkout to get 125% off your first order! The deal starts at $99.99 and includes free shipping and free shipping throughout the month of December. and includes shipping on all orders, plus a free delivery throughout the U.S. After that includes a two-week shipping option, plus two-day shipping and two-month shipping, plus an additional $99 shipping option! Thanks BenGuest will be giving you get $25 off your choice of a copy of the book "Get The Deal With Meghan's new mattress and a free copy of my book "12 Rules For Life." and a $50 shipping address and an extra $150 discount when you sign up to get the deal starts after the book is reviewed in the book. . Thank you, Ben Guest! Ben Guest: Subscribe to BenGuest: The Real Talk Podcast: Subscribe and Rate BenGuest Learn more about your ad-free version of this podcast on Audible: This episode is available in Kindle and Audible.
00:02:00.000Why do you think that, number one, your profile has become so big of late, and number two, why do you think it is that so many members of the left are so angry about that?
00:02:09.000Why are they characterizing people who listen to you as angry and enraged young white men?
00:02:13.000Well, we could look at the characterization to begin with, you know, because I think it speaks to the pathology of the radical left.
00:02:19.000Instantly, they're absolutely incapable of viewing the world except through group identity terms.
00:02:25.000You know, and so if someone comes out and disagrees with them, then they have to characterize them by their fundamental group attribute, whatever that happens to be.
00:02:33.000Maybe it's gender, because that's a favorite, or maybe it's race.
00:02:36.000And so angry white men, young, there we go, sexist, ageist, and racist all at once, right?
00:02:44.000Well, it has to be that way if you're going to play the leftist game, because that's the only way that you can look at the world.
00:02:51.000And then if you can't make your opponent reprehensible in some manner, and it's strange that they would attempt to make them reprehensible on the grounds of race, age, and sex, since that's precisely what they stand against, hypothetically.
00:03:05.000But if you can't make your enemy reprehensible along some dimension, then you have to contend with them seriously.
00:03:11.000And so, you know, if I'm not an alt-right fascist like Hitler, you know, or Milo Yiannopoulos, which was how I was characterized in Canada, because the radical leftists can't even get their bloody insults straight, he's like Hitler!
00:03:36.000There was an article written by, I believe, the editor of the New York Review of Books, that was just republished in the Globe and Mail, talking about the emergence of hyper-masculinity, and how I was somehow responsible for that, or contributing to it, like Mussolini.
00:03:50.000And I read that, and I thought, yeah, like Mussolini.
00:03:53.000And I thought, okay, so what are you doing?
00:03:59.000You're conflating masculinity and hyper-masculinity at the same time.
00:04:03.000Then you're virtue signaling by being against hyper-masculinity.
00:04:07.000But really what you're trying to do is bring down whatever it is that's masculinity.
00:04:12.000And what masculinity is in this frame is something like competence.
00:04:16.000And so it's part of the radical leftist's general war on competence as well, which I think is one of the most pernicious elements of the culture wars.
00:04:26.000The dissolution of hierarchies, the assumption that every hierarchy has to be based on power and serve the needs of your group, whatever that happens to be, that there's no such thing as competence.
00:04:38.000And then the other thing that's reprehensible about it, because that's not enough, is that it's just wrong.
00:04:44.000Like, I've got tens of thousands of letters from people and people come up to me all the time on the street.
00:04:54.000So I was in LA about a month and a half ago.
00:04:57.000And I was downtown L.A., and downtown L.A.
00:04:59.000is kind of rough, and I was wandering around with my wife, and this young guy pulled a car up beside me and hopped out, and he was kind of a stylish-looking 21-year-old Latino guy, something like that.
00:05:50.000Oh yeah, yeah, and it's wherever I go now.
00:05:53.000And this is the thing that's so wonderful about that, all of this, as far as I'm concerned, is that people come up to me all the time, and that's exactly what they say.
00:06:02.000They say, look, I was lost, aimless, depressed, nihilistic, anxious, drug-addicted, alcoholic, wasting my time, masturbating too much, although they don't generally use that particular example.
00:06:18.000Lost essentially and and and hopeless in some sense and I've been watching your lectures and they've really helped and I've really been putting my life together and I've been trying to say what I believe to be true and develop a vision and it's really helped and like and it's so Overwhelming, you know, like if I'm doing book signings after a talk then there'll be a dozen people or more who
00:06:42.000And these aren't, like I'm only talking to people for about 15 seconds, but you can have a very intense conversation in 15 seconds.
