The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and

00:00:05.560 important. Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those

00:00:10.560 battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can

00:00:15.700 be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.

00:00:20.080 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you

00:00:25.520 might be feeling this way in his new series. He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that

00:00:30.400 while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're

00:00:35.700 suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to

00:00:42.100 Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety. Let this be

00:00:48.080 the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast,

00:00:56.420 season four, episode 54. This episode was recorded on June 14th, 2021. In this episode, Dad spoke with

00:01:05.300 Dr. Clay Routledge, an existential psychologist, writer, and professor at North Dakota State

00:01:10.960 University. He's also a senior research fellow at the Arkbridge Institute and an editor for

00:01:16.620 Perfectus Magazine. Dr. Routledge studies basic psychological needs and how they're shaped by

00:01:22.240 family, social bonds, economics, and broader cultural worldviews. He's published over 100

00:01:27.860 scholarly papers, co-edited three books on existential psychology, and written several books,

00:01:33.120 including Nostalgia, a Psychological Resource, and Supernatural, Death, Meaning, and the Power of the

00:01:39.100 Invisible World. A lot of Dr. Routledge's work focuses on the need for meaning, so he has a lot in

00:01:45.040 common with my dad there. They had a very engaging conversation where they spoke about loneliness,

00:01:49.660 meaning nostalgia, terror management theory, and existential psychology. They also get into human

00:01:55.300 progress, responsibility, religion, and UFOs, so a pretty wide range of topics. I hope you enjoy this

00:02:02.080 episode as much as I did, and have a wonderful week. Hello, everyone. I'm pleased to have with me as a

00:02:07.960 guest today Dr. Clay Routledge. He's a faculty scholar in the Sheila and Robert Shelley Institute for

00:02:13.400 Global Innovation and Growth, professor of management at North Dakota State University,

00:02:18.220 and senior research fellow at Archbridge Institute. Dr. Routledge studies, among other topics, meaning,

00:02:25.080 belief, atheism, magical thinking, existential economics, and entrepreneurship. He is the author

00:02:31.980 of Nostalgia, a Psychological Resource, and Supernatural, Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible Word.

00:02:39.540 He has published more than 100 academic articles, co-edited three books, and written numerous pieces

00:02:45.560 for outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Harvard Business Review,

00:02:50.900 and the National Review. I first ran across his work in Newsweek, where he wrote an interesting article

00:02:56.380 on what you might describe as the potential moral failings of universal basic income, and its

00:03:01.400 failure to address people's need for meaning in addition to the necessity for economic security.

00:03:07.640 I looked up his website and found that his lab does unique work. There aren't a lot of psychological

00:03:13.800 labs that are concentrating as intently as Dr. Routledge on meaning and belief and that sort of

00:03:20.280 thing, and so I thought it would be very much worth talking to him, especially also given his

00:03:25.600 emphasis on economics, which adds an additional twist to his interests. So welcome, Dr. Routledge.

00:03:31.780 Clay, thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me today.

00:03:34.740 Thank you for having me on, Dr. Peterson. It's a great privilege to be on your podcast.

00:03:41.260 Well, so fill me in a bit. Tell me what your lab has been doing and how you got interested in doing

00:03:46.360 what you're doing, and also how you managed it, because your research interests, I wouldn't say,

00:03:50.580 are exactly center of the road by academic psychological standards, but you've been very successful with it.

00:03:56.960 Yeah, so I mean, I'm a bit of an atypical academic in a lot of ways. One, when I was in college,

00:04:05.820 I didn't even think I was supposed to be there. I remember I had a high school guidance counselor

00:04:10.940 who said, well, you're not college material, so you need to figure out a job that you can do when you

00:04:17.620 graduate. So why did he think you weren't college material?

00:04:22.220 I'm a late bloomer. I wasn't a great student. This was decades ago, and now I'd probably be

00:04:33.860 diagnosed with ADHD or something like that. I mean, I was just a very active young male who

00:04:40.120 wasn't particularly interested in setting still in classes and reading books and things like that.

00:04:45.500 I wanted to be engaged doing active things, so I wasn't a great student, but I think I was just

00:04:52.900 kind of a late bloomer, and then by the time I graduated, I thought, well, I should go to college.

00:04:57.500 I should give it a shot, and I went to a local commuter college, and it pretty much worked,

00:05:03.620 oftentimes full-time, as a security guard and a bunch of other jobs. I've done martial arts much

00:05:11.160 in my life, and so I was a part-time martial arts instructor. Then I was just going to college,

00:05:15.840 and I was actually originally a criminal justice major because I thought, well, I should probably

00:05:19.620 do something like be a police officer, something a little bit more active. And I wasn't really into

00:05:27.360 that. I took a psychology class, which is common as part of a criminal justice major, and I was like,

00:05:32.040 oh, wow, this seems pretty cool. And so I got interested in psychology, but even still,

00:05:38.220 when I finished my psychology degree, I had no intentions of going to graduate school.

00:05:43.040 I spent a few years actually working in outpatient clinical mental health and also in social work,

00:05:48.500 which we can get into later because I do think that some of those experiences have really influenced

00:05:55.800 how I think about things. Just the practical experience of working with people in the community,

00:06:01.620 sometimes it was because of severe mental illness. Sometimes it was just people that had

00:06:06.400 real social dysfunction and a lot of problems in their family and in their personal lives.

00:06:11.860 Right. So you had the opportunity to do something that was clinical to bring your knowledge down to

00:06:16.440 earth, so to speak.

00:06:18.060 Yeah, absolutely. And I just had an undergraduate degree. I wasn't a psychologist,

00:06:22.180 like a clinical psychologist or anything. I was basically a social worker, an outpatient caseworker,

00:06:27.620 but I had dozens of clients that I was responsible for, checking on them, making sure they were

00:06:35.700 medication compliant or doing the things that they were supposed to do as part of their treatment

00:06:40.080 plan. And it was a very interesting and educating experience. I did that, but then decided I want to go

00:06:47.960 to school. I want to try graduate school. I had a professor who was, as an undergraduate,

00:06:54.300 who she was very much like, you should go to graduate school. You would be great. You would

00:06:58.480 do really well. And I just wasn't super confident about it. But then I took the GRE and I did pretty

00:07:05.860 well, I think. And I applied to a few. I only applied to, I think, four programs. I got into two

00:07:11.220 of them and then I went to school at the University of Missouri. So that's a long way of saying when I

00:07:16.160 started school, which was in September of 2001, then that was when, right when the 9-11 happened.

00:07:28.340 Like it was within my first week or two of classes. In fact, I remember I went to-

00:07:34.440 In graduate school.

00:07:35.340 In graduate school. Yeah. In fact, I remember I went to this really, I had this ANOVA. Like,

00:07:40.860 you know, when you're in grad school, you take these quantitative site classes. I had a class,

00:07:44.420 I think it was just called ANOVA. And, you know, I was in this class and then, you know,

00:07:49.820 it was kind of announced that, hey, there was this attack happening. And I saw some of it was

00:07:55.040 unfolding before I left the house in the morning, but we didn't know what was going on. And then I

00:07:59.420 was in this grad seminar and our professor actually sent us home and said, everyone needs to go home.

00:08:05.820 There's a terrorist attack, something happening. So this was at the very beginning of my first semester

00:08:10.660 of graduate school. At the time I was in more of a personality and social psych, like health lab.

00:08:20.740 It was an alcohol lab. And so we were really looking at like very practical,

00:08:26.020 very practical outcomes related to risky behavior and as predicted by individual differences.

00:08:32.340 But when 9-11 happened, I just started thinking about, I mean, it just really astonished me how you had

00:08:38.360 these people that are because of a cause or something they believed in are willing to

00:08:44.640 sort of override their self-preservation instinct and, you know, and die in the service of an ideology.

00:08:53.720 Yeah. Well, that was something that really compelled me too. I was very curious all the way through my

00:08:59.400 graduate school career about what it was about belief that was so compelling that people were willing

00:09:04.440 to risk their lives or to kill or to commit atrocities, all of that. What is it that belief

00:09:09.560 does that's so psychologically significant that it seems to override everything else? It's a hell of a

00:09:15.400 question. Right, right. And so it just happened by chance that I was at the University of Missouri

00:09:21.140 doing my, you know, starting graduate school. And after this happened, and I was thinking about

00:09:26.820 these questions, there was a scholar there, Dr. Jamie Arndt, who this was his whole area of research

00:09:34.060 was he was in an area I don't know if you're familiar with called terror management theory.

00:09:38.240 Yes. And so he was doing research in his lab, not on terrorism or anything like that, but on this

00:09:43.980 notion of what does it mean to be an organism intelligent enough to be aware of your inevitability

00:09:49.820 of your own mortality? Right. That's based on Ernest Becker's work, The Denial of Death,

00:09:56.620 which is a great book. I think he's fundamentally wrong, but it's a great book. Nonetheless, he's wrong

00:10:01.480 in a very interesting way. And he's very, very smart person. So The Denial of Death is a great book.

00:10:06.360 And I'm familiar with some of the major researchers in the terror management area. I've met a couple of

00:10:12.360 them, and we've had some discussions. Excellent. So yeah, so that's how I kind of got started. And,

00:10:18.100 you know, so I, so I ended up changing labs, which people might not, you know, your listeners and

00:10:24.560 viewers might not really know what that means, but that's kind of a big deal. It's, it's, it's kind

00:10:29.800 of a dicey thing to navigate in graduate schools. You get accepted typically at, you know, you're

00:10:35.720 accepted by a person to work with them in their lab. And then to be like, well, I want to move to a

00:10:42.060 different lab. It's, it's kind of a big, it's like switching an apprenticeship. Right, right.

00:10:47.140 And it can go quite wrong. Yeah. So it's risky. It's a risky move. But I, you know, when I started

00:10:52.440 grad school, I wasn't, I wasn't really sure what I was doing. I went to a small one as an undergrad,

00:10:56.480 I went to a small commuter college and there was no, you couldn't work in a lab. There wasn't anyone

00:11:01.100 doing research. So it wasn't like what a lot of like, you know, my own students have the opportunity

00:11:06.180 for, you know, undergrads to work in my lab and get a sense of this for me. So I had no idea. So

00:11:12.080 when I started, I really didn't know what I was getting it into. And so when it, you know, when I,

00:11:16.680 when I had the opportunity to potentially change labs, you know, I negotiated it carefully. So no

00:11:21.840 one would be offended or anything. I certainly didn't want to hurt my own future prospects in the

00:11:26.880 field, but everyone was fine with it. What did you find compelling about terror management theory?

00:11:33.200 And can you outline it a bit for everyone? We could have a bit of a discussion about that as well.

00:11:38.200 Yeah, yeah, of course. So what I found compelling about it was, and I do have, you know, I do have

00:11:43.840 some issues with it. I'm not in total agreement with it in its purest form. But what I found

00:11:51.160 compelling about it was really the writing of Ernest Becker that it is based on, which is this notion of

00:11:56.200 what does it mean to be so smart that in a lot of ways where, you know, as Becker pointed out,

00:12:02.180 humans have godlike imaginative capacities, right? We can, we can fantasize about all sorts of things

00:12:09.120 we can do all, you know, we can engage in all sorts of mental exercises in which we can, which has

00:12:16.160 allowed us to transform this planet, right? And even send people into, into space. What does it mean

00:12:22.000 to have that intelligence yet at the same time, know that you're a biological organism that no matter

00:12:27.220 how smart you are, you can't outsmart your own demise. And not only that, that it can come without

00:12:34.440 warning. So you can, you can exercise and wear your seatbelt and drink green tea and everything

00:12:41.740 else you're told to do. And maybe if you're lucky, you'll avoid an early death. But that doesn't change

00:12:47.900 the fact that, you know, when this podcast is over, I could take a walk out the door feeling pretty good

00:12:52.220 about my day and get run over by a truck. And, you know, so that's what, you know, so, so what Becker

00:12:58.620 and then ultimately some of the terror management scholars pointed out is, or they argued was that's,

00:13:04.040 that's always kind of in the background, right? The threat of mortality. It's not, you're not,

00:13:09.900 we don't, you know, we've got things going on. We're not consciously thinking about it most of the time,

00:13:14.500 but we're aware of it. And so Becker tried to bring closure to Freudian psychoanalysis. And so

00:13:20.880 people who are interested in Freud could read Becker because he did a good job of modernizing

00:13:25.500 Freud. And he claimed that we needed an immortality project to set up against the mortality and the

00:13:32.840 terror that it held for us. And that we were compelled to identify with large scale systems in

00:13:39.560 an attempt to muster a kind of immortal heroism as an antidote to the, to the terror of death.

00:13:45.340 He thought of that, I think essentially, although he wavered somewhat in the book, essentially as

00:13:49.360 delusional. And I think in some sense, from my perspective, that was where he went wrong.

00:13:54.340 Because I'm not, I'm not convinced precisely that it is delusional in its fundamental essence, but,

00:13:59.260 but plenty of people would debate that. I think you and I are on the same page about that. I would

00:14:05.000 agree. I don't, I don't think it's delusional. And, you know, there's, you know, some other

00:14:09.040 issues maybe I think that people can take with some of the theorizing, but ultimately the terror

00:14:14.660 management theory for people who, you know, aren't familiar with it is, is taking those ideas of

00:14:20.000 Becker of saying that, well, because of this awareness of mortality, which Becker argued would

00:14:25.020 otherwise be paralyzing if you didn't have this hero project to engage in that. And that's why the

00:14:31.200 book's called denial of death, right? At some level, you have to deny that that's it, right?

00:14:35.900 And, and you have to transform yourself into something symbolic. And so one of the arguments

00:14:42.420 that Becker made is, is humans live in kind of two, kind of two worlds. We live in the material,

00:14:48.280 physical world that, you know, every morning when you wake up and have your aches and pains and need

00:14:53.060 to go to the, you know, go to the restroom, you're, you're, you're become well aware of your animality,

00:14:58.820 right? Your creatureliness. But we also live in this imaginative, symbolic world where we're able to

00:15:04.480 create works of art, world religions, all sorts of, you know, all sorts of interesting things.

00:15:10.100 And that world is the world of meaning that we, we seek to create. And ultimately, that is the,

00:15:16.300 the, the world that's immortal, because I know that, you know, I'm going to die. But I can be part of

00:15:23.380 a project, like you said, I can be part of a heroic project that's outlives me. So in, in a lot of

00:15:29.160 religious traditions, that might be very literal, right? And their belief in an afterlife. But Becker

00:15:34.480 also argued that we have the ability to engage in symbolic immortality projects as well. So

00:15:41.220 passing down our genes or creating works of art or, you know, building communities or things that

00:15:46.940 outlive us to the extent that I can say part of myself is, is in those projects, then part of myself

00:15:55.120 lives on, even if, even if I don't physically. And so that gets into, you know, that takes us back to

00:16:01.820 the, to the terrorism idea, because, you know, one of the arguments was that, well, you know, you're

00:16:07.840 going to die, and there's not much you can do about that. But if you, if you invest yourself in something

00:16:12.900 bigger than yourself, and that thing lives on, then you have some type of immortality. And I don't,

00:16:19.400 do you remember that movie Braveheart?

00:16:20.880 Braveheart. Yeah, I interviewed the director a few weeks ago on my podcast.

