The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 219. Narrative, Story, and Writing pt. 1

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00:00:52.000 Welcome to the JBP Podcast, Season 4, Episode 76.

00:00:59.000 We use stories to understand the world around us.

00:01:02.000 It's the reason we appreciate a beautiful poem, or why our breath is taken away by a movie.

00:01:07.000 Any great piece of music tells a story, too. Through the lyrics, of course, but through the instrumental arrangement, too.

00:01:13.000 Personally, I've noticed that parts of life are arranged in stories, too, overlapping narratives for different aspects of your life, relationships, adventures.

00:01:22.000 I find it particularly obvious during trying times. Those times feel like narratives.

00:01:28.000 Part one of this compilation focuses on Season 4 conversations between Dad, Randall Wallace, Chloe Valdry, that episode's coming soon, and Angus Fletcher.

00:01:39.000 I hope you enjoy this narrative.

00:01:42.000 Also, if you want to stop hearing my voice reading ads throughout these episodes, check out jordanbpeterson.supercast.com.

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00:02:10.000 That's jordanbpeterson.supercast.com.

00:02:14.000 It's also in the show notes. I hope you enjoy this episode.

00:02:17.000 We're still unwrapping, well, we're certainly still unwrapping the Bible. We're still unwrapping Shakespeare.

00:02:39.000 There's more depth there than we can understand explicitly.

00:02:44.000 And so anything that uses character has that tremendous advantage.

00:02:48.000 And then there's also this strange ability that some people have in spades to create fictional worlds that are of unbelievable profundity and power.

00:02:59.000 And, I mean, the greatest example of that in the last 30 years in terms of sheer imaginative power has got to be J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter series,

00:03:08.000 which, you know, gripped the imagination of the entire planet for a decade and produced untold wealth and spread literacy everywhere as well.

00:03:18.000 She had a remarkably creative imagination and something quite mysterious.

00:03:26.000 And so you're fortunate enough to work at the marriage of ideas and drama.

00:03:31.000 Yes. And, you know, it's really interesting when you've spoken about Dostoevsky and others in some of your lectures.

00:03:39.000 I'm fascinated by him and all the Russians. I studied Russian for four years in college and read some of these in the original.

00:03:48.000 My Russian wasn't fluent enough for me to really. I mean, I had to grind through them. 1.00

00:03:53.000 But Tolstoy, Chekhov, Chekhov, who was a doctor, a medical doctor, as well as a writer.

00:04:01.000 So that that congruence of of a commitment, not just in terms of literature, but that he used his profession as a doctor to also inform him as a writer.

00:04:19.000 He famously said medicine is my is my wife and literature is my mistress.

00:04:28.000 And when I tire of one, I spend time with the other.

00:04:31.000 And I and Pushkin, who would who would write stories that that were full of thought, but the story itself was bigger than any thought he could put around it.

00:04:47.000 It was it was more resonant. It carried more.

00:04:52.000 By the way, when I listened to your your biblical series, it caused me to decide to read through the whole Bible and just start to finish.

00:05:05.000 And I grew up Southern Baptist. So ever since I could read, I've read the Bible virtually every day of my life.

00:05:13.000 But I'd never read the Bible start to finish. And there were some books that even when I was a religion major at university, I would get to some of the books and go, I can't stay awake for this book.

00:05:26.000 I just got to move on. But when you really go through it and you see the the Old Testament as this this incredible saga of a people trying to find the rules that that kept them together as a people.

00:05:44.000 And it felt if you disobey these rules, then it's going to end badly for us all.

00:05:51.000 And the greatest the greatest violation is to erect altars to other guys.

00:05:59.000 Right. That's false idols. Yeah, that's the worst.

00:06:02.000 And then along comes Jesus, who is completely steeped in all of the Old Testament.

00:06:08.000 I mean, he is he is profound in his knowledge of it.

00:06:12.000 And he lives and does and says these things.

00:06:17.000 But it's not like it's a philosophy. It's a narrative, a narrative which I've studied a great deal.

00:06:23.000 And I believe is is largely historical or I should say significantly historical.

00:06:30.000 I believe these things did happen.

00:06:34.000 And then you have St. Paul, who's trying to make sense of what happened.

00:06:40.000 And and and it's mind blowing to me.

00:06:44.000 It's mind blowing to to read it as a whole and put it into perspective in that having having spent my life.

00:06:51.000 Well, what's mind blowing about it in part?

00:06:55.000 I mean, and I try to speak of the Bible, not from the perspective of a committed believer.

00:07:00.000 And I have my reasons for that.

00:07:03.000 I guess it's partly because I want to concentrate on what everyone can come to see as true, I suppose.

00:07:12.000 Perhaps that's it.

00:07:14.000 But it is remarkable that the Bible does, in fact, make a coherent narrative because we don't understand that it was seek.

00:07:25.000 It was written by a very diverse range of people over a span of time that we can perhaps not even imagine.

00:07:31.000 It's very difficult to tell how old the the oldest stories in Genesis particular are the the the the story of the fall and of Adam and Eve and and Cain and Abel.

00:07:42.000 They bear all the hallmarks of a previous oral tradition that would have existed in relatively unchanged form for tens of thousands of years and perhaps even longer than that.

00:07:55.000 And so they're unbelievably ancient and then parts of it obviously are newer and the written parts are obviously newer than any tentative oral tradition.

00:08:05.000 But you have a you have at the bare minimum an unbelievably deep psychological development document that weaves itself over centuries into a coherent story.

00:08:17.000 And Northrop Fry, I would say he's a Canadian literary critic, has did more for me than any other particular thinker to help me understand the nature of the narrative.

00:08:28.000 Because Fry, I suppose he did the same thing or I'm doing the same thing that he did because he preceded me also at the University of Toronto.

00:08:36.000 He assessed the Bible as a work of literature, as a narrative, and that to me was never any denigration because narrative, a powerful narrative.

00:08:52.000 And you talk about this when you talk about Braveheart, for example, because there isn't that much known about William Wallace historically, but you craft you crafted a narrative.

00:09:01.000 That's that was true enough, let's say, to be unbelievably attractive to people and to motivate them very deeply because it's an affecting movie.

00:09:10.000 Well, and if it wasn't, it wouldn't have been so popular.

00:09:13.000 And so there's a there's a truth in narrative that I think is even deeper than historical truth, a true like a truly profound narrative truth is like the average of a whole variety of historical truths.

00:09:27.000 And so it's the essence of historical truth.

00:09:30.000 So it's even more true than his than than what we would consider, say, eyewitness history, because eyewitness history is just it's one battle, you know, and and there is maybe an epic theme in that battle.

00:09:42.000 But then imagine that you could look at a thousand battles and you could and you could extract out from that what was canonical about heroic victory across all 1000 battles.

00:09:52.000 You see something like that happening in the Old Testament and the narrative, the narrative thread is really quite deep that their societies emerge formulate fall off the path, worship false idols collapse.

00:10:08.000 And then the same thing happens again and the collapse happens and the collapse happens because people become too prideful.

00:10:15.000 The kings in particular, they don't listen to the voice of conscience.

00:10:19.000 And a prophetic voice arises and says, you're wandering off the tried and true path and you're going to be punished terribly for that.

00:10:30.000 And generally speaking, the kings ignore that and catastrophe breaks free.

00:10:36.000 And you see, and in the Old Testament in particular, there's the promise of the ultimate state in some sense.