00:06:49.000And they'll say, look, you know, like I was suicidal, man.
00:06:51.000Like I was really hanging on to the edge of the earth by my fingernails and I'm better.
00:07:02.000Well, I think that when I look at your rise and look, I talk to people who love what you do.
00:07:08.000I mean, every time I go on the road and I'm speaking at a campus, you're the number one name that gets mentioned by people who come to my lectures.
00:07:15.000And I think that the reason for that that I've seen is really twofold.
00:07:18.000One is that one of the things that you really talk a lot about is the notion of self-discipline and purpose in your life and control and the idea that you are in control of your decision making and your decision making
00:07:28.000Yeah, well, I mean, the gender issue is really an interesting one because
00:07:53.000One of my professional domains of expertise is individual differences.
00:07:57.000I'm a personality psychologist, and so I know the gender difference literature.
00:08:59.000We'll go around the world, we'll look at cultures, we'll rank order them in terms of the gender equality of their sociological policies.
00:09:07.000We can do that, with broad agreement from the right and the left.
00:09:11.000Then the hypothesis would be, if gender differences decrease among more egalitarian societies, then the gender differences are sociocultural, or at least more sociocultural.
00:09:22.000That's exactly the opposite of what was found.
00:09:45.000Like you say, well how do you know that you can trust someone's judgment about a fact?
00:09:50.000The fact emerges despite their ideological presuppositions.
00:09:54.000Okay, so it's well known that the social sciences and the humanities have a left tilt, and a lot of that's temperamental, and the tilt has become more pronounced.
00:10:04.000But as Jonathan Haidt has pointed out, there are no conservatives among social personality psychologists, or none to speak of.
00:10:14.000And if the field has a bias, it is definitely and indisputably a left-wing bias.
00:10:20.000Okay, so you have to fight that if you're a scientist, right?
00:10:23.000Even if you're a left-wing scientist, you have to fight that because you want to get to the facts.
00:10:27.000It was these social scientists who generated the data that suggested that the gender differences not only were real, but that were bigger in egalitarian societies.
00:10:35.000They didn't do that to grind their ideological acts, because their ideological presupposition was, no, no.
00:10:42.000You make the society egalitarian, men and women get more the same.
00:10:46.000It's like, nope, they get more different.
00:10:51.000And so then there's a corollary there, which is, all right, you could still say, and they're kind of pushing in this direction in Scandinavia, boys and girls are different.
00:11:22.000The problem with that is that if you seed that much
00:11:27.000Well, I mean, this is one of the big questions that we were discussing earlier, is that we were talking about the polarization in politics between right and left.
00:11:33.000And obviously, you're a psychologist, you're a philosopher, but you've been dragged
00:11:56.000Almost kicking and screaming into this political sphere because everything has been so politicized.
00:12:00.000And so when you say, when you cite social science statistics and they're scientifically based, you're called a racist, you're called a sexist, you're called a homophobe.
00:12:10.000So why is it that so, why do you think it is that so many folks on the left who purport to be all about reason and science and objective fact are so willing to throw those out the window the minute that it becomes politically inconvenient for them?
00:12:24.000Because imagine that the cognitive system, an interpretation of the world, has levels, they're axiomatic levels.
00:12:32.000Some fundamental presuppositions are more fundamental than others.
00:12:37.000And you could say, well, the leftists historically, maybe because of their atheistic rationality, are more on the side of science than, say, the fundamentalists of any sort.
00:12:47.000But when push comes to shove, you find out how the axioms are nested.
00:12:54.000There's deeper axioms underneath that, which is that
00:12:57.000All hierarchies are based on power, and all power plays are based on group identity, tribal identity, essentially.
00:13:04.000And that the entire history of the world is nothing but a power play between these different identity groups.
00:13:10.000It's like, okay, well, if the science indicates that some of that's wrong, then do you alter those beliefs, or do you alter the science?
00:13:18.000And the answer to that question is, well, it depends on how you've hierarchically arranged those.
00:13:22.000If the science is at the bottom, then you alter your beliefs.
00:13:26.000If the scientific facts are the axiomatic substructure, then you alter your beliefs.
00:13:33.000If your beliefs are the axiomatic substructure, then you alter the science.
