The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 240. Why Free Speech is the Antidote to Ignorance and Corruption ｜ Cambridge University Speech

00:00:00.960 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:00:57.420 It's wonderful to be here. This is such a remarkable place, and for a Canadian in particular, with our rather, what would you say, paucity of history.

00:01:08.760 It's really something to come here and see a place that's so saturated with, I would say, beauty and integrity.

00:01:15.260 I hope you know what you have and that you take careful care of it, because it certainly deserves it.

00:01:20.200 I'm going to speak tonight as a clinician, I would say, about free speech.

00:01:29.760 Dr. Orr gave a bit of an account of the battle behind the scenes, so to speak, that took place so that I could come here and talk,

00:01:38.280 and that's much appreciated. A lot of people put a lot on the line to make this possible.

00:01:42.660 But I find the debate itself somewhat of a mystery.

00:01:47.660 I can't really understand why it's raging precisely the way it is raging,

00:01:52.700 and I would say that specifically from a clinical perspective.

00:01:57.740 I'm going to tell you a little bit about a clinician named Carl Rogers, and I learned something.

00:02:02.740 I've studied the people I regard as the great clinicians in some detail,

00:02:08.220 and learned a lot from all of them, regardless of their particular school of psychotherapeutic endeavor,

00:02:13.300 let's say, or their historical background, or their genre.

00:02:16.660 I learned a lot from Freud in the psychoanalysis, from Carl Jung, from Rogers, who was a humanist,

00:02:22.300 from Maslow, who was perhaps equally outstanding as a humanist psychologist,

00:02:27.660 the existential psychologists, and the cognitive behavioral types,

00:02:31.280 who were much more cut and dried, let's say, in their approach than, you know,

00:02:34.900 the more mythologically-oriented, narrative-oriented psychoanalysts.

00:02:39.380 They all had something to teach me, and I learned it with great, what would you say?

00:02:47.780 I was driven by a great need to learn what they had to say, and thank God for that.

00:02:52.600 Since they were clinicians, you'd hope that reading what they wrote would be helpful,

00:02:55.800 and it certainly was helpful to me personally, practically in the conduct of my profession,

00:03:01.360 but then also in my interpersonal relationships.

00:03:03.120 It's unbelievably helpful, and I would say the most stellar piece of advice that I ever encountered

00:03:09.060 that was actually both, I would say, profound in some sense, but also immediately practical

00:03:14.520 came from Carl Rogers, and Carl Rogers did an awful lot of clinical research

00:03:19.260 into clinical efficacy, as well as being a rather admirable theorist.

00:03:23.920 Now, his background is somewhat germane.

00:03:26.160 He was really an evangelical Protestant up until the time he became a young man.

00:03:30.840 He was going to go to China as a missionary and stop because of his developing agnosticism,

00:03:36.780 and then I would say atheism, as a consequence of his inability to reconcile the distinction

00:03:41.500 between science and religion.

00:03:42.900 But his clinical thinking is saturated with Judeo-Christian suppositions,

00:03:47.780 and foremost upon them, I would say, would be something like respect for the word in capital,

00:03:52.780 as a capital, a capitalized phrase, respect for the divine word, let's say, in a secularized fashion.

00:04:00.100 But Roger was also extraordinarily careful, I would say, to elaborate beyond the word

00:04:07.020 to the act of the exchange of words, let's say, because for anyone to speak, in some sense,

00:04:12.980 you need a listener, and what that means is that if you're going to be a participant

00:04:16.860 in a good conversation, or we might even say a therapeutic conversation, that not only

00:04:21.620 do you have to be an active speaker, but you have to be, to use a terribly clichéd phrase,

00:04:26.660 an active listener.

00:04:28.220 And it stays a cliché unless you understand what it means, but if you understand what it

00:04:32.580 means, then it can stop being a cliché.

00:04:34.260 And I can tell you that if you take nothing else from this lecture, but you practice this,

00:04:38.700 it will completely transform the way that you interact with people.

