The Ben Shapiro Show - Jordan B Peterson | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep.1

00:00:00.000 There's lots of times in your life you're not going to be happy, and so that's not going to work.

00:00:03.000 You want to have something meaningful.

00:00:05.000 That's the boat that will take you through the storm.

00:00:14.000 Well, here we are with Jordan Peterson, and I could not be more excited to talk with the best-selling author of 12 Rules for Life.

00:00:21.000 And I will talk with him, but first, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Helix Sleep.

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00:01:12.000 Okay, so I could not be more excited to speak with Jordan Peterson.

00:01:15.000 Well, as Jordan knows, before the show, we talk

00:01:17.000 Thanks for the invitation.

00:01:42.000 Well, you know, obviously your prominence has just blown up in the last year and a half.

00:01:47.000 We were talking before the show about why that is and why there are so many people who suddenly are very angry about you.

00:01:51.000 I noticed there was an article in Politico suggesting that young angry white males, you are now their leader, so congratulations.

00:01:57.000 Oh yes, yes.

00:01:59.000 I wanted to ask you about that.

00:02:00.000 Why 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?

00:02:09.000 Why are they characterizing people who listen to you as angry and enraged young white men?

00:02:13.000 Well, we could look at the characterization to begin with, you know, because I think it speaks to the pathology of the radical left.

00:02:19.000 Instantly, they're absolutely incapable of viewing the world except through group identity terms. 0.99

00:02:25.000 You 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.

00:02:33.000 Maybe it's gender, because that's a favorite, or maybe it's race. 0.92

00:02:36.000 And so angry white men, young, there we go, sexist, ageist, and racist all at once, right? 0.99

00:02:41.000 They're angry, young, white men. 0.95

00:02:44.000 Well, 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.

00:02:51.000 And 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.

00:03:05.000 But if you can't make your enemy reprehensible along some dimension, then you have to contend with them seriously.

00:03:11.000 And 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!

00:03:23.000 Or Milo Yiannopoulos!

00:03:24.000 It's like, because there's no difference between them, right?

00:03:27.000 No obvious difference.

00:03:28.000 It's just another attempt to pillory, as far as I can tell. 0.98

00:03:31.000 And I think that it's dreadful.

00:03:34.000 I really think it is.

00:03:36.000 There 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.

00:03:50.000 And I read that, and I thought, yeah, like Mussolini.

00:03:53.000 And I thought, okay, so what are you doing?

00:03:56.000 I see.

00:03:57.000 You're defining masculinity.

00:03:59.000 You're conflating masculinity and hyper-masculinity at the same time.

00:04:03.000 Then you're virtue signaling by being against hyper-masculinity.

00:04:07.000 But really what you're trying to do is bring down whatever it is that's masculinity.

00:04:12.000 And what masculinity is in this frame is something like competence.

00:04:16.000 And 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.

00:04:26.000 The 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.

00:04:38.000 And then the other thing that's reprehensible about it, because that's not enough, is that it's just wrong.

00:04:44.000 Like, I've got tens of thousands of letters from people and people come up to me all the time on the street.

00:04:51.000 I'll give you an example.

00:04:52.000 This is a great story.

00:04:53.000 This is really touching.

00:04:54.000 So I was in LA about a month and a half ago.

00:04:57.000 And I was downtown L.A., and downtown L.A.

00:04:59.000 is 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.

00:05:11.000 He was all excited.

00:05:13.000 He asked me who I was, and I told him.

00:05:15.000 You know, that's what he had presumed, and so he was kind of excited about that.

00:05:17.000 And he said, look, I've watched all your lectures, and it's really helped me.

00:05:20.000 And I've been straightening out my life and trying to get my room clean.

00:05:23.000 And he laughed about that.

00:05:24.000 But, you know, developing some aims and trying to tell the truth.

00:05:27.000 And look, I've really fixed up my relationship with my father.

00:05:30.000 And so then he said, wait, wait, just wait a minute.

00:05:32.000 And I thought, sure, sure.

00:05:34.000 And so he went back in the car, and he got his father out of his car.

00:05:37.000 And he came over with his dad, like they had their arms around each other.

00:05:40.000 And he said, look, we've really improved our relationship.

00:05:42.000 And they were both smiling away.

00:05:43.000 And, you know,

00:05:45.000 That's, man, if you're going to target me for that, just go right ahead. 0.90

00:05:49.000 Sounds real white supremacist.

00:05:50.000 Oh yeah, yeah, and it's wherever I go now.

00:05:53.000 And 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.

00:06:02.000 They 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.

00:06:18.000 Lost 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

00:06:42.000 And 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.

00:06:49.000 And they'll say, look, you know, like I was suicidal, man.

00:06:51.000 Like I was really hanging on to the edge of the earth by my fingernails and I'm better.

00:06:57.000 And they have tears in their eyes.

00:06:59.000 It's like,

00:07:00.000 That's amazing.

00:07:00.000 Little of that goes a long way, man.

00:07:02.000 Well, I think that when I look at your rise and look, I talk to people who love what you do.

00:07:08.000 I 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.

00:07:15.000 And I think that the reason for that that I've seen is really twofold.

00:07:18.000 One 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

00:07:28.000 Yeah, well, I mean, the gender issue is really an interesting one because 0.98

00:07:53.000 One of my professional domains of expertise is individual differences.

00:07:57.000 I'm a personality psychologist, and so I know the gender difference literature.

00:08:02.000 And it's a very solid literature.

00:08:05.000 Well, first of all, it's very solid.

00:08:07.000 It has a 30-year history.

00:08:09.000 One psychologist got the personality models down, so that would be the Big Five model.

00:08:14.000 All empirically derived.

00:08:15.000 Straight statistics, right?

00:08:16.000 Brute force empiricism.

00:08:18.000 Nobody had a theoretical ax to grind with the Big Five except to say,

00:08:23.000 Maybe there are human traits.

00:08:25.000 Maybe they're encapsulated in language.