00:14:25.000So, not only do you regress to a tribalism, but you also invalidate the one proposition that's been able to help us arise above the tribal, which is the idea that the individual should be sovereign.
00:14:39.000And so I think the culture war is about what's the proper framework within which to view human identity, and what's the relationship between the individual and the group
00:14:59.000So in just a second, I want to ask you a little bit about some of the more enlightenment-minded thinkers who are out there right now, because it seems like we've been discussing the big gap in Western civilization right now, which is between the collectivists and the individualists, if you were to put it broadly.
00:15:13.000But I want to talk about some of the divisions among the individualists in just a second.
00:15:15.000First, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Birchgold.
00:15:20.000Market right now with all the volatility.
00:15:22.000A lot of Americans are increasingly concerned about the security of their savings, and the Federal Reserve obviously has a loose monetary policy.
00:15:28.000It's been shoring up recently, but there's a lot of volatility in the markets.
00:15:31.000Well, this is the reason why I need to talk to my friends over at Birchgold.
00:15:34.000So, birchgold.com is the place to go if you want to put some of your assets in precious metals.
00:15:38.000I'm not saying take all of your money out of the stock market and push it in precious metals.
00:15:41.000But you should have a little bit in precious metals to hedge against inflation and volatility in the markets.
00:15:46.000Birch Gold sells physical precious metals for your own possession.
00:15:48.000They'll ship metal right to your front door.
00:15:49.000And right now, thanks to an IRS tax law, you can even move your IRA or eligible 401k into an IRA backed by physical gold or silver if you so choose.
00:15:57.000It's a good option for people who want to ensure that their retirement savings are protected.
00:16:01.000from the possibility of inflation or stock market volatility.
00:16:04.000Birch Gold Group, they have a really good, long-standing track record of continued success.
00:16:08.000They've been advertising with me for years.
00:16:09.000Thousands of satisfied clients, countless five-star reviews, an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau.
00:16:13.000Ask all your questions about precious metals investing, get all your answers, and then contact Birch Gold Group to request a free information kit on physical precious metals.
00:16:20.000Their comprehensive 16-page kit shows how gold and silver can protect your savings, how you can legally move that IRA or 401k out of stocks and bonds and into a precious metals IRA if that's something you're interested in.
00:16:35.000That also lets them know that we sent you.
00:16:36.000Okay, so, Jordan, one of the things that we've been talking about, obviously, is the big gap that I think we certainly agree on between the collectivist identity politics and the sublimation of science in favor of subjective politics that favors a power group.
00:16:52.000But I want to talk a little bit about a division that is also now breaking out among those of us who I think would consider ourselves friends of the Enlightenment.
00:17:01.000So, you consider yourself a friend of the Enlightenment-style thinking, at least in the essence that individuality matters and that the individual is sovereign.
00:17:08.000And that the scientific method is useful.
00:17:32.000It has a different perspective on the world than you do.
00:17:35.000I have a different perspective than Sam Harris does.
00:17:37.000You and I have our differences, probably, on some matters of philosophy.
00:17:40.000So, where do you think the vulnerability lies in the possibility of revivifying an Enlightenment mentality?
00:17:47.000Because it seems to me that one of the big problems that's popping its head up above the water now is the rejection of the Enlightenment in favor of this old-style tribalism that you've been talking about.
00:17:57.000That we're now going to repeat history because we've benefited so much from the Enlightenment that we forget that things don't have to be this way.
00:18:02.000We've got so much nice stuff, we live in so much freedom, that we forget that if we just toss those Enlightenment ideals out the window, things get really ugly again.
00:18:09.000I think that's what unites... Well, that's the question.
00:18:13.000What do you toss out the window before things get ugly?
00:18:35.000Interesting, because if you look at the typical academic psychologists, say, their historical knowledge generally runs back about 15 years, because they're all concerned with the modern literature.
00:18:45.000And there's some utility in that, but the downside is they don't have any historical context.
00:18:50.000So you read someone like Taylor, and you think, wow, he's stretching it back 500 years.
00:18:55.000There's reading that goes way beyond that to look at the sources of the self and the source of the modern ethos.
00:19:02.000And this is a huge bone of contention between people like me, say, and people like Harris, and I think between people like you and people like Harris, is that my sense is that the enlightenment values themselves are grounded in an ethos that's much deeper and much less articulated.