00:04:41.340 And that's something that's worth noting, too, that something like this can, in fact,

00:04:45.640 completely transform the way that you interact with people, and that it's actually something,

00:04:49.540 in some sense, that's simple enough to learn in a very short period of time.

00:04:53.700 So, Roger said that he had noted in his interactions with people, and in the clinical domain,

00:04:58.960 that it was very difficult for people to listen, and that most people had never really been

00:05:02.860 listened to at all, or that many had never been listened to at all, never really attended

00:05:06.840 to properly, let's say, by their parents during their course of development, never had

00:05:11.220 a mentor or a teacher who really attended to them and listened, and Rogers also noted

00:05:17.740 that you listening may be thinking that that's not true of you, let's say, as a person, you

00:05:23.120 had people who guided you, or as a listener, you're perfectly good at it, and he would

00:05:27.100 say, no, probably not.

00:05:30.660 And so he posited a little experiment that you could run, and I would highly recommend

00:05:35.260 that you run this experiment every time you talk to people for the rest of your life,

00:05:39.760 because it really works.

00:05:42.120 And it points to something deep that we'll go into after the description of the practicalities.

00:05:48.740 So, Rogers said, it was an axiom of his theoretical stance, let's say, and derived it in no small

00:05:55.600 part from the Freudian revelations.

00:05:57.640 I mean, Freud, basically what Freud did in his clinical practice was have people come into

00:06:02.960 his office, his clinic, lay down on a couch with him not visible, and talk.

00:06:09.460 And the instruction was, say anything that comes to mind, anything and everything that comes to mind.

00:06:15.600 So, completely untrammeled, revelatory thought.

00:06:20.480 Now, Freud's observation was that if you let people do that and maintain an active listening environment,

00:06:26.960 even though you were hidden, he didn't want you to be dissuaded or persuaded in your utterances

00:06:31.820 by any reflection of emotion on his face, that you would just have the opportunity to

00:06:36.080 wander haphazardly through your field of thought.

00:06:40.080 And what Freud came to realize was that the haphazard nature of that tended to transform

00:06:45.600 rather quickly into something that was much more coherent and much less contaminated with excess emotion.

00:06:52.620 And so that if you just let the revelatory process of free speech occur, that that in

00:06:58.280 itself was therapeutic.

00:07:00.120 And that was a radical claim for its time.

00:07:04.340 But in some sense, it's not that radical at all, unless you think that speech is divorced

00:07:09.200 entirely from thought, which it certainly is not, although thought cannot be reduced merely

00:07:15.700 to speech, because there are forms of thought that are imagistic, let's say.

00:07:18.920 But certainly much of what goes on in the theaters of our imagination that constitutes thought

00:07:24.440 is in the form of speech.

00:07:25.920 You could say, well, we think with speech, and thought is in many ways internalized speech.

00:07:31.740 And so the notion that allowing yourself to notice what you actually think about things

00:07:37.360 by talking about them might be good for you if thought is in some important sense linked

00:07:42.740 to, well, your bodily incarnation, let's say.

00:07:46.420 And if it's not, well, then what good is it?

00:07:51.180 And so technically speaking, the part of the brain that produces semantic content, the prefrontal

00:07:58.800 cortex, usually in the left, but it depends to some degree on lateralization and handedness.

00:08:03.220 We don't have to get into that.

00:08:05.280 The prefrontal cortex grew out of the motor cortex in the course of evolutionary history.

00:08:11.820 And so what happens in the theater of thought is that potential actions and perceptions

00:08:17.280 are tried out for potential utility, so they're revealed in a sense, and then potentially criticized 0.99

00:08:23.640 out of existence before you implement them stupidly in behavior and die. 0.84

00:08:29.860 And I believe it was Alfred North Whitehead said, the purpose of thought is to let our thoughts 1.00

00:08:33.540 die instead of us, which is correct, right? 0.98

00:08:37.360 It's correct biologically, it's correct technically, it's correct philosophically, and it's worth

00:08:42.240 thinking about.

00:08:43.500 So, well, Freud let people reveal themselves to themselves.