00:08:27.000 We can use statistical techniques to find out what they are.

00:08:30.000 That was it.

00:08:30.000 That's the whole ideology.

00:08:32.000 So very, very neutral as far as ideologies go.

00:08:35.000 Five traits emerge.

00:08:36.000 Okay?

00:08:38.000 Are there differences between the sexes?

00:08:40.000 Turns out there are.

00:08:41.000 Alright?

00:08:42.000 They're not massive, although if you sum them across all the traits, you can separate men and women with about 75% accuracy.

00:08:49.000 So it's not trivial, but you have to sum across all the traits.

00:08:51.000 Then another question comes up.

00:08:53.000 Well, are those differences sociocultural or biological?

00:08:57.000 Okay, we can test that.

00:08:59.000 We'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.

00:09:07.000 We can do that, with broad agreement from the right and the left.

00:09:11.000 Then the hypothesis would be, if gender differences decrease among more egalitarian societies, then the gender differences are sociocultural, or at least more sociocultural.

00:09:22.000 That's exactly the opposite of what was found.

00:09:25.000 Repeatedly.

00:09:26.000 That's pseudoscience.

00:09:27.000 It's like, no, that's mainstream psychology.

00:09:30.000 Those papers have thousands of citations, and the Average Humanities paper,

00:09:35.000 Has zero citations, right?

00:09:37.000 And then the next most common one has one.

00:09:39.000 Three thousand?

00:09:40.000 That's an unbelievable classic.

00:09:43.000 And here's the other bit of proof.

00:09:45.000 Like you say, well how do you know that you can trust someone's judgment about a fact?

00:09:50.000 The fact emerges despite their ideological presuppositions.

00:09:54.000 Okay, 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.

00:10:04.000 But as Jonathan Haidt has pointed out, there are no conservatives among social personality psychologists, or none to speak of.

00:10:12.000 Very few.

00:10:13.000 Vanishingly few.

00:10:14.000 And if the field has a bias, it is definitely and indisputably a left-wing bias.

00:10:20.000 Okay, so you have to fight that if you're a scientist, right?

00:10:23.000 Even if you're a left-wing scientist, you have to fight that because you want to get to the facts.

00:10:27.000 It 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.

00:10:35.000 They didn't do that to grind their ideological acts, because their ideological presupposition was, no, no.

00:10:42.000 You make the society egalitarian, men and women get more the same.

00:10:46.000 It's like, nope, they get more different.

00:10:48.000 Oh, hmm, isn't that something?

00:10:51.000 And 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.

00:11:01.000 Men and women are different.

00:11:03.000 It looks biological.

00:11:04.000 But because people are malleable, you could push the sociocultural structure harder and harder to minimize the biological differences.

00:11:13.000 Okay, well, first of all, maybe, and maybe not, maybe you'd get a rebound and they'd get even, like, the kids would rebel.

00:11:19.000 That could easily happen.

00:11:20.000 But let's say, okay, you could.

00:11:22.000 The problem with that is that if you seed that much

00:11:27.000 Well, 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.

00:11:33.000 And obviously, you're a psychologist, you're a philosopher, but you've been dragged

00:11:56.000 Almost kicking and screaming into this political sphere because everything has been so politicized.

00:12:00.000 And 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.

00:12:08.000 You're called Milo Yiannopoulos.

00:12:09.000 Exactly.

00:12:10.000 So 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?

00:12:24.000 Because imagine that the cognitive system, an interpretation of the world, has levels, they're axiomatic levels.

00:12:32.000 Some fundamental presuppositions are more fundamental than others.

00:12:37.000 And 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.

00:12:47.000 But when push comes to shove, you find out how the axioms are nested.

00:12:54.000 There's deeper axioms underneath that, which is that

00:12:57.000 All hierarchies are based on power, and all power plays are based on group identity, tribal identity, essentially.

00:13:04.000 And that the entire history of the world is nothing but a power play between these different identity groups. 0.73

00:13:10.000 It'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?

00:13:18.000 And the answer to that question is, well, it depends on how you've hierarchically arranged those.

00:13:22.000 If the science is at the bottom, then you alter your beliefs.

00:13:26.000 If the scientific facts are the axiomatic substructure, then you alter your beliefs.

00:13:33.000 If your beliefs are the axiomatic substructure, then you alter the science.

00:13:37.000 Well, we've seen how that plays out.

00:13:39.000 And one of the things I've tried to do, so to speak, is to diagnose the axiomatic structure.

00:13:44.000 It's like, okay, what's the metaphysical presumption structure of the radical left?

00:13:50.000 Well, what it is, is you're basically your group.

00:13:53.000 Your groups are basically engaged in warfare, right?

00:13:57.000 And the warfare is arbitrary, except insofar as it serves your group.

00:14:01.000 Okay?

00:14:02.000 I don't buy any of that.

00:14:03.000 I think that's a route to certain disaster.

00:14:06.000 I think it's a degeneration into tribalism, and that we will 0.93

00:14:10.000 Seriously pay for it.

00:14:12.000 Not only because it returns us to tribalism and tribes fight as the anthropological evidence for that is overwhelming, right?

00:14:19.000 Tribes fight.

00:14:20.000 It doesn't even matter if they're chimpanzee tribes.

00:14:23.000 Even chimpanzee tribes fight.

00:14:25.000 So, 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.

00:14:39.000 And 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

00:14:52.000 In relationship to that identity.

00:14:54.000 And the leftist answer is, it's all group, and it's all power.

00:14:57.000 It's like, okay.

00:14:59.000 So 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.

00:15:13.000 But I want to talk about some of the divisions among the individualists in just a second.

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00:16:36.000 Okay, 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.

00:16:52.000 But 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.

00:17:01.000 So, you consider yourself a friend of the Enlightenment-style thinking, at least in the essence that individuality matters and that the individual is sovereign.

00:17:08.000 And that the scientific method is useful.