00:19:20.000an ethos of metaphor, image, drama, ritual, religion, art, music, all of that, dance even for that matter, the nonverbal, the pattern recognition.
00:19:32.000Ian McGilchrist has written a book called The Master and His Emissary which lays that out quite nicely with regards to hemispheric specialization.
00:19:51.000The rough idea would be that the left hemisphere generates paradigmatic systems, so that would be like the Enlightenment system, axiom-predicated, right?
00:20:01.000But that entire axiomatic system is based in a non-verbal, in the non-verbal domain that's associated with, well, it would be associated with the right hemisphere, but it would also be associated with deep motivations, biological motivations, and emotions.
00:20:19.000And so, because here's one way of looking at it.
00:20:22.000You think, well, how do you validate an axiomatic system of ethics?
00:20:26.000And the answer is quite straightforward.
00:20:27.000Jean Piaget figured this out, is you play it out in the world, literally, you act it out in the world, and then you watch each other's emotional responses.
00:20:36.000And if the thing that you're playing out, if the axiomatic system that you're playing out
00:20:41.000satisfies the motivations and the emotions of the people who are engaged in that system, then the system is justified.
00:20:48.000And then you say, well, it's not just that their motivations and emotions are satisfied.
00:21:05.000And not only my emotions and motivations, but yours as well.
00:21:10.000Now, next week, next month, and across time.
00:21:12.000So there's terribly tight constraints placed upon an axiomatic system's validity.
00:21:20.000Now, the way Jean Piaget thought of that, he said, well, think about it like a child's game.
00:21:24.000A bunch of kids get together, and they decide to play pretend.
00:21:27.000OK, and pretend is, let's model the world, right?
00:21:31.000And as a place to act, because to pretend, you act out, right?
00:21:35.000So the kids get together, and they assign roles.
00:21:38.000And they say, well, you're going to be mom, you're going to be dad, you're going to be the dog, and we're going to play house.
00:21:43.000And then they act it out in what they're doing.
00:21:47.000is seeing if they can regulate the manner in which they're constructing the game so that everyone's emotions and motivations are so well satisfied that they want to continue the game.
00:26:28.000So here's my question about all of this, because now we're really not talking about 12 Rules for Life as much as Maps and Meaning, which is your first book, which you're doing the audio read of it now.
00:26:45.000Meaning, why is it that the Enlightenment only arrives at one time in human history and one place in human history, as opposed to if human biology is essentially consistent across humanity, then why is it that if
00:26:57.000At the apex of the levels, you end up with the Enlightenment idea, which is where we started this particular question.
00:27:02.000Then, why is it that it only arrives in one place at one time, as opposed to arriving in a variety of places, in a variety of different times, in a variety of different cultures?
00:28:33.000It's like, well, then the literary critics come along, the philosophers, and they say, oh, what are the principles by which the admirable people operate?
00:28:41.000It's like chimps woke up and said, oh, well, some chimps are more successful than others.
00:29:06.000OK, so you start by mapping your customs in drama.
00:29:10.000and story, and that way you can represent them and you can transmit them.
00:29:14.000Then once you have them in your grip, say, they're represented now, not just acted out, well, then you can move one step backwards from them, and you can say, well, what's the commonalities among these?
00:29:41.000It took human beings a very long time to evolve their hierarchies, to evolve their structures of success, and then to have enough people around with enough spare time to engage in the artistic cultural process of mapping the adaptive structure.
00:30:00.000That all emerges in mythology and drama.
00:30:02.000Then that lays the groundwork for philosophy.
00:30:23.000It's like, oh, well, here's a bunch of semantic codes.
00:30:25.000It's like, yeah, yeah, those are great.
00:30:27.000So this is really interesting, because if you read Pinker or if you read Jonah Goldberg's new book, essentially they attribute the Enlightenment to, Jonah Goldberg calls it the miracle.
00:30:35.000It's almost as though it accidentally occurred in a certain place in a certain time.
00:30:39.000Jonah doesn't quite go quite that far, I think, to be fair to him.
00:30:41.000But I think that that philosophy, that this sort of sprang up randomly here, is very much embedded in a lot of Sam Harris's
00:31:25.000But that doesn't mean we can't generate a plausible evolutionary account.
00:31:29.000It's like, if you have a bunch of motivated, emotional, limited beings occupying the same territory and competing and cooperating for the same resources,
00:31:40.000including the resource of cooperation, which can generate more resources.