00:08:47.640 Now, later investigations, particularly by James Pennebaker, showed that the Freudian transformation,

00:08:54.460 insofar as it did occur, say in relationship to trauma, was not a consequence of emotional

00:08:59.580 catharsis, which was part of Freud's essential hypothesis, although he was more sophisticated

00:09:05.000 than that, but actually a consequence of the cognitive reconstruction and reappraisal that

00:09:10.380 occurred attendant upon speech related, let's say to trauma, to revelatory speech related

00:09:15.700 to trauma.

00:09:16.680 Now, there are other ways of engaging in such things.

00:09:19.860 There's the pure revelatory explication, and so one of the things you do do as a clinician,

00:09:24.940 you try your best, so when someone would come and see me, well, at first they were very

00:09:29.060 tentative, because who the hell wants to go see a clinical psychologist, right?

00:09:32.920 I mean, you only do such a thing if you're driven to desperation in some sense, you have

00:09:38.460 to admit to yourself that you're no longer capable of dealing with your own affairs, or

00:09:43.260 that at least something could be improved, and you have to turn to a relative outsider,

00:09:47.300 so it's not, it's a somewhat humiliating initial endeavor, and I would say if you ever know

00:09:53.400 anyone who needs to be convinced to see a psychologist because things have got out of hand, one way to

00:09:58.480 smooth the way forward to that is just to tell them to try it once, right?

00:10:02.580 Because then it's not a long-term commitment, and I would tell people when they walked into

00:10:05.400 my office, you know, well, we'll see how this goes, and I know you're uncomfortable about

00:10:09.680 being here and disoriented and all that, but let's try it out for one session, and if it

00:10:15.340 works, then you could have another one, and then you could decide again then, and so, you

00:10:19.960 know, it's a gentle introduction, and I would never assume to begin with that I knew what

00:10:31.800 was wrong with them.

00:10:33.200 I was never striving for a diagnosis, and that was partly because I was trained, formally

00:10:37.940 trained as a cognitive behavioral psychologist, and cognitive behavioral psychologists are much

00:10:42.620 more concerned with the particularities of perception and behavior than with such things

00:10:47.240 as psychiatric diagnostic categories, and so it was a very strategic approach, and one

00:10:51.720 that was really based on a gentle and facilitating inquisition.

00:10:57.740 It's like, well, there must be something wrong in your life, I would presume, because here you

00:11:02.680 are, or you're trying to make something that isn't so good better, that's another possibility.

00:11:07.680 I wouldn't presume to know what that is, because what do I know about you?

00:11:11.260 Like, nothing, and so a lot of the initial discussion was just, well, what's wrong?

00:11:17.960 Like, as far as you can tell, how would you describe in as detailed fashion as possible

00:11:22.460 what's wrong?

00:11:23.900 And then, if things weren't wrong, well, what might they look like?

00:11:28.900 So, and that's a great thing, by the way, if you're ever arguing with someone in an intimate

00:11:32.320 relationship, right?

00:11:33.320 Because there's some issue on the table, and one of the things you can ask them is, well,

00:11:37.900 what are your conditions for satisfaction?

00:11:39.520 Like, if this was resolved to your satisfaction, what is it that I would have to offer, what

00:11:45.480 is it that would have to change, that I could actually practically implement right now?

00:11:49.640 And one way of doing that, by the way, is sometimes the person wants you to say something,

00:11:54.260 an apology, maybe, and you have to be, agree that perhaps you should utter an apology, but

00:11:59.540 you can say to them, well, what words should I couch this apology in that would be sufficient

00:12:04.480 as far as you're concerned?

00:12:05.500 And they're going to say, well, you have to figure that out on your own, or if you loved 0.99

00:12:09.420 me, you'd know, and that's like, no, I'm stupid, and I don't know what would satisfy you, and 0.96

00:12:15.000 I'm awkward at these sorts of things, and I could use a hand at practice, and so maybe 0.78

00:12:19.000 if you just let me stumble through this apology in the manner that you see fit as a genuine

00:12:24.700 actor, then maybe the next time I do it, I'd be a little better at it.