00:10:44.000 The utopian promises that run through it, the search for the promised land.

00:10:47.000 And then so strangely, you see that transformed into something that's not really political in the New Testament.

00:10:53.000 You see that the promised land becomes the nature of experience as a consequence of a particular form of moral being.

00:11:01.000 And then perhaps that has political implications because people who acted like that would produce a particular state.

00:11:08.000 But it's no longer the dream of establishing the state that will solve all problems.

00:11:16.000 It's psychologized and it's it's unbelievably profound.

00:11:20.000 And it's and that's I think you can derive all of that from from the biblical writings without even starting to move on to classically religious territory.

00:11:31.000 And and and it's and then that does beg the question, of course, is what does all that wisdom point to in the final analysis?

00:11:40.000 And that's when the questions start to become religious.

00:11:43.000 Yes.

00:11:44.000 And well, Jordan, that's that's the part to me that it takes it into a whole whole different realm, as you as you say.

00:11:53.000 And there's a quote from Mary Oliver that a friend shared with me recently.

00:11:59.000 It's keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

00:12:03.000 And I find that in in a great story in any or any great piece of art that surprise is the central currency of its power.

00:12:16.000 So there's an element of, if you will, of revelation, if you will.

00:12:20.000 And I think it was Paul Tillich.

00:12:23.000 I'm not sure who said that religion is man's way to God and is always erroneous.

00:12:29.000 But revelation is God's way to man.

00:12:31.000 Maybe it was Karl Barth. It's God's way to man.

00:12:34.000 And it's always perfect.

00:12:36.000 Well, there's there's a revelatory aspect to any great story.

00:12:41.000 When you're telling someone a story and they didn't see coming what just happened, that's what makes them awake.

00:12:50.000 That's what stabs them broad awake.

00:12:54.000 In Braveheart, so many people said to me it was it was when the woman that William Wallace loves when her throat is cut.

00:13:04.000 That's when suddenly they knew they were not in a typical action movie, even to the very end of Braveheart.

00:13:14.000 There would have been many people in Hollywood and were who thought, well, that this movie needs to end with his friends swinging in on vines and saving him.

00:13:24.000 We can't end an expensive historical epic movie with a guy beheaded and disemboweled.

00:13:33.000 But that was where it had to end for me.

00:13:37.000 But but how we get there and what it says surprised me and surprised the audience, too.

00:13:48.000 And in that, I think, is how it becomes resonant.

00:13:53.000 I was doing a charity screening of Braveheart a few years ago for the first time in two decades to sit in a theater and actually see the movie screened, not on television, but projected in a theater and doing it for a charity in Austin, Texas.

00:14:16.000 And at the end of the movie, I walked up onto the stage to do a Q&A and the first person who stood up was a young woman in the front row, 19 years old.

00:14:28.000 So she wasn't born when Braveheart had come out.

00:14:32.000 And I was surprised that she stood up first and she said, Mr. Wallace, I don't have a question.

00:14:39.000 I just want to tell you something.

00:14:41.000 My fiance died six months ago.

00:14:44.000 And before he died, he told me he wanted me to watch Braveheart so I would understand the way he loved me.

00:14:51.000 And I did I I had to stop.

00:14:57.000 I I couldn't go on for several minutes.

00:15:00.000 It it it it shocked me.

00:15:05.000 It moved me.

00:15:06.000 It surprised me.

00:15:08.000 You said that you write love stories and I guess she put her finger on that.

00:15:13.000 Hey, yeah, profoundly.

00:15:15.000 And and the and the idea that that men want to be courageous, they want to be willing to sacrifice themselves for what's worth sacrificing for.

00:15:30.000 And women want a man like that. 1.00

00:15:33.000 They went women want to and they they want to be participants in that story in that same journey for themselves. 0.97

00:15:42.000 And in to me, it's narrative can give you that more than any abstract explanation of it.

00:15:51.000 I mean, I don't mean to.

00:15:53.000 There's a lot to unpack in that.

00:15:55.000 I want to go back to your your discussion of surprise.

00:15:59.000 I mean, among people who assess information theory, there's a strong association between something that's informative and something that's surprising.

00:16:10.000 If you can predict it, technically speaking, it doesn't contain any information.

00:16:14.000 And so information always comes in the form of surprise, technically speaking.

00:16:20.000 And and we are wired to attend to what's informative because that's what updates and teaches us.

00:16:27.000 And so then you you said revelation comes in the form of surprise.

00:16:33.000 And I would say that's virtually the case by definition, isn't it?

00:16:36.000 Because imagine that you're viewing this narrative through a particular lens.

00:16:40.000 You're you're in a you're in a cognitive perceptual structure, a frame of reference that you're using to track all the actions and to make sense of them and to make predictions.

00:16:50.000 And if something unexpected happens, that means that you've just learned that that frame of reference is no longer applicable to the current circumstance.

00:17:00.000 And so what that really does mean is that something transcendent, at least from the perspective of that current frame of reference, has, in fact, occurred because so that's a mini miracle in some sense.

00:17:11.000 Right.

00:17:12.000 Because yes, a miracle is something that doesn't obey the laws that you're currently following that that that that that's one way of thinking about it.

00:17:22.000 And so a revel a surprising revelation is a mini miracle.

00:17:26.000 And maybe it's because of that.

00:17:28.000 It's it's what it's reminiscent of the fact of the miraculous, generally speaking.

00:17:34.000 But I would also say the narrative does something else if it's profound, too.

00:17:38.000 It doesn't just surprise you.

00:17:40.000 It also it also gives you a new frame of reference instantly within which that surprise now makes sense.

00:17:49.000 And if it doesn't, then you're left unsatisfied by the movie.

00:17:52.000 You think because I've seen that often in particularly in movies, it doesn't seem to happen quite so much in novels where the director and the writer will throw a whole variety of things up in the air.

00:18:04.000 And you have it's really compelling.

00:18:07.000 And then about three quarters of the way through the movie, you think it'll be really something if all of that gets tied together.

00:18:13.000 And then it doesn't. Right.

00:18:16.000 It falls flat.

00:18:17.000 It doesn't it doesn't end in a manner that that's that that does justice to what's being set up.

00:18:22.000 So, yeah.

00:18:25.000 And, you know, that's that's.

00:18:28.000 That's.

00:18:29.000 That's a classic narrative structure.

00:18:30.000 Right.

00:18:31.000 There's a stable state to begin with, and then something that disrupts it and throws everything into a state of chaos temporarily and then the establishment of a new state.

00:18:39.000 And and a good story definitely does that for us and guides us through that and shows us that we're the thing that does that as well.

00:18:47.000 Well, like if you take an Agatha Christie movie or or story, there'll be all of these clues.

00:18:55.000 And then then Hercule Perrault or we we have a term in screenwriting, we call it Irving the explainer will show up at the end of the movie to to explain everything.

00:19:07.000 And then it off and and and the Sherlock Holmes movies will often be that way, too.

00:19:14.000 To me, they become much less fun.

00:19:17.000 Then the fun is is when you don't yet know the answers.

00:19:22.000 But once it's explained, it's no it no longer has any magic for me.

00:19:28.000 An example would be when I was in college and I was a singer songwriter and I worked with a friend who was a magician.

00:19:36.000 And we would entertain at different gatherings.

00:19:39.000 And he was great at slighted hand of slight of hand with cards.