00:16:25.440 Oh, really? Well, there's a great scene in there where he's trying, William Wallace is trying to

00:16:32.360 motivate the, the people to overcome their, their fear of what is clearly a lopsided battle,

00:16:40.320 right? And he does like everyone, and he has this speech where it's like, you could all go home,

00:16:46.180 and right now, and maybe you'll live perfectly fine, complete lives. And but one day, you'll be

00:16:53.300 old on your deathbed, and you'll look back on this. And maybe you'll, you know, maybe you'll wish that

00:16:58.780 you would have gone for it. Right? Because this is a bigger, this is going to be a more enduring,

00:17:04.240 a meaning project than you just going home and, you know, having a normal, normal life course.

00:17:09.720 Part of what got me about Becker, I mean, Becker said at the beginning of the denial of death that

00:17:16.280 he never read Jung. And that was a big mistake, because much of Carl Jung's writing centered on

00:17:22.040 the immortality project from a different perspective than Freud. Jung didn't consider

00:17:26.580 the participation in the hero project as delusional. He thought about it as centrally adaptive. And it

00:17:33.400 seems to me, I mean, the tack I've taken is that the meaning that people derive from being embedded in

00:17:39.800 significant projects is an antidote to the terror of not so much mortality, but fragility, I would say,

00:17:46.580 because there's actually things you can be a lot more afraid of than death, I believe. And that that's

00:17:51.320 not illusory. I mean, it can be right, it can become delusional. But it's not reasonable for me to

00:17:58.160 believe that the projects that we undertake, the heroic projects, let's say, even such things as

00:18:03.720 raising a family, are the denial of death. They're an attempt to extract meaning out of finite life.

00:18:10.660 And, and I suppose it's also too much of a cognitive theory for for my liking, because it doesn't take

00:18:18.760 other elements into account, like the existence of a religious instinct, let's say, or something like

00:18:23.920 that. So, despite that, I have a lot of regard for the book. I think it's a brilliant book.

00:18:30.020 Yeah, yeah, no, no, I agree with you. And, but that's, that's kind of how I got started is I,

00:18:35.140 so I entered this lab at the University of Missouri, and we were doing so the idea was,

00:18:40.760 the people who started terror management theory, I think they wrote like a theoretical article or

00:18:46.100 something and presented it maybe like at a social psychology conference, in the the early 80s. And

00:18:52.280 people were like, hey, that's all sounds really cool, but totally untestable. And so I think that

00:18:58.060 was the initial reaction. And then so what what they did is they tried to create a series of hypotheses

00:19:03.540 that they could test. And one of them, you know, the most common one, but certainly not the only one

00:19:09.640 is what's called the mortality salience hypothesis, which basically is, if it's true that, you know,

00:19:16.660 the awareness of death is the thing that provokes our investment in these belief systems, and as well as

00:19:24.960 the self esteem project, which, you know, Becker talked about a lot, then temporarily heightening people's

00:19:31.500 awareness of mortality should in turn temporarily heighten their defense of these systems, right?

00:19:39.060 Right. So that's where they started doing experiments.

00:19:41.160 That was Solomon Greenberg and Puszynski. Correct. Right? Yeah, they wrote a book called The Worm at

00:19:48.300 the Core, on the role of death in life that came out in 2015. I haven't looked at that book. I've talked to

00:19:53.920 Greenberg and Solomon about about their work before. They'd be good to have on this podcast. Actually, I

00:19:59.860 hadn't thought about that. So, so yeah, so so they would bring people into the lab and remind them in various

00:20:05.340 ways of their mortality, and then look at the effects on their beliefs, the putative effects. They also had a hell of a

00:20:11.120 time publishing their work to begin with, was resistant quite, quite stringently, quite assiduously by people in the

00:20:17.480 field. Yeah, I think so. I mean, in a lot of the resistance, it seems to be this is too philosophical, it's too

00:20:27.780 abstract, it's hard to pin down. And understandably, because I mean, one challenge, you know, one of the challenges that

00:20:33.820 people have made to the theory is, when you make people aware of the mortality, or when you heighten people's awareness of

00:20:40.840 mortality, regardless of how rigorous of a control condition you have. So you can say, for instance,

00:20:46.720 well, maybe the problem with death is that it's, it's separation, it's isolation, right? And so maybe

00:20:54.140 it's really a social thing, maybe, maybe what's, you're being separated permanently from loved ones.

00:21:00.020 And so what's triggering these defenses is something social. So you can try to control for social exclusion,

00:21:05.020 or, or things like that. But one of the challenges is regardless of what type of control condition you

00:21:11.840 have, by nature, death is a, it's, it's a real thing. It's not an abstraction. And it's multifaceted,

00:21:19.140 it's multidimensional, because you do worry about all these things, right? We and there is, there are some

00:21:24.820 Israeli social psychologists who were also Victor Florian, I don't know if you've heard of him,

00:21:31.140 and Mario Michelin, sir. They were also doing this kind of existential psychology. And they were

00:21:37.680 looking at the awareness of death more through this multidimensional perspective that when people

00:21:42.560 are the fear of death isn't just the fear of annihilation, which is kind of what Becker focused

00:21:47.440 on. But it is the fear of, there's uncertainty about what's going to happen after you die, there is so

00:21:54.700 there is a social element of it, too, which is I'm going to be separated from the people I love.

00:21:59.320 There's a fear of pain. I mean, so there is a whole bunch of other stuff packed in there. And it's

00:22:04.840 hard when you when you make people aware of death, you're bringing online all of that stuff. And so

00:22:11.180 how do you it's a bit, it's a bit complicated to disentangle. Yeah, it's not obvious to whether

00:22:16.660 like death is a subset of an uncertainty or uncertainty is a subset of death terror. I mean, part of the

00:22:23.420 problem with Becker's theory is that a lot of beliefs are actually representations of way to

00:22:29.080 ways to act in the world that stabilize the world, right? So if you have a theory about something,

00:22:34.740 you act it out and you get what you want, then you validate the theory and you indicate to yourself

00:22:39.740 that your knowledge is sufficient to protect you from uncertainty. Well, the ultimate uncertainty in

00:22:44.880 some sense is your annihilation. I mean, you can make that case. But you can't say that all belief

00:22:49.860 systems function to specifically inhibit the fear of death. I mean, that now he would say that that's

00:22:56.860 the worm at the core, which is, of course, what what Solomon Greenberg and Pashinsky talked about

00:23:02.360 in their book. And, and, but I'm not, I'm not even completely certain of that. Because like I said,

00:23:07.360 I think there are things that you can be more afraid of than death. Pain might be one.

00:23:12.740 Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so I agree with that. So there are the kind of hard line terror management

00:23:18.200 people that take the position you just articulated, which is, this is it, this is the core, this is the

00:23:24.460 core existential issue. But then there are people more like me who sees death as one of a number of

00:23:31.040 potential existential threats. And in addition to that, even though early on in my, in my career,

00:23:38.840 because I worked in the terror management lab, and so I was largely, we were largely running these

00:23:42.680 types of studies where you make people aware of their death. And then, you know, you, you measure

00:23:47.780 a bunch of things. After that, I really started getting more into a more what I would consider a

00:23:53.140 more complete existential psychology. And this is an oversimplification, of course, but you can,

00:23:59.620 you can kind of think of existential psychology as having like a dark side and a light side in some

00:24:03.960 ways. And terror management and Becker, that was kind of, you know, the, the, the edgier dark side,

00:24:09.360 which is ultimately what meaning about is, is it's a defense system, right? Like people are afraid,

00:24:16.280 people, you know, people are aware of these vulnerabilities, and it makes them afraid. And

00:24:20.660 so they dogmatically cling to beliefs in order to reduce that fear. So that's kind of an extension

00:24:28.260 of Freud's notions of religious belief as a, as a defense mechanism. And you can see the Freudianism

00:24:33.800 sleep slipping through there. And that is the issue is it? What's the difference between a defense and

00:24:38.880 an adaptation? Right. And, you know, on one hand, culture, you could say that your identification

00:24:44.020 with your culture allows you symbolic immortality. But you could also say, yeah, well, it builds your

00:24:49.640 house, so you don't freeze to death in the winter, too, right? So it's not just symbolically present

00:24:54.840 preventing your death, say, let's say, or protecting yourself against your fear of death, it's actually

00:25:01.020 stopping you from dying, which is not a trivial issue. Right, right, of course. And, and,

00:25:08.440 and so there, you know, and then there's, but there's the second side is, you know, we might

00:25:11.780 call the light side, which is more of what people might be familiar with in the positive

00:25:15.820 or humanistic psychology tradition, which is humans aren't just trying to defend, you know,

00:25:23.120 they're not just in this defensive mode. We also are explorers, we're growth oriented, right? So

00:25:30.280 part of what we're striving for isn't just to, you know, to defend the world as we know it,

00:25:35.760 it's, it's to create new beliefs and to explore new ideas. And so, you know, even when I was in

00:25:41.420 grad school, because there were some positive psychologists in the department, and then I was

00:25:44.940 in this terror management lab, you know, I had the opportunity to work with, with different,

00:25:50.260 to collaborate with different people. That was what was great about our program is they very much

00:25:53.820 encouraged people to go work with, with other professors. So even starting in graduate school,

00:25:59.160 I was starting to explore the tension between psychological defense and psychological growth

00:26:04.260 motives. You know, and so this idea is that you, you need both, right? Because

00:26:10.220 like an artistic or creative pursuit, sometimes you can do things that bring you so outside of

00:26:17.260 the structures that provide, you know, protection that provide psychological defenses that they can

00:26:22.560 leave you very vulnerable, right? To anxiety and to chaos, right? As you know. And then, so you might

00:26:30.140 kind of retreat a little bit, look for your protection. And so balancing that.

00:26:35.180 Yeah, that's just like when a child, you see this in children. I mean, when they start to explore,

00:26:40.460 they move out away from usually their mother, but it can be anybody they're stably bonded with,

00:26:44.720 they move out to explore until they hit a threshold where the fear of being isolated overwhelms

00:26:51.440 the compulsion to explore. And then they run back to become, to be comforted. And then they explore next

00:26:57.080 time a little bit farther. And that meaning that's associated with exploration isn't the same thing

00:27:02.220 as dogmatic protection from uncertainty, right? So there's at least two things going on there.

00:27:07.500 There's the orienting that dogma gives you in the world, which is your crystallized knowledge,

00:27:13.480 let's say. But there's the meaning that's intrinsic in extending that knowledge that also seems as a,

00:27:18.860 it's like an existential antidote to suffering and to even to mortality, say,

00:27:24.060 it's because you get lost in that, right? And that's, you get immersed in that, engrossed in

00:27:28.960 that. And that's central to the idea of meaning, I think. Yeah, yeah, totally. I totally agree with

00:27:35.220 that. And so I became very much interested in that. And, you know, I was using these kind of

00:27:40.600 regulatory, self-regulatory models of like approach avoid, behavioral inhibition, behavioral activation,

00:27:47.260 right? And so that was something I became very interested in was what shifts people towards,

00:27:54.180 you know, a threat shifts people towards defensiveness, right? Because you face a

00:27:58.760 threat and then you're like, well, now's not the time to be super creative or open-minded. Now's the

00:28:02.660 time to be vigilant, right? To shrink in a little bit. You saw that after 9-11. Right. Everyone was

00:28:08.460 shell-shocked and retreated for a while in a state of surreal existence. Right, right. Yeah. So that,

00:28:16.000 you know, so that's kind of how I got started in existential psychology. And then I ended up,

00:28:20.960 you know, this is going to seem like a, like it's a bit off message, but it connects, which I ended up

00:28:27.720 studying the psychology of nostalgia. And it turns out there, there wasn't, you know, there's, there's a

00:28:33.780 long history of theoretical writing and, you know, kind of case study and anecdotal writing on nostalgia,

00:28:41.980 speculating things like it's a neurological disease to it's a, it's a form of repression and

00:28:48.520 all these different things, but there wasn't really much empirical research on it, except in

00:28:52.800 the area of marketing and marketing researchers were doing, they were doing some neat stuff, but

00:28:57.820 they weren't interested in kind of getting down to the mechanics, the psychological mechanics of

00:29:03.160 nostalgia. Instead, what they were doing was just seeing, does nostalgia predict consumption,

00:29:08.760 right? Does, if you're nostalgic for something, do you want to go buy it? And, but why, you know,

00:29:15.080 they, they weren't really answering why. So I started doing research in, in the psychology of

00:29:19.640 nostalgia. Again, this was in grad school. And part of my motivation for that was similar to the,

00:29:26.020 to the ideas we've been talking about, you know, people turn, just like people are aware of their,

00:29:31.380 that our ability, our temporal consciousness, right? Our ability to move the self through time

00:29:35.880 allows us to go into the future and think about our mortality as we've been talking about. So that

00:29:40.740 we think that's somewhat unique to, to, to, to humans, right? That we can think long into the

00:29:46.040 future and think about a future without us. And so what I, what I thought was interestingly, that might

00:29:51.140 provoke us to turn to the past, because if I'm thinking about a future and it makes me anxious or

00:29:57.020 uncertain, I can look to the past at meaningful memories and I can, I can kind of comfort myself to

00:30:02.420 be like, no, you know, I've, I've had a good life. I have people that care about me. I've done

00:30:06.520 interesting things and that can make me feel that can kind of reinstate or, you know, boost my meaning

00:30:14.640 if I'm feeling, you know, feeling potentially meaningless because of the inevitability of my

00:30:20.300 mortality. So that's why I started studying nostalgia as a, as a, as a psychological defense.

00:30:27.420 But what's cool about doing research, as you know, is you might have ideas of how things are.

00:30:33.760 And so you, you know, you propose hypotheses and you test them, but then there's also this kind of

00:30:39.040 discovery process, you know, while you're doing a bunch of studies where you, you're looking at the

00:30:44.600 data and you're just thinking, oh, wow, there's some, there's a story here that I missed. And what I was

00:30:50.360 finding when we were doing nostalgia research is we were asking people to detail in writing

00:30:57.160 a memory that makes them nostalgic. And, and so we have all these like long narratives of people

00:31:02.460 talking about nostalgia. And one thing that I thought was interesting, but did not expect

00:31:07.220 was how much of these narratives were actually kind of future focused. And what I mean by that is people

00:31:14.620 would say things like, when I was a kid, I used to spend summers at grandma's house. And it was,

00:31:21.440 you know, these, this, this was awesome. And it was, this was a great time. And I, and I,

00:31:25.140 and I'll always cherish these memories. It makes me sad that my grandmother's no longer alive. And so

00:31:33.240 that's gone. I can't return, you know, I can't return to that experience, but it makes me hopeful

00:31:38.160 for the future because I want to do that for my grandchildren someday. And so what, what I saw in a,

00:31:44.880 in a fair amount of these nostalgic narratives were, was this kind of self-regulatory processes

00:31:50.840 where people were like dipping into the past to, to bring to mind a memory that they found

00:31:56.560 particularly meaningful. And that felt that that was comforting. It was also a little bit sad,

00:32:02.760 you know, nostalgia is a ambivalent emotion. But then they were using, that was inspiring them.

00:32:08.940 Like that was motivating them. That was saying, you know what, that was special. So I should,

00:32:13.440 you know, I should orient my life in a way that allows me to reproduce something.

00:32:17.840 Well, right. Well, that's the purpose of memory, right? I mean, people think that the purpose of

00:32:22.720 memory is to remember things as they happen. And that's, that's really rather shallow conception

00:32:28.120 psychologically. I mean, you remember bad things, so you don't repeat them. And you identify good

00:32:34.200 things so that you know what good things are, and you can pursue them. It's, it's a very pragmatic

00:32:38.300 process when it's, when it's, well, when it's fun, when it's properly functional.