00:32:21.000So not only do they have to be games, and comprehensible to everybody, and enjoyable, but they have to be self-maintaining and everyone has to want to play them.
00:32:32.000That's the answer to the postmodern conundrum.
00:32:34.000A plethora of potential ethical implications of the world.
00:32:42.000Not an infinite variety of pragmatically applicable interpretations.
00:32:47.000You instantly constrain the universe to, well, to what?
00:32:51.000Well, this is why there's commonalities in mythologies.
00:32:54.000It's like, if you put enough people together in enough different places,
00:32:58.000The commonality of the groups of people, because of the grounding in common motivation and emotion and embodiment, because we're embodied, means that they're going to generate hierarchies that are broadly similar, with strategies of success within those hierarchies that are broadly similar, with descriptions of the strategies that are broadly similar.
00:33:18.000And so you could say, in some sense, the ethic that gave rise to the Enlightenment is in place more or less everywhere.
00:33:26.000Now, it's tricky, because not every hierarchical system is as functional as every other hierarchical system.
00:33:32.000Some of them can degenerate into tyranny.
00:33:34.000We're talking about the set of all voluntarily playable games, or something like that, and that can degenerate.
00:33:40.000Out of that, you're going to get common hero myths.
00:33:49.000And this is the Enlightenment guys, they're not getting that.
00:33:53.000And this gets to, I think, the broader question that I know you and Sam went on for three hours about the nature of truth, particularly truth in the moral sphere.
00:34:00.000Would it be fair to say that you guys agree on the idea of truth in the scientific sphere?
00:34:05.000That if there is such a thing as objective truth,
00:34:10.000I would say we agree on a lot of that.
00:34:12.000The question is, to some degree, why do scientists accept the idea that objective truth is true?
00:34:19.000And then I would say, we probably don't agree about that, because I would ground that in pragmatism, and Sam would ground that in the idea of an independently existing objective world.
00:34:46.000Truth is in the use that it has for human beings.
00:34:49.000Well, that's the thing is that, you know, I don't know if we would consider scientific truth true unless we are also simultaneously accepting the idea that scientific truth is good for people.
00:35:01.000So, there's one other thing I wanted to bring up that's relevant because you brought up the idea of God.
00:35:06.000So, here's a way of thinking about it.
00:35:09.000And I don't know what to make of this, because this is stretching me, this is stretching my thoughts out beyond where I've been able to develop them.
00:35:15.000So this is the intuition that I have based on a variety of things, experiences I've had.
00:35:20.000So imagine that there's a very wide range of human behaviors, okay?
00:35:26.000And some subset of those are both admirable and not admirable.
00:35:30.000So let's call them good and evil at the extremes, okay?
00:35:34.000Then we might say, well, there's a pattern that characterizes all the actions that are good, and a pattern that characterizes all the actions that are evil.
00:35:43.000And that's a transpersonal pattern, because it's not just about you or me, it's about everyone.
00:35:48.000Okay, and so then that gets personified.
00:35:50.000That's Christ and Satan, let's say, or Cain and Abel.
00:35:58.000It's Thor and Loki, you know, in the Marvel movies.
00:36:02.000Now you take the idea of Christ and you think, okay, so that's the abstraction of everything that's admirably good about the set of all human behaviors.
00:36:13.000Okay, and then you think, well, what sort of reality does that have?
00:36:17.000And this pulls back into the reality of the idea of the Logos, and the idea that it was the Logos that God used at the beginning of time to extract order out of chaos.
00:36:28.000So, you think, well, it's transpersonal, the goodness.
00:36:31.000Because it's not just characterized, stick of any one person.
00:36:36.000It's more like something that inhabits a person, rather than that a person is.
00:36:40.000You can really see this, for example, on the other end too, with the satanic end, because if you read the writings of people who do absolutely horrific things, like the shooters, you can see that possession extraordinarily clearly.
00:36:52.000If your eyes are open, it's like, and it's shocking, so people don't usually look at it.
00:36:57.000And they even say that themselves, like the Columbine kids, their writings are hair-raising, and they were clearly possessed by an evil that you only encounter if you sit in a dark place and brood on your hatred for months and years.
00:37:58.000Which is, I think, it's so interesting because there's a proposition there, and the proposition there is that if you encounter potential with truth, the cosmos you create is actually good.
