The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 107 ｜ Jordan Peterson Knows Why We're Obsessed with Aliens ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

00:00:00.000 Jordan Peterson is one of the most misunderstood people I know, and believe me, I know a lot of people that people think they know and they don't.

00:00:08.360 To me and millions of others all around the world, he is reshaping the world in incredible educational ways.

00:00:16.620 He is a force of positive change in a world that badly needs it.

00:00:21.560 Now, the fanatics who hate him, mostly woke elites pretending to be journalists or pundits or academics, they really, really hate him.

00:00:31.400 And I mean, it's an obsession with them, but they not only hate him, they hate anyone who associates with him, which was an extra added bonus of associating him with me in this podcast.

00:00:44.280 They hate anyone who is effective, and he is very effective.

00:00:54.420 Those people are trying to destroy anything, like I said, that is effective, even the conservative media.

00:01:01.060 They can they accuse the conservative media of going easy on Peterson.

00:01:06.120 I don't think anybody goes easy on Peterson.

00:01:08.940 I just I think, you know, maybe there's manners and we're like, hey, he's down.

00:01:13.900 Maybe we should stop kicking him.

00:01:15.820 I mean, maybe.

00:01:18.400 If you don't already know about Peterson, you are in for a treat.

00:01:22.880 He is one of the most important intellectuals of our time.

00:01:26.160 Until 2016, he was a clinical psychologist and a professor in Canada.

00:01:30.860 Then he was catapulted into the culture war, and he was saying things that so many people just feel is true.

00:01:39.740 And he had the courage to say it.

00:01:42.400 Well, one controversy after another brought him more fame, but also drew more hate.

00:01:47.820 The result has been a vicious seesaw of yin and yang that he has managed somehow or another to survive.

00:01:55.900 The guy is captivating.

00:01:58.300 I took my son to see him because he did a for an entire year, a stage show where he just sat and he talked and he sold out opera houses and theaters and arenas all around the world for his book tour.

00:02:13.040 I brought my son and I leaned over.

00:02:15.400 He was, I think, 13 at the time.

00:02:16.900 And I said, what are you getting?

00:02:18.720 And he said, almost nothing, dad, but it's fascinating.

00:02:21.560 Last fall, the announcement of his latest book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules, caused protests within the company publishing it.

00:02:32.480 The announcement caused protests.

00:02:35.980 Nobody even knew what the book was about.

00:02:38.140 That's how much they hate him.

00:02:39.300 Discourse has deteriorated so much that a conversation about life and love and the importance of cleaning your room has been deemed not just offensive, but deadly to the hateful activists.

00:02:54.360 The mere fact that anyone, but especially Glenn Beck and some of his other conservative friends are having Jordan Peterson on and they're having civil conversations is proof that all of their delusions are true.

00:03:08.020 But in the words of Marcus Aurelius,

00:03:10.500 It's the truth that I'm after and the truth never harmed anyone.

00:03:17.240 What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.

00:03:22.940 Today, the Glenn Beck podcast is pleased to welcome Jordan Peterson.

00:03:29.440 Hey, it's Mother's Day.

00:03:31.180 It's Mother's Day weekend.

00:03:33.140 Fantastic.

00:03:34.520 I haven't really had a chance to talk to my kids about Mother's Day.

00:03:38.780 Father's Day is much easier, much better, because you don't have to do any thinking.

00:03:43.820 In fact, every holiday is easier because mom always does all of the thinking for the whole family.

00:03:50.360 That's why Mother's Day is so important, which makes it worse that I haven't prepared.

00:03:56.480 Now, every mother I know loves built bars. 1.00

00:04:00.220 Mother's Day, built bars, course, built bars keep you healthy. 0.85

00:04:05.540 You could probably swing that, but they're low calories, even though they taste fantastic. 0.62

00:04:11.860 That's starting to look like, mom, you're fat or yes, you do look fat in that dress. 1.00

00:04:17.440 Probably not a good idea. 0.55

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00:04:40.220 I don't know how they do it.

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00:05:16.800 Dr. Peterson, how are you, sir?

00:05:19.000 Mr. Beck, good to see you.

00:05:20.860 It is good to see you.

00:05:21.980 I wish it was in person.

00:05:22.900 Uh, it is, uh, it has been a, uh, a wild trip in just the, I think it's two years since we saw each other.

00:05:33.360 Uh, the whole world seems to have changed.

00:05:36.700 And I, I want to talk to you.

00:05:38.660 Uh, I want to approach things differently.

00:05:40.520 I don't want to go to politics.

00:05:42.020 Um, I want to talk, uh, let's start here.

00:05:46.240 I don't know if you've been following this, but the Pentagon in the U S has for the last five years, and it's becoming more and more clear.

00:05:55.100 Um, they are verifying UFOs.

00:05:59.100 Um, they're verifying ships.

00:06:01.380 They're saying that we now have technology that is extraterrestrial.

00:06:07.620 Uh, and it is a fascinating thing to watch.

00:06:12.360 And the one question that I've been having is what will that do if one day we wake up and, uh, you know, the president says, Hey, a three, a three headed alien was in my office last night.

00:06:24.720 And I'd like you to meet him.

00:06:26.000 What does that do to religion politics as normal? 0.99

00:06:32.540 I actually would be relieved if he, if the three headed said, I, I'm, we're going to kill all your politicians. 0.98

00:06:38.920 You're now under us. 0.97

00:06:40.220 I think I would be okay, but what would that do to us?

00:06:44.420 And why do we have this fascination?

00:06:46.640 And I, I read some young where, uh, you know, the modern myth of things seen in the sky where, um, we seem to need something like that.

00:06:59.180 Well, that isn't a question I expected.

00:07:01.580 I can tell you that.

00:07:02.580 Yeah.

00:07:03.120 Right.

00:07:03.380 Why do we need something like that?

00:07:05.660 I think it's because there's something within us that is constantly compelling us to look for and work towards an ideal.

00:07:16.640 And it's built into us extraordinarily deeply.

00:07:19.980 It's a, it's an instinct.

00:07:21.400 Now, what that means for the fundamental structure of underlying reality, I don't know, but it's definitely there.

00:07:28.240 I mean, you, you can see the manifestation of that instinct in all sorts of ways once you learn to look.

00:07:35.780 So I was writing this morning about a hypothetical football team in a hypothetical American small town, you know, which is the theme of endless numbers of American films and stories.

00:07:47.520 It's an, it's a story that's told over and over the high school team.

00:07:51.960 Everyone knows the whole town watches the boys compete to be on the team or they're jealous and envious because they can't be.

00:07:58.580 Then when they make the team, they compete for top spot.

00:08:01.360 Sometimes the best sport comes out on top, even if he's not as athletically gifted as the cynical player.

00:08:07.240 You know, you know, the story, everyone knows the story.

00:08:09.800 Yeah.

00:08:10.000 The cheerleading team is striving to go out with the quarterback, et cetera.

00:08:14.160 Well, you might say, well, what does that have to do with your question?

00:08:17.740 Well, look.

00:08:18.920 Well, why do we watch football?

00:08:23.740 It's because we like to see people, we like to see men organize themselves into groups, aim at a target and hit it with skill.

00:08:33.900 We really, really, really like that.

00:08:37.120 It's a religious ceremony to go to a football game and to watch that.

00:08:40.660 That accounts for the tribal identification with the teams and the spontaneous and deep enjoyment that everybody has in witnessing the spectacle.

00:08:51.640 And we want ethical behavior as well as part of the play because we want the great player to be a great teammate, to be generous with his prowess, to bring his teammates along for the ride, to help them develop their skill.

00:09:03.760 And so, even in something as basic as that, as fundamental as that, as trivial and day-to-day in some sense as that, you can see this deep desire we have to identify an ideal and to pursue it.

00:09:18.300 And so, we're searching.