00:19:44.000 He could do a trick right in front of your face with cards and you'd be gobsmacked.

00:19:49.000 And and he would show me how he was doing it.

00:19:54.000 And all of a sudden I'd go, oh, gee, that's just so simple.

00:19:59.000 And how could I miss that?

00:20:01.000 And then he would do the same trick to someone else.

00:20:04.000 And I would be watching the trick and I would think, oh, he blew it.

00:20:07.000 He he he slipped.

00:20:10.000 He showed them that they can see how it's done.

00:20:13.000 And they were gobsmacked.

00:20:15.000 They didn't understand how it was done.

00:20:18.000 So they were amazed.

00:20:20.000 But that to me is a difference about a story like you say, the Agatha Christie or or they throw up a whole bunch of parts and they they never come together for a great story.

00:20:34.000 It's one that you're left.

00:20:38.000 It's it's vibrating in you and you can't fully explain it.

00:20:43.000 You you just know what happened.

00:20:45.000 I hate to keep referencing Braveheart, but but I wanted to make a movie and it was my first movie.

00:20:52.000 I wanted to to make a movie that would have people walk out of the theaters the way I walked out of theaters at different times in my life and would say my life will never be the same after what I just experienced there.

00:21:09.000 I mean, that that's always been what I was look for.

00:21:12.000 And that happened with Braveheart.

00:21:13.000 I had a huge, tough Scott.

00:21:17.000 I mean, a burly, brawling, head butting Scott come up to me after a screening of Braveheart and look at me with tears in his eyes and say, I will never forget that.

00:21:26.000 Not ever.

00:21:27.000 And and I think of like a story like Tolstoy wrote a tale called The Woodfelling or The Woodfelling Party.

00:21:37.000 And it was about some some Russian soldiers who were fighting.

00:21:42.000 I believe they were fighting Afghan or Muslim troops in Azerbaijan or in the mountains, but they've been in this cold forbidding place for a long, long time. 1.00

00:21:55.000 They've seen all sorts of death and they've gone out to to cut wood and loaded firewood and loaded into a wagon.

00:22:03.000 And a sniper hits one of them in the leg and he's or hits him in the body and he's bleeding to death and he knows he's dying.

00:22:11.000 And they load him on the wood wagon to carry him back while he's still alive.

00:22:15.000 But he grabs the lieutenant by the collar and says, there are letters from my wife in my boot, take them and send them back to my wife so she'll have them. 0.98

00:22:25.000 And the officer says, yeah, yeah, I will.

00:22:27.000 But the dying man knows he won't because he's seen many men die and just pitched into shallow graves and there's just so much death.

00:22:36.000 So he says, no, take them while I'm still alive and then I know you'll do it.

00:22:40.000 So the officer gives the order and they strip off the man's boot and cut through his his pant and unwrap the wrappings around his leg that he's done to keep warm.

00:22:51.000 And there are the letters.

00:22:53.000 But what the officer sees for the first time in months and months, maybe years, is the bare flesh of a man's leg, this white sunless flesh.

00:23:05.000 And it's that that reminds him that this is a human being.

00:23:11.000 And Tolstoy says he was struck with a terrible dread of the loss of life.

00:23:16.000 It and I thought even I was 18 when I read that this is what an artist does.

00:23:23.000 You you hold up to us when we've become inured, immune to the to certain things like watching women. 0.99

00:23:32.000 It's one time it's many skirts. 1.00

00:23:35.000 Another time it's no bras.

00:23:37.000 Another time it's bare midriffs.

00:23:38.000 Another time it's something else.

00:23:40.000 But you get used to something.

00:23:42.000 So nothing, nothing makes you notice.

00:23:46.000 And the artist looks for what can I do that will make people notice to say, look here.

00:23:52.000 See what you see, what's there rather than what you remember.

00:23:55.000 Yes.

00:23:56.000 So there's that interplay with, OK, there's there is your perception in what you're looking at, what you expect, like the magic trick.

00:24:08.000 If you're expecting one thing and you don't see it or or now, you know, the trick.

00:24:12.000 So now you perceive that's one part of the other part of it is, OK, now I have experienced perceived something.

00:24:21.000 How do I make sense of that?

00:24:23.000 I mean, another thing that I've been doing is working on the story for the resurrection, which I have studied since well, since I was in school.

00:24:33.000 The resurrection has fascinated me more than anything else, in part because as I think it's N.T. Wright would say, if you if you don't think the resurrection is preposterous, you're missing the point.

00:24:50.000 The whole point is that this is beyond anything you could imagine.

00:24:56.000 You said in a few weeks ago, I was listening to your podcast and I was believe with that brilliant.

00:25:03.000 I think it's Canadian who makes the icons.

00:25:06.000 Jonathan Paggio.

00:25:07.000 Oh, the mind blowing.

00:25:09.000 Yeah, that was great.

00:25:11.000 The conversation.

00:25:12.000 Yes.

00:25:13.000 And and and Jonathan said that that there's this outside of what what we can imagine that that is going on.

00:25:24.000 And you said, yes, you would have you would never you would never make this up if you make up make up this Jesus story.

00:25:35.000 I even believe that.

00:25:36.000 Well, that's part of the problem with Marxist theory that religion is the opiate of the masses.

00:25:41.000 It's like, OK, fair enough.

00:25:42.000 I get it.

00:25:43.000 And and and it's actually a reasonably intelligent critique.

00:25:46.000 You could say, well, if you wanted to enslave people and and oppress them, then you could invent a story and you could use that as a manipulative technique.

00:25:56.000 But then you you'd see it seems to me that you'd want a story that was sort of maximally fantasy like an attractive.

00:26:04.000 And so then you're stuck with, well, why invent hell, for example?

00:26:10.000 And then you can say, well, that's where you put your enemies, you know, so that's kind of convenient.

00:26:16.000 If you take medieval experience seriously, it's quite obvious.

00:26:23.000 There's a philosopher in in Canada, Taylor, who wrote a wrote about this in a book called Sources of the Self.

00:26:32.000 Medieval people took the idea of hell extremely seriously and tortured themselves with it, believe that the fruits of immorality were infinitely terrible.

00:26:42.000 Well, that isn't something that that you go that you that you use as a childish defense against the world.

00:26:49.000 In fact, fear of hell is actually more intense, I would say, in some sense than fear of death.

00:26:55.000 And I believe that I think there are things that are if you if the thing you're most afraid of is death, you haven't been very afraid because there are things that are far more terrifying than death.

00:27:05.000 And certainly, well, hell is among those.

00:27:09.000 And I suppose that's the place that you're eternally tortured for for your own immorality, maybe perhaps even defined by your own conscience.

00:27:19.000 Anyways, you wouldn't invent that as something attractive to the masses.

00:27:24.000 And and there's much of of religious thinking that's like that.

00:27:28.000 It doesn't have the aspect of there's too much burden in it for it to be pure escapist fantasy.

00:27:36.000 There's too much and there's too much about it that's incomprehensible for it to be like what would a cons a conspiratorial machination.

00:27:47.000 No, it doesn't.

00:27:49.000 It's not a hypothesis that that fits the data well at all.

00:27:52.000 Right.

00:27:53.000 Well, it's a limit case also in some sense like you talked earlier about you said something about sacrifice, you know, and that.

00:28:01.000 Well, people don't take the idea of sacrifice very seriously.