00:38:08.000Well, that's just an absolutely overwhelming idea.
00:38:11.000It's like, if it's true, it's the greatest idea there ever was.
00:38:16.000Your thoughts on this actually, from Maps of Meaning, helped generate what we in Judaism call Tzvar Torah in Hebrew, meaning a thought about the Bible.
00:38:26.000But this, merged with a little bit of Aristotelian thought, led me to the idea that when it comes to the mystical notion of the tree of good and evil in Eden, what is that supposed to be?
00:38:36.000What did people do wrong by eating from the tree of good and evil?
00:38:39.000And my feeling is that what they did wrong is that God created a universe in which the value was embedded in the object.
00:38:46.000In the same way that you, in your book, talk about if you're teaching a child about an object, the rules of the object are embedded in the teaching about the object.
00:38:54.000So you use the example of the vase, we were discussing this earlier, but you use the example of a vase where you teach a child, don't touch the vase because the vase will break.
00:39:17.000So if you believe that God created the universe along these lines, and that what natural law is, is just the human attempt to understand the lines along which God created the universe, then where human beings went wrong is when they decided to separate values from the universe.
00:39:32.000When we decided to take values and say, this is a completely separate thing.
00:39:35.000So this vase has no rules attached to it anymore.
00:39:39.000And we can construct the rules arbitrarily as to what to do with this vase.
00:39:43.000And so eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil,
00:39:45.000Changes the nature of good and evil from the universe comes along with a set of rules to human beings think that they can use their own intuition to supplant God's rules and to supplant Universal rules with their own particular vision of what the universe ought to be and at that point they have to be expelled Yeah, well, okay.
00:40:01.000Okay, so that's also associated to some degree I would say with
00:40:04.000Milton's warning in Paradise Lost because Milton basically portrays Lucifer who's the bringer of light weirdly enough as the spirit of unbridled rationality Which accounts for the say the Catholic Church antagonism the Catholic Church's antagonism towards rationality The idea was same idea in the Tower of Babel that human beings have a proclivity to erect their own dogmatic
00:40:50.000How that's tangled up with the knowledge of good and evil, while you're making some headway towards sorting that out.
00:40:57.000I mean, there is a cataclysm that's explained in the story of Adam and Eve.
00:41:03.000The cataclysm is the coming to wakefulness.
00:41:07.000And it's associated partly with recognition of nakedness, which is recognition of vulnerability and mortality, and the discovery of death, and then also the discovery of good and evil that goes along with that.
00:41:17.000So you said, well, that's partly the cognitive division of ethics from the facts of the object.
00:41:24.000I would also recommend to people, I think I mentioned this before, is Ian McGilchrist's book, The Master and His Emissary, because he looks at this neuropsychologically, right, and looks at the
00:41:34.000The left hemisphere as the hemisphere that's dealing with the explicitly axiomatic systems, and the right hemisphere that's dealing with what those systems are embodied in.
00:41:45.000Okay, so part of what happens with the emergence of good and evil, as far as I could tell, it took me a long time to think about this, and this is different than the hypothesis that you laid forward, which is why I can't reconcile it exactly.
00:42:27.000You also realize that you can be hurt and suffer, and that kind of goes along with God's command that you're going to work in the sweat of your brow and that you're going to die, and that women are going to be subjugated to men, which is put on as a curse, not as a moral imperative, right?
00:43:11.000And that once human beings begin to supplant their own rationality for
00:43:16.000There's something about that that's right.
00:43:17.000I mean, part of what happens in the New Testament, as far as I can tell, is that what Christ says, so he's trying to transcend the rule structure, right?
00:43:35.000Not because there's anything wrong with the rules.
00:43:37.000They're a necessary precondition for discipline, which is actually why I wrote 12 rules.
00:43:41.000You need rules, but rules conflict, and they don't always apply, and so there has to be an ethic underlying the rules, and you should have more respect for the ethic than for the rules.
00:43:52.000Christ's idea, and this is part of the idea of the re-establishment of paradise, is that
00:43:56.000You should orient yourself towards the good, and that's something like an alliance with God, and then that you should tell the truth, and that's the ethic that generated the rules to begin with.
00:44:07.000Okay, and then we could be serious about this, you know, and we could say, well, how do you adjudicate the reality of that claim?