00:17:11.000 And that facts are useful and real.

00:17:14.000 And in this group, I consider myself as part of this group.

00:17:16.000 People have started to call it the intellectual dark web.

00:17:18.000 Sam Harris is part of this group.

00:17:20.000 There are a wide variety of folks with a lot of broad political differences that are part of this group.

00:17:26.000 But there are some real differences that are broken out even among people who consider themselves part of this group.

00:17:31.000 Steven Pinker.

00:17:32.000 It has a different perspective on the world than you do.

00:17:35.000 I have a different perspective than Sam Harris does.

00:17:37.000 You and I have our differences, probably, on some matters of philosophy.

00:17:40.000 So, where do you think the vulnerability lies in the possibility of revivifying an Enlightenment mentality?

00:17:47.000 Because 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.

00:17:57.000 That 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.

00:18:02.000 We'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.

00:18:09.000 I think that's what unites... Well, that's the question.

00:18:13.000 What do you toss out the window before things get ugly?

00:18:17.000 Right.

00:18:20.000 proponents

00:18:35.000 Interesting, 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.

00:18:45.000 And there's some utility in that, but the downside is they don't have any historical context.

00:18:50.000 So you read someone like Taylor, and you think, wow, he's stretching it back 500 years.

00:18:55.000 There's reading that goes way beyond that to look at the sources of the self and the source of the modern ethos.

00:19:02.000 And 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.

00:19:18.000 And that would be

00:19:20.000 an ethos of metaphor, image, drama, ritual, religion, art, music, all of that, dance even for that matter, the nonverbal, the pattern recognition.

00:19:32.000 Ian McGilchrist has written a book called The Master and His Emissary which lays that out quite nicely with regards to hemispheric specialization.

00:19:39.000 It's kind of predicated on

00:19:41.000 Thanks for joining us.

00:19:51.000 The rough idea would be that the left hemisphere generates paradigmatic systems, so that would be like the Enlightenment system, axiom-predicated, right?

00:19:59.000 Even statable axiom-predicated.

00:20:01.000 But 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.

00:20:19.000 And so, because here's one way of looking at it.

00:20:22.000 You think, well, how do you validate an axiomatic system of ethics?

00:20:26.000 And the answer is quite straightforward.

00:20:27.000 Jean 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.

00:20:36.000 And if the thing that you're playing out, if the axiomatic system that you're playing out

00:20:41.000 satisfies the motivations and the emotions of the people who are engaged in that system, then the system is justified.

00:20:48.000 And then you say, well, it's not just that their motivations and emotions are satisfied.

00:20:52.000 It's more complex.

00:20:53.000 It's that the motivations and emotions of each individual are satisfied.

00:20:57.000 But not only now, but now, next week, next month, and next year.

00:21:02.000 So you have to extend it across time.

00:21:05.000 And not only my emotions and motivations, but yours as well.

00:21:10.000 Now, next week, next month, and across time.

00:21:12.000 So there's terribly tight constraints placed upon an axiomatic system's validity.

00:21:20.000 Now, the way Jean Piaget thought of that, he said, well, think about it like a child's game.

00:21:24.000 A bunch of kids get together, and they decide to play pretend.

00:21:27.000 OK, and pretend is, let's model the world, right?

00:21:31.000 And as a place to act, because to pretend, you act out, right?

00:21:35.000 So the kids get together, and they assign roles.

00:21:38.000 And 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.

00:21:43.000 And then they act it out in what they're doing.

00:21:47.000 is 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.

00:21:58.000 Okay.

00:21:58.000 And so that's so cool!

00:21:59.000 So what it shows you is that's how an ethical system is tested and justified.

00:22:05.000 It's like you play it out and you see if everyone wants to keep playing.

00:22:08.000 And so that's a whole different methodology than the scientific domain.

00:22:12.000 So the axiomatic system isn't, the ethical axiomatic system isn't justified by reference to the scientific method.

00:22:19.000 It's justified by reference to the emotional and motivational well-being of all the players of the game.

00:22:26.000 Now that game emerges, this is the second part of this, and this is so cool.

00:22:31.000 Then the question is, well, how does that game emerge?

00:22:35.000 And the answer is the same way that children's games emerge.

00:22:39.000 So what Piaget noted is that kids would get together and they'd play marbles.

00:22:43.000 And if they were young kids, they could all play marbles, say six years old, they could all play marbles.

00:22:48.000 And if they were in a group, they were playing marbles and it all worked out fine.

00:22:51.000 Squabbles and all that, but you know, the kids would keep playing, validating the game.

00:22:56.000 But if you took the kids out of the game and you said, what are the rules of the game?

00:22:59.000 They would give completely disparate accounts, so they knew how to do it.

00:23:03.000 It was like the wisdom was in the group.

00:23:06.000 The wisdom was fragmented enough among the individuals, so if you pulled the individuals out, they'd give disparate accounts.

00:23:11.000 But if you put them all together, they could play the game.

00:23:13.000 But then if you waited until they were 11 or 12, and you pulled them out of the game, then they could tell you the rules.

00:23:19.000 Then at 14 or 15, they would be willing to

00:23:24.000 This is with more sophisticated games.

00:23:25.000 They would be more willing to regard themselves as makers of the rules.

00:23:30.000 Okay, so here's how it happens in an evolutionary sense.

00:23:33.000 People, going all the way back to our primate forebears, organize themselves into functional hierarchies. 0.98

00:23:40.000 The hierarchies are complex, and they're not just based on power, despite what the idiot Marxists say. 0.95

00:23:45.000 Even de Waal has noted that chimpanzee hierarchies are unstable if they're only based on power. 0.98

00:23:52.000 They don't last.

00:23:52.000 They degenerate into violence.

00:23:54.000 So you have a hierarchy that works

00:23:59.000 But it's acted out.

00:24:00.000 No one knows why it works.

00:24:02.000 It works because everyone seems to be happy with it.