00:12:28.120 But don't expect satiating perfection, first utterance, because you're not going to get

00:12:34.080 it, because you're likely tangled up with someone who's no more sophisticated or intelligent

00:12:37.900 than you are.

00:12:39.280 So that's very helpful.

00:12:41.440 So the clinical sessions were as free an exchange of information as I could manage, and one of

00:12:51.940 the things I did notice consistently in my clinical practice was that if I really, really

00:12:56.860 listened to the person, they were unbelievably interesting.

00:13:01.000 And so I would say, this is a rather corrosive bit of self-reflection, but if you're bored

00:13:07.560 in a conversation, you're the boring person, right, because you're not listening, because

00:13:13.120 if you were listening, that person is a strange creature, man, and if they told you what they

00:13:18.280 are actually up to, first of all, it'd be a shock to them, that's for sure, but if they

00:13:22.480 were telling you, you would not be bored.

00:13:24.920 And so there's a high probability that you're sitting there thinking what you already know

00:13:29.340 about this person, what you're assuming by the way they're dressed, or the way they comport

00:13:32.540 themselves, or their class, or their social status, or their ethnicity, or whatever the

00:13:36.800 hell it is, stereotypes that you're using as a replacement for the genuine dialogue.

00:13:41.380 And then you're also sitting there thinking about what you're going to say next when they're

00:13:44.780 talking so that you can impress them, and so on and so forth.

00:13:47.720 And you're not doing the kind of listening that Rogers suggested at all, because you're treating

00:13:52.880 the other person as an end to an a priori defined instrumental means, and that's a big mistake.

00:13:59.860 And so Rogers thought you could check yourself, and here's the experiment. And this works in a

00:14:05.260 lovely manner, and actually Rogers' work has been used in conflict management, sociology and

00:14:12.220 management, at fairly high levels of governmental intervention, especially in times of war,

00:14:16.940 because it actually does make peace. And so his rule was, well, first of all, you're going to be

00:14:23.560 afraid to listen. Because if you listen to someone who disagrees with you, and you really listen,

00:14:30.400 they're going to tell you things that will reveal your errors and make you change. And now that might be

00:14:36.100 a good thing if you know that you're so damn ignorant that little humility is in order, and that the 0.99

00:14:40.540 better you could be given rise to in place of the already totalitarian certainty, you know, that 0.99

00:14:46.760 constitutes you at the moment. But still, especially if you're dealing with someone who truly is 0.57

00:14:52.120 different than you, the probability that they'll reveal things in honest dialogue that will shake

00:14:56.780 you to the core is quite high. And that's a very common experience in clinical practice. Well,

00:15:01.860 partly why else would it possibly work if that wasn't the sort of thing that was happening?

00:15:06.120 And so that was another barrier to listening, is you don't want the person to reveal themselves

00:15:11.620 in their complexity to some degree, because they shake you to the depths of your core

00:15:15.840 certainties. And that's actually a great thing, unless you're already living in paradise, right?

00:15:20.640 Because since you're not, the probability that you're existing in error is fairly high. And some

00:15:25.580 of those errors are probably pretty severe. But that doesn't mean it's a particularly pleasant

00:15:29.780 experience to have them revealed or to stumble upon them. So Roger suggested this technique,

00:15:36.200 which I said I would get to the technique. He said,

00:15:38.060 the next time you find yourself embroiled in an argument with someone that's contentious and

00:15:44.120 uncomfortable, say, institute the following rule. You don't get to respond to the person's claims

00:15:50.540 until they've exhausted that particular claim. And this does presume to some degree that you're

00:15:55.100 dealing with a good faith actor, even if they feel differently than you do. You don't get to respond

00:15:59.660 until you have recapitulated their viewpoint and summarized it in a manner they find acceptable.