00:44:13.000All right, so then we might think, well, we already walked through the fact that
00:44:17.000The heroes of the past acted on potential to extract out the world of actuality, and if they did that properly, then the world they extracted was good, and that that is a divine principle.
00:44:28.000And then we might say, well, is it a divine principle?
00:44:32.000And you might say, well, what is it that's acting through people in the good?
00:44:37.000Like, the Christian theological answer to that would be the Logos, right?
00:45:43.000Female chimps in estrus will mate with any chimp.
00:45:46.000The main chimps, the dominant ones, chase the subordinate males away, so they're more likely to have offspring, but it's not because of female choice.
00:45:54.000Now, human females have done this whole different thing, is that they have hidden
00:46:01.000Fertility and they're much more likely to go after guys who have climbed up the hierarchy So let's say heroes will give the women some credit for intelligence right and say that that's what they're after Even if they're using wealth and so forth and status as a marker
00:46:17.000They're actually using those as a marker for competence.
00:46:21.000And I think the evidence for that is clear.
00:46:23.000Okay, so you might say, oh well, it was human female conscious choice that selected us.
00:46:30.000Okay, and you think, well that's not random.
00:47:06.000Okay, so here's what happens, essentially.
00:47:09.000The men all get together and vote on the good men.
00:47:12.000And the good men are then chosen by the women, and those are the people who propagate.
00:47:18.000And so, it's like men are voting on which men get to reproduce, and women are going along with the vote, and being even more stringent in their choices, let's say.
00:47:28.000And so then what you get is that the consciousness, that through its active expression, transforms the potential of the world into actuality, also selects the direction of evolution
00:47:42.000Right, and that's where the meme, Dawkins term, turns into the biological reality.
00:47:47.000So, yeah, this is something that's so cool about Dawkins.
00:47:51.000It's like, I've often thought this about Dawkins, is if he would push his thinking to the limits, he would fall right into Jung.
00:47:58.000Well, and then he'd be lost, of course, because that's a whole other universe.
00:48:01.000But if you take that meme seriously, and I mean really seriously, you think, yeah, there's some ways of
00:48:07.000conceptualizing that becomes so all-encompassing.
00:48:11.000Powerful that they outweigh themselves.
00:48:43.000That's expressed in the Hero of Heroes, that idea.
00:48:47.000That Hero of Heroes is the driving force behind human evolution.
00:48:52.000So not only do you get the action of the Logos metaphysically as the process that extracts order out of chaos at the beginning of time, you also get it as the major driver of evolution.
00:49:04.000Okay, then what kind of reality does that have?
00:49:06.000Because you chase consciousness back, like it disappears into the mystery of the past, and we have no idea what its relationship is with matter.
00:49:14.000But it's the force that gives rise to the cosmos and drives evolution.
00:49:18.000It's like you're getting pretty close to God there.
00:49:23.000You know, not close to, but in the midst of an argument about free will.
00:49:26.000Because obviously if you make the hard determinist argument that free will doesn't exist and that consciousness is merely a sort of trick that your brain is playing on itself, then how exactly does... how does culture propagate?
00:49:41.000Sexual selection and natural selection become one and the same as soon as you boil sexual selection down to natural selection.
00:49:46.000Well, and also, I think the free will argument, I mean, I see why Harris gets tangled up in that, you know, because, well, first of all, deterministic arguments are unbelievably powerful, and when we use deterministic models for many things, they really work.
00:49:59.000So you could say, well, we're going to use that by default.
00:50:38.000The way I treat myself, if I'm going to be good to myself, in the proper sense, is that I'm an active agent of choice confronting an infinite landscape of potential and casting that potential into a reality for good or for evil.
00:50:54.000And if I treat myself that way, then I have proper respect for myself and proper fear of myself.
00:51:01.000Because I can make bad decisions and warp the structure of reality.
00:51:04.000And I think if you read Frankl, for example, or Solzhenitsyn, and you see how your bad decisions can warp the structure of reality, then that wakes you up, right?
00:51:16.000If you don't treat yourself like an active agent, imbued with logos, then your life doesn't go well.
00:51:22.000But more, if you don't treat other people that way, they do not want to play with you.
00:51:27.000If we set up societies that aren't predicated on the idea that people are like that, then the societies become, they dissolve or they become totalitarian almost instantly.
00:51:37.000So then I would say, well, you've got the problem of determinism.
00:52:01.000This is where the truth pragmatism question comes back into being, right?