00:24:05.000 Okay, and so those hierarchies get more complex and more sophisticated, and then people start to observe them and talk about them.

00:24:11.000 It's like, well, we've got this hierarchy here.

00:24:13.000 What's it like?

00:24:14.000 And then they spin off dramas about the hierarchy.

00:24:16.000 Here's a hero who climbed up the hierarchy, and here's what a hero looks like.

00:24:20.000 Okay, so then you get the idea of hierarchy.

00:24:23.000 And then you get the idea of the hero as the person who moves up the hierarchy and generates it.

00:24:27.000 Okay?

00:24:28.000 Then out of that, you get the extraction of the idea of the hero, and then you get development of that idea.

00:24:34.000 And it's out of that that you get the monotheistic religions.

00:24:37.000 And so it's like, the procedure and the hierarchy come first.

00:24:41.000 No one knows what the rules are.

00:24:43.000 It's all played out the same way that wolves play it out in a pack, or chimpanzees play it out in a troop.

00:24:48.000 Then we wake up and think, oh, we live in a structure.

00:24:51.000 Here's the structure.

00:24:52.000 That would be Osiris in the Egyptian mythologies.

00:24:55.000 Here's the structure.

00:24:56.000 Here's how the structure goes wrong.

00:24:58.000 Here's what the structure does.

00:24:59.000 Here's its tyrannical aspect.

00:25:01.000 Here's what you have to do to generate the structure and to thrive in it.

00:25:05.000 Okay, that's even more important.

00:25:07.000 The hierarchy is important enough.

00:25:08.000 But what we want to know is how to master the hierarchy.

00:25:11.000 Okay, that's where you get the mythologies of the hero.

00:25:13.000 Okay.

00:25:13.000 And so then this generates all sorts of different heroes, because there's different ways of being successful.

00:25:19.000 Then you have a panoply of heroes.

00:25:21.000 Then you think, okay, well now we've got all those heroes.

00:25:24.000 That's a set.

00:25:26.000 We can pull back and say, okay, something about all these heroes is what makes them heroes.

00:25:33.000 That's when you extract out the monotheistic savior. 0.60

00:25:36.000 Because that's why in Christianity, Christ is the king of kings.

00:25:40.000 It's actually, you can think about it as a literal statement.

00:25:44.000 Forget about the religious overlay.

00:25:45.000 It's like, okay, you got a bunch of people.

00:25:47.000 Some of them are kind of king-like.

00:25:49.000 Okay, so you admire them for whatever reason that is.

00:25:53.000 It's not easy to figure out why you admire someone.

00:25:55.000 That's complicated.

00:25:56.000 But let's say you've got admirable people.

00:25:59.000 You start telling stories about them.

00:26:00.000 That's why you go to a movie.

00:26:02.000 You want to go watch someone you don't care about, you're bored by?

00:26:05.000 No, you want to go watch someone admirable and interesting, or maybe the opposite of that, but it doesn't matter.

00:26:10.000 It's the same thing.

00:26:11.000 Then you think, okay, well we've got all these admirable people.

00:26:14.000 They're generating the world properly.

00:26:16.000 That's what makes them admirable.

00:26:17.000 There's a principle they embody, and that principle is the process by which the admirable world is generated.

00:26:24.000 That's the logos.

00:26:26.000 That's the thing that's operative

00:26:27.000 Without the beginning of time.

00:26:28.000 So 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.

00:26:36.000 Yeah, I'm recording the audio.

00:26:37.000 And it's definitely a harder book than 12 Rules for Life, and a much more complex book in a lot of ways than 12 Rules for Life.

00:26:43.000 So how universal are these systems?

00:26:45.000 Meaning, 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

00:26:57.000 At the apex of the levels, you end up with the Enlightenment idea, which is where we started this particular question.

00:27:02.000 Then, 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?

00:27:09.000 Okay, that's a great question, man.

00:27:10.000 The first thing we would say is, the process by which the hierarchy itself

00:27:16.000 And success within the hierarchy is generated.

00:27:19.000 That's to be accounted over millions of years.

00:27:22.000 At least hundreds of thousands of years.

00:27:24.000 But I would push it back, because you can see analogs in the chimps.

00:27:27.000 So 20 million years, let's say.

00:27:29.000 That's a long time.

00:27:31.000 On that time scale, the fact that the Enlightenment values arose in Europe 500 years ago before anywhere else, it's like, well, who cares?

00:27:40.000 It's five old men long, right? 0.91

00:27:42.000 If you put five 100-year-old men in line, it's like, it's yesterday.

00:27:47.000 It's this morning.

00:27:48.000 So, we've evolved these hierarchical structures.

00:27:53.000 That's our culture.

00:27:54.000 We've evolved ways of maneuvering within the hierarchical structures that are successful.

00:27:59.000 And now we've started to evolve ways of mapping our adaptation.

00:28:04.000 Not just adapting, but mapping it.

00:28:07.000 Okay, so how does the mapping occur?

00:28:10.000 First, admiration.

00:28:13.000 Second, imitation of admiration.

00:28:16.000 And that would be drama.

00:28:18.000 It's like you dramatize.

00:28:19.000 Shakespeare extracts out what's admirable and interesting and plays it out.

00:28:24.000 So that's the use of the body as a representational structure of the body.

00:28:28.000 So we act out what's admirable.

00:28:29.000 You think, okay, now we've kind of got the drama down.

00:28:31.000 We're all captured by this drama.

00:28:33.000 It'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?

00:28:41.000 It's like chimps woke up and said, oh, well, some chimps are more successful than others.

00:28:45.000 What are the rules of success?

00:28:47.000 It's like, well, there were no rules, because they weren't running by rules.

00:28:50.000 There aren't rules until you describe the patterns.

00:28:53.000 Then you have a rule.

00:28:54.000 That's what happens with Moses, by the way.

00:28:57.000 Moses has a revelation.

00:28:58.000 Here's the rules.

00:28:59.000 It's like, yeah, we've been living out those rules forever.