00:28:04.000 I've looked at the development of the idea of sacrifice in the Old Testament.

00:28:09.000 And one of the things I've come to realize is that one of the great human discoveries was actually that of sacrifice because it was the discovery of the fact that you could modify the present.

00:28:20.000 So the future was different.

00:28:22.000 So it signals the discovery of the future by humanity, the idea of sacrifice, because you become consciously aware, perhaps after acting it out for God only knows how long that you can give up something that you're deeply committed to in the present, something of extreme value and obtain something of even more value in the future.

00:28:43.000 Yeah.

00:28:44.000 And that's the discovery of an entire dimension, the temporal dimension.

00:28:48.000 It's a cataclysmic discovery.

00:28:50.000 It's on the same order as the emergence of self consciousness.

00:28:53.000 And so and then the and then mysteries emerge out of that as well.

00:28:57.000 Some sacrifices work better than others.

00:28:59.000 Well, why?

00:29:00.000 Well, the reaction of being to sacrifice seems to be reflective of the nature of being.

00:29:07.000 And that's that that's definitely the case.

00:29:10.000 Some sacrifices work and some don't, just like some games are playable and some aren't.

00:29:15.000 And and so sacrifice has value.

00:29:17.000 Well, then the question starts to become, well, what's of the highest value that you should sacrifice for?

00:29:23.000 And what is the ultimate sacrifice?

00:29:25.000 And while you can give up something that you own, you can give up something that you love, you can die for something or you can sacrifice your entire life to it.

00:29:36.000 And it seems to me that in some sense, the latter, the last of those is the ultimate sacrifice to to give up your entire life for the sake of the highest ideal.

00:29:48.000 And that is the ideal of humanity.

00:29:50.000 And then that is the ideal of humanity.

00:29:52.000 And that is what everyone admires.

00:29:54.000 And that's what we all look for in stories.

00:29:56.000 That's what compels us.

00:29:57.000 You said, well, it's the attract.

00:29:59.000 It's the basis of romantic attraction.

00:30:01.000 And I believe that to be the case that associated with generosity, right, to share the fruits of your sacrifice.

00:30:08.000 And the question arises, well, what is the ultimate sacrifice and what would be the consequences of that?

00:30:13.000 And that's obviously what's being investigated, let's say, in our religious thinking in the New Testament.

00:30:20.000 There's no doubt that that's that's what's being investigated.

00:30:23.000 Is there a cosmic significance to the idea of sacrifice?

00:30:27.000 And I agree with that completely.

00:30:31.000 And I believe that that's that that's what is at play when you're making the sacrifice.

00:30:36.000 There's this other element of of faith in it.

00:30:41.000 Like the person making the sacrifice.

00:30:44.000 Is instead of it just being a negotiation central to the sacrifice, it seems to me, is is a transforming commitment that the person is being transformed and what he is giving is transforming.

00:31:01.000 It's like one of the most commonly quoted lines from Braveheart is every man dies.

00:31:06.000 Not every man really lives.

00:31:08.000 And I didn't.

00:31:10.000 By the way, it's pet peeve of mine.

00:31:13.000 The the other another line from Braveheart, besides just the scream of freedom that that people do that comes from the film.

00:31:22.000 But is they may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom.

00:31:27.000 And that quote is on the wall of the United States Air Force Academy.

00:31:31.000 But under it is the name William Wallace, although William Wallace never said that.

00:31:35.000 I keep wanting to write the English department there and say, hey, listen, guys.

00:31:39.000 But the but the where that quote came from was me thinking, OK, is it ego?

00:31:49.000 Is it pride?

00:31:50.000 Is it stubbornness that keeps William Wallace in the dungeon, refusing to to submit to the king, refusing to ask the king for mercy and maybe buy time in his life so he can survive a while longer?

00:32:05.000 And the queen, the future queen comes to him with that offer.

00:32:09.000 And then she says, you'll die. 0.98

00:32:11.000 It'll be terrible. 0.81

00:32:13.000 After he has said, if I submit to him, if I cry out for mercy, then everything that is me is dead already. 0.99

00:32:21.000 And she says, you'll die. 0.96

00:32:22.000 It'll be awful.

00:32:24.000 And I was thinking, well, what can he answer to that?

00:32:29.000 And that was every man dies.

00:32:32.000 Not every man really lives.

00:32:34.000 And and it it became that.

00:32:36.000 And it in thinking of, say, Jesus at Golgotha, that if you took a snapshot at Golgotha on the day Jesus was crucified and you said, who's the victor in this picture?

00:32:51.000 You probably wouldn't be inclined to say the guy on the middle cross.

00:32:56.000 But you might if you stared at the picture long enough, you actually might see it.

00:33:03.000 Human beings may recognize that that this one.

00:33:08.000 Here in this way was doing something beyond all understanding.

00:33:16.000 And to me, writing a story isn't just me going, what will surprise the audience?

00:33:23.000 It's I am being surprised by the story as it's coming through to me.

00:33:29.000 And the most notable part of that in Braveheart was I reached the end of the story.

00:33:34.000 And and I can see this clearly now, although it was more than 25 years ago, the the axe is falling toward William Wallace's throat.

00:33:46.000 And I wrote that on the page.

00:33:48.000 And then I thought, well, we can't see the axe. 0.99

00:33:51.000 Contact his throat and sever his head. 0.97

00:33:55.000 What do we see now? 0.97

00:33:57.000 And then I thought, well, what about to look at this from the point of view of him when he knows he has fractions of a second to live?

00:34:06.000 What would he look for?

00:34:08.000 Well, where would he turn his eyes?

00:34:10.000 Would he look at the axe?

00:34:11.000 What would he do?

00:34:12.000 And he would know that his friends were there.

00:34:15.000 So I wrote in the last instant of his life, William Wallace turns his eyes to his friends who were Stephen and Hamish.

00:34:24.000 And I did not know Jordan until that instant that there between them was her, the wife he had lost.

00:34:33.000 And I wept.

00:34:36.000 And I had no sense that anybody else was going to relate to that story.

00:34:42.000 I have a friend named Jack Bernstein, who's a comedy writer.

00:34:46.000 He wrote Ace Ventura, the original Ace Ventura.

00:34:49.000 And Jack is different from me in almost every way.

00:34:53.000 If you put our traits on paper, we're just polar opposites.

00:34:57.000 And he's the one I always take my first drafts to and say, I know this is a mess, but is there anything here?

00:35:04.000 And he read Braveheart and we sat down to have breakfast and for him to give me his notes.

00:35:11.000 And he said, this is the best thing of yours I've ever read.

00:35:14.000 And and I was completely blindsided.

00:35:19.000 I had had no sense that anybody would like it, that particularly him, that it had any value.

00:35:26.000 But the story surprised me.

00:35:29.000 And I think, therefore, that revelatory quality was love.

00:35:35.000 I think it happens in music.

00:35:37.000 What what makes music magical is not that it's what we if it's just the same beat, the same monotony, the same chord changes we've heard, the same lyrics we've heard.

00:35:48.000 It doesn't open us up at all.

00:35:52.000 But when it's when it's just enough different that we notice the difference and are drawn into it.

00:35:58.000 Now, if it's too different, you know, when I was in school and took music classes and they're telling us about a tonal this and that and abstract.

00:36:07.000 And it had no life, no heart at all.