00:52:04.000Because Sam would say, well, it's true regardless of what the effect is.
00:52:07.000And you would say, well, it's obviously not true if morals are constructed for a pragmatic reason and if this pragmatism doesn't work, if it falls into nothingness.
00:52:14.000Well, it also depends to some degree on how you're willing to test your hypothesis, because I might say, well, if your hypothesis is factually correct, wouldn't you assume that if people based their behaviors, individually and familial and socially, on that set of facts, which is basically what Sam claims about facts to begin with, if you based your ethos on those facts, wouldn't it work?
00:52:45.000We have to treat each other like divine centers of consciousness in order for society to work.
00:52:53.000I can't see any way out of those arguments.
00:52:55.000Yeah, I can't either, obviously, which is why you and I agree on so much about this kind of stuff.
00:53:00.000And I think that it's also the reason why people find your work really inspiring.
00:53:04.000While the left wants to claim that you are an angry person, or they'll claim similarly that I'm a deeply angry person, I don't think there's been quite an angry conversation.
00:53:18.000And I think that it's demonstrative of why so many people find what you're doing inspiring.
00:53:23.000Unlike the radical left, which is consumed with the idea of victimhood and victimology, and we're victims of the system.
00:53:29.000Marxism makes the claim that the only way that people suck is the claim that Marxism makes, but the only way to cure people of sucking is by changing the entire system, which will, in some magical fashion, transform the nature of humanity.
00:53:50.000And your whole goal is to tell people exactly how it is that they can clean up their rooms, as your famous phrase goes.
00:53:56.000Yeah, well, they might as well start with what's right in front of them.
00:53:58.000It's a lot harder than it looks, because to clean up your room means to accept that it's actually necessary for you to take that little bit of chaos that's in front of you, that chaotic potential, and cast it into habitable order.
00:54:10.000And then you have to develop the right attitude towards that.
00:54:13.000It's like, okay, well, I'm going to put my room in order.
00:54:17.000Order is in relationship to something.
00:54:19.000You know, like if your desk is ordered, it means you've ordered it because you're going to work there and you're working there on something valuable.
00:54:25.000And so the order is conceived of in relationship to a telos.
00:54:29.000It's like, okay, you're going to order your room.
00:54:55.000See if you can put your immediate environment together.
00:54:57.000And you'll find, if you're in a chaotic household, and a chaotic household would be one where
00:55:03.000No one has any discipline, no one has any aims, and there's a terrible battle between Cain and Abel going on all the time, right?
00:55:10.000So life sucks, and everything's miserable, and we're cynical, and that's what wisdom is.
00:55:16.000It's like, and there's no point in trying anything because everything's meaningless, and who the hell's gonna care in a million years, and you're a fool to move forward in any case.
00:56:08.000And if you've got your room in order, then put your office in order.
00:56:11.000See, and then you're going to encounter the, as soon as you do that, you step out into the social world, you're going to encounter the antipathy between men and women.
00:56:19.000You're going to encounter the identity politics in the workplace.
00:56:22.000You're going to encounter how you regulate your sexual morality while you're working with people of the opposite sex.
00:56:28.000You're going to encounter the ethics that are necessary to move your business forward.
00:56:32.000It's like the whole, it's a microcosm, it really is.
00:56:36.000And so to take those microcosms seriously, well that's what I'm asking people to do.
00:57:17.000Don't be thinking that your errors aren't linked to hell, because they are.
00:57:22.000If you look at what happened in the 20th century, the brilliant commentators on the 20th century totalitarian states and all of their atrocities said the same thing over and over.
00:57:39.000It's the moral failings of every single individual unwilling to say their truth, unwilling to act out what they know to be right that
00:57:48.000accumulate and produce the catastrophic state and so when you're fussing about with your life when you're not manifesting your potential when you're falsifying your speech and your actions in the service of short-term expedience you are working to bring about hell on earth and that's true it's true literally and then it's true it's I suspect it's also true metaphorically and that's a real truth man when you get the literal and the metaphorical working at the same time it's like that's
00:58:18.000So it isn't just that you have to fix up yourself so that, you know, you can have a better life.
00:58:22.000It's like, who cares about you for a moment?
00:58:25.000You know, it's you have to fix up your life because if you don't, every time you make a mistake that you know to be a mistake, you're leading the world toward hell.