00:32:43.040 There's no reason just to have an objective record of the past in your head, you want to

00:32:48.540 mine it for significance. And so it's very interesting that, that nostalgia took that

00:32:52.840 future oriented turn. So you think people get meaningless, let's say, and they get a little

00:32:57.480 bit desperate. So they turn to the past and they look for things, they search for places that were

00:33:02.160 meaningful. They think, oh, that was valuable. Maybe I could pursue that in the future.

00:33:07.300 Yeah, yeah, I think so. And that and so I've now done dozens and dozens and dozens of studies on on

00:33:14.080 on the psychology of nostalgia, and which is, you know, led me and not just me, but you know,

00:33:20.260 a number of other researchers to, to kind of position nostalgia as this mode as being a motivation is

00:33:26.920 having a self regulatory or motivational purpose, which is exactly what you just said, which is,

00:33:32.800 I might be experiencing loneliness, or even boredom, or uncertainty, or, you know, something's going on,

00:33:39.420 and I don't feel totally stable in life, I'm missing something. And so I reach into the past.

00:33:46.200 And I think it's, it's good to think about it that way. I re it's not because a lot of there's a popular

00:33:51.280 conception of nostalgia that it's hiding in the past that you're avoiding your problems that you're

00:33:56.420 avoiding the future. And so there's a very negative attitude in some, in some quarters of like

00:34:02.560 nostalgia is bad, because it gets in the way of progress. But my argument is, no, what happens is

00:34:07.340 you're not running to the past and hiding, you're reaching into the past to pull into the present

00:34:12.920 experiences that will help guide you. And then that puts you on the path forward that, and you know,

00:34:20.580 and now we've done a number of studies, in which we find that, you know, after people engage in

00:34:26.500 a nostalgic writing task, that they subsequently feel more optimistic and motivated, and it also,

00:34:33.720 it also increases actual behavior. So when people write about a nostalgic experience, which is

00:34:39.740 typically social, it's typically an experience shared with loved ones, they subsequently want to go out

00:34:45.200 and do things with people, right? They were like, hey, that was really good, I should do that again.

00:34:49.880 And so I think that's, that really got me thinking more about this, not just a growth oriented approach,

00:34:57.800 but that people move back and forth between defense and growth, right? And you can also imagine that

00:35:04.880 that could become pathologized, like anything, you know, I mean, if you're, you know, people fantasize

00:35:11.000 about what they want. And then out of those fantasies, they can derive goals and begin to act

00:35:17.180 in relationship to those goals, or they can just spend more and more time elaborating the fantasies

00:35:23.040 and not moving at all. And that can lead to delusional thinking if it's taken to an extreme.

00:35:28.400 But that doesn't mean that fantasy per se is a pathological activity, just that when it becomes

00:35:33.960 a substitute for action, then it can become pathologized. So yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean,

00:35:40.320 yeah, you know, I always say nostalgia is like a lot of things that are generally good for you that,

00:35:46.020 you know, people can, I mean, there are people who overexercise, right? That, you know, physical

00:35:51.000 fitness is good, but there are people that spend too much time at the gym, and then it ends up causing

00:35:55.880 injury, because they're, you know, they're doing too much of a good thing, right? There are lots of

00:36:00.460 people who drown from drinking too much water, as it turns out as well. So, you know, anything in excess

00:36:06.180 can be a poison. Yeah, so I'd say for the, you know, for the typical person, you know, nostalgia is a

00:36:12.020 a relatively healthy activity that helps them kind of figure out what's important

00:36:18.040 in life. Do you know what elicits it in particular? Is it loneliness? Or what are there particular

00:36:24.180 eliciting factors? Yeah, yeah. So there's two general classes of nostalgia triggers. One is very

00:36:30.660 obvious, because it's just, you know, what we call sensory inputs, which is you hear a song come on the

00:36:35.480 radio, or somebody puts like a photo up on social media. And so that's a direct trigger of reminding,

00:36:41.740 you know, right, the smell, right, scent, yes, scent evoke nostalgia is very powerful. So there's

00:36:46.960 those what we, you know, what we call direct triggers. And then there's what we call psychological

00:36:50.720 triggers, and they tend to be negatively, negative affect, typically loneliness, but other things as

00:36:58.180 well. So, so we've done this where we've induced, we've used like emotion inductions, where we've had

00:37:03.640 people watch, you know, watch video clips, that either make them happy, or sad, or have a more neutral

00:37:08.980 affect. And so it's not just the case that any emotion provokes nostalgia, it tends to be negative

00:37:15.480 emotions. So when people feel sad, when they feel loneliness, when we ask people, loneliness is the

00:37:21.980 most common trigger. But we've also looked even at boredom, we've done these experiments where we have

00:37:27.420 people do these really, really boring tasks, where they're just spending a period of time writing down

00:37:32.940 concrete mixture, you know, the formulas for concrete mixtures, or things like that.

00:37:37.040 So it just seems like a meaningless task, which, which, which increased subsequently increases

00:37:42.640 nostalgic feelings. We've looked at meeting, like meaning threats, we've had people read

00:37:48.580 existential philosophy essays that remind them of how insignificant their life is. And, you know,

00:37:54.700 that that increases nostalgia, but because of the social nature of nostalgia, that is most nostalgic

00:38:01.080 memories do involve time spent with with loved ones.

00:38:05.340 So do you suppose that's a, is that a, an analog? Do you think of the security seeking behavior that

00:38:12.040 that we discussed a little bit earlier, you know, when a child goes out and explores and then hits a

00:38:16.340 wall, they return to something comforting. And, you know, almost all higher cognitive functions are

00:38:23.200 elaborations of something that's much more basic. So I mean, affection between adults looks like it's an

00:38:28.640 elaboration, like deep affection, it looks like it's an elaboration of infant attachment circuitry.

00:38:33.180 And so you, you, you make people bored, or you, you put them in a bad mood, and then they return to

00:38:39.900 the security of social interactions in the past. And you can think of that as purely defensive, but it

00:38:44.880 also indicates to them what they did find meaningful, and they can use that in a positive way.

00:38:51.120 Yeah, yeah, I think exactly that. I mean, in fact, we've looked, we've done some work looking at

00:38:57.220 nostalgia and attachment theory. And it does seem like nostalgic memories, you know, they're basically

00:39:03.140 bringing online these attachment schemas, these frameworks that people use. And in fact, when you

00:39:09.100 look at interactions between people's scores on attachment scales, it is the people who score high

00:39:17.320 in attachment security, or what, you know, modern psychologists would say low attachment anxiety,

00:39:23.500 low attachment avoidance. Right. So these are, these are healthily attached people who had

00:39:29.100 decent maternal relationships. And that's another indication that this isn't psychopathological.

00:39:34.200 Right. So they, those people get the most social benefits out of nostalgia. One, when you look at the

00:39:41.980 content of their memories, people who have, are high in attachment security, those people have,

00:39:48.340 their nostalgic memories tend to be more social, and they tend to be more intimately social.

00:39:53.280 So nearly what I mean by that is, if you ask somebody to write down a nostalgic memory,

00:39:57.800 or to just share with you a nostalgic memory, for nearly everyone, it's social. But if you,

00:40:03.940 if you look at the writings of people who are high in attachment security, they tend to get into more

00:40:10.360 intimate or more detailed, they carries more themes of law of love and like strong body. And so again,

00:40:17.700 like the attachment system, they're really saying they have a secure, they have these very

00:40:22.920 deep, secure bonds. They, they approach relationships, you know, to see if people who

00:40:28.400 are indulging in, in nostalgic memories that are associated with attachment, to see if they're

00:40:33.580 more analgesic to pain, because they, right, because they, that loneliness and social isolation

00:40:39.820 look like they're pain related phenomena, at least according to people like Yach Panksepp. And so

00:40:44.320 hypothetically, bringing to mind a social attachment memory that's deeply meaningful should make you more

00:40:50.440 pain tolerant. We used to use this thing that I referred to as a finger crusher, which it wasn't.

00:40:56.680 It was just a weight, a weighted blade, dull blade that pushed on a finger here, like that.

00:41:03.180 And then it, the pain sums across time, until you tell the people, take your finger out when you think

00:41:09.620 a reasonable person would. And you can ask them, when does it hurt? And then you can measure when

00:41:14.640 they take it out. And you could do it with a couple of fingers to get a good, you know, repeated measure.

00:41:20.440 And we tested, I never did publish this study, but we tested at Harvard with an undergraduate.

00:41:25.640 We had people interact with a dog. They had to like dogs, and then tested them for analgesia

00:41:31.340 afterwards. And they were more analgesic as a consequence of interacting with the dog.

00:41:35.940 That's interesting. Yeah, no, that would, that would be, that would be a really cool study.

00:41:40.400 It's not the same thing, but there, and this isn't research I did, but some, there were some researchers

00:41:44.940 that looked at nostalgia in the context of feeling of actual physical feelings of, of warmth. And the

00:41:52.540 idea was, was kind of like what you're talking about. Like we associate relationships with comfort

00:41:57.720 and warmth and emotional warmth. Right. And so they did things like manipulate the temperature

00:42:03.140 in the room and in the lab and then had people, you know, kind of estimate it and, you know, people

00:42:10.680 in the nostalgic condition thought their room was warmer. And yeah, I would say that is analogous,

00:42:15.920 you know, and that's a good example too, of how these, these sources of meaning are not merely

00:42:21.760 cognitive. Right. I mean, one of the things that I studied pain responses for quite a long time

00:42:27.960 in their differentiated form. And so frustration produces a pain like state. Disappointment does

00:42:33.920 grief does. And people use tactile contact as a mediation for pain and for grief. And it's about

00:42:41.620 the only thing we know of that's actually useful for grief, real touch. And one of Pankseps,

00:42:47.140 one of the people that was affiliated with Panksep did massage with premature infants

00:42:56.020 in their incubators and accelerated their growth up to the rate of normal neonates. And the,

00:43:02.100 the effects, this was three 10 minute massages a day. The effects were measurable six months later

00:43:08.300 in terms of physical and cognitive development. And so these aren't, these aren't cognitively,

00:43:13.020 precisely cognitively mediated meanings. They're, they're really embodied. It's interesting though,

00:43:18.280 because you can call them to mind, which is a abstract cognitive representation of something

00:43:23.880 that's much more physical and tangible, but they're not delusional and they're not just meaning

00:43:28.500 systems. There's something far more basic than that. Right. Do you know what the, what the state

00:43:34.560 of the science is on? I remember years ago, there was a, there was a lot of excitement about

00:43:40.060 some social neuroscientists that were, they were arguing that social pain, that the neurosystems built

00:43:47.740 upon the same frameworks as physical pain. And so that, and maybe that you could even,

00:43:53.700 I think they were, you know, doing studies where they were giving people, um, like acetaminophen or

00:44:00.600 I can't remember. Yeah. That was Baumeister. Yeah. Um, I don't know what the status of his research

00:44:05.080 was, but I regarded that as pretty well established. I mean, if the pain system is very, very ancient

00:44:11.860 from an evolutionary perspective, you'd expect it to have branched out and differentiated into all

00:44:17.400 sorts of higher functions. And if you look at the drugs that affect response to frustration,

00:44:23.660 disappointment, grief, they tend to be opiates. So that's another line of evidence. That's all

00:44:29.660 documented quite nicely in Jeffrey Gray's book, the neuropsychology of anxiety, because he talks a fair

00:44:34.320 bit about the difference between pain and, or so that would be physical punishment and what it elicits as

00:44:40.840 a state, which would be pain-like and anxiety, say, which is elicited by threat of punishment and

00:44:45.720 not punishment itself. And opiates are good at moderating punishment-like responses, pain,

00:44:52.240 essentially. So I think it's well-established in the animal literature. Some of that, the human

00:44:57.580 researchers caught on to that, but it was the animal researchers who nailed it down.

00:45:04.080 Yeah. Yeah. So, so.

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00:47:50.660 So that's kind of the area that I started doing work, nostalgia specifically,

00:48:00.140 that kind of branched me away from just thinking about, well, we're doing these kind of defensive

00:48:07.400 studies, right? Where we threaten people and then see what they defend, both in terms of-

00:48:12.640 Just out of curiosity, another thing that would be interesting is that if nostalgic memories of

00:48:19.100 attachment ameliorate feelings of depression, because depression looks like a pain phenomena

00:48:24.460 as well, at least in some of its manifestations. Yeah, so I don't know if there's- I haven't done

00:48:30.780 anything looking at actual clinically depressed people. So most of the nostalgia work I've done

00:48:38.080 has been in, for lack of a better term, what we call the normal population, right? So I haven't

00:48:44.320 done work with clinical groups, but certainly in our research among the normal population,

00:48:51.980 we find that nostalgia does have effects that you would predict would reduce depression,

00:48:59.120 because it does reduce loneliness, it does reduce negative affect, it does reduce anxiety,

00:49:04.940 it increases positive emotions, and it does things that counter depression, like it increases

00:49:13.060 optimism and inspiration. So, you know, but it's an open question about, well, what if you looked at

00:49:19.140 severely depressed people? Right, but no, all those pieces of evidence that you cited do suggest that

00:49:24.780 at least with normative levels of depression, it would have an ameliorating effect. So, yeah,

00:49:31.260 so, and there, you know, that is a, I know there is a whole nother literature on reminiscence therapy,

00:49:38.740 and, you know, that the stuff we've done has been more experimental, but I think that, I think you

00:49:45.840 could certainly connect nostalgia as a big part of the reminiscence therapy. The reason I think that,

00:49:53.880 you know, we haven't really is because a lot of the reminiscence therapy people, they're not

00:49:59.160 particularly interested in basic scientific questions, so they're not trying to tease apart

00:50:04.780 the specific, you know, cognitive and affective mechanisms. They want something that works,

00:50:11.520 right, so they kind of deliver a whole package, and so in the reminiscence therapy work, a lot of it is

00:50:19.600 what we would consider in the experimental world kind of confounded, right, because they're doing a bunch

00:50:23.860 of stuff at once. They're bringing to mind nostalgic memories, but they also typically are in the

00:50:28.620 context of a group setting where they're talking to other people and sharing memories with other

00:50:34.380 people, so then, you know, you have to get into, well, is it the nature of this conversation that

00:50:39.340 they're having with people where they're talking about, you know, things that are really important

00:50:43.280 to them, or is there something specific about the actual memories that they're engaging in,

00:50:50.020 but what I think our research does is it complements that by saying, well, if you just isolate the

00:50:56.540 experience of bringing to mind the nostalgic memory in a laboratory cubicle where people are by

00:51:02.740 themselves and you get these positive effects, it suggests that at least part of what's happening in

00:51:08.100 reminiscence therapy is this individual level experience of bringing nostalgia, nostalgic memories to

00:51:15.060 mind, revisiting, reconnecting with them, and then I'm sure it only helps if you have

00:51:20.020 the opportunity to talk about those memories with other people and share those memories.

00:51:24.980 In fact, that's a new area of research that we don't have anything published in yet, but I had a PhD

00:51:31.140 student who actually just graduated, and this is what her dissertation was on, is what she called

00:51:36.580 shared nostalgia, and her argument was what we do in the lab is not very typical of how most people

00:51:43.780 actually experience nostalgia, which is people tend to be nostalgic when they're around others.

00:51:49.140 You get together with family members and you talk about memories, especially in the context of loss.