00:09:19.200 That was what Jung was pointing out to some degree when he talked about UFOs as symbols of redemption from the sky.

00:09:26.020 In science fiction stories, often aliens are there to save us or to judge us.

00:09:30.280 They're the projection of heavenly beings.

00:09:32.440 And that's our association, our tendency to associate the ideal with what's transcendent and above us.

00:09:41.200 You know, and you might ask, well, why would that be?

00:09:43.360 It's like, well, what happens when you go out and look at the night sky and the stars are there?

00:09:48.340 You're filled with a feeling of awe.

00:09:50.620 And that awe is, that awe is of, it's your reaction to the magnificence of the ultimate unknown.

00:09:59.360 And so, you project eternity into the sky.

00:10:02.460 And that becomes the place of the ideal.

00:10:05.440 And so, well, so that's part of the answer to why we need such things.

00:10:10.740 There's no way around that.

00:10:12.220 So, I know, I lived in New York City for a long time, and it was amazing.

00:10:18.500 I bought a ranch in the middle of nowhere.

00:10:20.880 And, I mean, you see the depth of the sky when there's no lights around you.

00:10:25.940 And we sat outside the first night, and we just talked about the meaning of things and life.

00:10:36.100 I hadn't done that at all, really, like that, when I was in New York.

00:10:42.180 There's some relationship where you are pondering bigger things.

00:10:48.060 And I think as we go into the cities, as we have more and more light and more and more distractions, we are missing some fundamental things of just, I guess we're just becoming so arrogant.

00:11:02.500 And we don't ponder how small we really are in things.

00:11:07.960 Well, I think your comment about the night sky is well taken.

00:11:11.800 I mean, it's definitely a good view of the night sky when it's dark is definitely one of those places, let's say, one of those situations where you encounter the absolute.

00:11:24.940 And you have to ask yourself, well, what's your life like when you don't have that opportunity?

00:11:31.440 Now, people made opportunities like that, too, right?

00:11:33.860 That's why they built cathedrals with their massive ceilings and the light pouring through in color and the music that would produce that sense of encounter with the transcendent.

00:11:44.460 But you can certainly experience that in nature, especially at night, especially in relationship to the sky.

00:11:50.800 People experience a similar sort of experience, I suppose, when they look at something like the Grand Canyon or the Niagara Falls, some massive work of nature.

00:12:00.340 But it calls to that part of us that's always aiming to move ourselves higher.

00:12:06.420 And it's become increasingly clear to me as a psychologist and as a biologically minded psychologist, just exactly how deep an instinct that is.

00:12:15.160 And, you know, there are people who believe that we can dispense, for example, with religious belief.

00:12:19.120 But I don't believe that's true.

00:12:21.080 And I think the reason it's not true is because we can't dispense with the religious questions.

00:12:25.960 Like we can't dispense with what's the meaning of our life?

00:12:29.940 What's the difference between good and evil?

00:12:31.780 What's the ideal?

00:12:33.080 What should we avoid?

00:12:34.680 We can't avoid those questions ever.

00:12:37.180 And so we need a realm that provides answers.

00:12:39.620 I think one of the first things I ever heard you talk about was relationship in a kind of abstract way with God and how important the redemptive story is.

00:12:54.780 And I so like the way you approach it because you don't know or maybe you do and you don't say, but you you don't you don't profess that you are a believer, but you understand the importance to humans to be able to start again and have redemption.

00:13:15.460 And we are destroying that now in in our culture, you know, cancel culture, all of this stuff, critical race theory.

00:13:24.960 There is no redemption.

00:13:26.900 And that is one of the things one of the things you're pointing to is that there's a there's an unrecognized danger of our technology.

00:13:34.340 I don't suppose it's entirely unrecognized, but, you know, the miracle of memory is not that we remember.

00:13:41.020 The miracle of memory is that we forget and that we only remember what is necessary.

00:13:46.640 And because we can forget, we don't drag the past along with us.

00:13:50.280 Right.

00:13:50.500 So we can get free of the past.

00:13:52.020 Like all you need is three sleepless nights to understand what kind of hell life would be if you couldn't dispense with the past.

00:13:58.080 Because each night when you sleep, you dispense with that day and and that renews you.

00:14:04.360 And so that that story of of of of descent into the depths and redemption, I mean, that's part of our natural biological rhythm.

00:14:11.320 That's the descent into unconsciousness at night into deep sleep and then our reawakening in the morning.

00:14:16.360 And that's associated with solar mythology, with the setting of the sun and the rising of the sun.

00:14:21.240 All that's tangled together.

00:14:22.640 But that definitely does renew us and it enables us to start afresh in the morning.

00:14:26.300 The problem with technology, a problem with technology, is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to shed our past.

00:14:34.620 And without that, you can't redeem yourself.

00:14:36.860 And that that is a mistake.

00:14:38.000 It is a problem because everyone makes mistakes and everyone mistake makes mistakes all the time. 1.00

00:14:42.280 And you might ask yourself, well, why isn't it appropriate for you to be crushed by the weight of your own stupidity? 0.99

00:14:49.200 You know, given that it's immense and that you make all sorts of mistakes. 1.00

00:14:53.320 Right.

00:14:53.660 No one can live under those conditions.

00:14:56.140 We need to be able to let go and to forget and to forgive.

00:15:00.120 And we all need there is.

00:15:02.460 I've seen a I've seen an interview.

00:15:04.400 I think there's there's like four or eight people on Earth that have perfect recollection.

00:15:10.120 And it is it's it's beyond just I remember.

00:15:13.560 They feel what they felt on any given day.

00:15:16.960 You can tell them a date.

00:15:18.600 They'll tell you the weather.

00:15:19.860 They'll tell you what they were wearing, what was happening.

00:15:21.700 And I saw an interview with one of them and they became very emotional because they're reliving it.

00:15:28.760 And the people who have that gift or curse.

00:15:32.620 It's a curse.

00:15:33.820 It's a curse.

00:15:34.460 Yeah.

00:15:35.140 Some some deal.

00:15:36.940 OK, with it.

00:15:38.340 The others are just crushed by it.

00:15:41.000 Well, it's very forgetting, forgetting and remembering are very, very sophisticated cognitive processes.

00:15:48.700 So normally what we do with an experience is we reduce it to its significance.

00:15:54.280 Then we remember the significance and we let go of the details.

00:15:57.420 We do something like that when you write fiction.

00:16:00.120 When you write fiction, you don't write down every single thing a character does or thinks that would bore your reader to death.

00:16:07.880 You write down what's significant and important about what they're experiencing and about what they do.

00:16:13.140 And if you get that right, then the story is interesting.

00:16:15.080 We do the same thing with our own lives, like we boil our lives down to the gist of the story.

00:16:21.320 And then we remember that.

00:16:22.700 And then we're not crushed by the weight of the detailed recollection.

00:16:26.420 And that's actually a consequence of very sophisticated psychological processing, that ability to reduce and forget.

00:16:33.240 So one of the things you do in therapy, for example, I wrote about this in my new book about writing memories down if they still bother you.

00:16:41.060 So if you have a memory, for example, that's more than 18 months old, for technical reasons I won't go into.

00:16:46.240 And it still produces a negative emotion when it comes to mind, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, then that memory has information in it that has not yet been unpacked.

00:16:58.260 So imagine the purpose of your memory is to extract wisdom from the past that you can apply to the future so that you don't do the same stupid thing over and over or so that you repeat things that worked well.

00:17:09.780 That's the purpose of memory, not recollection as such.

00:17:14.020 It's the extraction of wisdom, the lesson.

00:17:17.280 Well, if you have a memory that's more than 18 months old and it's still hurting you, making you anxious, disappointed, ashamed, guilty, any of that, it means that you have not undertaken the complex process of analyzing that memory, pulling out from it the moral and dispensing with the details.