00:36:10.000 But when I listen to Beethoven, I can just feel the feel the swelling of his heart and in in here hundreds of years later.

00:36:24.000 Yes. Well, you hear something great and you follow it and then there's a move of genius.

00:36:29.000 And out of that greatness comes something that's even greater.

00:36:32.000 And you're so you're so satisfied by that because you can see what's greater emerge from what's great.

00:36:37.000 But you can also see that that's characteristic of humanity.

00:36:41.000 You're participating in that.

00:36:44.000 Yes.

00:36:45.000 Emergence of what's better in this surprising manner.

00:36:48.000 Yeah.

00:36:49.000 One of your new rules is is to take a room and make it beautiful.

00:36:55.000 And I love that.

00:36:58.000 I love that rule.

00:37:00.000 I mean, that that it seems so simple, but it that is one of the richest ones for me.

00:37:09.000 I had.

00:37:10.000 That's my favorite chapter of all the of all of both books, I would say I'm happiest with that one.

00:37:16.000 Wow.

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00:42:18.000 Why term it the theory of enchantment?

00:42:21.000 You're careful with your words.

00:42:23.000 You obviously thought about that for a long time.

00:42:25.000 It's interesting because I feel like the term enchantment came to me almost in passing.

00:42:38.000 I was trying to figure out how to, and we don't have to get into the details of this.

00:42:43.000 I'm happy to get into it if you'd like.

00:42:45.000 But I was trying to teach people or figure out a framework that could teach people how to love each other in the agapic sense of the word.

00:42:55.000 And then I began to ask myself, what are people already in love with?

00:43:00.000 And so I ventured into pop culture because pop culture shows us what people are already in love with.

00:43:05.000 And I started to study aspects of our popular culture, which included things like Disney films and Nike and Beyonce and all these brands that have quasi religious, actually not quasi, religious like devotion from their fans.

00:43:26.000 And I was just like, why, what is happening there?

00:43:31.000 That's so interesting because it means that you, you, this is one of the problems I have with the rationalist atheist types.

00:43:38.000 Like it's a major problem.

00:43:39.000 It's like, forget about the ontological claims of religion.

00:43:42.000 And that isn't the issue in some sense, as far as I'm concerned.

00:43:46.000 And this touches on your discussion of Descartes.

00:43:49.000 Like people obviously, obviously have the capacity for religious experience.

00:43:54.000 We have the capacity for awe.

00:43:56.000 And you could say, well, awe isn't a religious experience.

00:43:59.000 Well, that's a matter of definition.

00:44:01.000 And we could play that game.

00:44:02.000 But if the awe is deep enough, and it's a definitional issue.

00:44:07.000 There's, is, for all intents and purposes, deep awe is religious.

00:44:12.000 Or, or we need another word that means the same as religious, if we're going to talk about it.

00:44:16.000 Yeah.

00:44:17.000 And you participate that, participate in that in dance and in music, and in these popular stories, which is why I've been so interested in taking apart Disney films, for example.

00:44:26.000 And they're very expensive productions.

00:44:29.000 They're very labor intensive.

00:44:30.000 The people of genius work on them.

00:44:32.000 They have huge cultural impact.

00:44:34.000 And, and they're extraordinarily popular.

00:44:36.000 It's like, what's going on here?

00:44:38.000 Exactly.

00:44:39.000 And so it's definitely worth an analysis.

00:44:42.000 And, and I think you're wise to, to start with, well, what is it that people are valuing?

00:44:48.000 And, and why?

00:44:49.000 It's, it's an empirical observation in some sense.

00:44:52.000 This is where they're deriving meaning and value.

00:44:54.000 Yeah.

00:44:55.000 And the deep study of that is a religious study.

00:44:57.000 And, and well, there's just no escaping that.

00:45:01.000 So, okay.

00:45:02.000 So you're looking at pop culture.

00:45:04.000 So I'm looking at pop culture and I'm studying Disney and Beyonce and Apple and Nike and all of these brands.

00:45:12.000 And I'm looking for a common theme to see if there's a common pattern across all of these.

00:45:17.000 And the common pattern I'm seeing is that all of these brands are creating content where their audience sees themselves, their, their imperfect selves and their potential reflected in the content, which is why they gravitate toward it.

00:45:33.000 And so I'm seeing, you know, these, these Disney films that are motifs for the human condition, where this imperfect flawed would be hero has to go through a series of ups and downs and ups and downs and ups and downs to discover their potential self and emerge the hero.

00:45:48.000 So I'm seeing, you know, I'm seeing, you know, almost every Nike ad being this, this narrative for this, you know, sort of junior varsity athlete trying to become better and better and better at her craft and then emerge in a spirit of excellence.

00:46:05.000 I'm seeing Beyonce say things like who run the world girls and women gravitating towards that because they see their potential reflected in those lyrics.

00:46:18.000 And it's a universal, it's a universal ideal that compels us to imitate.

00:46:23.360 And that's what attracts our attention.

00:46:24.900 And that pattern to identify that pattern is to look for what is truly religious because the pattern that underlies all of the pattern that underlies everything that

00:46:34.680 compels us is the religious pattern and it's the religious instinct that orients us towards that.

00:46:40.800 And that is not an ontological claim about the structure of reality.

00:46:43.620 I'm not saying anything about God.

00:46:45.100 This is, this is a different kind of conversation.

00:46:47.960 Right.

00:46:48.120 Now that might point to God.

00:46:49.680 And in some sense it most definitely does, but that isn't the same as the discussion about whether God exists.

00:46:56.620 Right.

00:46:56.960 As a, as a, from a propositional perspective.

00:47:00.260 Which would be the wrong question anyway, I would argue.

00:47:03.460 But, but yeah, so I, I was seeing all of this emerge from the research that I was conducting.

00:47:10.280 And then at the time I was, I also read a book called Enchantment, which was written by Guy Kawasaki, the former marketing director of Apple.

00:47:20.520 And he defined enchantment as a process by which you delight someone where a person sort of starts to open up to life.

00:47:28.840 It's enticement, an enticement, an invitation, an invitation, an attraction, so to speak.

00:47:36.300 And he, he said that this can be present in a human being and a product in an idea.

00:47:43.580 And he also said that Steve Jobs used this idea to design Apple products to, to sort of figure out the, the aesthetic of what Apple products should look like.

00:47:54.180 And meanwhile, you know, the idea of enchantment correlates very closely with Disney because Disney is, you know, takes place in these enchanted forests and these magical kingdoms.

00:48:03.540 And there's this underlying concept of enchantment.

00:48:05.980 And so I just decided that enchantment seemed like the proper word to define this or to describe this phenomenon by which we start to open up to the complexity of ourselves and thus to others and can, and which can give us a sense of a relational way of being as opposed to a consuming way of being.

00:48:29.900 Right. Eric Fromm, the philosopher, wrote a number of essays on the difference between having and being and how he talked about how in the West in particular, we have become caught up in this need to consume where we define our identity according to how much we possess, according to how much we have, as opposed to our capacity to become wise, to be right, not to have, to be, to be wise, to be mature.

00:48:57.660 And that should also be viewed with a tremendous amount of sympathy because it wasn't that long ago when we were all like struggling to feed hand to mouth in the face of terrible privation and starvation.

00:49:08.940 That's very well said.

00:49:10.220 Yes, yes. So, so that's another place to have some sympathy for hyper-consuming human beings. It's like, oh, look, we, we have enough. Oh, well, that's never happened before, ever. So now we don't really know what to do with this.