00:51:56.420 You go to a funeral or what do you do? You're sad, of course, but then you talk about memories you

00:52:02.660 shared with that person, and oftentimes people are laughing and trying to honor that person's life,

00:52:08.420 but also trying to connect over the meaningful memories you had together.

00:52:13.380 Yeah, well, it reminds you of your affiliation with those other people too, which would be a

00:52:17.860 great thing to have happen when you're experiencing a significant loss.

00:52:21.380 Yeah, absolutely. So I do think that there's some more research to do in that area, and like I said,

00:52:28.660 we're just kind of getting started into how do people actually share nostalgia, and might it serve

00:52:34.980 even beyond the individual and beyond the more interpersonal relationships? We're also interested

00:52:41.060 in nostalgia at the cultural level because there are ways that we might pass down traditions and rituals

00:52:51.540 intergenerationally that connect. So I might have a lot of things that are different in my life and the

00:52:58.420 experiences I've had at the time period in which I grew up than somebody 20, 30, 40 years older than me,

00:53:05.780 but to the extent that there are things that are passed down in the family or in the community

00:53:13.220 that can connect me to that person that might help with intergenerational community life, right?

00:53:19.540 Or with social cohesion period, because if we're strangers to one another and then we can identify

00:53:28.420 elements of our past experiences that we share, maybe like shared love of a particular band or something

00:53:34.180 like that, then we're identifying areas of commonality and perhaps decreasing our distrust of one another.

00:53:42.020 I mean, Robert Putnam has demonstrated that, you know, communities tend to be more generous

00:53:48.020 politically when they view those in the community as importantly similar to them. And so you can imagine

00:53:56.740 that going through the search for a shared past and identifying commonalities might be also a way of

00:54:02.580 generating a shared history across time as part of what unifies people together.

00:54:08.100 Yeah, absolutely. So this is what we call collective nostalgia, what you just articulated, which is,

00:54:15.460 I might, you know, I might have never met somebody who lives across the country. But to the extent that,

00:54:22.020 you know, that we have as Americans, that there is something that we've, that, that we identify with,

00:54:28.420 like even music, like you said, or, or, or, or a movie, if you remember when,

00:54:33.940 um, I don't think they were particularly good movies, but when the, the new, um, Star Wars movies came out,

00:54:41.300 people were really excited about them because there was, you know, there was this collective nostalgia of,

00:54:46.820 we all remember when we were, um, watching the original Star Wars movies and that was, you know,

00:54:53.300 kind of like a, a quintessential late seventies, early 1980s, American, you know, thing to do

00:55:00.740 that we could bond over. And yeah, well, it's part of, it's part of experiencing a shared myth.

00:55:05.860 It's not trivial. I mean, it's trivial in one sense, but it's not trivial at all in another.

00:55:10.420 I mean, we don't exactly know what it is that bonds people together in a community, a family,

00:55:15.300 a community, a nation, any of those things. And the idea that it's shared positive memories is,

00:55:20.340 well, that's gotta be part of it. Yeah. Yeah. I actually talked to a, uh, a screenwriter,

00:55:27.700 um, a while back about this and he made an interesting point. He was talking about how,

00:55:33.140 because we have, um, the way with the internet and with all these different certain entertainment

00:55:38.900 options we have now, you know, his argument was, we might be losing some of the, the shared,

00:55:44.980 uh, media shared entertainment. Now people talk about this when they talk about news all the time,

00:55:50.260 they say, oh, people consume different news, but to the extent that he was making even the point

00:55:54.820 that we have all these like dedicated children's programs where he was talking about when he was a

00:55:59.860 kid, he had to watch whatever his dad was watching. And so his dad would introduce him to Western movies

00:56:05.380 or whatever, and the whole family would watch the same thing. And, and so you had this shared cultural,

00:56:10.980 um, artistic experience that, that connected you. But now he's like, you know, you know, you might,

00:56:18.180 the kids might be in the backseat of the car, each with their own screens, watching totally

00:56:22.180 separate things. And you're listening to your own thing. And, um, the whole family isn't crowded

00:56:26.820 around the TV together when one room sharing the same experiences. And, and so we might have very,

00:56:32.100 very individualistic, very tailored media experiences that make it harder to have those

00:56:39.300 socially connecting, um, entertainment.

00:56:41.780 Yeah. Yeah. Well, it makes it harder to communicate too, because, you know, to communicate

00:56:46.180 with anyone, you have to mostly share their experience and then talk about a little bit

00:56:50.420 of variation. I mean, if you're totally opaque to one another in terms of what you've experienced,

00:56:55.380 there's so much to talk about that you can't even gain a toehold. And you do wonder if this

00:57:00.740 incredible explosion of, of entertainment options, let's say, but it's far more than that. It's,

00:57:07.460 it's cultural options does produce, well, perhaps does heighten the probability of the kind of

00:57:13.620 fragmentation that we seem to be experiencing right now. Yeah. Well, that might be why every,

00:57:19.220 so every now and then something's popular enough to where every, like, but not everyone, but a decent

00:57:25.940 chunk of people rally around it and it becomes the thing everyone's talking about. So like Game of

00:57:30.980 Thrones, that might be an example, where there's some kind of program that is either so well executed,

00:57:36.580 or it just, you know, delivers the goods in whatever way, whether it's a movie or television

00:57:42.020 show where enough, it becomes a cultural phenomenon. But a lot of the times it's not that, especially,

00:57:48.580 I don't know if you watch like streaming, but like Netflix or things like that, but like you can now

00:57:53.940 kind of, you don't even have to turn on. It's not like we all have to turn on the TV on Monday night,

00:57:59.720 7 PM, if we want to watch something, because that's our chance. Now we can, I can watch a show that you

00:58:05.040 watched five years ago. So not only is it the case that there's a ton of options, they're delivered

00:58:12.640 at, you know, individual times. I can watch, I can, I can, you know, what do you call it when people

00:58:19.860 binge, I can binge watch a show that, you know, you're not going to watch for another year,

00:58:25.480 if you watch it at all. And again, I don't know if they're, you know,

00:58:29.100 Well, it's very peculiar too, when you think about it, that we have the opportunity to,

00:58:33.380 you think about something like a, a Marvel movie with its, that costs hundreds of millions of

00:58:39.380 dollars, that we have the technology that enables us to experience that singly. I mean, it's,

00:58:46.120 it's completely preposterous. I've been associated to some degree with one traditional culture and

00:58:51.140 they use dance, music, storytelling, masks, religion, it's all integrated into one thing.

00:58:59.300 And they all participate in that simultaneously. And that's really the core of their culture. I

00:59:04.820 mean, without that, they're not a people. And when you're not a people, to be a people is to be very

00:59:10.340 much the same as other people in important ways. And that's part of what makes peace. And you do wonder

00:59:16.140 the increasing atomization of our exposure to cultural material, what that leaves us to have

00:59:23.180 in common. Right. So there is a provocative argument that some have made people like, I don't

00:59:31.000 know if you're familiar with Patrick Dean and, you know, some of these, you know, like Catholic

00:59:37.780 traditionalists. And I, he wrote that book, Why Liberalism Failed. And, you know, I'm not in a,

00:59:44.660 it's not my expertise to, I don't know anything about like political history. And so I can't

00:59:50.440 really, you know, I can't really like litigate his case for him or make a case against it from

00:59:56.100 that perspective. But from this perspective of psychology, I think that he's onto something

01:00:00.960 and his basic argument is the success of liberalism is its ultimate failure in that if total

01:00:08.720 individualism means that I owe you nothing, right? That I, that I can reject whatever,

01:00:16.160 you know, I can reject whatever culture I was raised in and forge my own path. And in many

01:00:21.840 ways that, you know, we can think of that as being, as being good, because it can mean we

01:00:26.540 can escape being oppressed, or, you know, we can get rid of bad systems that are barriers

01:00:32.400 to my liberty. But at the same time, that also means there's, you know, you're, it's

01:00:38.280 the atomization that you're talking about, that it can be very alienating. And it can

01:00:42.240 get, ultimately, it can get to a point where what he calls anti-culture, which is, it's not

01:00:48.500 just individualism is another culture, which is what cultural psychologists, you know, tend

01:00:53.500 to argue that there's collectivist cultures and individualistic cultures. His argument is

01:00:57.400 that it's an anti-culture, because it's a rejection of culture. And again, I might maybe

01:01:02.460 I'm misrepresenting his, you know, or I'm certainly oversimplifying it, maybe I'm misrepresenting

01:01:08.180 this case a little bit. But that is, that's just one example.

01:01:11.380 Well, it's at least an open question, how much we have to have in common with one another

01:01:16.180 to live in something approximating mutual understanding and peace. I mean, it can't be

01:01:21.020 nothing. You know, and the people who've I don't attend church, but I have some close

01:01:25.600 friends who insist upon its utility, and who are very intelligent people. And part of the

01:01:31.060 argument they make is a cultural argument, like, well, at least for one hour a week, cynical

01:01:36.460 about that, though you may be, the entire community is doing one thing that's the same. And so there's

01:01:43.060 a point of focal union there. And of course, the churches used to be the center of the towns

01:01:47.620 and, and, and orient the town towards temporality, all of those things. And so we don't really know

01:01:53.700 what we've lost when we lose those shared, those shared rituals and, and shared beliefs.

01:02:00.840 Right. And, and we don't know what we've lost when, when, when part of the part of the reason

01:02:06.100 we've, we've lost it is, of course, people are, you know, people don't believe. And so people are

01:02:11.320 becoming non religious. But, you know, I have an argument that, you know, part of belief is,

01:02:18.560 is, is it kind of an individual difference. And so it could be the case that there's always been

01:02:25.300 varying degrees of people who are extremely committed to a faith versus people who are

01:02:31.780 just tend to be more skeptical, regardless of the state of scientific knowledge. And this gets to,

01:02:38.280 you know, some people have argued as like the extreme male brain idea.

01:02:42.700 Is it related to interest in people and interest in things?

01:02:45.900 Correct. Right. Oh, good. Oh, I always wondered about that. Yeah. So the people who are interested

01:02:51.260 in things are much less likely to be religious believers, I would presume. Correct. Correct. So

01:02:56.560 there is an argument that some people have made that, that sort of that religion is very much relies

01:03:02.900 on social cognition, right, or relies on the same neuro processes involved in thinking about people,

01:03:11.160 like, like, like you just said, because to spirituality, you have to animate the world

01:03:16.220 with minds in a way, right, you have to anthropomorphize, you have to, so you could have a,

01:03:21.080 in fact, in some, in some cultural traditions that, you know, we have our big five personality model,

01:03:27.520 of course, but some cultural traditions, they have a spirituality dimension, a personality,

01:03:33.400 you know, it's recognized that people just naturally vary. In the West, we tend to be a little bit

01:03:39.140 more blank slatist about, about religion, that people tend to think, well, you just decide to be

01:03:46.400 religious, or you were raised religious. Right, that it's just a matter of cold cognitive belief,

01:03:50.140 rather than a temperamental proclivity. Right. So, but, you know, but at the same time, we say things

01:03:56.840 like people have a calling, or, and maybe secular people don't say that, but they, but people kind of

01:04:05.060 recognize that there's individual differences in what, in what people, some people are good

01:04:10.600 artists, right, some people are just more artistic, and some people just, so some people are just more

01:04:16.880 likely to see the world as, as a little bit enchanted, whereas others are just more naturally

01:04:22.560 skeptical, and so, so let's just assume for a second that that's true, that there's this individual

01:04:27.880 difference that's always existed, where you've had some people that are just more interested in

01:04:32.860 things, like you said, and so they might even be somewhat, at the extreme, they might even be

01:04:37.700 somewhat mind-blind, that religion might not, they might not even totally understand it, because they

01:04:42.700 can't really tangibly grasp it, whereas other people are, you know, they're, they can see the world

01:04:48.280 as more magical, and even, so if that's always existed, then what you, what you might find is in the

01:04:54.720 past, when we had a less individualistic culture, everyone went to church, not because everyone

01:05:00.060 necessarily believed at the same level of commitment, but people didn't have this attitude

01:05:05.920 of, well, I'm not going to go, because I don't believe, people had more of a, well, I, this is the

01:05:11.600 thing that we do. Well, it was also the case, I think, to some degree, that, you know, part of the reason

01:05:18.180 that we don't believe now, is because we have a variety of things we can believe in, and the farther

01:05:24.500 back you go in history, I mean, imagine a medieval town, where Christianity dominated, there might have

01:05:29.900 been some Jews there, who would posit an alternative faith, let's say, but Christianity wasn't so much

01:05:35.660 an explanation of the world, as it was the explanation of the world, so, I mean, maybe you were a brilliant

01:05:42.160 iconoclast, and, and you doubted certain things, but you didn't have an alternative scheme of

01:05:47.540 representation at hand, like you do now, so, right, yeah, it was the only game in town, so, so, yeah, so I do

01:05:56.260 think that's part of it, but, but maybe there is a benefit, even though we have more things you can

01:06:03.620 believe, of course, you know, it, people act like it's weird, if you say something to them, like, well, maybe

01:06:10.120 it's good from time to time to submit to things that aren't, you know, 100% in alignment with what

01:06:19.780 you want to do, and what you believe, right, maybe there are, you know, maybe there are benefits to

01:06:24.720 being part of a community project, and there's a recognition that it's full of people with individual

01:06:30.920 differences, that there are going to be people that are devout believers, and then they're, you know,

01:06:36.060 going to be people that are more skeptical, but there's something, there's a place for everybody

01:06:40.500 in this, in this community, I mean, we do this with, with other things, like, like sports, I mean, some

01:06:47.540 people just aren't good athletes, no matter how hard they try, but at least in American culture, and I

01:06:53.920 assume it's the same, and they're similar in Canada, we think that kids should have a go at it, and we

01:07:00.980 think that it's okay, if you're, if you're not naturally gifted, it's good for you, there's

01:07:06.200 benefits from participating in physical activities, and it's fun, and it's a way to have teammates, and

01:07:12.940 to connect with people, and to maybe learn leadership skills, or learn what it's like, how to win, and how

01:07:17.840 to lose, and you learn all these life skills, and it's fine that some people aren't that, you know, just

01:07:24.820 aren't that good at it, or kind of clumsy, or whatever, and so I'm not trying to say that religion and

01:07:30.100 sports are, by any means, the same thing, but in other, the point is, in other domains, we recognize

01:07:35.440 that there are individual differences, and that doesn't preclude them for participating

01:07:40.320 in, in the project, and that there might be benefits for having a more, I mean, I know this is a, a loaded

01:07:47.460 term now in academia, but inclusivity, but there might be benefits for being inclusive, and saying that,

01:07:54.080 that, you know, there's a place in religion, even for people who are more skeptical, and I do think

01:08:02.580 that might be the case, I'm not 100% sure, but I do think that, that might be the case, outside of,

01:08:09.460 outside of the Western world, again, I think in the more individualistic cultures, we're more apt to

01:08:15.280 say, well, what do you believe, what do you think, as an individual, what do you want to do, as opposed to,

01:08:23.200 what is your duty to do, or what is, and what's your relationship to the collective, correct, well,

01:08:29.400 you could also imagine that it might be a, it might be something like a difference in fundamental

01:08:34.200 cognitive metaphors, as well, and those could be different niches, so imagine that, so just for the

01:08:40.480 benefit of the audience, the biggest difference known between men and women, in terms of individual

01:08:45.220 differences, is interest in people versus interest in things, and men are more interested in things,

01:08:50.660 and women are more interested in people, on average, the difference is about one standard

01:08:54.440 deviation, which is very large by the standards of such things, and so you could imagine that

01:08:59.340 maybe it's more acceptable, more understandable for people who are primarily interested in things

01:09:09.060 to view the world mechanistically, whereas, so that's a metaphor, the world is a machine,

01:09:14.900 and there's a kind of determinism that goes along with that, but also a logical analyzability,

01:09:21.800 and a reductionism, and a decomposition, that would all go along with tool formation, let's say,

01:09:28.000 whereas you could also visualize being as a spirit, and that also makes sense, because the community,

01:09:35.220 in some sense, is a spirit, and other people are spirits, and so, and animals are spirits, they have,

01:09:40.360 they're personality-like, and so to view existence itself as characterized by personality would be a

01:09:47.340 different approach, but one that would have its benefits and detractions just as viewing it like

01:09:53.040 a machine might. Right. You know, I'm often struck by the fact that, you know, it seems to me that

01:09:59.100 engineers, engineer types, are more likely to be critical of mythology and narrative, religious in

01:10:05.780 nature, particularly, because it doesn't align with their mode of thinking, but they tend to pick up

01:10:11.100 their mythology in the form of, say, science fiction. It comes in a more implicit level.