00:17:33.400 So that's why you say in the book, if you have a bad experience, you have a bad memory, it won't leave you alone.

00:17:40.160 Write it out, write it in detail.

00:17:42.160 Yep, write it out.

00:17:43.100 Yep, write it out, write it out.

00:17:44.880 Everything you can remember about it.

00:17:46.560 We have software online at a site called selfauthoring.com that helps people write an autobiography.

00:17:55.960 And so they go through their lives, breaking their lives into epochs and identifying the most emotionally and practically significant events and detailing them.

00:18:04.740 And that's all in an attempt to help people forget and to let go of uncertainty and threat and anxiety and, well, the whole panoply of negative emotions that their life memories might otherwise be contaminated with.

00:18:17.860 And so you do that in therapy continually with people when you're talking about their past.

00:18:22.300 And it isn't catharsis.

00:18:23.640 The Freudians believed, for example, that if someone had a traumatic experience and then they were able to express the emotion that was associated with that experience, that that would be curative.

00:18:34.100 But it doesn't look like it's the expression of the emotion.

00:18:36.580 It looks like it's the extraction of the significance of the event.

00:18:41.700 Interesting.

00:18:42.600 I had a friend over last night who has had, you know, a year like I have had in the past and you have had.

00:18:51.180 They're just under attack and it's relentless.

00:18:54.200 And and the attacks, they always go to, it seems to me, to the thing that you hold most dear, like I've always valued my my word to tell the truth as I understand it, to correct my mistakes because I was an alcoholic and I lost the ability to tell anybody anything and have them believe me.

00:19:19.580 So I understood the the importance of your word.

00:19:24.720 And and so that's where the attacks would always hit me, or at least that's those are the ones that I felt his were very specific to.

00:19:32.820 He's a public figure and he just had the worst year of his life.

00:19:37.280 And he came over and as he was recalling some of the things he's gone through, he teared up and I said to him, and I'd love to hear your opinion on this.

00:19:47.680 Congratulations.

00:19:49.040 You now have a superpower.

00:19:50.920 And he said, what do you mean?

00:19:53.260 And I said, you've had the worst done to you.

00:19:57.080 You've had the worst said to you.

00:19:59.180 You've you've had to face every fear that, you know, any fear that you had somebody come after me or somebody's going to say this about me or something.

00:20:07.900 That's all over now.

00:20:09.040 And now you have the ultimate now you can walk into a room and you can have the attitude of go ahead, do your best.

00:20:17.340 It's not going to bother me now.

00:20:18.840 It's not going to bother me.

00:20:20.220 I know who I am.

00:20:21.480 I know what I believe.

00:20:23.080 I know the truth.

00:20:25.380 And nothing's going to stop me.

00:20:29.240 What do you what are your thoughts on that?

00:20:32.480 Well, I can just relate my own experience, really.

00:20:35.060 Um, when when I come under attack now, it's usually a consequence of some press attention.

00:20:47.140 It's it still disturbs me deeply.

00:20:49.380 And I'm very concerned about what the consequences are going to be.

00:20:53.540 Now, I've learned and my family has learned that if we're careful and we ride it out and we attempt to deal with it truthfully and carefully, that it'll likely subside within about two weeks and that public opinion will maintain itself on my side.

00:21:11.940 And so that's been the case.

00:21:14.640 I don't take it for granted.

00:21:16.060 I do think it's made reacting to the attacks somewhat less stressful, somewhat less stressful, but it's still nothing that I would I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone else.

00:21:31.840 I mean, there is some utility in watching yourself go through it.

00:21:35.380 Yeah, I don't I would never wish it on anybody and I don't even want to think about it.

00:21:43.820 But if you do go through it, I think you become it either destroys you or it makes you much stronger because you are you you know, the bogus lie that you're dealing with.

00:22:01.440 You know, if they're taking you down in such a way and it's kind of true, I don't know.

00:22:07.420 I think it would be easier in some ways if it's absolutely not true.

00:22:11.380 It's hard to get your arms around things and say, well, that's that.

00:22:17.000 I mean, you know, you feel like you're in a Hitchcock movie where, you know, where you're just trapped and it's it's surreal.

00:22:24.260 But once you get through it and you're on the other side and you've made it, you realize that is nothing but shadows and mirrors and smoke.

00:22:33.360 It's nothing unless you give into it, unless you play ball, unless you start to become part of it and put it back out in the other direction.

00:22:46.080 You know, it was making any sense that yes, yes, it was helping people deal with that sort of thing when I was a clinician that really alerted me to the miracle of the presumption of innocence.

00:22:58.000 So, for example, I had a client whose details I'll obviously disguise, who is a very competent professional.

00:23:06.600 And this person had brought a substantial amount of work into a new company they had been hired by.

00:23:13.920 And then that work was taken by a predatory individual and aspersions cast on this person's reputation.

00:23:23.860 They described them as unstable and unreliable and vengeful and vindictive and partly, I suppose, because the person whose work had been stolen was actually upset about it.

00:23:34.080 But they produced a very credible case.

00:23:37.380 And because the person I was working with was a good person with a strong conscience, it wasn't easy for them to defend themselves.

00:23:46.860 Because most people, when they're attacked, especially if many people are doing it, and many doesn't mean that many.

00:23:54.520 20 is plenty.

00:23:55.620 20 is plenty.

00:23:56.920 Five is probably plenty.

00:23:58.580 But 20 is certainly a mob, a big enough mob.

00:24:01.280 It's very, very difficult not to take accusations against yourself seriously.

00:24:07.380 Not if you have a conscience, because people, most people, are quite aware of their own flaws. 0.99

00:24:13.100 And so you get attacked and you think, well, is it possible that I am that son of a bitch that everyone is claiming? 0.99

00:24:19.960 So then you think you... 1.00

00:24:21.280 You're a monster if you don't think that. 0.77

00:24:24.000 If somebody is attacking you and it seems universal, you'd be a monster if you went, wait a minute, wait a minute. 0.99

00:24:30.100 What am I doing that might give that appearance or am I that person?

00:24:35.540 That's the kind of soul searching that you go through that I think makes you stronger in the end.

00:24:41.140 Yeah.

00:24:41.300 Well, if it works out for you and if you have support from people.

00:24:44.180 You know, generally what happens in my experience is generally what happens is people cave very rapidly and they apologize like mad, even if they haven't done anything wrong.

00:24:53.520 And I think that's a mistake.

00:24:55.700 I understand why people do it.

00:24:57.360 I mean, I really do understand why people do it.

00:24:59.400 But it isn't...

00:25:01.640 I don't think it's a good idea.

00:25:03.040 If you haven't done anything...

00:25:04.620 So that's the thing about the presumption of innocence.

00:25:06.680 And it really is a miracle, right?

00:25:08.360 Because if you think that, you know, if I accuse you, my tendency is to think that you're bad and you might think, well, my tendency is to think that I'm good.

00:25:16.580 But, you know, that isn't the tendency for most people.

00:25:20.080 People have a pretty guilty conscience, almost everyone.

00:25:22.920 And it does tie itself up with this idea of monstrosity that you just described.

00:25:26.920 The only person for whom public opinion means nothing is a psychopath, right?

00:25:32.520 The rest of us regulate ourselves by watching our impact on others.

00:25:36.880 And we're doing that all the time.

00:25:38.820 And generally, even if the fault is relatively trivial, I mean, we're capable of denial and all of that.

00:25:43.920 But generally, we take our impact on other people very seriously.

00:25:48.540 And so the presumption of innocence is a very difficult thing even to apply to yourself.

00:25:52.440 But it's unbelievably useful.

00:25:54.540 It's like, wait a sec, you're innocent unless you're proven guilty.