00:29:02.000 But we didn't know what they were, because they weren't rules.

00:29:04.000 They were customs.

00:29:06.000 OK, so you start by mapping your customs in drama.

00:29:10.000 and story, and that way you can represent them and you can transmit them.

00:29:14.000 Then 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?

00:29:25.000 What are the general principles?

00:29:27.000 That would be the development of something like the Code of Hammurabi, right? 0.94

00:29:30.000 It's like, well, we've got all these customs,

00:29:33.000 What are they?

00:29:41.000 It 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.

00:30:00.000 That all emerges in mythology and drama.

00:30:02.000 Then that lays the groundwork for philosophy.

00:30:05.000 Then the philosophers can come in.

00:30:06.000 Especially once it's written, like in the Judeo-Christian pantheon. 0.55

00:30:09.000 It's like, oh, now we've got it written down.

00:30:11.000 Oh, well, we don't have to remember it.

00:30:14.000 We can read it.

00:30:16.000 And while we're reading, we can think about it.

00:30:18.000 And so then out of that starts to come the semantic codes.

00:30:21.000 Well, then you get the enlightenment.

00:30:23.000 It's like, oh, well, here's a bunch of semantic codes.

00:30:25.000 It's like, yeah, yeah, those are great.

00:30:27.000 So 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.

00:30:35.000 It's almost as though it accidentally occurred in a certain place in a certain time.

00:30:39.000 Jonah doesn't quite go quite that far, I think, to be fair to him.

00:30:41.000 But I think that that philosophy, that this sort of sprang up randomly here, is very much embedded in a lot of Sam Harris's

00:30:50.000 No, I don't think it's accidental.

00:30:52.000 I'm not making a reductionist argument.

00:30:54.000 So the first thing is I'm going to say this is how religion evolved.

00:31:16.000 But I'm not saying that this explanation exhausts the phenomenon, because it's a very strange phenomenon.

00:31:24.000 It's very, very strange.

00:31:25.000 But that doesn't mean we can't generate a plausible evolutionary account.

00:31:29.000 It's like, if you have a bunch of motivated, emotional, limited beings occupying the same territory and competing and cooperating for the same resources,

00:31:40.000 including the resource of cooperation, which can generate more resources.

00:31:44.000 It's not a zero-sum game.

00:31:46.000 There are going to be patterns of adaptation that emerge from that, that are similar.

00:31:52.000 So, here's a way of thinking about it.

00:31:54.000 If you put a bunch of kids together, they're going to evolve games.

00:31:58.000 Well, which games?

00:31:59.000 Well, a bunch of different games.

00:32:00.000 Yeah, but they're all games, right?

00:32:02.000 So, that's the moral relativist element.

00:32:06.000 A bunch of different games.

00:32:08.000 But the moral absolutist element is, yeah, yeah, but they're all games.

00:32:11.000 And the games have to be playable.

00:32:14.000 Which means they have to continue in an iterated way.

00:32:17.000 So that's a big constraint.

00:32:19.000 People have to want to play them.

00:32:21.000 So 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.

00:32:32.000 That's the answer to the postmodern conundrum.

00:32:34.000 A plethora of potential ethical implications of the world.

00:32:38.000 An infinite variety.

00:32:40.000 Yeah, okay, fine.

00:32:42.000 Not an infinite variety of pragmatically applicable interpretations.

00:32:47.000 You instantly constrain the universe to, well, to what?

00:32:51.000 Well, this is why there's commonalities in mythologies.

00:32:54.000 It's like, if you put enough people together in enough different places,

00:32:58.000 The 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.

00:33:18.000 And so you could say, in some sense, the ethic that gave rise to the Enlightenment is in place more or less everywhere.

00:33:26.000 Now, it's tricky, because not every hierarchical system is as functional as every other hierarchical system.

00:33:32.000 Some of them can degenerate into tyranny.

00:33:34.000 We're talking about the set of all voluntarily playable games, or something like that, and that can degenerate.

00:33:40.000 Out of that, you're going to get common hero myths.

00:33:42.000 You have to.

00:33:43.000 And then that lays the groundwork for even our ability to communicate.

00:33:48.000 Right, right.

00:33:49.000 And this is the Enlightenment guys, they're not getting that.

00:33:53.000 And 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.

00:34:00.000 Would it be fair to say that you guys agree on the idea of truth in the scientific sphere?

00:34:05.000 That if there is such a thing as objective truth,

00:34:10.000 I would say we agree on a lot of that.

00:34:12.000 The question is, to some degree, why do scientists accept the idea that objective truth is true?

00:34:19.000 And 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.

00:34:30.000 A leap of faith.

00:34:46.000 Truth is in the use that it has for human beings.

00:34:49.000 Well, 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.

00:35:01.000 So, there's one other thing I wanted to bring up that's relevant because you brought up the idea of God.

00:35:06.000 So, here's a way of thinking about it.

00:35:09.000 And 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.

00:35:15.000 So this is the intuition that I have based on a variety of things, experiences I've had.

00:35:20.000 So imagine that there's a very wide range of human behaviors, okay?

00:35:26.000 And some subset of those are both admirable and not admirable.

00:35:30.000 So let's call them good and evil at the extremes, okay?

00:35:34.000 Then 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.

00:35:43.000 And that's a transpersonal pattern, because it's not just about you or me, it's about everyone.

00:35:48.000 Okay, and so then that gets personified.

00:35:50.000 That's Christ and Satan, let's say, or Cain and Abel.

00:35:52.000 That gets personified.

00:35:54.000 And that's a bad guy and a good guy in a movie.

00:35:56.000 It's personified all the time.

00:35:58.000 It's Thor and Loki, you know, in the Marvel movies.

00:36:02.000 Now 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.

00:36:13.000 Okay, and then you think, well, what sort of reality does that have?

00:36:17.000 And 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.

00:36:28.000 So, you think, well, it's transpersonal, the goodness.