00:49:22.900 It's so true. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that, but that's very, that's very well said. And it's not like we don't need, we have, we do have to have things, right, to survive. We have to have food and water and shelter.

00:49:35.940 But we've fallen into what John Verveke calls this modal confusion, where we said, I want to be mature, so I need to have as many carbs as possible, right?

00:49:49.340 So we're confusing the having mode with the being mode. So enchantment, the objective of enchantment, of the theory of enchantment is to bring people back to this relational way of being and to be in balance with the complexity of themselves, which includes the having mode, right?

00:50:04.400 Which includes our shadows, which includes our aggression, which includes our angst and anxiety and our melancholy. It's not to the end of suppressing any of those sort of more negative, more darker emotions, but to be in balance with all of them, which is what Jung said was the ultimate ideal or the ultimate objective of doing shadow work in the first place.

00:50:26.980 The same thing is happening in literary studies now that happened in the Middle Ages. People read the same book. They come up with conflicting interpretations of them. Those interpretations reflect their ideal ideologies, and then they argue about them.

00:50:41.600 And so we just have these sort of endless combustions that don't go anywhere, just like the Protestants and the Catholics in the Middle Ages. And so, you know, what my work basically says is, what if we just back out of that? And what if we just do the same thing that science has done? 0.91

00:50:56.240 And we focus on the way that stories can empower us, the way the stories can improve our human performance? Because that's really why they were created by our ancestors. Our ancestors came to be in a tragic world where they realized their own frailty and insufficiency.

00:51:13.380 They said, how do I find strength in the face of my own mortality? How do I lift myself up when I see so much frailty within myself? I see so much frailty in terms of my capacity for anger, for hate, and also my ability to be damaged, my ability to suffer grief and trauma and loneliness.

00:51:36.300 How do I lift myself up? How do I lift myself up? What tool could help me do that? And so the beginning of that, literature with early scriptures, there's a ton of technologies, as I talk about in my work, that we can actually trace their effects in the brain.

00:51:47.760 And then going beyond that healing work into actually making us into our better selves, empowering us with joy, with creativity, with resilience, with the power to lift up others.

00:51:59.920 And perhaps most importantly, the power to grow, to not stay still, to take on damage and turn that damage around into a source of strength.

00:52:10.660 And so what my work does is my work focuses on how literature does all those things, which all of us know intuitively.

00:52:16.940 All of us have read a book at some time, have read a novel at some time or watched a movie at some time or read a poem at some time and felt healed or uplifted or strengthened.

00:52:26.440 If you have a favorite musician, a favorite artist, a favorite rapper, you'll listen to their lyrics and feel the same thing.

00:52:32.540 But the question has always been, how? How is it doing that?

00:52:35.640 And so my work goes into that, but also more powerfully, my work breaks down the technology of literature so you can identify the specific nuts and bolts, the specific blueprints that are having those specific effects.

00:52:47.140 And so that's the work that I do at Project Narrative.

00:52:49.300 So in Wonderworks, in this book, which I referred to earlier, you list out what you consider 25 inventions and they basically constitute the chapter structure of the book.

00:53:02.200 And so you examine the manner in which stories do such things as rally courage or stoke romance or help control anger or transcend hurt or excite curiosity.

00:53:15.560 I'm not going to go through all of them, but to dispense with pessimism and banish despair and heal from grief and decide more wisely.

00:53:26.160 And so in some sense, it's a listing of existential concerns.

00:53:30.420 And so you've broken down narrative in these 25 ways in this book to discuss the major sources of existential concern that plague mankind and then have put forward the notion that we have stories that surround each of these fundamental concerns that help us understand, verbalize, communicate about,

00:53:54.620 and maybe see a pathway through each of these, in the case of the terrible emotions, each of the terrible emotions or to foster and develop the ones that are more positive.

00:54:04.620 I mean, that's exactly right. And even more than that. So, I mean, part of what stories do is they is they give us a plot, a roadmap out of some of these negative emotions into positive emotions.

00:54:16.620 But even more powerfully, they can actually shape our emotions once we understand how to use them.

00:54:22.360 Certain stories can just build optimism or resilience or courage.

00:54:26.300 So to take the first chapter of the book, which is about courage, Homer's Iliad, this extraordinary work.

00:54:33.660 When you read the Iliad, it makes you feel braver. It makes you feel stronger.

00:54:40.120 And it can do that even when it's not talking about courage, even when it has no message about courage, even when it's talking about, oh, well, how does it do that?

00:54:48.600 Well, Homer, he probably didn't invent this technology, but we don't know who did it before him.

00:54:54.460 And so we give Homer credit. Homer realized that when he saw soldiers marching into war, they sang songs.

00:55:02.660 And those songs made them feel braver. Why did those songs make them feel braver?

00:55:07.080 Well, those songs made them feel part of a larger voice.

00:55:09.960 They felt they were bigger than themselves. And on a deep psychological level, they could feel that strength because they knew that even if their individual body died, the voice would carry on.

00:55:20.000 And that's a scientific power of song. We know that to be the case, that when people sing together in choirs, they feel braver.

00:55:27.380 They feel more courageous. And so what Homer did is he said, well, what if I could give you that power of singing without you actually singing?

00:55:35.280 What if I could create a technology, a way of writing so that it tripped your brain into thinking that you were singing as part of a choir?

00:55:42.560 And that's, of course, what the Iliad does. It makes you believe that you were listening to the song of a god, sing goddess of the anger.

00:55:52.220 That's how it begins. And it uses all these tricks and techniques, which I go through in the book, into making your brain believe that you are singing as part of this larger chorus.

00:56:02.660 And so when you simply read the book, it makes you feel braver.

00:56:06.960 And that technology, that idea that you had there, that it, that, that group singing unites you with the central voice whose existence transcends death.

00:56:17.600 I mean, there's a very deep religious like idea in there that's, that's implicit, right?

00:56:22.180 That there is a voice and there are words that unite and transcend and that supersede death.

00:56:28.940 And so that's some, that's part of that heroic pattern, I suppose, that Homer is referring to, that you can step into as an, what would you say, an active agent in engaging in this literature.

00:56:41.720 Just like when you walk into a movie and you, you embody the heroes or the, or the antiheroes sometimes that you see on the screen and experience the emotions that they experience for better or for worse, as a, as I suppose, as a form of practice.

00:56:59.940 In today's chaotic world, many of us are searching for a way to aim higher and find spiritual peace.

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00:58:14.460 Elevate your prayer life today.

00:58:19.020 That's exactly right.

00:58:20.100 And, you know, one of the things that is distinct about the Homeric gods is they're large humans.

00:58:24.340 You know, Homeric gods, you know, unlike sort of an extreme Gnostic version of God as, you know, as the via negativa or something that is completely non-human and that we can't access,

00:58:35.400 these Homeric gods are essentially heroes in the sense of just being bigger versions of us.

00:58:40.120 And so they're gripped with all the same problems that we have, all the same frailties that we have, jealousy, rage, insufficiency.

00:58:47.260 And so when you join with them in this bigger voice, just as you would in a hero in a movie, you feel that you are becoming yourself only greater.

00:58:59.840 You don't feel like you're losing yourself, but you're joining this bigger thing that is yourself, that makes you bigger, that makes you more powerful.

00:59:05.360 And that's where the spiritual experience comes from.