00:25:57.960 So I think I agree with you, but I think if we want to put this in today's terms, the idea of I'm not that we've heard, you know, racist, racist, racist, bigot, whatever, all these name calling for so long that it is now it's now made that charge laughable.

00:26:22.120 And some people are deeply affected by it, but most people are like, yeah, whatever, everything is racist now.

00:26:28.700 What happens when you don't when you have so overexposed and you've called everything, you know, bad, dangerous, bigoted, racist?

00:26:39.180 What happens to a society when they lose the ability to point something out when it's real?

00:26:46.740 Yeah.

00:26:46.880 Yeah, well, that is the danger of casual critique, isn't it, is that you lose the capability of pointing to actual danger when it exists.

00:26:55.640 It's the problem with with with with gerrymandering the the borders around concepts.

00:27:01.880 So, I mean, I think what's happening, what we're seeing now, and I'm not exactly sure why it's happening, but it definitely is happening, is we're seeing a tremendous decrease in trust in public institutions and institutions in general.

00:27:17.660 And that's that's not good, because societies societies are healthy and prosperous to the degree that they run on trust and trust is a moral virtue.

00:27:27.300 It's in its essence.

00:27:29.340 It's not naivety.

00:27:30.680 You can naively trust. 0.98

00:27:31.940 You're a fool when you naively trust, but you're courageous when you trust when you're not naive and societies that are functional run on trust. 0.97

00:27:39.640 It's a catastrophe when it's eroded, and that is happening now, you know, is that happening? 0.99

00:27:45.420 Why is how is that related to the constant assaults that our culture is taking?

00:27:50.700 I can't put my finger on that exactly.

00:27:52.840 I don't understand the relationship, but.

00:27:57.200 But this deep cynicism about our institutions is a real it's a real problem.

00:28:02.240 It's growing part of it is because things have gone on too long, but a lot of it is smears and and intentional things.

00:28:15.900 And I don't know why this keeps coming to mind as we've been talking, but Star Wars, there is there there is Darth Vader all dressed in black.

00:28:26.940 You know, he's a bad guy the minute he walks in, then you have the reluctant hero of of what's his name?

00:28:35.540 Skywalker.

00:28:36.920 Then you kind of have everybody else, you know, that that are on the side of the empire.

00:28:43.140 Are they doing it out of fear or do they actually believe it?

00:28:46.920 How do you get people?

00:28:48.680 Because right now, I think we're looking at some things that are truly evil.

00:28:53.700 And I don't use that word lightly, but as I look at things like critical race theory, I can only see destruction out of that.

00:29:05.020 I can't see any positive telling people you'll never make it because this group of people are after you.

00:29:13.640 So we have to destroy these people and these people are irredeemable.

00:29:18.100 I can't think of anything more evil and good.

00:29:24.360 Well, I've in my writings and my my lectures, I've tried to encourage people to deal with malevolence at the level of the individual, because when you start dealing with it in others, you you there's a big risk in that.

00:29:42.200 It's like clean up your own house, which is right.

00:29:44.940 I mean, I've been parodied for that.

00:29:46.400 So, well, look at all the social problems in the world.

00:29:48.540 And Dr. Peterson is telling the oppressed to clean up the rooms.

00:29:52.680 It's like, how is that going to solve anything?

00:29:54.500 It's well, first of all, have you tried it?

00:29:56.420 Actually, it's not that easy to clean up your right.

00:30:00.000 And so it's harder.

00:30:01.260 It's much easier to clean somebody else's room.

00:30:04.040 Yes.

00:30:04.420 Well, yes.

00:30:04.780 Or it's certainly a lot easier to point to the mess in someone else's room.

00:30:07.820 And, you know, there's such a danger, there's such a danger in that.

00:30:11.180 And it's so attractive, right, to identify, to localize malevolence externally.

00:30:17.120 It's so attractive because, first of all, it lets you off the hook.

00:30:20.780 And that's a relief.

00:30:21.640 And second, if you've identified malevolence, there's nothing you can do to what is malevolent that's unjustifiable.

00:30:28.320 And so your worst impulses have free reign.

00:30:31.860 Because especially if you can also add to that a good cause.

00:30:34.700 You know, you say, well, this is in the service of the eventual utopia.

00:30:39.040 It's like, well, now you have carte blanche for your worst motivations.

00:30:43.040 And that's very, very dangerous.

00:30:44.820 And so I always think that it's better to stick to the psychological, which.

00:30:50.420 So here's what I think I want, I was trying to drive at, was, you know, you see it in these big movie terms.

00:30:57.340 People see it in big movie terms.

00:30:58.480 And you can't move.

00:30:59.980 You know, you're either on this side or that side, and you can't move.

00:31:02.560 And nobody moves.

00:31:03.380 Nobody wants to recognize, you know, they're on the wrong side.

00:31:06.720 Nobody's making a case.

00:31:07.760 They're just killing each other.

00:31:09.580 There is a growth of the reluctant hero in all stories.

00:31:15.320 There is this arc of that hero.

00:31:18.540 And something happens, and they change, and they become heroic.

00:31:22.640 But they're not heroes.

00:31:25.200 And so many people don't think that they have what it takes.

00:31:29.480 They're not the hero.

00:31:30.780 And the people who are standing around are looking and just following the crowd.

00:31:37.940 How do you get, or what's happening to us, to where so many people are seeing what's going on, if they know history at all, they'll understand the pitfalls.

00:31:51.100 It doesn't mean we end in the same place, but we can see the patterns repeating.

00:31:54.580 How do you get people to recognize and then have the courage to stand?

00:32:04.380 You've taken a beating.

00:32:07.080 Nobody wants to do that.

00:32:09.160 Why is that worth it, and how do you get there?

00:32:11.780 Well, I think it's worth it because of the alternative.

00:32:15.660 I believe the alternative is worse.

00:32:18.740 I mean, that's why I think it's worth it.

00:32:21.380 I think it's a decision that you make.

00:32:24.780 To stay silent when you have something to say.

00:32:27.160 You know, you don't know what it is within you that requires your voice, right?

00:32:35.320 Because you feel, I have something to say.

00:32:37.100 It's like, well, where does that come from exactly, that feeling that you have something to say?

00:32:40.860 You're disgruntled at work, and you're choking on your own bile because the situation is not just in your estimation.

00:32:47.080 You're dying to say something, but you won't.

00:32:49.860 Well, you'll die if you don't say it.

00:32:51.920 Maybe it's a death of a thousand cuts. 0.58

00:32:53.800 I don't like deferred punishment.

00:32:55.640 I'd rather take it now and keep the future clean, which is why I encourage people, too, to have the fights now.

00:33:05.160 Not to hide things in the fog for later because they grow and metastasize.

00:33:10.880 It's better to confront what you need to confront when it's small and when you have some possibility of victory.

00:33:17.860 You talk about, in your book, one thing that I think is such a huge key to healing of ourselves because you're right.

00:33:33.480 Everything is personal.

00:33:35.760 And we somehow or another have lost this.

00:33:38.580 Well, we insist that everything is political, you know, and this is something, I'll just interrupt you for one second.

00:33:47.140 The other thing that I do believe the idea that everything is political is a very bad idea because everything isn't political.

00:33:53.980 Love isn't political.

00:33:55.520 Religion isn't political.

00:33:57.360 We need separation between these domains.

00:33:59.620 And if everything is political, then the political becomes contaminated with all sorts of things that aren't in its proper purview.

00:34:06.860 And one of the things that I see happening continually is that political belief takes the place of religious belief.

00:34:14.040 And so Caesar is elevated to the position of God.

00:34:17.580 And that is not a good idea psychologically or politically.

00:34:21.140 We need a separation between church and state psychologically, just as we do in our society.

00:34:27.280 So when everything's political, political becomes religious.

00:34:31.280 And that's not good.

00:34:35.060 Let me switch gears.