00:16:09.760 That's so treacherously sneaky, that rule. Because what it means is, you have to demonstrate that you

00:16:19.380 attended to what they say closely enough and carefully enough to, first of all, act out validation of the

00:16:28.920 idea that they have an opinion worth attending to. So that's a big deal. People really like being paid

00:16:34.280 attention to. There is nothing people like more than that, unless they have something to hide. And

00:16:39.000 even then, there's a part of them that would rather have that paid attention to than fail to pass,

00:16:45.000 what would you say, to go unnoticed. Every cynic is entirely disappointed when his or her cynicism

00:16:51.540 goes unchallenged. Because there's a part of them, like a little unwarped part of their soul,

00:16:56.180 that's still alive, thinking, oh my god, I hope someone calls me on all my foolishness and cynicism,

00:17:02.400 because if they don't, that means that it's valid and generally applicable, and I'm in hell,

00:17:08.200 and what good is that? And so, and I really mean that, I really mean that. And so,

00:17:13.480 so you're called upon to, first of all, summarize what they said, which is not an easy thing,

00:17:19.040 right? Because it means you have to, and sometimes it's somewhat incoherent and emotion-laden,

00:17:23.660 especially if it's in the course of an argument. So you have to sort of strike right to the quick.

00:17:28.200 It sounds to me like this is the point you were making. And then you lay out the point,

00:17:33.500 and then you see, they have to be happy with your summary. They have to be pleased with it.

00:17:37.940 Which means that you're doing exactly the opposite of strawmanning the argument,

00:17:41.880 quite the contrary. And you're doing them a favor in some sense by reducing it to the gist,

00:17:46.840 because that's actually an incredibly complex cognitive operation.

00:17:49.920 I had one client who was extraordinarily seriously affected. And in the final analysis,

00:17:56.480 I don't know if I was of any help to her, because the pit of family pathology she was

00:18:02.300 ensconced in was so deep that no matter how far we dug, there was already always a number,

00:18:08.420 a new layer of lies underneath the lies we had already worked months to uncover. It was just awful,

00:18:14.060 like homicidal level awful, literally terrible. But she told me, she went on a tangent that lasted

00:18:22.740 for four consecutive day clinical sessions. Like they weren't the whole day, but they were

00:18:28.420 50 minutes on four consecutive days. I had no idea where she was going. She was wandering all over in

00:18:35.200 this Freudian associational manner. And she came to the point at the end of it. It was unbelievable.

00:18:41.640 She tied together this, she was a very intelligent woman. She tied together this tremendously long,

00:18:46.880 incoherent ramble into a little bow right at the end, like the punchline of a remarkable joke.

00:18:52.820 And so, and she had extracted in some sense the gist of what she was saying as a consequence of the

00:18:58.520 circumambulation, the wandering through all this territory. And when you listen to someone very,

00:19:03.140 very carefully, and especially if they express themselves for a while, and you say to them,

00:19:07.460 well, it sounds to me like this is what you're saying, what you're doing is taking a tremendous

00:19:13.720 amount of emotionally laden material, a lot of it unnecessary in the final analysis, because of

00:19:20.320 the ensuing synthesis, and offering them a synthesis, which is a great thing to do,

00:19:25.660 especially if they're happy to accept it, because that also means that you did listen to them. So you

00:19:31.700 signified that they were worth attending to. And then you listen to them enough to actually

00:19:36.100 understand what they were saying to try to understand it. And then you did understand it.

00:19:41.540 And then they're way happier with you, even if you're arguing with them, because at least now

00:19:45.740 they know they can rely on you to be a reliable listener, and that you're not trying to, you know

00:19:50.720 how it is when you're arguing with someone, there's a part of you that really wants to win. 1.00

00:19:54.520 It's like, I'm right, you're stupid and wrong. And so the best way for me to demonstrate that is to 1.00

00:20:01.760 warp and bend your argument in some, make it trivial in some way it isn't, especially if

00:20:06.480 it's directed to some degree, like elucidating my character flaws, and to minimize you in doing so.