00:36:31.000 Because it's not just characterized, stick of any one person.

00:36:36.000 It's more like something that inhabits a person, rather than that a person is.

00:36:40.000 You 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.

00:36:52.000 If your eyes are open, it's like, and it's shocking, so people don't usually look at it.

00:36:57.000 And 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.

00:37:13.000 You go places that

00:37:16.000 You go places where all the dark people go. 1.00

00:37:18.000 Right.

00:37:19.000 And then that takes you over.

00:37:22.000 Okay, so the good can take you over as well.

00:37:24.000 Okay, so there's this spirit of good, let's say.

00:37:29.000 And what the spirit of good does is act in the world on the potential of the world to generate the actuality of the world.

00:37:36.000 And the Judeo-Christian proposition is that if you confront the potential of the world

00:37:41.000 with God.

00:37:58.000 Which 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.

00:38:08.000 Well, that's just an absolutely overwhelming idea.

00:38:11.000 It's like, if it's true, it's the greatest idea there ever was.

00:38:16.000 Your 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.

00:38:26.000 But 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?

00:38:36.000 What did people do wrong by eating from the tree of good and evil?

00:38:39.000 And my feeling is that what they did wrong is that God created a universe in which the value was embedded in the object.

00:38:46.000 In 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.

00:38:54.000 So 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.

00:39:01.000 Mm-hmm.

00:39:17.000 So 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.

00:39:32.000 When we decided to take values and say, this is a completely separate thing.

00:39:35.000 So this vase has no rules attached to it anymore.

00:39:38.000 It's just a vase.

00:39:39.000 And we can construct the rules arbitrarily as to what to do with this vase.

00:39:43.000 And so eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil,

00:39:45.000 Changes 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.

00:40:01.000 Okay, so that's also associated to some degree I would say with

00:40:04.000 Milton'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

00:40:28.000 I think so.

00:40:47.000 That's a catastrophe.

00:40:50.000 How that's tangled up with the knowledge of good and evil, while you're making some headway towards sorting that out.

00:40:57.000 I mean, there is a cataclysm that's explained in the story of Adam and Eve.

00:41:03.000 The cataclysm is the coming to wakefulness.

00:41:07.000 And 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.

00:41:17.000 So you said, well, that's partly the cognitive division of ethics from the facts of the object.

00:41:23.000 So I have to think that through.

00:41:24.000 I 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

00:41:34.000 The 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.

00:41:45.000 Okay, 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.

00:41:58.000 You recognize you're naked.

00:42:01.000 You know you can be hurt.

00:42:03.000 You know you're vulnerable and insufficient.

00:42:05.000 You hide from God, because that's what happens next.

00:42:09.000 And the reason you hide from God, say, God is your destiny, or you're walking with God as a manifestation of your ultimate proper destiny.

00:42:17.000 You doubt whether you're capable of that, because now you realize your embodied finitude, your nakedness and insufficiency.

00:42:24.000 So you hide and you're ashamed.

00:42:25.000 So there's that.

00:42:27.000 You 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?

00:42:40.000 Right.

00:42:41.000 But then what emerges out of that is that as soon as you know that you can be hurt,

00:42:47.000 This is what differentiates us from animals.

00:42:49.000 And you really think that through.

00:42:51.000 Here's all the myriad ways I can be hurt.

00:42:53.000 Then you're angry about that, because you can be hurt.

00:42:55.000 But even worse, you can figure out how to hurt other people.

00:42:58.000 And so that's part of that knowledge of good and evil.

00:43:01.000 You associate it with this dissociation of the object from its ethical container.

00:43:07.000 Of the universe as created by God, from our interpretation of the universe.

00:43:10.000 That there is a gap between the two.

00:43:11.000 And that once human beings begin to supplant their own rationality for

00:43:16.000 There's something about that that's right.

00:43:17.000 I 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?

00:43:35.000 Not because there's anything wrong with the rules.

00:43:37.000 They're a necessary precondition for discipline, which is actually why I wrote 12 rules.

00:43:41.000 You 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.

00:43:52.000 Christ's idea, and this is part of the idea of the re-establishment of paradise, is that

00:43:56.000 You 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.

00:44:07.000 Okay, and then we could be serious about this, you know, and we could say, well, how do you adjudicate the reality of that claim?

00:44:13.000 All right, so then we might think, well, we already walked through the fact that

00:44:17.000 The 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.

00:44:28.000 And then we might say, well, is it a divine principle?

00:44:32.000 And you might say, well, what is it that's acting through people in the good?

00:44:37.000 Like, the Christian theological answer to that would be the Logos, right?

00:44:40.000 That's the idea.

00:44:41.000 That's the idea of the Holy Spirit, roughly speaking.

00:44:43.000 You might think, well, is that a real thing?

00:44:45.000 It's like, well, to me, it's real the same way that consciousness is real.

00:44:51.000 And we don't know the role of consciousness in determining reality.

00:44:55.000 But even if you're an evolutionary biologist,

00:44:58.000 And this is so interesting, because the evolutionary biologists actually differentiate themselves from Darwin on this point.

00:45:05.000 Darwin was very, very forthright in his claim that sexual selection was as powerful as natural selection, or even more so.

00:45:12.000 So here's where that goes.

00:45:16.000 And because that brought consciousness into the world as an active player, the materialistic evolutionary biologists ignored that.

00:45:22.000 for like 150 years and only concentrated on natural selection, where they could play, well, this is all chance.

00:45:28.000 It's like sexual selection is not chance.

00:45:32.000 Okay, so here's a hypothesis.

00:45:34.000 Human beings separated themselves from chimpanzees.

00:45:37.000 One of the reasons they did that was because human females are sexually selective. 1.00

00:45:41.000 Chimps aren't. 0.94

00:45:43.000 Female chimps in estrus will mate with any chimp. 1.00

00:45:46.000 The 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.