00:34:37.480 I want to ask the question I was going to ask, but let me switch gears on this because I think it's tied into this.

00:34:42.040 Because you have, I read someplace that in one room in your house, maybe your living room or hallway or whatever, you have real, pretty dark propaganda from Soviet Union.

00:34:59.860 Go ahead.

00:35:00.180 Yes, I had 250 pieces of Soviet realist art.

00:35:04.520 It's not hanging in my house at the moment, but it was for years.

00:35:07.920 Yes.

00:35:08.260 I collected as well.

00:35:10.000 I kind of, I feel like if you don't understand the darkness, you can't really understand the light and you won't see the pattern.

00:35:17.560 Because some of it, the propaganda can be beautiful.

00:35:20.600 The art can actually be beautiful until you attach it to what it did.

00:35:25.940 You know what I mean?

00:35:27.340 Yes, I do know.

00:35:29.860 Is that why you, is that why you were attracted to that?

00:35:33.240 Or why were you?

00:35:34.700 That was one of the reasons.

00:35:35.820 Well, some of it was, some of it was just sheer shock that I was able to purchase these items.

00:35:43.660 Because when I grew up, when you grew up, we had, we never saw anything from the Soviet Union.

00:35:48.720 I mean, that was just impossible.

00:35:49.880 And it was so comical to me that I could buy portraits of Marx on eBay.

00:35:54.800 It was so unlikely that that was the case.

00:35:58.060 It was a miracle, right?

00:35:59.720 I mean, my daughter bought me once a Karl Marx doll at a scientific toy store, and it was half price off.

00:36:07.000 So she couldn't resist it.

00:36:08.480 You know, it's the same kind.

00:36:09.560 Right.

00:36:09.960 It's the same kind of comedy.

00:36:11.360 It's like, really, I can buy a picture of Lenin and Marx on the most free market platform that's ever been devised for next to nothing.

00:36:24.080 How could I pass that opportunity up?

00:36:26.160 It was so ironic.

00:36:27.960 And I was interested in the artifacts themselves.

00:36:31.340 But the paintings in particular, because many of the paintings I purchased were very high quality paintings.

00:36:36.640 Technically, they had been, they had taken people months to make.

00:36:39.120 They were huge, like eight by 10.

00:36:40.500 My house was literally covered with paintings, every square inch virtually, ceiling as well, paintings everywhere.

00:36:48.880 And they were very high quality.

00:36:50.420 So technically, they were very sophisticated.

00:36:53.420 And there was a battle between the propaganda and the art going on in the canvases all the time.

00:36:58.920 And I could see that.

00:36:59.940 And that was really fascinating because over time, as we moved farther and farther away from the Soviet Union, the art won out over the propaganda.

00:37:08.080 So that was really something to see.

00:37:11.460 And yet it is many times the, many times it's the art that drags you into the problem.

00:37:19.000 And then it is the art and the artist that drags you back out.

00:37:22.000 Yes, well, it's a terrible sin for art to be subjugated to propaganda, to politics.

00:37:28.360 It's like the subjugation of religion to politics.

00:37:30.880 It's the lower subordinating the higher.

00:37:33.860 It's a catastrophe.

00:37:34.880 It's an ethical catastrophe.

00:37:36.040 And I was very interested in that in those paintings as well, to watch that and to see it.

00:37:40.020 And so right now they're in storage because we renovated our house and we're not exactly sure what to do now in terms of what the wall should portray, because maybe the time for that is past.

00:37:52.840 Perhaps not.

00:37:53.640 We'll see.

00:37:54.220 But yes, I had many, many paintings for years.

00:37:57.020 Your whole book is about what you just talked about in the art, the battle between the extremes, that it is it's this it's this daily fight.

00:38:09.860 I'm fascinated by the contract of wave or the the pendulum of, you know, the societal pendulum that keeps going from, you know, me, me, me to the collective.

00:38:22.020 It's the same thing over and over again.

00:38:24.660 And when we as a society get it right, it's generally, you know, five o'clock to seven o'clock, not nine o'clock and three o'clock.

00:38:33.400 It's that middle ground.

00:38:35.540 Is there a way to or is it are we destined to always repeat?

00:38:42.840 OK, there is a way.

00:38:45.220 And that's why we have the instinct of the way.

00:38:47.620 And the marker for that is meaning.

00:38:50.340 That's the marker.

00:38:51.280 So imagine that you're you're a biological organism.

00:38:53.640 I'll speak scientifically.

00:38:54.660 You're a biological organism.

00:38:55.620 You're adapted to reality.

00:38:57.340 You have instincts that orient you in the world.

00:38:59.960 Deep, deep instincts way underneath your cognition.

00:39:02.700 They direct your cognition in ways you you can barely comprehend.

00:39:06.900 And one of those deep instincts is the instinct of meaning.

00:39:09.820 And so, look, you know, you're you do this sort of thing, this conversing.

00:39:14.320 You do this for a living, at least in part.

00:39:16.080 Now, you know perfectly well that there is a difference between a high quality and a low quality conversation.

00:39:20.540 You can feel that you, you know, when you're in the zone in the conversation and, you know, because you're completely compelled by what's happening.

00:39:28.800 Time disappears.

00:39:30.200 Your attention is focused on the content.

00:39:32.180 You're generating some spontaneous responses, but your attention is very, very focused.

00:39:36.380 You're not thinking about anything else.

00:39:38.540 Okay.

00:39:38.800 Well, then that's because you you're because the conversation is manifesting itself to your deepest instincts as meaningful.

00:39:45.860 That meaning signifies that you're in the right place between chaos and order, that you're you're able to maintain a certain stability of thought and outlook.

00:39:57.620 But you're introducing new information into that stable structure at the rate that's optimal for you.

00:40:03.540 And all of a sudden you're in the right place at the right time.

00:40:07.020 And that's the marker for that, because being in the right place at the right time is.

00:40:11.300 But but I think there are a lot of people that are agents of chaos and Antifa, they're agents of chaos.

00:40:22.640 They are going for they believe burn it all down.

00:40:27.540 Others have been like this, that they they believe their meaning is something extraordinarily destructive without a true north marker.

00:40:40.100 Yeah.

00:40:40.520 How do you do that?

00:40:42.160 You're convinced they're right.

00:40:43.680 Look, one of the things that I puzzled out a long while back and tried to adhere to to the best of my ability was driven by exactly the concern that you're expressing, because I realized that the instinct for meaning is a genuine instinct.

00:41:01.260 And it it underlies even our attention.

00:41:03.820 It's unbelievably deep.

00:41:05.300 It's the deepest thing about us.

00:41:06.780 OK, but what about the search, the search for meaning that's that or meaning and the search?

00:41:15.900 OK, well, I would say both of those.

00:41:18.480 Both of those are there.

00:41:19.640 They're somewhat independent because the search for meaning is very motivating.

00:41:23.120 But the experience of meaning is something in and of itself.

00:41:25.420 We talked about that in relationship to the night sky, for example.

00:41:28.560 Right.

00:41:28.860 So, OK, but your objection was, well, what if that meaning instinct goes wrong?

00:41:35.140 It's like, yeah, what if?

00:41:37.200 What if?

00:41:37.920 OK, how do you make it go wrong?

00:41:40.040 Lie and see what happens?

00:41:43.940 Because you'll pathologize that instinct and then you're lost.

00:41:49.000 So if you understand that, there isn't anything more frightening than understanding that.

00:41:54.860 Because your your your stability as an entity, as a soul is dependent on your relationship with that instinct for meaning.

00:42:03.200 And if you pathologize that with deceit, you're you will find yourself in the hands of things that you do not want to be in the hands of.

00:42:13.200 Put it that way.

00:42:14.100 But you know, if you're the argument today is there is no truth.

00:42:19.640 Who's truth?

00:42:20.460 That's my truth.