00:20:12.860 And if you do that, of course, well, that's not a great road to peace unless you're willing to bring

00:20:18.100 a big club to the argument. And many people are. And instead of listening and trying to make peace and

00:20:23.260 sort things out, they'll use all sorts of subtle forms of suppression in their ensuing dialogue just to

00:20:29.180 keep everything, you know, under the rug or in the closet. I wouldn't recommend that as a medium to

00:20:34.600 long-term strategy, especially if you're trying to bring peace to a household. You have to go through

00:20:38.860 this horribly painful process of listening to the people around you tell you what they think of their

00:20:44.700 lives. And if you do that, then, well, maybe you can all come to a place that is characterized by

00:20:50.860 something approximating genuine peace. And I would say that even psychophysiologically, you know. I mean,

00:20:56.360 when there's tension in a household and multiple, what would you say, systems of value operating

00:21:02.380 simultaneously, there's a tremendous confusion about what should reign supreme, right? And you think, well,

00:21:07.880 nothing has to reign supreme. We can all have our diverse opinions. It's, no, you can't. Not if you're going

00:21:14.300 to live together in harmony. There has to be some overarching structure that unites you. If there, I mean, what

00:21:20.020 else is a family if it's not an overarching structure that unites you? Now, within that, there can be

00:21:26.160 tolerance and even appreciation for necessary individual differences. And obviously, there should be. But that

00:21:32.160 doesn't mean there's a, not a higher unity that the entire organization, let's say, is striving for in some

00:21:38.320 manner. And not only striving for, but pining for, or even dying for. And I don't use those words lightly. Like, the

00:21:46.140 absence of that incorporating higher structures is a felt sense of catastrophe on the part of the members

00:21:52.440 of the family. They're always at each other's throats. They're interfering with each other's goals.

00:21:56.860 They can't listen. They're in a chronic state of hyper arousal because they don't know what to do

00:22:02.340 ever. They're hopeless because no goals have been clearly defined. And we experience almost all our hope

00:22:08.540 in relationship to define goals. So this isn't some, what would you say, humanity's myth or some reality

00:22:19.440 that isn't as concrete as everything that you see before you. It's quite the contrary. And as far as

00:22:24.780 Rogers was concerned, well, you had to let people talk to find out what they thought so they could find

00:22:35.400 out what they thought so they could move towards something so they could move away from hell.

00:22:41.300 Because that's certainly what you see in clinical practice. I mean, people are suffering in ways you

00:22:45.660 can hardly, well, you can probably imagine because no doubt many of you have either been there or seen

00:22:51.440 people who were there, lived with them. You know, to move away from that is, that's more real than

00:22:56.860 anything else. If pain is more real than anything else, what's even more real than pain is whatever we

00:23:02.200 have to fight off the pain. And that's free speech. It's identical with freedom of thought.

00:23:09.900 It's associated with this capacity and necessity to listen deeply. There are flip sides of the same

00:23:15.900 coin, to use a terrible cliche. And all the clinical data we have, including the more stringently

00:23:22.360 research-oriented clinical inquiry, indicates quite clearly that the exchange of information like that,

00:23:30.980 the generation of semantic and emotional information in a state of relative freedom, the revelation of

00:23:38.560 those thoughts, and then the discursive analysis of those thoughts, say, and then the implementation

00:23:43.780 into action and the testing of them, that is the pathway to hell, insofar as that can be attained by,

00:23:50.180 say, psychological or spiritual means. And so that's why free speech is not just another

00:23:56.500 freedom or right among many. It's certainly not viewpoint diversity or anything like that. It's

00:24:04.300 the mechanism by which we generate the conceptions that allow us to organize our experience in the

00:24:10.520 world. It's that mechanism. And more than that, it's the mechanism that allows us to reformulate and

00:24:17.920 criticize those conceptions when they've become outdated and sterile, to dissolve them into a chaos that we

00:24:24.040 have to contend with while it's occurring, and then to reanimate them in a new form so that we can move

00:24:30.160 into the future. And so if you're concerned with the oppressed, let's say, why in the world would you

00:24:36.640 oppose free speech? It's the only thing the oppressed have. And if you don't understand that, I would say,

00:24:43.760 well, that's either an ignorance that's so deep that you should remediate it as rapidly as possible,

00:24:48.320 or a malevolence that's so appalling that you should face it even though you'll face it at your peril.