01:10:17.880 Right. You're actually getting to a series of studies that we did looking at this, so there was

01:10:26.680 some surveys that came out a number of years ago that found that the more secular people were,

01:10:32.980 the more likely they were to believe in UFOs, and when I say UFOs... No, that's perfect. That goes

01:10:38.180 along with Jung's analysis of visions of UFOs in the sky, right? He thought those were replacements

01:10:43.880 for religious revelations, the angels essentially descending from on high. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:10:50.000 Michael Shermer and I talked about this because he, you know, he's written about this before that.

01:10:54.260 He's got a great quote that UFOs are like deities for atheists, or I can't remember exactly what it was,

01:11:01.620 but it was something to that effect. So there are these surveys that find that the more secular

01:11:08.180 people are, the more likely they are to believe in UFOs, and not just UFOs in the sense that, well,

01:11:14.300 we don't know what these things are, but they are likely to believe that there's intelligent

01:11:19.060 alien life among us. So they're really taking a leap of faith. So those surveys existed,

01:11:26.800 but what we were interested in in our lab was, well, to what, if religion is about meaning,

01:11:34.560 which there's a lot of, you know, studies looking at the existential benefits of religion,

01:11:38.980 including meaning making, we're like, well, if a religion's about meaning, and people who aren't

01:11:45.200 religious might be, so they might be more vulnerable to not having meaning, and thus more likely to be

01:11:51.720 searching for meaning, would they be more likely, would that explain why they're more likely to

01:11:57.680 believe in UFOs? So in other words, from like a methodological point of view, what we did is we

01:12:03.600 looked at this correlation between lack of belief in religion and a positive belief in aliens to see

01:12:12.700 if it was mediated, see if that relationship is mediated by these meaning-making variables.

01:12:18.860 And so there's these measures that maybe you're familiar with called the presence of meaning,

01:12:24.800 which measures to what extent you actually see your life as meaningful. And then there's another

01:12:28.800 measure called the search for meaning, which is basically to what extent you're currently looking

01:12:33.620 for meaning in life. They tend to be negatively correlated, not always, but it makes sense that

01:12:39.040 they are, because the more you feel like your life is full of meaning, the less in need you are to go look

01:12:44.660 for new meaning. And so what we found was, we found a support for a mediation model in which

01:12:51.960 the less people believed in God, the less meaning they reported having, the higher they were in search

01:13:00.460 for meaning, which in turn predicted their belief in aliens and UFOs.

01:13:06.000 Have you, have you expanded that to political belief? Because one of the things I, look, I heard

01:13:11.500 this survey once from the Gallup organization in Canada. Now, you know, you may know this, you may

01:13:17.080 not, but Canada has had its bouts of separatism, right? Quebec, our French-speaking province, has

01:13:22.280 put forward the plans to separate a number of times and has come very, very close to breaking up the

01:13:27.960 country. And Quebec was the last country in the West, really, to radically abandon Catholicism.

01:13:34.540 It was a really Catholic country till like 1959, and then it just disappeared. And now Quebec has

01:13:39.820 like the lowest birth rate in the Western world, or close to, and very many out of common law

01:13:47.940 households rather than formally married. And, you know, whereas in the 50s, the typical family had 12

01:13:54.800 children, it's like one now. So radical transformation, a very short period of time that dovetailed with this

01:14:01.000 rise in Quebec nationalism. And I always thought, well, you know, Catholicism disappeared and the

01:14:06.400 state became the religion. And then I saw a Gallup poll that indicated that if you were a lapsed

01:14:11.220 Catholic, you were 10 times more likely to be a separatist. I thought, well, there's evidence that

01:14:17.920 when the religious instinct falls out of the religious domain, it plummets down to something like

01:14:22.940 the political level. And then political, the political becomes religious. And so you're seeing

01:14:28.480 that people who are less formally religious. So, and do you distinguish between dogmatic belief and

01:14:35.920 spiritual belief? Because that's often distinguished. But in any case, they're more likely to believe in

01:14:41.440 these extraterrestrial events, any work at all on the political end.

01:14:47.300 So I haven't done any empirical work on the political end. But what you just said is exactly

01:14:53.560 what I was thinking. Now, there is some work in this model of compensatory control. So they're not

01:15:00.520 looking at meaning, they're looking at a sense of control in life. And they found like the, there's

01:15:08.800 a paper on it, and I'm trying to remember the name of it. It's called something like God or Government.

01:15:13.540 And basically, what they find is the less religious the society is, the more people want big government.

01:15:20.100 And so the idea is that people want some kind of controlling structure that helps make when you

01:15:25.500 feel personally out of control, that helps order the world. And if a society moves away from religion,

01:15:32.620 they tend to be more interested in government, which isn't exactly what you were saying.

01:15:37.860 But I think it's close, though, it's close. And I mean, it, it, it indicates, like your research

01:15:44.660 seems to indicate is that there is this fundamental impulse towards something approximating religious

01:15:50.680 belief. And so then you might think, well, in most cultures, particularly traditional cultures,

01:15:56.340 that need is fulfilled by the totality of the culture. It's relatively integrated, and everything

01:16:03.480 is oriented in the same direction. Whereas in our culture, that's fragmented to the degree that it

01:16:08.820 has, that's all gone away. But that doesn't mean that the desire for something like coherence

01:16:12.920 is, has, and I can't see how it can disappear, because who wants incoherence? Yeah, I mean,

01:16:20.340 that's uncertainty and, and, and trouble. And maybe that's driving part of this search for meaning

01:16:25.040 that you're describing.

01:16:26.960 Yeah, I think so. And, you know, one of the things that's really fascinating about this,

01:16:30.580 because when I was doing this work, and I was writing, I was writing a book on all of this.

01:16:35.720 So I was doing empirical work, but I was also looking at broad trends. So if you look in the

01:16:40.080 US at the areas of the country that are the least religious, so you can look at that both in terms of

01:16:45.600 self identified religiosity, but you can also look at church attendance, and you know, other

01:16:50.680 indicators of religion. Those are the places where the new age industry is thriving, right? So like on the

01:16:57.860 on the coast, right? So you can look at that broad level of analysis, you can say the more secular

01:17:03.480 parts of society tend to be the ones that go more in on new agey stuff. They also tend to be the one

01:17:10.420 and this gets to what you're saying, they also that also tends to connect with the political activism.

01:17:16.220 And I remember this happening during during and maybe it's the early Trump administration years

01:17:22.600 that you'd see these articles and places like the New York Times, like these weren't fringe

01:17:26.380 outlets. You'd see articles where it's talking about like witchcraft, the resistance witchcraft.

01:17:32.000 So they're like people. So there were there were witches that were trying to cast spells against

01:17:36.980 Republicans and and Donald Trump. And and they you know, they were there were these articles

01:17:42.380 totally unironic like and, you know, it wasn't like they were presenting this and saying like, wow,

01:17:47.920 these people really believe this stuff. They were just presenting it as this is how it is,

01:17:52.500 right? There's these people. So imagine this is this is something I've read that as it's analogous

01:17:59.260 to what you're saying that as belief in dogmatic, the dogmatic traditions of religion decline.

01:18:07.000 There's a corresponding increase in the number of people who claim to be spiritual.

01:18:12.120 So there's a separation between spiritual and dogmatic. And so it's really easy to criticize dogma

01:18:17.200 say, well, do you really believe that concrete thing? Why not make it more abstract? Well,

01:18:22.780 it's less susceptible to rational criticism. And so that's advantageous. It's more individually

01:18:29.180 tailored in some sense. But the problem is, is it lacks structure and the ability to unite people,

01:18:35.660 you know, and obviously the problem with New Age spirituality, in some sense, is that everything

01:18:39.860 goes, right? And there's no uniting. See, the thing about dogma, because it's codified and traditional,

01:18:48.500 everyone shares it. And then you can think about it in terms of your own speaking, your own thinking

01:18:54.080 as well, like you and I can have this conversation, because we accept a whole variety of things

01:18:59.400 dogmatically, we can experiment on the fringes a bit, you know, we don't have to dig into what each

01:19:04.540 of us means by every single term. So we stand on dogma and make a foray out into investigation.

01:19:11.920 But when you when you get rid of the dogma, well, you get rid of the blinders and the constraints,

01:19:16.580 but you seem to also get rid of the structure and the coherence and the thing that organizes the

01:19:20.800 community. And it certainly doesn't appear to me that New Age thinking is more coherent than,

01:19:27.600 say, Catholic thinking, not not at all. Right? Well, so yeah, so you're actually getting into,

01:19:32.560 you know, exactly what we, what we observed is, is it appears that a lot of these New Age

01:19:38.220 alternative beliefs, and are motivated by the need for meaning. But they don't seem to do a good job

01:19:46.100 of providing meaning, because remember, they're inversely correlated, but with the with the presence

01:19:51.780 of meaning. And I think for the reasons you just articulated, I mean, when we have a meaning

01:19:56.560 framework, what some people might call dogmatic framework, everything you just said, like it

01:20:02.420 organizes us. And not only that, but it calls, it gives us responsibilities and duties. So with

01:20:08.240 this, anything goes, new age stuff, you can just say, like, well, I'm not really into that I'm into

01:20:13.880 this. But if we all if we have a shared religious belief that says, well, you have a duty to do this,

01:20:20.880 like you have a duty to take care of your family, to, you know, you have a duty to help your neighbor.

01:20:26.920 It takes away the selfishness, right? It takes away the, well, I don't want to do that, I want to do

01:20:32.680 this other thing. And, you know, that it might be that a lot of things that provide meaning are,

01:20:39.040 well, you talk about this in your latest book I just read, about responsibility, the connection of

01:20:47.340 responsibility to meaning, like, these dogmas give you responsibilities, where I think about a lot of the

01:20:52.620 new age stuff. It's like, you're not responsible for anything. You know, no one's saying that, well,

01:20:58.420 you have to do this, or you have to do that, you can, it's almost like a, it's a consumer experience

01:21:03.920 of, well, this works for me, or this doesn't work for me. And, you know,

01:21:08.400 yeah, the problem is atomization, but also that lack of, well, and we should talk about meaning a

01:21:14.460 little bit. I wrote a paper a long while back about different kinds of meaning. And they're

01:21:18.900 sort of paradoxical, because there's, there's the meaning that exists when something really unknown

01:21:24.500 happens. And that's a funny meaning, because you don't know what it means, but it's meaningful,

01:21:29.440 it's significant, and maybe you go out and explore it. But then there's the meanings associated with

01:21:33.420 things that are fixed, right, that are already in place. And it seems like you need a balance between

01:21:39.300 both of those to have an optimal experience of meaning, because one takes you way out on the

01:21:43.920 fringes where, you know, you're atomized and insane, and the other, well, locks you into a

01:21:49.220 structure that has no escape, and no room for you. So the meaning is this umbrella term, but

01:21:56.860 decomposing it into its constituent elements also seems to be useful. And that would also allow for

01:22:02.880 the investigation of what meaning suits what situation, because sometimes what you want is

01:22:08.340 the meaning of security, right? You want constraint, you want not that I don't want all those choices.

01:22:14.380 And other times, that's not the case. Right? Yeah, I think so. So I edited or co edited a book on the

01:22:21.640 existential science of religion, a couple years ago. And one of the chapters that that one of the

01:22:29.120 contributions to the book was making this argument that religion functions as a meta choice. And it's

01:22:37.960 for what you just said. So if it's so it actually provides it promotes freedom, because people think

01:22:42.740 of religion as being like restrictive, right? Often, they're like, well, I can't do the things I want to

01:22:48.040 do, because religion's telling me I have to do, here's all the things I have to do, right? Here's all the

01:22:52.960 rules that the that are imposed upon me. But this argument was religion, at least done in a healthy

01:22:58.680 way, as a meta choice, in the sense that there's this this behavioral economics type of research,

01:23:04.620 where if you have too many choices, you're paralyzed by indecision. So if you narrow down,

01:23:09.140 if you have too few, it's suffocating, right? So there's an optimal level of choice in which you're

01:23:15.180 free, right? You're not overwhelmed. But you can, you know, you have options. And so what religion

01:23:21.260 might do well, is function as a meta choice, which is, I can reduce to one choice, this,

01:23:27.760 the system, I can buy into the system that sets up these parameters. And as a as a guidebook for how

01:23:34.280 to live. So I don't have to think about every single little thing, like I'm buying, I'm making

01:23:38.800 the meta choice of buying into this framework. But that in itself is a choice, because you could

01:23:43.580 reject, you could say, well, I'm not going to do this anymore. Yeah, well, you can think of it in that

01:23:48.260 sense as something that's more akin to, and I'm, this isn't reductionistic, it's more akin to a game.