00:42:21.900 It's your truth.

00:42:23.100 You're I think what you're saying is you find meaning in truth.

00:42:27.180 And if you're lying about something, then that's the the absence of truth.

00:42:33.880 Well, if you tell the truth, if you tell the truth to the best of your ability, then you can trust your instincts to some to some degree, to the to the greatest degree that you're capable of.

00:42:45.720 And then that can help orient you in the world properly.

00:42:48.280 You can rely on your instincts if you don't pathologize the information that you're feeding yourself.

00:42:54.380 So, you know, if you want to live in harmony with yourself, which you would assume to be somewhat desirable rather than a hellish disharmony, then don't feed yourself what's indigestible. 0.93

00:43:07.200 And certainly don't warp the world around you with deceit, you know, to be deceitful.

00:43:12.700 It's extraordinarily damaging and dangerous.

00:43:16.260 And so, but because I go ahead, go ahead.

00:43:20.220 Well, because I realized that the instinct for meaning could become pathologized.

00:43:24.200 That's what made me obsessed to begin with about spoken, the spoken word with free speech, for example.

00:43:31.540 You are also talking about what orients us in the middle.

00:43:34.240 Well, the thing about the middle is where the middle is shifts because the environment around us shifts.

00:43:39.860 The natural world shifts.

00:43:41.120 The social world shifts.

00:43:42.060 And so, that middle moves on us.

00:43:44.940 And so, what we do is we talk to each other, which is a form of thinking.

00:43:49.420 Thinking is internalized speech.

00:43:52.100 So, the dialogue we're having is thought.

00:43:55.020 If I'm thinking, I just have that dialogue in my head by myself.

00:43:58.520 It's still a dialogue between two viewpoints.

00:44:01.700 So, we orient ourselves with untrammeled, honest speech in a constant search to find that optimal middle ground.

00:44:10.080 But it always moves.

00:44:11.320 So, we are destined in some sense to continually communicate about where we should be.

00:44:17.420 That's for sure.

00:44:18.200 But the idea that there's a desirable middle that we can attain through dialogue, well, that's a presupposition of the – that's a presupposition of Western individualism.

00:44:28.300 It's also something that's under attack conceptually.

00:44:33.220 Right.

00:44:34.020 I was going to say, to me, that's where we lose the middle.

00:44:39.720 When we are the collective, or we are just isolated at me, me, me.

00:44:45.720 And, you know, when you're me, me, me, you generally don't lead a, you know, a mass murder, you know, as a country.

00:44:53.440 You don't round people up.

00:44:55.160 So, it's a little less dangerous.

00:44:56.760 But that self-absorbed, you know, nature of just there's nobody important but me is also dangerous.

00:45:02.640 But we've lost, it seems, in a country that should understand it, in a society, the entire Western society, that was entirely built around the individual.

00:45:16.300 Well, there is an assault on that idea.

00:45:25.220 Like, so, if you buy the idea that our institutions are basically predicated on tyrannical power, so that's the basis for institutional organization is power.

00:45:34.960 Then you buy the argument that the dialogue between institutions is nothing but the expression of that power.

00:45:46.380 There are no individuals, and there's no space for rational negotiation.

00:45:51.240 And that case is being made constantly, particularly by radicals on the left.

00:45:56.080 It is fundamentally anti-individual.

00:45:59.040 And there is no room in that system for free speech itself.

00:46:02.620 It's not like it's anti-free speech.

00:46:04.320 That's a misconception.

00:46:06.780 Something isn't anti-free speech if it has no room whatsoever for the concept of free speech.

00:46:13.500 That's a much deeper criticism.

00:46:16.100 And that's part of what's driving this identity politics movement.

00:46:21.140 It's an assault on the idea of the individual word, the word itself.

00:46:25.060 It's an assault on the idea of the redemptive power of the word itself.

00:46:29.140 There's no individuals.

00:46:30.560 There's no rational discourse.

00:46:32.020 There's no possibility of meeting in the middle.

00:46:33.760 There's no middle.

00:46:35.220 There's just a territory defined by struggles for power between groups.

00:46:39.720 That's why it's okay not to invite someone who disagrees with you.

00:46:42.960 They don't disagree with you.

00:46:44.800 They represent a different power structure.

00:46:47.540 And you might think you have an opinion, but you don't.

00:46:50.060 You're merely mouthing the platitudes of your social structure.

00:46:53.680 You're not there as an individual, not from that perspective.

00:46:57.300 This is a much more radical critique than people generally realize.

00:47:00.740 It goes all the way to the bottom.

00:47:03.060 That's why we are finding ourselves in tribalism.

00:47:08.700 And most people don't even realize it.

00:47:11.180 Both sides think they're fighting for the good.

00:47:14.040 And they don't realize, wait, wait, wait.

00:47:16.020 You're entering tribalism.

00:47:18.120 You're just parroting what your side believes.

00:47:23.580 And you don't really solve anything until you can find the people who think in broad values or virtues on the other side.

00:47:38.020 And you can come together and say, okay, wait, wait, wait.

00:47:42.360 Does this make sense to you?

00:47:43.680 It's like, well, that's I think what I can have a conversation with.

00:47:46.800 I can have a conversation with anyone.

00:47:48.300 That's what your country is always being so good at.

00:47:50.220 Right.

00:47:51.300 We had this e pluribus unum.

00:47:55.880 You know, we came here for one idea.

00:48:01.540 And that idea is enshrined in our Bill of Rights.

00:48:05.040 That the individual is supreme.

00:48:06.600 And, you know, just blow it off.

00:48:09.480 I don't necessarily have to like you or agree with you.

00:48:12.020 But I'll support you.

00:48:13.180 I'll fight to the death to have the right for you to say that.

00:48:17.160 We don't have that.

00:48:18.140 We don't have that attitude.

00:48:19.500 I don't ever hear that expressed ever.

00:48:21.720 I grew up hearing that all the time.

00:48:25.100 Well, you know, you might think, at least under some circumstances, that it's useful to have an enemy because perhaps they could point out flaws that you wouldn't be otherwise prone to notice.

00:48:35.420 And so there is just at that level alone, there's utility in free speech and dialogue across avenues of disagreement.

00:48:42.960 You want to approach the conversation ready to hold your fort, but not with the assumption that you're absolutely right.

00:48:50.260 I mean, I remember I was on – oh, now I'm going to forget the name of the show.

00:48:59.120 Bill Maher.

00:48:59.820 There we go.

00:49:00.400 Good.

00:49:00.680 Got it.

00:49:01.460 In the holes of my pockmarked memory.

00:49:03.740 And it was a panel composed mostly of people who were liberal and left-leaning, although not particularly extreme.

00:49:12.860 But the conversation degenerated into something like an exchange of insults about people who were supporting Trump.

00:49:21.680 I'm a Canadian, right?

00:49:22.760 So I'm kind of watching this from the outside, at least to some degree.

00:49:25.040 And I thought – I asked, too.

00:49:26.500 I listened for a while.

00:49:27.360 I said, well, how do you propose to live with these people since they're 50% of the population? 1.00

00:49:32.860 It's like they're all stupid? 1.00

00:49:34.240 Is that – that's your theory, is it? 1.00

00:49:35.820 Really?

00:49:36.220 That's your theory. 1.00

00:49:37.140 They're all stupid. 1.00

00:49:38.780 And you're not. 1.00

00:49:40.200 And you're going to live with them.

00:49:41.480 How are you going to do that?

00:49:43.060 Well, that's the problem that confronts us, right?

00:49:45.040 And now, look, most people in the U.S., the statistics bear this out absolutely clearly.

00:49:50.720 There are very few radicals on the left or the right.

00:49:54.380 It's a very tiny proportion of the population.

00:49:57.020 Most people are moderate.

00:49:58.700 Most people want to meet in the middle.