00:59:06.900 And absolutely, one of the basic primordial experiences of literature, which is so basic, I don't even include it as one of the technologies in the book.

00:59:13.960 I just talk about it in the introduction, is spiritual experience.

00:59:18.840 We can actually detect you having deactivation in your parietal lobe, as you have what's known as a self-transcendent experience,

00:59:26.320 in which you feel the boundaries of yourself and the world dissolving, between yourself and the world dissolving.

00:59:31.500 And that's associated with increased life purpose, increased generosity and kindness, because you no longer have the same sense of ego.

00:59:40.360 You feel connected to others.

00:59:42.380 And that sense of spiritual, I mean, the word literature and the word scripture are synonyms.

00:59:47.120 They mean that which is writ.

00:59:49.720 And so if there's one fundamental thing, more fundamental even than any of the technologies that I talk about, to get from literature,

00:59:55.700 it simply is that sense of spiritual experience.

00:59:57.580 And I do think that that is the basic and most powerful experience that any of us can have in this world,

01:00:02.440 because it makes us not only stronger and more purposeful in ourselves, but kinder to others.

01:00:07.980 And really, that's ethics, to be stronger in yourself and kinder to others.

01:00:12.880 Right, to be more effective and more useful socially, broadly.

01:00:17.180 So, okay, I want to ask you a couple of things.

01:00:21.260 I've done a lot of thinking about narrative.

01:00:23.520 When I read, I read this book back in the 1980s, The Neuropsychology of Anxiety by Jeffrey Gray.

01:00:31.000 And that book had a tremendous impact in the field of psychology, although it took about 20 years before people, I suppose, incorporated at least some of what Gray had proposed.

01:00:42.760 And he got a lot of his ideas, although I didn't know it at the time, from Norbert Weiner, I don't know how to say his name,

01:00:50.660 a brilliant cybernetician who worked on establishing what might be the basis of intelligent abstraction,

01:01:02.120 and so that it could be mechanized.

01:01:04.100 And so, I read Gray at the same time, and learned about his association with Weiner and cybernetics,

01:01:13.460 and at the same time that I was reading a lot of analytical psychology, mostly by Jung and his students.

01:01:21.200 And I started to understand that the basic cybernetic mechanisms that Gray was discussing as characteristic of cognitive processing

01:01:32.980 seemed to me to be the same thing as the fundamental elements of the story.

01:01:37.760 So, let me run this by you, and you tell me what you think about this, okay?

01:01:40.800 We'll see how our thinking is meshing, perhaps, and differing.

01:01:44.920 So, I thought that there are basically two types of stories in a functional sense.

01:01:53.980 There's a simple story, and there's a story about how stories transform.

01:01:59.700 And a story itself is actually the frame of reference that we use to perceive the world and act within.

01:02:06.700 So, I don't think we think, and then we think in stories as a subset of thinking.

01:02:14.260 I think that the story is the frame for our thought, and that frame is actually what produces our motivation and our emotions.

01:02:22.800 And so, a lot of this is, again, influenced by this cybernetic work that was developed by Gray.

01:02:27.820 His tremendous knowledge of animal behavior and cognition, because he was an absolute genius.

01:02:33.040 I think he cited 2,000 papers in the Neuropsychology of Anxiety.

01:02:37.600 It took me like six months to read that book and understand it.

01:02:40.460 It was really dense.

01:02:41.180 So, imagine that in the simple story, you mentioned literature as a story, as a map.

01:02:49.500 And I think that's the fundamental issue.

01:02:51.440 So, we're always somewhere.

01:02:53.560 That's our starting point.

01:02:55.080 And we're always moving somewhere else, because we're active creatures.

01:02:58.580 And so, we have an image of the destination in mind.

01:03:01.540 And so, we segregate up time and space into a functional unit that defines the geographical and temporal bounds of our current operations.

01:03:15.380 And we specify a target.

01:03:16.900 And even when our imagination is free-floating, partly what we're doing is playing with different spatial-temporal frames of reference.

01:03:28.760 So, we might be playing with 10 minutes.

01:03:31.520 We might be playing with an hour.

01:03:32.880 We might be playing with a day.

01:03:34.400 We might be playing with two weeks.

01:03:36.340 We can expand and contract that, more or less at will.

01:03:39.740 But so, the map covers a spatial-temporal domain.

01:03:45.580 Okay.

01:03:45.880 And then, the goal is specified.

01:03:51.180 And then, we feel positive emotion when we see any indication from the environmental feedback that our actions are moving us towards the goal.

01:04:02.540 And we feel, and that's technically positive affect, because it's associated with forward movement, left hemisphere activation, dopaminergically mediated.

01:04:13.740 So, we can conceptualize the goal abstractly, interestingly enough.

01:04:19.040 And we have to do that, because we can play with these spatial-temporal frames of reference.

01:04:23.160 And then, if we see a pathway to the goal, a clear pathway that we can implement behaviorally, then that fills us with positive emotion.

01:04:34.080 If we see obstacles in the way, then that induces negative emotion and stops us.

01:04:40.140 And when we stop, we'll play around with the spatial-temporal framing, making it smaller.

01:04:46.240 Maybe we have to deal with the next minute, or larger, trying to reconceptualize the territory, so that we can continue our movement forward.

01:04:54.460 Okay.

01:04:54.700 So, that's story number one.

01:04:56.380 Simple story.

01:04:57.280 I was here.

01:04:58.760 I went there.

01:05:00.820 And here's how I got there.

01:05:02.460 And you might want to listen to that, because maybe you're there, and you want to get to the goal, and you need directions.

01:05:08.820 Okay.

01:05:09.340 The next story is different.

01:05:11.580 It's the transformation of stories.

01:05:13.900 And so, it's the typical fall, or paradise fall, paradise rekindled story.

01:05:21.260 So, you have a frame of reference.

01:05:24.720 You're moving towards a goal.

01:05:27.500 Something that isn't modeled within that frame of reference occurs.

01:05:33.880 It's like an alien invader, in some sense.

01:05:36.820 It doesn't make sense from within that current frame of reference.

01:05:40.040 It blows the frame of reference into pieces.

01:05:42.500 There are, you enter a land of, in some sense, of narrative fragments.

01:05:47.680 That's the underworld in mythology.

01:05:50.260 You have to sort those narrative fragments up and rebuild them, remap the territory, and then you build another story.

01:05:57.740 So, that's a meta story.

01:05:58.980 It's a story about how a story can decompose, collapse into catastrophe, and rekindle itself.

01:06:04.860 And it seemed to me that there isn't anything more basic to our abstract thinking than that sort of nesting inside of stories.

01:06:14.060 First of all, I completely agree on the overall point.

01:06:19.280 So, I mean, I actually have a book coming out next year on Columbia University Press, and the title is Story Thinking, because basically my belief is that human cognition is largely narrative.

01:06:29.500 And that actually we process the world narratively in this exact way.

01:06:35.880 And this is actually what makes our brain function different from computers and AI.

01:06:40.600 Whether or not computers and humans can do the same tasks, we do them differently.

01:06:47.120 Computers think in these kinds of logical correlational sequences.

01:06:50.520 And humans, to your point, think in plots and plans and narratives and goals.

01:06:57.100 And those plots and plans are then associated with emotions.

01:06:59.940 Because a computer exists in the mathematical present tense, so it cannot have desire.