01:23:54.220 I mean, people aren't annoyed when they play Monopoly that they can't bounce a basketball off

01:23:58.820 the center of the board, right? They're happy because they have adopted this set of rules that

01:24:03.520 it enables a kind of cooperation and competition that's enjoyable and constrains choice to something

01:24:09.360 approximating an optimal range. Yeah. And you could say, well, we could play Monopoly,

01:24:14.760 or we could play Catan. But fine, you make that decision, you got to play something or you play

01:24:20.800 by yourself in a corner. And that that issue of being overwhelmed by choices, that's, that's something

01:24:26.640 that that that people don't seem to be quite as, as, what would you say, they're not quite as aware

01:24:31.820 of, if you tell people about that, they think, Oh, yeah, I know what you mean. But we, our society,

01:24:36.520 and maybe that's because of its individualistic nature, is we recoil at constraint,

01:24:40.960 we fail to see the fact that we do want our choices narrowed to a range of, I mean, look,

01:24:47.880 what's our working memory capacity? Four items, something like that, right? Our field of conscious

01:24:53.220 choice is very narrow. And so when we're presented by options that exceed that constraint, and there's

01:24:58.760 other constraints, it's very easy to become anxious instead of free. Right? Yeah, yeah. And so this is,

01:25:06.280 I mean, and of course, there are a number of people who have, you know, put forward ideas like

01:25:11.440 this, talking about the idea of ordered liberty or disciplined freedom, you know, that you get more

01:25:15.980 freedom when your life is disciplined. Like if you, if you, if you don't have certain rules that you live

01:25:22.760 by, then your life can descend into chaos pretty quickly. I mean, people do this, even when they think

01:25:30.840 about something as simple as going on a diet, right? So if you, if, if somebody gives you advice,

01:25:38.580 like if you went to, you know, if you went to like a nutrition person, or, you know, you, you hired

01:25:43.380 like a trainer or someone to help you lose weight or get healthy. One of the things they would tell you

01:25:49.120 to do is if, you know, if you don't have certain foods in your house, you're less likely to at night

01:25:56.600 be tempted to walk into the kitchen and eat a bunch of cookies if they're not there, but that requires

01:26:02.140 a choice of not putting them there. So it's not, it's not a restriction on your freedom, right? You

01:26:07.040 could get your car, I guess, and drive out to the store and get cookies, but you're less likely to do

01:26:10.960 it if you set up your, your environment in such a way that removes temptation. And so there's a lot of

01:26:18.940 even very little things we do in life that are like that, right? We there, you know, some people might

01:26:23.560 say life hacks, right? Where we learn, well, if I do, if I do this, then I'm, I know myself and I know

01:26:30.780 I'm the type of person that after a long day's work, if I come home, I'm gonna, I'm gonna drink

01:26:35.840 too, too much beer. And so I'm just not going to keep beer in the house. I'm going to make beer a thing

01:26:41.200 that I do only if I go out with friends. I mean, there are people that make these choices because

01:26:45.980 they have, they know they have vulnerabilities to, you know, over drinking. And so I think there's a

01:26:53.180 lots, lots of things in life that even beyond religion or, you know, other systems in which,

01:26:58.780 like you said, we kind of implicitly understand that you have to set up guardrails and rules and

01:27:04.640 people don't scream, well, that's anti, anti freedom. They think that's just being sensible and

01:27:11.080 being, and being reasonable. But when you talk about certain things like, like, like religious

01:27:17.300 traditions or faiths, for some reason, it seems to, at least in, you know, in the, in the kind of

01:27:22.720 modern Western secular world, people seem to think that that's, that's more oppressive.

01:27:28.800 It's also, I think, partly because more academically oriented types thinkers have proposed critiques of

01:27:37.500 religion that are very, that reduce it to a single dimension, and then criticize it along that

01:27:43.500 dimension. And so the atheist types like Richard Dawkins, and he tends to think that belief in God

01:27:50.660 is like belief in a proposition, a statable proposition. Is God real? Like, is a table real?

01:27:57.980 And it isn't obvious that that's the proper way to formulate that issue. And you can make it absurd

01:28:04.880 almost immediately by reducing it to that sort of representation. But there's multitude of

01:28:12.800 functions that religious traditions serve. And even people like Becker, you know, he basically reduced

01:28:20.020 it to a single dimension. It's a defense against death anxiety. It's like, well, it may be that,

01:28:24.900 but it certainly isn't only that. It's, it's a very, very complex issue. Right. And so, but people run

01:28:33.420 into these critiques, Marxist critique, religion is the opiate of the masses, or the Freudian critique,

01:28:38.480 which is, well, God is essentially a projection of the father, an infantile projection of the father.

01:28:43.380 It's like, well, yes, sometimes in some cases, and in some ways, but, but wait, like, and I guess it

01:28:50.200 depends to, to, to some degree, and maybe you could tell me what you think about this.

01:28:54.420 It seems to me that the core of a culture is something that's essentially religious by definition.

01:29:04.980 Like if, if you look at what unites people across geographic, geography and time, there's some

01:29:11.580 central conception of the world as spirit that brings people together implicitly and explicitly.

01:29:17.980 And then if, if you dispense with that, well, well, then what? Well, you, you've demonstrated that,

01:29:25.440 well, you would get people adopting rather odd beliefs. So that's a kind of heresy essentially.

01:29:31.120 So there's an automatic tendency to produce heretical religions. That's the, that's the consequence.

01:29:36.480 And maybe some of those are political and they're fragmentary.

01:29:40.060 Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, that that's actually why I started looking at the individual difference

01:29:48.380 level of analysis, not because I was particularly interested in thinking about spirituality or

01:29:55.220 religion or any of these things as an individual difference. But I was interested in is if there is

01:30:01.320 people did this in the, when they talked about the need to belong, you can pretty much get everyone

01:30:05.660 to agree that humans are social and have a fundamental need to belong. That's not controversial.

01:30:12.120 So you can use that as an example. And you, and what researchers did, well, they said, well, if that's

01:30:17.500 true, then you would expect there to be natural variability. Everyone might have some basic need to

01:30:23.680 belong, but there are going to be some people that are very, very oriented towards belongingness,

01:30:28.460 whereas others aren't going to be so much. And so that individual difference isn't a case against the

01:30:34.000 basic need. It's saying that the basic need manifests, you know, differently across the

01:30:38.800 continuum. And so that's pretty much my argument, I think, for, for religion and spirituality is

01:30:45.460 that what you just said, I think is true is if people, if a society abandons religion, they don't

01:30:54.240 really become secular. They start investing in all sorts of other things, you know, what we might call

01:31:00.720 like a substitution hypothesis to fill that space of, you know, of the, of the role that, or the

01:31:07.780 multiple roles that religion was playing in their society. But then an important question, you know,

01:31:13.000 which we talked about a little bit is just because people are turning to different things to fulfill

01:31:17.980 that function doesn't mean they're actually doing a good job of fulfilling it. Right. Just because

01:31:24.180 people are turning to politics as a substitute religion or UFOs or new age beliefs doesn't mean those

01:31:30.140 things are actually doing a good job of providing meaning. Um, so, so, so let, let me ask you this

01:31:35.820 then. So, okay. So we, we've kind of come together on, on, on, on a hypothesis here is that there,

01:31:43.260 there is some need for union around a centralizing tendency. And that kind of throws us back to the

01:31:49.360 beginning of the discussion because Becker would identify that need for the central 10, 10 centralizing

01:31:56.020 tendency as a manifestation of the denial of death. And we've kind of elaborated on that and criticized

01:32:02.460 it and broadened it, I would say. So it's something more like, well, the need to, you know, imagine we

01:32:10.100 have to unite in personality to some degree, right? I mean, so we're ruled by a body of laws and it's

01:32:16.900 interesting that it's a body of laws and the laws are what we act out. So as long as we're law-abiding,

01:32:24.260 that makes us a certain kind of personality. And I would say a more conscientious personality,

01:32:30.260 probably a more agreeable personality, probably a more emotionally stable personality than we

01:32:34.700 would otherwise be alone. And so imagine that for us to live in a group, we have to partake

01:32:40.940 in a central personality and deviate in our individual ways. But that, that partake, partaking

01:32:47.460 of the central personality, without that, we get fragmentation and inability to make peace,

01:32:52.760 inability to understand each other, inability to cooperate. Right. And that is something like

01:32:57.200 the worship of a central spirit. Yeah. At least as, as it's acted out. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. And

01:33:05.720 also connecting back to, you know, something that we, we talked about the difference between,

01:33:10.100 you know, more defense versus growth perspectives. It's not just the case that, that unifying around

01:33:16.940 belief is somehow, you know, like Becker would argue somehow allowing us to, to escape our anxiety.

01:33:23.840 It's very inspiring and mobilizing because if you look at a lot of the projects that we engage in that,

01:33:30.640 so I know you had Marion Tupi on, who's a friend, you know, a number of weeks back and he talked about

01:33:38.320 the human progress and how that people don't see, you know, a lot of people don't, don't think that

01:33:44.180 we've made progress. Yeah. Well, they're, they're blinded by the variability. Right. Right. Right.

01:33:49.080 But if you look at, if you look at progress, there's a lot of things and, and not just the

01:33:53.820 progress that we're, we've benefited from. I mean, you and I are able to have this conversation

01:33:57.940 separated by many, many miles over the internet, instantaneously communicating thanks to project,

01:34:05.040 thanks to progress and technology. Right. We wouldn't have been able to do this decades ago,

01:34:10.000 but if you look at a lot of projects that are focused on making society or the world a better

01:34:17.120 place, they're projects that extend beyond our individual lifetimes. So in other words,

01:34:23.600 you have to make some commitment to say, I'm not just going to be hedonistically looking out for

01:34:29.100 myself and, you know, trying to have as fun of a life as I can. And then it's over, you know,

01:34:34.000 which some people do, of course, but you have to say, I'm going to give part of myself to something

01:34:38.960 bigger than myself. So that's not just the defense in my mind. That's an, you know, you talked about

01:34:45.100 something that's, um, adaptive. That's something that that's very good for society to say it might

01:34:51.500 take 50 years or a hundred years before we make this cure, this disease or reach this, you know,

01:34:58.940 make or build this, you know, build this project or send something out into space. And I might not

01:35:04.620 even see it myself, but I believe in it. Right. I, I, I believe that thing that we unite around,

01:35:10.760 right. That might be not so much a structure of dogmatic belief as a shared ideal, some of which

01:35:17.200 is described in dogmatic terms. I mean, when I look at the abolition of slavery, let's say, I mean,

01:35:24.120 you can certainly come up with any number of reasons why slavery is a good idea from the perspective

01:35:29.080 of the slave owner. Now, the question is, how the hell did it ever get to be the case that people

01:35:35.200 decided that that was a bad thing? And it looks to me like it's the working of that ideal across

01:35:41.240 millennia, really, that finally manifested itself in that ethical decision. It's like, well, there was

01:35:46.920 this idea, and it's part of the Judeo-Christian tradition that we're all imbued with a spark of

01:35:52.240 divinity that aligns us with God, that we're supposed to act in relationship to that. And there was a

01:35:58.340 logical incompatibility between that and the, and the forces that the economic forces primarily that,

01:36:05.140 that propelled slavery forward. And so it's not just that we're united by a dogmatic structure,

01:36:12.120 we're united by a personality that's an, that's the ideal towards which we're trying to struggle,

01:36:17.800 something like that. And that has more of that growth oriented element that you're describing.

01:36:22.720 Right. Like, I mean, I've been struck repeatedly by this idea recently, and perhaps it's not

01:36:27.980 particularly original, that the figure of Christ in the West is at least the consequence of a

01:36:35.140 millennia long, millennia's long discussion about what constitutes the ideal. Look, we haven't agreed

01:36:41.240 exactly, because it's too complicated to fully agree on. But I do believe that we feel guilt when we

01:36:48.660 fail to live up to whatever that implicit ideal is.

01:36:51.580 Right. Yeah. Yeah, no, I agree. So yeah, so I do think that, you know, what you're talking about

01:36:59.240 of this, the central, you know, this, that we all kind of rally around is inspirational,

01:37:06.060 right? It gives people a reason to be optimistic. And I think there are, and, you know, I suspect you

01:37:13.580 agree with me just based on, you know, seeing some of your, some of your own discussions on,

01:37:18.820 on current trends. There are reasons, I think, to be concerned, that we have a growing amount of not

01:37:26.120 just people in hyper individualism of people not, you know, having shared, you know, shared culture,

01:37:34.600 but also just the, the, the associated pessimism and cynicism. You see this in the antinatalist

01:37:42.860 movement, right? You, you see this, and some of the activism that is associated with the social

01:37:50.320 justice movement, which is not, you know, I think most of us would agree that there's more work to

01:37:58.260 be done in any, in any area where you might say there's still, you know, unfairness or injustice.

01:38:05.200 But there's this notion among at least a certain component of the, a certain portion of these

01:38:12.580 activists that is, it's not going to get better, right? It's, it's, it's permanent. These...

01:38:19.620 And that it hasn't got better. It hasn't. In fact, we just, so at the, at the Challey Institute,

01:38:26.100 where, when you did my introduction, where I'm a, I'm a scholar at, we actually just ran a survey

01:38:31.900 that will probably be released by the time this, this podcast airs, where we, we, we look, we

01:38:41.120 recruited a thousand U.S. university students from all over the country. And we asked them questions

01:38:48.680 about, about progress. And we asked them specifically connected to their college experience,

01:38:55.420 because what we were interested in is what are people learning? You know, you hear all these

01:38:59.120 criticisms about colleges and indoctrination, but we wanted to ask students, where are they actually,

01:39:04.900 what do they think they're learning? And so we asked them, based on what you've learned in college

01:39:10.620 so far, do you think the world has gotten better over the last 50 years? And we even gave them

01:39:17.920 specific examples, because you could say, well, it depends on what you mean by getting better, right?

01:39:22.280 So we, we, we had examples like, and to pop things that we knew based on the human progress and other,

01:39:29.200 you know, other data points that had gotten better, like poverty, right? That, you know, poverty has been

01:39:34.920 decreasing. And I actually... Radically and, and immensely. Right. And so what was amazing to me,

01:39:42.740 and I can, I can actually bring up, so I don't get the numbers wrong. So we asked people,

01:39:50.020 well, based on what you've learned in college so far, is the world getting better over the last 50

01:39:55.180 years? And not even 50% of students said yes. So half of students don't think that the world has

01:40:02.900 gotten better. And we asked the same questions about the U.S. Has the U.S. gotten better? And very

01:40:08.420 similar answers. Only about a quarter of the students of U.S. college students said that they're

01:40:14.280 optimistic about the future of the world based on what they've learned in college so far.

01:40:21.000 Only 11% of U.S. college students said that their college experience has made them have a more

01:40:28.260 positive view of the U.S., whereas 45% said that their college experiences made them have a more

01:40:34.800 negative view of the U.S. The rest said their view hasn't changed. And only half of students are

01:40:41.100 optimistic about, say they're optimistic about their own future and their, and their ability to make a

01:40:47.820 difference in the world. So I could go on with, with, with all these statistics, but essentially we,

01:40:55.440 you know, we found a number of reasons to think that students, well, let me back up a little bit.

01:41:02.080 So if you think about objectively, if you think about American college students using, you know, using

01:41:07.300 the terms that are often used in this discussion, which is the concept of privilege. Like, if you

01:41:13.200 think about the concept of privilege, to be born in America, to live in America, you've already kind

01:41:20.720 won the lottery. I'm not saying America's the greatest, you know, the greatest place, but compared

01:41:25.960 to a lot of places in the world, there's opportunity. There's, you know, there's a lot more opportunity

01:41:31.000 here, right? So only a small percentage of people have that privilege already, right? And then on top

01:41:37.020 of that, only a minority of people get to attend university. I mean, the vast majority of the world

01:41:43.240 doesn't have the opportunity to attend university, right? So at some level, it seems obviously true

01:41:51.960 that if you have the privilege of attending university in America, you would think that you

01:41:58.360 would, should be pretty off, you know, you should be pretty optimistic about your situation in life and

01:42:03.620 have a lot of gratitude about it. But what we're finding, and of course, these aren't, you know,

01:42:09.520 these, this is just a poll. These aren't experiments or anything. And we're not, and we're not controlling

01:42:14.860 for personality or, you know, other potential factors, but we're getting a snapshot of college

01:42:22.460 students not being very, one, many of them not seeing that, you know, there's been progress. So what

01:42:29.820 are they learning in college where they're not saying, hey, wow, like maybe things aren't

01:42:33.620 perfect, but they certainly gotten better. They're not seeing that. And then on top of that,

01:42:38.460 they're not particularly hopeful or optimistic about the future. And they don't seem to have

01:42:43.020 a real sense of agency, right? That they can make a difference in the world that they're,

01:42:47.640 and again, you would think that if you were, you know, if you were sufficiently blessed to live in the

01:42:52.740 United States and go to college, that might, you know, from my perspective, that might come with a

01:42:57.960 certain level of responsibility, right? That's, you know, you, you, you're very fortunate and you have

01:43:04.280 a duty to do something in the world to help others, to make a difference, to, you know, to make your

01:43:10.980 community and your society better. But it seems like a good portion of students aren't particularly

01:43:17.100 optimistic about that and don't really see that they have a place.