00:50:00.880 We have some problems, though.

00:50:02.340 We don't know exactly what to do with, for example.

00:50:04.540 And I've really seen this in – watched your political system.

00:50:08.100 I was shocked.

00:50:09.180 I became somewhat familiar with Washington over the last few years, visiting there many times,

00:50:13.240 talking to many senators and congresspeople, and I was shocked.

00:50:18.820 Well, most of them were very admirable.

00:50:21.520 Most of the people I met were very admirable, regardless of which side of the poll they were on.

00:50:26.960 But I was shocked at the lack of a coherent policymaking apparatus for both parties.

00:50:32.980 It just isn't there.

00:50:34.320 There's no coherent policymaking apparatus.

00:50:36.440 There's no structure for generating policy.

00:50:38.560 There's no messaging structure.

00:50:40.460 There's no sophistication in messaging delivery.

00:50:43.240 The congresspeople and the senators spend a disproportionate amount of their time raising money outside of their office,

00:50:49.220 and they're required to do that by their parties,

00:50:51.700 and reacting to the worst excesses of the extremists on the other side of the table.

00:50:59.140 Well, that's a structural problem.

00:51:01.120 So it's a structural problem in the manner I just described.

00:51:04.380 But there's another problem, too, which is say what you want about the extremists.

00:51:09.500 Here's what they've got going for them.

00:51:11.460 They have a story, and it's romantically attractive.

00:51:16.240 Okay, you're going to defeat that?

00:51:17.940 Tell a better story.

00:51:19.420 Well, so that's up to the moderate Democrats.

00:51:22.020 What's their story?

00:51:23.000 And so I can criticize the moderate Democrats.

00:51:25.700 You guys need a story that's better than the radicals.

00:51:28.140 You don't have one.

00:51:29.040 But the same applies absolutely to the moderate conservatives.

00:51:32.760 And then I'm not going to point fingers at the moderate conservatives or the Democrats.

00:51:36.320 I'm going to pull back and say, no, this is our problem.

00:51:40.000 Here we are, technologically sophisticated, wealthier than we've been at any point in the entire history of the planet,

00:51:45.880 with an almost unlimited future ahead of us if we can grasp it, and we don't know what to do.

00:51:54.300 So what's our vision?

00:51:55.820 And so, but doesn't this stem from aren't we prey to this?

00:52:00.980 The most important chapter of your book is, I think it's the last one, to be grateful.

00:52:09.140 In COVID, I've heard everybody complain about COVID.

00:52:11.980 I could complain a lot about COVID.

00:52:16.400 A lot of bad has come out of it for my family and my business.

00:52:21.040 However, my family is closer than ever.

00:52:24.980 You know, we spent time together.

00:52:28.140 We recognize the importance of things because of the absence of other things.

00:52:33.640 We went, oh, my gosh, what have we been doing?

00:52:36.080 This is much more important.

00:52:37.380 So you can look and be grateful for horrible things, horrible things.

00:52:42.320 My brother-in-law just committed suicide.

00:52:45.740 I can be grateful for that experience of going through that and being reminded of that and what's important.

00:52:52.600 And you can find gratitude.

00:52:57.720 But now what we're doing is just finding axes to grind.

00:53:01.980 We're blaming it.

00:53:03.340 I think it's one of the things we lost when we became a culture that was driven by the cities, not by the farmlands.

00:53:12.400 You can be a farmer.

00:53:13.420 I'm a farmer, part-time farmer.

00:53:15.020 You can be a farmer.

00:53:16.240 You can do absolutely everything right.

00:53:18.140 You can plow the fields.

00:53:19.300 You can plant at the right time.

00:53:20.980 You can do everything.

00:53:22.100 You could have the greatest crop coming in because you've done everything right.

00:53:26.280 Then you cut that crop.

00:53:28.240 And as it's laying on the ground, it can rain and it's all destroyed.

00:53:31.720 You don't blame anybody.

00:53:34.360 It's just part of it.

00:53:36.260 I mean, it happens sometimes.

00:53:38.840 We're looking for blame on everything right now.

00:53:42.920 Look, in chapter 11 of Beyond Order, this new book that you've been referring to, I tried to delineate out sources of tragedy.

00:53:52.020 And malevolence, for that matter.

00:53:55.000 But we can start with tragedy because you need a theory of tragedy because otherwise you tend to blame simplistically.

00:54:04.020 Okay, so we could walk through it very quickly.

00:54:06.060 You just talked about one particular kind of tragedy, which is natural.

00:54:09.860 It's like you can do everything right and nature can take you out at the knees, right?

00:54:14.200 Okay, so that's one source of suffering in life, the natural world.

00:54:18.560 Another source of suffering is the inadequacy of our social institutions.

00:54:23.820 And a third source of tragedy is our inadequacy as individuals.

00:54:28.360 And malevolence doesn't apply particularly to the natural world, although it can feel like that at times if someone you love is afflicted by some terrible disease, for example.

00:54:37.260 And we tend to think of that as particularly malevolent when we admire the moral stature of the person so affected, right?

00:54:44.240 But it's somewhat unfair to attribute malevolence to nature.

00:54:47.520 It's more fair to attribute it to social structures.

00:54:50.600 And it's more fair to attribute it to the darkness in our own souls.

00:54:54.120 But you need to know, you need to know, I think you need to know, you need to have a sophisticated representation of tragedy and malevolence so that you don't fall prey to simplistic blaming.

00:55:09.840 So human suffering is not caused by capitalism.

00:55:14.420 That's wrong.

00:55:15.560 Now you could say there are elements of human suffering that are exaggerated by excesses and defaults in capitalism.

00:55:24.080 That's a different statement.

00:55:25.560 That's not a black and white statement.

00:55:27.080 It's a reasonable statement.

00:55:28.140 You can progress from there.

00:55:29.180 But you should say perhaps at the same time that for all its faults, this is the good that it's done and it isn't obvious what system would work better.

00:55:40.020 So now the question, I suppose, part of the question is why do we fall prey to more simplistic forms of reasoning?

00:55:48.240 And some of that is, well, it's convenient.

00:55:51.740 It's easy and convenient.

00:55:52.820 It's easy because it's easier to think in black and white terms to just attribute malevolence.

00:55:58.380 So, for example, if you believe that all human suffering is a consequence of capitalism, that solves a lot of problems for you.

00:56:04.060 You know where malevolence is.

00:56:05.820 You know what your moral duty is.

00:56:07.420 You've simplified the world.

00:56:08.560 You've taken a huge burden off your shoulders and you certainly don't have to take on the moral requirement of participating in the system.

00:56:17.680 And perhaps you don't want to.

00:56:19.080 And God only knows why that might be.

00:56:21.720 You want this more nuanced approach.

00:56:23.620 And that was actually part of the purpose of a classical education.

00:56:26.580 A humanities education was designed to give you a more nuanced view.

00:56:30.080 That was its original purpose, although that's, you know, sadly, I would say gone by the wayside.

00:56:35.780 It looks like it.

00:56:36.740 I've had these conversations recently that have been quite interesting.

00:56:39.780 You know, they're very disturbing, actually.

00:56:41.280 I talked to two of Canada's most outstanding people in the last two weeks, Conrad Black, who ran a huge newspaper empire, and Rex Murphy, who's probably Canada's best-known journalist personality, because he's both.

00:56:57.080 He's a great journalist, but he's a personality as well.

00:56:59.320 And they remembered their university education.

00:57:03.800 Jocko Willink as well.

00:57:05.360 He's not a Canadian, but he had the same kind of memory.

00:57:07.620 He talked about, they talked about their education in the humanities, mostly concentrating on English literature, and described it with tremendous fondness as a turning point in their life, as an opening up of the world of knowledge to their youthful eyes, right?

00:57:24.560 Very, very fondly.