01:07:04.360 There's nothing missing to a computer, because it's always in the same place all the time.

01:07:07.560 It's always the equal sign of the mathematical present tense.

01:07:10.880 But we as humans are able, through plotting and planning, to imagine a future that is distinct from the present, which creates desire or fear or hope or all these other emotions.

01:07:19.040 And so narrative and emotion just go together completely in human experience.

01:07:23.820 And that's why emotions are both shaped through narrative, but narratives are also shaped through emotion.

01:07:29.960 So the kind of simple thing is to say, well, we can use narratives to influence people's emotions.

01:07:37.320 I mean, this is the sort of thing that is somewhat, sometimes positive, but often a kind of cheap political trick.

01:07:42.240 Right, right, exactly.

01:07:43.340 To scare people or manipulate them into doing things and whatnot.

01:07:46.700 But the real power here is to say, first of all, how can I shape my own emotions with narrative?

01:07:53.200 What emotions?

01:07:53.780 In other words, I'm not trying to shape your emotions.

01:07:55.440 I'm trying to shape my own emotions.

01:07:56.740 I'm trying to control my own anger or increase my own hope.

01:08:00.120 How do I do that by retelling my own stories in my own head?

01:08:03.540 And then the second factor of that is, how can my emotions come into play and enable my narratives?

01:08:09.280 How can I develop the emotional resilience to be more likely to carry on my own story?

01:08:13.560 How can I complete my story, even though I have these obstacles in front of me?

01:08:18.760 And to me, the function of literature.

01:08:20.880 So literature is related to stories, but slightly different in the fact that literature is really the kind of experimental zone where you're pushing the envelope.

01:08:29.100 I mean, you know, literary writers are people who are somewhat dissatisfied to kind of, you know, talk, you know, to think about how you're talking about stories breaking.

01:08:38.600 They're dissatisfied with the stories they have, you know, they're not working, you know, and they say, how can I take these stories and somehow make them new?

01:08:44.740 How can I innovate them?

01:08:45.640 How can I go beyond the stories that I've inherited?

01:08:48.000 You know, how can I push that envelope?

01:08:50.120 And so really what I do in the book is say, you know, here's 25 examples of how stories were broken and then put back together again.

01:08:56.940 And how this technology, just like, you know, any technology that humans have developed, has been expanded and innovated over time to go beyond that simple, I just have to get to this goal story, which I agree with you.

01:09:08.420 Is that, I mean, that's a fundamental story, beginning, end, you know, the most basic unit, you know, beginning, end, and I find myself in the middle.

01:09:14.980 But, you know, the wonder of being on this earth is that there is this possibility to tell our own story and beyond that to build stories that we can hand on to other people to empower them to tell their own stories.

01:09:31.440 And it all goes back to this sense of dynamism that you're talking about, and also these emotions that you're talking about.

01:09:38.240 And to unite us, and to unite us in a collective story so that we can work cooperating together towards the same ends, right, so that we all come under the same banner in some sense.

01:09:47.780 And that's that shared intentionality that's very specifically human.

01:09:52.160 You don't see that much manifest itself much in other animals.

01:09:54.880 Even the higher apes have a hard time with it compared to us. 0.94

01:09:59.320 Absolutely, yes.

01:10:00.040 And, you know, what's a big, what's really important about that is that it's ultimately voluntary.

01:10:04.260 Because, I mean, again, if we brainwash people to have the same story as us, you know, that's, to me, a biological no-go.

01:10:10.500 It's not particularly effective, and it's unethical.

01:10:12.700 But if we find a story that's so compelling that when we share it with someone else, it empowers them, and they join our story.

01:10:18.240 We are most happy when we do not perceive ourselves as inheriting an archetypal story from somebody else.

01:10:24.140 If I were to say to you, you know, here's the archetypal story.

01:10:27.700 You're going to end up back there.

01:10:30.100 You know, that would be disinteresting to us emotionally.

01:10:33.420 You know, we want to tell our own stories.

01:10:34.820 We want to be particular in ourselves.

01:10:36.560 I would also say that even though human psychology has remained relatively constant for at least 300,000 years and parts of it for over a million, our world is changing and has changed.

01:10:47.860 And there are real differences between the way the world works now and the kinds of actions and behaviors that are going to function now than there was even 500 years ago.

01:10:56.060 And so there is this need for flexibility in narrative.

01:10:59.200 So even as what you're talking about, I think, Jordan, is this fundamental spiritual component of narrative, the way in which narrative can connect us with the eternal, a sense of things bigger than ourselves.

01:11:08.860 And that transcendent sense of purpose is what lifts us.

01:11:12.740 But narrative also has this flexibility outside the spiritual in the material world to say, OK, how do I navigate this challenge?

01:11:20.220 I'm not going to navigate this challenge as Luke Skywalker or Christ because Luke Skywalker Christ didn't encounter it.

01:11:25.320 OK, I don't I don't think it's OK.

01:11:28.020 I don't think it's abstracted outside of the spiritual.

01:11:30.840 I think this relates to the issue of the relationship between the conscious propositions and the unconscious understructure.

01:11:36.840 So I think that we think in stories, we frame the world in stories, we see in stories.

01:11:43.680 And this is partly why, for example, our eyes are adapted with the whites of our eyes so that other people can see our eyes.

01:11:51.720 It's really important for us to see other people's eyes because we can see where they're pointing their eyes.

01:11:56.680 And if we can see where they're pointing their eyes, we can see what they're interested in.

01:12:00.180 We can see what they value and we can instantly infer their motivation.

01:12:04.440 And that makes them predictable.

01:12:05.560 And so so and it's so important that every all of our ancestors whose eyes weren't that visible, either didn't mate or got killed.

01:12:15.640 It's really important.

01:12:17.440 OK, so so we have now this shared narrative.

01:12:21.400 So imagine this is part this perhaps relates to the particular the absolute.

01:12:25.060 As you specify the narrative for small scale actions, and those would be particularized, the connection with the absolute, the larger absolute, in some sense, falls away.

01:12:36.400 But it's nested.

01:12:37.940 So you could say if you're an integrated person, it's nested.

01:12:42.120 It's so like right now you're talking, you're listening to me and sometimes you're talking to me.

01:12:47.660 OK, so and the story there is, well, we want to have an engaging conversation.

01:12:52.860 And and why?

01:12:54.200 Well, there's a bigger story outside of that, because we want to further our knowledge about narrative and we want to share that with other people.

01:12:59.840 And then there's a story outside of that, which is, well, why?

01:13:03.400 Well, because we're both we're both educators and public communicators.

01:13:07.240 Well, why bother with that?

01:13:08.980 Well, because we think education, rationality and narrative are important for the proper functioning of human beings.

01:13:15.920 Well, why is that relevant?

01:13:17.160 Because we care about the emotional experience of people and we want to further their growth because we want things to be better.

01:13:25.820 And what's outside of that?

01:13:26.740 Well, the idea that, well, it's something like the idea that truthful and engaged exploration is a is a high value.

01:13:36.920 And then outside of that, well, at some point you get to the ultimate abstraction, right, which is the ultimate good.

01:13:42.280 And if you're an integrated person, the particular of your action is associated with that broad scale abstraction.

01:13:48.940 But you don't have to refer to it in the moment.

01:13:51.600 And thank God for that.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - January 22, 2022

219. Narrative, Story, and Writing pt. 1

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