01:43:20.600 Well, I talked to Tupi and to Bjorn Lomberg and to Matt Ridley. These are all optimistic sorts of

01:43:28.360 characters who've done a lot to document the radical improvement in absolute terms of, of human

01:43:36.100 existence over the last, especially the last 30 years. And all of them know that they have a marketing

01:43:42.720 problem, right? It's like, yeah, well, why isn't this compelling? Because it's just, it's an,

01:43:48.880 it's an uphill battle to, to get this information out there. And the question is why? And it seems

01:43:55.440 to me that it has something to do with, it's in some sense too materialistic. Like, not that that's

01:44:02.000 bad exactly, because isn't it good to have enough to eat and all of that? But there's some impetus,

01:44:08.020 some spiritual impetus or something like that, that seems to be lacking. And then there's another

01:44:12.700 issue. I don't know if you thought about this or not, but, you know, in the Christian tradition,

01:44:17.840 there's an apocalypse, there's apocalypse. And it's sort of projected in some sense out into the

01:44:24.300 spiritual world. So the end of the world is at hand, but who knows when? Right. Well, so it's

01:44:30.620 projected like utopia is projected. And so then you might ask yourself, well, what happens if it isn't

01:44:36.040 projected? Is there a utopian and an apocalyptic tendency in human thinking? And if so, what happens

01:44:42.900 if it's not contained within a religious structure? And so I would wonder, to what degree

01:44:48.160 the pessimists in your survey have apocalyptic visions of the future? Because there's certainly

01:44:53.780 no shortage of suggestions that we're facing, continually facing something that looks like

01:45:00.120 an apocalyptic nightmare. And it isn't obvious to me that that's the case.

01:45:04.100 Right. Yeah. Now, you see this with what's become almost a religious environmentalism,

01:45:10.260 right? Of it's very apocalyptic. We, you know, depending on who's talking and on what day,

01:45:17.260 it varies from we've only got like a decade left before the planet turns into an uninhabitable

01:45:24.360 hellscape to, you know, on the more optimistic side, you'll see some people say, well, we can still do

01:45:29.820 something to mitigate it. But you do see, again, there are plenty of environmental activists that

01:45:34.980 I think are very practical, very solution oriented, very entrepreneurial, who are thinking about

01:45:40.900 technologies and strategies to make. Yeah, Lomberg is like that. Right, right. But then there's,

01:45:48.560 there's a, but there is an element of these activists that it is almost like an apocalyptic

01:45:55.160 meaning, you know, meaning making religion where, because the reason I say that is because it seems

01:46:01.120 to accompany this antinatalist and right, right view of, it's almost as if the best. So how you might

01:46:09.860 ask, well, what's that got to do with, with meaning? Well, it's almost as if what they're arguing is the

01:46:13.920 most meaningful thing that humans can do is go away. Yes. Well, you surrender the planet to the other

01:46:23.180 species because we've screwed it up. Well, and the thing about the apocalyptic, like, I mean, when I grew

01:46:31.600 up, the apocalypse was basically the threat of nuclear war, which seemed very real, and seems to have at

01:46:37.940 least vanished to some degree in terms of what people fear. And maybe that's because the actual risk has

01:46:44.720 declined. I would say that's the primary reason. I mean, it isn't obvious to me that Russia is going to attack

01:46:50.980 the United States with nuclear bombs. So, and China and America, well, it's not a full-fledged Cold War

01:46:57.560 yet. So, so, but, you know, back in the 60s, there were many people who were entirely convinced that

01:47:05.200 everyone was going to be starving and that we were going to run out of resources by the year 2000. I

01:47:09.480 mean, the population bomb, Ehrlich's book, the Club of Rome, all these people said, oh, we're going to

01:47:15.200 overpopulate the planet, and we're going to run out of resources. And we didn't, and we aren't going

01:47:20.700 to, by all appearances, we're going to peak at about 9 billion. And it wouldn't surprise me at all

01:47:24.920 if in 100 years, the fundamental problem is that there aren't enough children. I mean, I don't know,

01:47:30.560 and who knows, because 100 years is a long way away. But that apocalypse, those apocalypses didn't

01:47:36.600 occur. And we have the environmental apocalypse. And it'd be interesting to see that the more

01:47:43.380 pessimistic students that you described, do you suppose they would, would they be more likely to

01:47:49.880 fall into the search for meaning camp? Would they be the ones that were more susceptible to

01:47:56.100 alternative quasi-religious beliefs? Do you know any of that yet? Because it'd be interesting to look

01:48:03.420 at all that relationship to views of the future. Yeah, no, that's, so there are some data, there are

01:48:10.320 some data points that I can bring up, not from, not from my survey, but that I think speak to this

01:48:15.320 issue. And other issues you raised, including that the materialism issue that you brought up about

01:48:21.200 progress. So for one, there has been global data looking at meaning across different countries. And as it

01:48:28.200 turns out, people in poorer countries report higher meaning in life than people in richer countries.

01:48:34.780 Even when you control for religiosity, the effect remains. Religiosity explains part of it.

01:48:42.020 Religious people have more meaning. But even when you control for that, that remains. So what's the

01:48:49.020 story there? Well, it could be that in poorer countries, people are naturally more interdependent.

01:48:53.480 Right. You, you're not as individualistic. You, you, you have to help each other. And so you can

01:48:58.920 very, you can, it's much easier to see how your life matters, right? People depend on you.

01:49:03.640 Well, you know, I just interviewed a man who was held in Guantanamo Bay for 14 years and released.

01:49:10.080 And he came from Mauritania. He came from a tribal society, like literally a tribal society. He's only one

01:49:18.140 generation. He's not even one generation removed from that. And he went to be educated in Germany

01:49:23.560 when he was an older teenager. And when he got to Germany, he was alone in a room

01:49:29.000 for the first time in his life. And he said it really upset him. And he said, we weren't talking

01:49:37.940 about meaning specifically, but that the meaning in his life was the interdependence with all of his

01:49:44.480 family members, whom he was never isolated from ever. And he said, specifically, he talked about

01:49:50.940 his mother and said that she was an eternal source of meaning from for him, and that that dissolved

01:49:55.380 very rapidly when he was isolated and individual. And he suffered repeated bouts of depression before

01:50:01.080 he ended up in Guantanamo Bay. And so I'd never talked to somebody who had come from a tribal

01:50:07.020 background like that. And, and, and was struck by that degree of interdependence. I mean, we don't

01:50:13.500 know. And you know, the students that you're describing that are pessimistic about the future.

01:50:19.840 Many material things have improved, but maybe we are more atomized than we were 50 years ago. I mean,

01:50:26.040 I don't know, right? I think families are more fragmented than they were 50 years ago, arguably.

01:50:31.820 Yeah. And some people, I think Putnam, again, have argued that social institutions that pull

01:50:38.520 people together have become much less prevalent as well. I think, did he write Bowling Alone? Was

01:50:44.440 that Putnam? Yeah, he did. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's true. I mean, that's one of the things that

01:50:50.100 I've been, you know, I've been thinking out because I naturally lean, you know, kind of libertarian,

01:50:57.760 classical liberal. And so I think one of the, this is something I'm, you know, as a psychologist,

01:51:05.400 I'm, you know, I'm always talking to people in, in this space, because it's, if you're very,

01:51:10.320 if you're smart and have high self-control, high trait self-control and are relatively successful,

01:51:15.680 then it's, it's pretty easy to be libertarian and think, well, you know, I can choose whatever I

01:51:23.480 want to believe in. And I don't want to tell anyone to do anything. The extreme libertarians,

01:51:27.900 like, I don't want anyone to tell anyone to do anything ever. But, you know, one thing I'm always

01:51:33.160 telling, you know, telling these people is, but that's not how most, that's not how most people

01:51:38.600 are. And one of the challenges that comes with, with the success of the free market, which I'm a big

01:51:44.900 advocate for, is affluence, right? Like markets have made, you know, capitalism has made societies

01:51:51.940 wealthy and, but potentially have created this psychological vulnerability that, that,

01:51:59.560 that you're talking about. So on the one hand, yes, we've progressed in many ways along material lines,

01:52:05.560 but to what extent has that potentially contributed to, or created certain vulnerabilities

01:52:11.180 in our social lives, because I don't have to even get along with my neighbors. If I have enough money,

01:52:18.520 I can just hire people to do things, right? I can just pay people, um, for services without actually

01:52:27.580 having to compromise or negotiate. And it turns out- Or develop attachments, right? Or cooperate.

01:52:34.620 Yeah. Or inspire or mentor or lead or any of those things, right? And then also,

01:52:40.760 you don't do those things that you pay other people to do, which is a form of loss often as well.

01:52:46.380 Right. Exactly. So I think this is a, you know, taking us back to the, to, to the unifying religion

01:52:52.820 idea. I think this is a good example where you, you might need something in a free market society,

01:53:01.120 you, you know, having religion is a good counter and people, that's not a novel, of course,

01:53:09.120 it's not a novel observation because a lot of people have talked about, uh, I've talked about

01:53:14.120 this. In fact, one of, you know, I'm in a business school and one of the growing areas, popular areas

01:53:19.080 that, that, that people are interested in is ethical leadership. And the idea is people have looked at,

01:53:25.400 and, you know, people have looked at like the financial crisis and all this, you know, the,

01:53:30.440 the crony capitalism and corruption of big business and these things. And people are like,

01:53:35.340 oh yeah, um, markets are great, but if you have people that do bad things and make unethical

01:53:41.900 decisions, they can take exploit people and they can take advantage of people. And, um, and so there

01:53:47.220 is this kind of ethical leadership movement. Like if you want, if you want the market to work,

01:53:51.520 then you need people to follow certain ethical rules, not just laws, but in certain ethical

01:53:57.600 principles. And in a lot of ways, that's a, a secular repackaging of, you know, what might've

01:54:04.960 been, um, in the past, it's just like, well, you have to, you, you have a business world,

01:54:10.620 but you also have the separate religious world. And that religious world is where you get your

01:54:14.380 morals, right? Your business world might tell you how to, how to sell a product. Um, but if that,

01:54:21.200 if selling that product makes you sin or it makes you violate, you know, certain, certain moral rules,

01:54:27.600 then that's a check on you. That's like, I'm not supposed to do that. But if you, if you strip

01:54:31.920 away that, that moral framework, um, and say, well, anything goes, it's all about making money

01:54:37.180 or it's all about material gain, or it's all about maximizing quarterly profits, which also makes it

01:54:42.540 very short term. Right. So, um, so these things, you know, so in a lot of ways, these, I think these

01:54:49.220 belief systems balance that. And part of the pessimism might be, um, that you, that you do have

01:54:56.080 in our materialistic culture, the sense of, well, I'm just supposed to be, well, you see this a lot

01:55:04.120 with the privilege talk. It's because the emphasis is always on billionaires or rich people, or you

01:55:09.740 always, you always see this like, well, your life's horror, you know, your life's going to be horrible

01:55:15.500 because you don't have, you know, you're not a billionaire, which of course, nearly no one is

01:55:21.120 right. It's a weird fixation because it's like the, the modal experience is not that right. So

01:55:26.720 well, it isn't obvious that that would be an advantageous experience to begin with. I mean,

01:55:31.020 along with that comes the same responsibility as running a small country.

01:55:35.440 Right. So that's another thing too, is the fixation on, uh, uh, on privilege in terms of,

01:55:41.720 well, people are rich or it's, it neglects the privilege of having, you know, having loving parents

01:55:48.900 or, you know, you know, having, uh, being, having access to nature, or, I mean, there's just so many

01:55:55.280 things in life that don't boil down to, um, to that material wealth. And so that might be,

01:56:02.980 that might be part of the issue that, you know, like you raised with, with, with people like

01:56:07.440 Marion to be, you know, I I've talked to, I know Marion, we've talked about this a lot as well as

01:56:12.080 because he's, he, this is something that he's grappled with is why, why can't people be like, wow,

01:56:17.540 like, I'm just really, really thankful to be alive right now because it's, it's demonstrably

01:56:23.080 better, um, than it was, you know, 50 years ago or a hundred years ago, certainly 200 or 300 or 400

01:56:31.500 years ago. Um, but yeah, maybe there is a tension that, well, when, when, have you, have you done

01:56:37.700 anything in your lab, like a, a qualitative taxonomy of meaning? So imagine, cause one of the things I've

01:56:44.620 sort of thought through is, uh, you know, where do people derive proximal meaning? And so, and I kind

01:56:51.380 of thought this through as a clinician, you should probably about be about as educated as you are

01:56:56.220 intelligent, or there's a lack, you need a career or a job, especially if you're conscientious,

01:57:02.220 you need a vocation. If you're creative, you need to spend your leisure time in some intelligent and

01:57:08.540 productive and non-self-destructive manner. You need an intimate relationship. You need a family,

01:57:13.580 et cetera. You can list maybe a dozen things that seem to be proximal sources of meaning, but

01:57:18.240 I don't really have any idea how those rank order. Yeah. You know, I mean, what is it that people

01:57:24.880 require to make them feel both secure and exploratory? Is that like, is that a stable

01:57:30.460 network of family and friends? Like what's on top there? Do you have any sense of that?

01:57:35.920 So we have done studies where we've just asked people to tell us what makes your life meaningful.

01:57:42.680 And it is qualitative. They just write. And then we use human coders and we've also used coding

01:57:49.080 software, you know, scanning software. And not surprisingly, I mean, the most common response

01:57:57.420 to that, the most, you know, the most frequent word uses in these narratives are about relationships,

01:58:03.740 family and friends. And so it certainly seems to, and that's more than people write that more than

01:58:09.200 they write about religion or anything else. We looked at this also among, to make sure there

01:58:14.900 wasn't something dramatically different between believers and non-believers. We were, we matched

01:58:20.200 a sample and we recruited, because as you know, in the United States, even though a lot of people

01:58:24.600 don't go to church, we're still, we're still talking about less than 10% or so of the population

01:58:29.720 that will identify, self-identify as, as totally atheist, right? Because people are, like you said,

01:58:37.420 people are spiritual, but not religious. So we recruited, we specifically recruited, you know,

01:58:42.860 a sample of people that said, you know, they were the real deal, like hardcore atheists. And then we

01:58:47.340 recruited a sample of believers, largely because we just, we thought, well, that's one dimension that

01:58:54.240 might, you know, people might write about different things. And they didn't. You know, basically,

01:58:59.540 everyone said the same thing when what gives their life meaning, which was family and close

01:59:03.780 relationships. And people did talk about it, you know, so the, the coding picked up a few other

01:59:08.720 things, like people talk some things about community, they talked about hobbies, they talked

01:59:14.040 about careers, but that was, but family was, you know, was way up here. And those other things were,

01:59:20.200 were down here. So one thing would be very interesting, then would be to see what sort

01:59:26.020 of social networks the pessimists have. Yeah. Right. I mean, if you have a paucity of social

01:59:32.660 networks, especially perhaps at the familial level, but maybe, you know, friends and family are in some

01:59:37.780 sense, somewhat interchangeable, I doubt it, but perhaps they are. Maybe that's one of the things

01:59:43.220 that sets you up pretty badly for optimism about the future. Yeah, yeah, no, that's a good point.