00:57:25.800 I contrasted that with Yeonmi Park, who was an escapee, is an escapee from North Korea, very brave woman, who was then enslaved in China, had a life that was just sheer hell, and spent a good part of the interview telling me how much better her life was than the lives of many people she knew.

00:57:43.300 She wrote a book called In Order to Live.

00:57:46.160 But the book stopped at the year 2015, so I asked her what she did.

00:57:50.820 She went to Columbia, took a humanities degree, which was a dream of hers, after finishing her entire education in one year, her education prior to university.

00:58:04.140 Right, exactly.

00:58:05.120 Then she went to a South Korean university for three years.

00:58:07.620 They're hard to get into.

00:58:08.860 And then she went to Columbia.

00:58:09.800 I said, what was it like going to Columbia?

00:58:14.200 Taking a humanities degree from this escapee from totalitarianism, who was once enslaved, got to go to one of America's august institutions and be trained in the humanities.

00:58:24.780 Someone who'd been exposed to George Orwell and who was motivated to write because she read Animal Farm, understood the power of literature.

00:58:31.720 She said it was a complete waste of time and money, and that she was afraid to say anything.

00:58:38.940 Wow.

00:58:39.800 Yeah, wow.

00:58:41.340 It's a hell of a thing to hear when you're a university professor.

00:58:44.360 I thought, how catastrophic, how utterly catastrophic that that can be the case.

00:58:48.840 She compared it to being in North Korea.

00:58:52.540 I said, surely, surely there was one professor, one course that provided you what you were searching for.

00:59:01.080 She thought for a while and conjured up a biology course where she learned about human evolution, but said that that had degenerated into political correctness by the end of the semester as well.

00:59:11.880 I can't leave it here.

00:59:12.900 I know we are really we are really over time, but you can't leave it with that story.

00:59:19.300 Where do you find the hope and the strength to continue to fight or for those who are listening to get the motivation to stand up and say what's on their mind?

00:59:33.060 Well, people have to have a dialogue with their own conscience.

00:59:38.700 Imagine that you get upset with something when you recognize an obstacle in your path, and then imagine that you need a path and that you've chosen reasonably wisely, let's say.

00:59:51.680 Not perfectly, but reasonably wisely, an obstacle arises, you're frustrated, disappointed, ashamed, afraid.

00:59:58.900 Well, you have something to do to clear out the obstacle.

01:00:01.300 You have something to say.

01:00:02.600 Well, then you don't clear out the obstacle because you're afraid to speak or you're unwilling to speak.

01:00:06.880 You want to defer the conflict because you hope it will go away.

01:00:10.340 All that will happen is that the obstacles will pile up, but then your life will be nothing but obstacles.

01:00:16.400 Well, you need to know that, and you have to ask yourself if you believe that's true.

01:00:20.220 If it's true, then you don't want to remain silent.

01:00:27.940 Imagine, too, that as you remain silent, you get smaller because you're not manifesting the courage necessary to live by your own standards, and the problem gets bigger.

01:00:38.600 Well, if you're not going to speak now, what makes you think you're going to be more prepared in the future?

01:00:43.740 You won't.

01:00:44.040 Why is that going to happen?

01:00:45.140 When does that ever happen?

01:00:47.120 Well, I can't believe we're talking about school.

01:00:49.380 People who say, just stay quiet in school.

01:00:52.840 Just get the grade.

01:00:54.500 That you're paying them.

01:00:57.180 That's right.

01:00:58.160 You're paying them.

01:01:00.260 You don't have the courage when you're paying.

01:01:03.440 When somebody is paying you and they're doing something at work and they want you to play along, you think you're going to have courage then?

01:01:10.480 I mean, you've got to face it.

01:01:14.360 I tell my students all the time to never, never write something they didn't believe to be true.

01:01:20.960 And I know this as a psychologist, too.

01:01:22.940 You know, you might think I can get away with writing out something I don't believe for the grade.

01:01:27.700 But there are studies of this sort of phenomenon.

01:01:30.860 So imagine you have a viewpoint.

01:01:33.160 And I measure that with a political attitudes questionnaire.

01:01:36.300 Okay.

01:01:37.280 Maybe it's a viewpoint.

01:01:39.120 You're, you're, you're, what do we take?

01:01:42.320 You're anti-immigration.

01:01:44.000 It's just for the sake of argument.

01:01:45.220 And then I ask you to write out a 500 word pro-immigration essay.

01:01:52.220 And then a week later, I give you the political questionnaire again.

01:01:55.280 Now I'm going to bury it in a bunch of other questionnaires.

01:01:57.380 So you don't know what I'm measuring.

01:01:59.140 Okay.

01:01:59.700 Your belief has tilted way towards the argument that you've made, even though you don't know it.

01:02:05.680 So, and it's because most of your beliefs are actually rather shallow in terms of their explicit formulation.

01:02:12.860 You think you believe something, but it's pretty shallow.

01:02:16.060 It's just an assumption.

01:02:17.480 Now you might act on it and all of that, but it's not well differentiated and articulated.

01:02:21.600 Now, if you take one of your assumptions and you write a counter example, you're going to articulate that.

01:02:27.700 Well, then that's going to move you.

01:02:29.000 And so if you think that you can write an essay that you don't believe and you'll remain unscathed by that, well, you're wrong.

01:02:38.420 You won't.

01:02:39.320 And if you do it 20 times, you will turn into what you wrote.

01:02:42.420 That's what will happen.

01:02:44.280 And it's an absolute sin in my estimation.

01:02:46.620 I mean that specifically for anyone who attends university to write what they do not believe to be true.

01:02:53.680 It's certainly a sin for anyone to encourage them to do that.

01:02:56.800 Now, you can do that as an exercise.

01:02:59.480 You can ask people to delineate out an argument that runs contrary to their viewpoint.

01:03:03.980 That can be part of the reasonable process of learning. 0.96

01:03:07.460 That is not the same thing as doing it for deceptive purposes to manipulate your professor because you're too cowardly to formulate your arguments properly.

01:03:15.020 And I mean, I blame the professors for setting up an environment where that is implicitly expected.

01:03:23.740 But I will tell you my experience within the university system is that it's the rare professors still who's so corrupt that they're going to severely punish a student who writes an essay that runs counter to their opinion.

01:03:37.560 And that's a good essay and fail them.

01:03:40.900 That takes a lot of corruption.

01:03:43.420 Yes.

01:03:43.900 You still say that's the the abnormal circumstance.

01:03:48.920 Yes, I do believe that that's still the abnormal circumstance.

01:03:52.040 So it takes a lot of corruption to do that in spite of quality.

01:03:58.220 Right.

01:04:01.260 Doctor, professor.

01:04:03.460 Thank you.

01:04:04.760 Really appreciate it.

01:04:06.060 You have an extraordinary voice.

01:04:08.180 I don't know if I shared this with you.

01:04:10.360 Last time I saw you, we were in the experiment.

01:04:12.640 Yeah.

01:04:13.100 And I saw my I saw my son was with me.

01:04:16.660 And I don't know if I told you this about 20 minutes into it.

01:04:21.320 I leaned over and I said, Rafe, what are you getting from this?

01:04:25.780 And he said, I don't know if I understand any of it, but it's fascinating.

01:04:31.140 And I kind of felt the same way he did.

01:04:35.940 You are a breath of fresh air that you don't talk down to people.

01:04:42.900 You expect them to come up a level and and to think deeply.

01:04:49.480 And that is very rare.

01:04:51.360 And we pray for you.

01:04:52.520 And God bless you.

01:04:54.940 Thanks very much for the discussion.

01:05:01.840 Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

01:05:12.900 And I'll see you next time.

The Glenn Beck Program - May 08, 2021

Ep 107 ｜ Jordan Peterson Knows Why We're Obsessed with Aliens ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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