00:45:54.000 Now, human females have done this whole different thing, is that they have hidden 1.00

00:46:01.000 Fertility 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 0.93

00:46:17.000 They're actually using those as a marker for competence.

00:46:21.000 And I think the evidence for that is clear.

00:46:23.000 Okay, so you might say, oh well, it was human female conscious choice that selected us. 1.00

00:46:30.000 Okay, and you think, well that's not random.

00:46:32.000 That's not random at all.

00:46:33.000 It's the farthest thing from random that there is.

00:46:35.000 And that means consciousness is making its choices with regards to what propagates.

00:46:39.000 But then it's even more complex than that.

00:46:42.000 So here's what happens among men.

00:46:44.000 The men all get together in their hierarchy.

00:46:46.000 They posit a valued goal.

00:46:49.000 They all accept that as the goal, because otherwise they wouldn't be cooperating.

00:46:53.000 Then they arrange themselves into a hierarchy, and they let the most competent guys lead, because they want to get to the promised land.

00:46:59.000 They want to get the most competent leaders leading.

00:47:03.000 Competent, defined by that value.

00:47:06.000 Okay, so here's what happens, essentially.

00:47:09.000 The men all get together and vote on the good men.

00:47:12.000 And the good men are then chosen by the women, and those are the people who propagate. 1.00

00:47:18.000 And 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.

00:47:28.000 And 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

00:47:42.000 Right, and that's where the meme, Dawkins term, turns into the biological reality.

00:47:47.000 So, yeah, this is something that's so cool about Dawkins.

00:47:51.000 It'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.

00:47:58.000 Well, and then he'd be lost, of course, because that's a whole other universe.

00:48:01.000 But if you take that meme seriously, and I mean really seriously, you think, yeah, there's some ways of

00:48:07.000 conceptualizing that becomes so all-encompassing.

00:48:11.000 Powerful that they outweigh themselves.

00:48:13.000 That's right.

00:48:13.000 They start to become an actual force of evolution itself.

00:48:16.000 And so then, here's the case you could make.

00:48:19.000 Consciousness extracts the proper world of being from potential through truth, and then it's good.

00:48:25.000 It's like, okay,

00:48:28.000 That's a hard one, man.

00:48:30.000 That manifests itself in human beings at the level of individual consciousness.

00:48:34.000 That's the logos within.

00:48:36.000 That's the metaphysical foundation of the idea of natural right and responsibility. 0.82

00:48:42.000 That's a bloody killer idea.

00:48:43.000 That's expressed in the Hero of Heroes, that idea.

00:48:47.000 That Hero of Heroes is the driving force behind human evolution.

00:48:52.000 So 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.

00:49:02.000 And so then you ask,

00:49:04.000 Okay, then what kind of reality does that have?

00:49:06.000 Because you chase consciousness back, like it disappears into the mystery of the past, and we have no idea what its relationship is with matter.

00:49:14.000 But it's the force that gives rise to the cosmos and drives evolution.

00:49:18.000 It's like you're getting pretty close to God there.

00:49:20.000 Even just pragmatically speaking.

00:49:23.000 You know, not close to, but in the midst of an argument about free will.

00:49:26.000 Because 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?

00:49:38.000 How do these memes propagate?

00:49:39.000 How are people choosing?

00:49:41.000 Sexual selection and natural selection become one and the same as soon as you boil sexual selection down to natural selection.

00:49:46.000 Well, 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.

00:49:59.000 So you could say, well, we're going to use that by default.

00:50:01.000 It's like, fair enough.

00:50:02.000 We're going to deviate from that with care.

00:50:06.000 But I don't see people as driven like clocks winding down.

00:50:10.000 First of all, we don't wind down in any simple way.

00:50:13.000 We're dissipative structures.

00:50:17.000 He wrote Schrodinger. 0.64

00:50:18.000 What is life?

00:50:19.000 A human being is a dissipative structure.

00:50:22.000 We're not an entropic structure like a clock running down.

00:50:25.000 We are in some sense.

00:50:26.000 But as living beings, we pull energy in.

00:50:29.000 And so we're not winding down like a deterministic structure.

00:50:32.000 We're something other than that.

00:50:33.000 And the way we treat each other

00:50:36.000 is as logos, as far as I can tell.

00:50:38.000 The 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.

00:50:54.000 And if I treat myself that way, then I have proper respect for myself and proper fear of myself.

00:51:01.000 Because I can make bad decisions and warp the structure of reality.

00:51:04.000 And 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?

00:51:13.000 Okay, so there's that.

00:51:16.000 If you don't treat yourself like an active agent, imbued with logos, then your life doesn't go well.

00:51:22.000 But more, if you don't treat other people that way, they do not want to play with you.

00:51:27.000 If 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.

00:51:37.000 So then I would say, well, you've got the problem of determinism.

00:51:40.000 It's like, fair enough, man.

00:51:42.000 How do you reconcile the fact that if you lay out a society at every level of analysis on strict deterministic grounds, it fails?

00:51:52.000 So doesn't that mean your hypothesis has a flaw?

00:51:55.000 I mean, maybe not.

00:51:57.000 Maybe you could say, no, the facts are independent of the ethical consequences.

00:52:00.000 Right, exactly.

00:52:01.000 This is where the truth pragmatism question comes back into being, right?

00:52:04.000 Because Sam would say, well, it's true regardless of what the effect is.

00:52:07.000 And 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.

00:52:14.000 Well, 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?

00:52:40.000 Right.

00:52:40.000 Well, he claims that that's a test, and I'd say, well, then it fails that test.

00:52:44.000 It doesn't work.

00:52:45.000 We have to treat each other like divine centers of consciousness in order for society to work.

00:52:53.000 I can't see any way out of those arguments.

00:52:55.000 Yeah, I can't either, obviously, which is why you and I agree on so much about this kind of stuff.

00:53:00.000 And I think that it's also the reason why people find your work really inspiring.

00:53:04.000 While 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.

00:53:11.000 I'm pretty sure it has not been.