01:59:49.020 And, you know, one of the, you know, one of the things that concerns me, of course, it's, you know,

01:59:54.240 it's possible, you could say, well, young people are, you know, maybe more pessimistic, and they're

02:00:01.300 college students, and there's something kind of edgy, or, you know, about being cynical, and, you know,

02:00:07.300 they're going to grow out of this. And, you know, all that's, all that's certainly possible. But it

02:00:13.540 seems to me, like, it's just would be way more beneficial for students to be able to say, hey,

02:00:19.360 this is, this is a real, you know, again, using, you know, the term privilege, this is a real

02:00:25.600 privilege to be here, I'm taking a space that probably millions of people around the world

02:00:31.240 would, would love to have this opportunity. And that comes with responsibility. But that doesn't

02:00:38.960 seem to be that, you know, that if you talk to people about responsibility, that, that gets you

02:00:45.040 almost no, well, that's funny, though, you know, because when I, when I went on my tour for my book,

02:00:50.640 I went to about 150 different cities. And one of the things that brought the audience, the only thing

02:00:56.700 I would say that brought every audience I talked about it with to a complete silence was the idea that

02:01:03.080 meaning could be found in the adoption of responsibility. And so it was peculiar, because

02:01:09.040 my original attitude would have been much like the one you just expressed, which is, well, you know, good

02:01:16.000 luck selling responsibility. That's what parents and figures of authority do all the time. But the thing

02:01:21.280 is, they don't sell it as a source of meaning. Right, right, they, they sell it as a moral obligation. And

02:01:28.900 that's fine, because you can, you can see the moral obligation element. But what they don't explain is

02:01:35.020 that in undertaking that moral obligation, you find a sustaining meaning. Right? No, I totally agree. I

02:01:44.480 mean, one thing that, you know, that I think that is, is interesting, where people miss, I think a lot of

02:01:51.080 people misunderstand meaning is they get that it's social. Well, it's like, you can tell people,

02:01:58.160 people find meaning in relationships. And that makes total sense to people. But in our society,

02:02:04.980 people often think of relationships in a very, I think about the meaning of relationships in a very

02:02:13.300 superficial level. What I mean by that is people just like, well, you need people to, to like you

02:02:18.760 and to support you. And you see this in the way we often approach things in academia, which is students

02:02:25.120 want to feel supported. And, and so you see this very caregiving approach to social relationships,

02:02:33.560 which I just want, you know, we need to make sure there's no bullying, which, you know, okay,

02:02:37.560 we all agree on that, we need to make sure that people are nice to each other, and that we have

02:02:40.920 inclusive environments. But, and that's all great. And, but to me, that's not meaning, you need to

02:02:48.460 like, so here's a, here's a way, here's a good example. Well, that might be the meaning of one

02:02:52.860 kind of security that's rather maternal in its orientation, but it certainly doesn't exhaust the

02:02:58.660 range of meanings that we might be encouraging university students to pursue. Right. So imagine,

02:03:04.520 so here's an example. Imagine that you were, we'll use work just for, you know, it'll be something

02:03:10.180 people can understand. Imagine you were on a work team, you know, you, a team got put together to work

02:03:15.220 on a project. And everyone on that team was very nice to you and very kind to you. No one ever said

02:03:20.040 a bad word to you. No one hurt your feelings. Everyone was very supported. But when it came time

02:03:24.420 to get the work done, no one was interested in your contributions. In fact, they were like, oh, you

02:03:29.900 know, you don't need to worry about this. Jordan will take care of it. Oh, that's fine. We all love

02:03:33.900 you, Jordan. You know, you're, okay. So think about that scenario and think about a different scenario

02:03:39.180 on which, yeah, maybe there's more conflict or, you know, maybe it's not high fives all the time

02:03:44.400 where people aren't supporting you, but your contribution is valued. You're making a significant

02:03:48.600 contribution to the team and people and you're needed. People are like, yeah. That would be more

02:03:52.800 akin to a sports team. Right. So, but oftentimes we, I think in our society, the first approach is what

02:04:01.100 people think of. And maybe like you said, it's a more of a maternal thing that it's like, well,

02:04:06.140 we just need to support people. And, but the problem with that is that's not a recipe to feel like you

02:04:12.320 matter. In fact, people don't like, over time, people figure out that, you know, people are just

02:04:18.020 pitying them and they don't really need them. They don't really like them, you know? So, you know,

02:04:22.580 people need to have some skin in the game. They need to be making a contribution. This actually

02:04:27.720 connects to the argument, um, that I have against things like universal basic income, um, you know,

02:04:35.120 which we, we can, or don't have to get into. Um, but the idea is it's great to think about taking

02:04:41.160 care of people that, you know, that we, we like that. Like, it feels good to be like, oh yeah,

02:04:45.180 well, we want to help people. Um, but oftentimes just, just taking care of people, isn't allowing

02:04:51.900 them to have agency. It's not allowing them, um, to make a meaningful contribution. It's in fact,

02:04:58.820 it could, you know, one of the predictors of, of, um, the desire to die by suicide is feeling like a

02:05:04.800 burden, um, to, you know, and so you can have the opposite effect where people feel like, well,

02:05:10.180 the most meaningful thing I can do is to opt out because I'm not making a contribution.

02:05:16.580 And so I'm very concerned about any kind of movement, even as kind hearted as it seems,

02:05:22.800 that's just about, well, let's just be nice to everyone and make sure everyone feels included

02:05:27.780 and loved and supported. And that's all great, but that's, to me, that's not, that's not meaning.

02:05:34.100 We want to live in a polite society, of course. Um, but people need to be able to make contributions.

02:05:39.920 And people need to be able to feel that.

02:05:41.980 Well, you could even look at that from a big five perspective, big five personality perspective.

02:05:46.560 I mean, that provision of basic care is an agreeable value, right? So it's a, it's a reflection

02:05:53.860 of trait agreeableness. And well, on one end, trait disagreeableness is more associated with

02:06:00.200 competition and conflict, right? And there's utility in that as well. So even by identifying,

02:06:07.020 taking care of people as the only value, we don't even exhaust the utility of trait agreeableness.

02:06:12.980 And then there's the meanings of duty and industriousness and orderliness that are associated

02:06:18.520 with conscientiousness and the meanings of creativity that are associated with openness. And you could

02:06:23.360 maybe put security for neuroticism on the same axis as care conceivably, but there's also meanings of

02:06:31.280 extroversion. And, and none of those are addressed with a sole focus on providing security to people,

02:06:38.920 let's say. I mean, I don't know if using the big five framework in that way is a good way of parsing

02:06:43.440 up the universe of meaning, but you know, we do know those dimensions exist.

02:06:48.000 Yeah, no. Yeah. That makes sense. So, yeah. So I think that the, you know, when we talk about

02:06:54.580 even social meaning, it has to go beyond just simple connectedness or having, you know, having a lot of

02:07:03.180 friends. I mean, this is why, if you look at like the loneliness literature, this is what people can be

02:07:08.260 surrounded by people who love them and still feel terribly lonely, right? And still feel totally

02:07:14.920 isolated, even though they're in an environment where everyone's being, being kind to them and

02:07:21.120 where they have a lot of social interaction. And so I, you know, that one of my concerns about,

02:07:26.780 you know, some of the, some of the movements that we're seeing that I, I, again, going back to the

02:07:32.700 pessimism thing that seemed to come from this idea of, well, there's not going to be any jobs for

02:07:39.340 anyone. Everything is going to be automated. And if you do do something, it's just based on

02:07:44.920 luck because some people are really smart. And so, you know, they're, they, they're going to be

02:07:49.780 privileged in the cognitive economy. And then there's going to be people that can't really do

02:07:53.780 anything. And so if you're, if you're a kind hearted person, what you do is you just say, well,

02:08:00.080 we're going to financially provide for people. We're just going to take care of people. But to me,

02:08:06.000 that's pretty insulting. It doesn't, it doesn't mean it may not address the core problem, which is

02:08:13.560 it may not address the core problem. And it, but I think it's, it's, it's very arrogant to assume

02:08:20.800 that you have the answers for who can and can't contribute. I mean, when I worked in, when, when

02:08:27.860 we were starting with, you know, my history, when I, before going to graduate school and I worked in

02:08:33.280 social work and outpatient clinical mental health, one of the things that we, we did because it was

02:08:39.100 an outpatient clinic is, and we had people, we had people with severe schizophrenia. Some of these people

02:08:44.280 really couldn't hold down jobs. And, you know, they really, they were on disability and, you know,

02:08:53.580 they had a really hard time, but many of them, many of them did, even though they were severely

02:08:59.820 mentally ill, or in some cases in another group that we worked with had severe developmental

02:09:05.700 disabilities. They still wanted to be contributing members to society. And so what, you know, what the

02:09:11.560 goal of a lot of the, the work we did was, was to integrate them. This is why it was an outpatient,

02:09:16.620 you know, program was they needed some support, right? They needed a caseworker to check on them.

02:09:22.380 You know, they needed an employer that was open-minded to, you know, finding ways for them

02:09:31.280 to contribute. But, you know, I had this one, this one client I worked with who, I mean, you wouldn't

02:09:37.520 want him in an office place. You just, you, but he was a very talented programmer. And so they, this

02:09:44.680 employer, you know, this was way before the, the remote work phase. This was decades ago, but this

02:09:50.740 employer figured out, well, this guy can work from home. He does good work. He's, you know, he's got a

02:09:55.080 methodical mind. But he's just, you know, he, he can't be around people, you know, everyone else won't

02:10:02.400 feel, it won't create a good office environment if he's here, because he, you know, he has auditory

02:10:08.700 hallucinations, and he's very paranoid. And he self-medicates with alcohol, and then that makes

02:10:15.940 things even worse. And so he just adds a layer of chaos to the workplace that, you know, we don't

02:10:20.920 need. But he can do, but he actually does good work on his time scale when he can do it. And, and so he

02:10:29.600 had, you know, he was, he was working, like he was, he was doing something. And then we, you know, I had

02:10:34.820 clients in another job I had that had severe developmental disabilities. And, but they, you know,

02:10:41.860 they wanted to go to work, they wanted to do something, they wanted to have the dignity of

02:10:45.860 feeling like they had a job to go to. And so those are just a couple examples. But, but that kind of

02:10:53.980 experience, that kind of practical experience stands at, you know, at odds with a lot of what I see in a

02:11:01.040 very more academic discussion, which isn't based on anyone's real life. It seems it's based on these

02:11:07.080 hypotheticals of, well, jobs aren't that meaningful. And, you know, some work is boring, or, or

02:11:14.920 monotonous. And so these, the best thing we can do for these people is just make sure they have a

02:11:21.420 universal basic income or whatever, so they can just do whatever they want with their time. But that,

02:11:28.100 you know, like you said, that might not bring its own hazards. Right, right. So we started this

02:11:35.280 discussion talking about Ernest Becker and a rather unidimensional view of meaning. But your walk

02:11:41.300 through your research and this discussion indicates that you've, as a consequence of studying this for

02:11:46.420 so long, you've developed a much more multidimensional sense of meaning. That's not

02:11:51.400 reductionistic in the same way. That's not merely defensive, that can't be reduced to the terror of

02:11:57.260 death or defenses against that. And so is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we close?

02:12:05.280 No, I think we, we, we covered a lot of, a lot of the areas that that I'm interested in. I mean,

02:12:12.060 one thing I'll just, you know, I can just add that, because you're absolutely right. Like I've,

02:12:16.460 what I've tried to do, and this is part of what I like about being a researcher, is I've tried to just

02:12:22.900 kind of follow the data. Like I have, I have ideas, of course, I have, and I have my own biases. And,

02:12:29.740 um, but I've tried, like with the nostalgia work I talked to, uh, I talked about, I try really hard

02:12:35.360 to, you know, test hypotheses, but then look, you know, kind of see what's going on. And then that

02:12:40.980 gives me ideas or make observations in, in the rural world. And that gives me ideas. And so you're

02:12:46.600 right. I have gone kind of on this journey where I definitely started out in this more kind of

02:12:50.700 defensive approach, because that's what I, you know, I learned in graduate school and have moved

02:12:55.880 more towards this explorative growth oriented kind of creative approach to meaning. And I do think

02:13:02.120 they are connected through, you know, some of the attachment and social and cultural security

02:13:07.120 systems and frameworks we talked about. Um, but now, so I'm, you know, I'm even going further in the

02:13:12.100 direction of looking at like how meaning contributes to things like entrepreneurship, because as you noted

02:13:19.460 before, there's a certain level, even if you look at the developmental literature on attachment,

02:13:25.080 like you talked about the studies where the little kids, you know, when they venture away from mom,

02:13:30.020 mom's the security, um, that gives them, you know, that makes them feel like there's something there

02:13:35.040 that will protect them, which makes them a little bit more willing to explore. Well, if you scale that

02:13:39.320 out on a society level, and we look at topics like entrepreneurship, um, which involves risk-taking

02:13:45.320 and putting yourself out there and fall and oftentimes failing repeatedly, um, is that, can you imagine

02:13:54.080 that same kind of framework where you, you know, uh, a society that has, um, existential frameworks,

02:14:01.940 whether they be strong social relationships, religion, other cultural, um, worldviews that

02:14:09.220 provide the type of security that encourages people to innovate and to take risks. And, um, and so

02:14:16.340 that, that's kind of the direction I've been going in and more recently, which I think very much

02:14:21.740 connects to this overall project that, that we've been talking about, because we need that, right?

02:14:26.060 We need risk-takers. We need, um, we need people who are optimists, who, who, who could look at the

02:14:32.700 same set of data of everyone else and who, and everyone else feels pessimistic to be like, no,

02:14:37.340 I think there's a solution. We just haven't figured this out yet. And I think those people are often,

02:14:42.300 um, inspired by, um, by meaning, right? You need meaning is in my world. Another way to say this

02:14:49.000 meaning isn't an outcome variable. It's a predictor variable, right? It's because we tend

02:14:54.560 to think of meaning as an indicator of wellbeing, um, which it is. But in addition to that, I would

02:14:59.460 say it's a, it, it, it's an, it's a cause it, um, and fitness research, they've done some studies

02:15:07.080 showing that when people think about what's important, what's meaningful in their life,

02:15:09.760 they're more likely to exercise. When you feel like your life's meaningful, you've got like a

02:15:13.600 reason to get up every day and do something. And sometimes that something is take risks to try

02:15:18.440 new things because you want to make the world better. You want to make life better for your

02:15:22.820 family. And so I think that, um, we just have to be really careful about, um, about that. Like

02:15:29.620 that's an important, that's an important element of life. And if you have too much cynicism and

02:15:35.220 nihilism and pessimism and anti-natalism and, you know, people don't have any, people don't feel

02:15:41.920 like they've got something to strive for into the future, then, um, not only we're going to see

02:15:46.180 psychological and social decline, but, um, we'll see economic decline as well. And we won't be able

02:15:52.860 to solve the problems that people say they're really concerned about, such as climate change.

02:15:56.900 If you don't have people that believe in the future is worth saving to begin with.

02:16:00.340 Those are excellent words to close on, I would say. Thank you very much for talking with me today.

02:16:08.340 It was very interesting. The time flew by.

02:16:11.220 It did. Thank you so much for having me.

02:16:13.300 My pleasure. My pleasure. Good luck with your research. And hopefully we can talk again at some

02:16:18.240 point. Yeah, I'd love that. Thanks a lot.

02:16:21.100 You bet. Bye-bye.

02:16:22.680 Bye.

02:16:30.340 Bye.

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02:16:58.180 Bye.

02:16:58.560 Bye.

199. Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World ｜ Clay Routledge

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