00:53:13.000 I'm horrified by what the radical left is capable of, but that doesn't make me angry.

00:53:17.000 Exactly.

00:53:18.000 And I think that it's demonstrative of why so many people find what you're doing inspiring.

00:53:23.000 Unlike the radical left, which is consumed with the idea of victimhood and victimology, and we're victims of the system.

00:53:29.000 Marxism 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.

00:53:40.000 In the proper direction. 0.96

00:53:41.000 Right.

00:53:42.000 Exactly. 1.00

00:53:42.000 The claim that you're making, and I hope that I'm making as well, is that human beings do suck unless they decide to stop sucking. 1.00

00:53:49.000 Right? 0.98

00:53:50.000 And your whole goal is to tell people exactly how it is that they can clean up their rooms, as your famous phrase goes.

00:53:56.000 Yeah, well, they might as well start with what's right in front of them.

00:53:58.000 It'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.

00:54:10.000 And then you have to develop the right attitude towards that.

00:54:13.000 It's like, okay, well, I'm going to put my room in order.

00:54:15.000 Well, what do you mean?

00:54:17.000 Order is in relationship to something.

00:54:19.000 You 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.

00:54:25.000 And so the order is conceived of in relationship to a telos.

00:54:29.000 It's like, okay, you're going to order your room.

00:54:31.000 Well, what are you going to do in it?

00:54:33.000 Like, what's your room for?

00:54:35.000 What's the purpose?

00:54:36.000 You can't order your room without falling into purpose.

00:54:41.000 And I would say, well, if you're going to fall into purpose, it's like, try it out on a local scale first.

00:54:45.000 Right?

00:54:46.000 You don't want to go out there and change the system.

00:54:48.000 It's like, what the hell do you know?

00:54:50.000 Leave the system alone.

00:54:52.000 See what you can do locally.

00:54:54.000 See if you can put yourself together.

00:54:55.000 See if you can put your immediate environment together.

00:54:57.000 And you'll find, if you're in a chaotic household, and a chaotic household would be one where

00:55:03.000 No 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?

00:55:10.000 So life sucks, and everything's miserable, and we're cynical, and that's what wisdom is. 0.99

00:55:16.000 It'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. 0.99

00:55:24.000 It's like, there's your household. 0.95

00:55:26.000 Okay, and so now you decide, no,

00:55:29.000 Despite all that, I'm going to put my room in order.

00:55:32.000 It's like, you will have a war on your hands.

00:55:34.000 Because the first thing the people around you who are aiming down will do is think, oh, you really, eh?

00:55:39.000 You think you're so much better than we are, do you? 0.99

00:55:42.000 You really think that, you and your fancy goddamn plans. 0.99

00:55:45.000 It's like, we're going to put every psychological obstacle we can possibly think of in your way. 0.99

00:55:50.000 Because if you succeed, even in something that trivial, you shed a very dim light on our existence.

00:55:56.000 And so we're going to put, we're going to do everything we can to take you out.

00:56:00.000 And so this, people think, oh well, cleaning your room, that's just a cliché.

00:56:03.000 It's like, yeah, really, eh?

00:56:05.000 Just go ahead and try it.

00:56:06.000 You see how much of a cliché that is.

00:56:08.000 And if you've got your room in order, then put your office in order.

00:56:11.000 See, 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.

00:56:19.000 You're going to encounter the identity politics in the workplace.

00:56:22.000 You're going to encounter how you regulate your sexual morality while you're working with people of the opposite sex. 1.00

00:56:28.000 You're going to encounter the ethics that are necessary to move your business forward.

00:56:32.000 It's like the whole, it's a microcosm, it really is.

00:56:36.000 And so to take those microcosms seriously, well that's what I'm asking people to do.

00:56:41.000 And I'm saying, look,

00:56:44.000 It isn't only about you being happy.

00:56:46.000 It's like, yeah, whatever, happy.

00:56:49.000 There's lots of times in your life you're not going to be happy, and so that's not going to work.

00:56:52.000 You want to have something meaningful.

00:56:54.000 That's the boat that will take you through the storm, right?

00:56:57.000 When you batten down the hatches.

00:56:59.000 But there's more.

00:56:59.000 It isn't even that.

00:57:00.000 It isn't even me.

00:57:03.000 I don't

00:57:17.000 Don't be thinking that your errors aren't linked to hell, because they are.

00:57:22.000 If 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.

00:57:33.000 It isn't top-down evil leader manipulating innocent masses.

00:57:38.000 That's not it.

00:57:39.000 It's the moral failings of every single individual unwilling to say their truth, unwilling to act out what they know to be right that

00:57:48.000 accumulate 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

00:58:17.000 That's real.

00:58:18.000 So it isn't just that you have to fix up yourself so that, you know, you can have a better life.

00:58:22.000 It's like, who cares about you for a moment?

00:58:25.000 You 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.

00:58:33.000 And I believe that.

00:58:34.000 I think it's true.

00:58:35.000 Well, Jordan Peterson's book is 12 Rules for Life.

00:58:38.000 Honestly, we could do this all day long, and we'll certainly have you back.

00:58:42.000 I really appreciate the time.

00:58:43.000 There's a reason so many people follow Jordan.

00:58:45.000 There's some reason so many people are buying this book.

00:58:47.000 The book is fantastic, and his other book, Maps and Meaning, is also fantastic, so go ahead and get a copy of that as well.

00:58:51.000 Jordan, thanks so much for stopping by.

00:58:52.000 I really appreciate it.

00:58:53.000 Thanks, Ben.

00:58:53.000 It was great.

00:59:01.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay.

00:59:04.000 Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.

00:59:06.000 Associate Producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens.

00:59:08.000 Edited by Alex Zingara.

00:59:10.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.

00:59:11.000 Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Alvera.

00:59:13.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

00:59:17.000 Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.

The Ben Shapiro Show - May 06, 2018

Jordan B Peterson | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep.1

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