00:24:55.540 And so you come to a university like this that's been a bastion of free speech, in a country that's

00:25:00.900 been a bastion of free speech, and a light unto the world in that regard for a thousand years, and all

00:25:07.280 due credit to all of you for that. It's like, don't forget this. This is the fundamental thing.

00:25:14.000 Say, the entire Judeo-Christian enterprise, to this date, has been an attempt, in some sense, 0.90

00:25:21.500 to elevate to the highest place the notion of the divine redemptive word. And there's no truth

00:25:27.180 that's deeper than that. And that's that. So, thank you very much.

00:25:34.760 Dr. Peterson, Jordan, thank you so much for that.

00:26:02.640 A lot of the way in which the debate has been conducted here in Cambridge on free speech has

00:26:08.020 been rather dry, in fact. It's been heated, but quite dry, quite arid. We've been thinking a lot

00:26:13.220 in philosophical terms, and we've been talking a lot about Milton and Mill. But what you've done

00:26:20.460 for us tonight is show us the existential power of being able to speak freely. That if we care about

00:26:30.340 well-being, we care about psychological flourishing, and we care about what Aristotle called eudaimonia,

00:26:38.320 happiness, well-being, flourishing, then we should prize truth and the free pursuit of truth above

00:26:44.760 all else. Now, the time has come for discussion, for Q&A. This is what we like to do here. In fact,

00:26:54.580 this is what it's all about. So, if anyone would like to kick off, Vincent here is going to traffic

00:27:03.900 the microphone around. If I could just ask you to speak into the microphone, just for recording

00:27:08.380 purposes and for amplification purposes. Vincent, you can't miss him. He's in a...

00:27:13.580 A bone-white suit in the middle of a Cambridge November. So, just make sure that you're...

00:27:28.760 Make sure that you put your hand up clearly so that he can spot you, and then, since Vincent will

00:27:34.340 have the mic, I'll let Dr. Peterson pick the questions as they are. Emily.

00:27:44.260 Hello, Dr. Peterson. Thank you so much for coming to talk to us. So, I have a question. It's sort of

00:27:50.140 personal. So, I've recently become convinced that I'm called to work either in politics or at least

00:27:56.680 in the public intellectual space, and I want to do that because I really love my country, and I want

00:28:00.840 to try to help preserve the values that have been at the foundation of our country. But I'm worried

00:28:07.240 that I'm going to be seduced by the lust for power, and I was wondering if you had any advice for how to

00:28:12.680 fight the lust for power. Well, that's kind of a germane question altogether, isn't it? Because

00:28:20.420 part of the cultural battle that we all find ourselves enveloped in is partially due to the claim

00:28:27.240 that there's virtually nothing other than the lust for power. And, you know, I would say fair enough

00:28:34.040 in some limited sense, which... and that's... that bears directly on your question, because you see

00:28:41.880 that as a temptation that might be powerful enough to bend and distort you as you attempt to make your

00:28:46.640 way through, let's say, the halls of power. Well, I heard recently from a reliable source that

00:28:58.240 Putin's conversion to Orthodox Christianity might be genuine. And then you might think, well, if you're 0.60

00:29:04.660 atheistic, well, that's not necessarily a good thing, or maybe you think it's a bad thing, or maybe you think

00:29:10.040 it's an irrelevant issue, and you may also think it's a lie. But I would say that

00:29:16.580 I would be more inclined to trust someone who thinks there's something higher than himself.

00:29:26.720 And then you might say, well, what is it that's higher than ourselves? And that's worth thinking

00:29:30.560 about. And we all need to think about this, regardless of the particulars of our religious

00:29:34.440 belief. And I would say, again, from a clinical perspective, service to others is really

00:29:42.740 something. People who are depressed tend to use the pronouns I and me much more frequently than

00:29:49.560 people who aren't depressed. And I'm not saying that people get depressed because they're selfish.

00:29:53.920 I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that one of the way out, one of the routes out of depression

00:29:59.720 appears to be an increase in service to other people. And I think the reason for that is because

00:30:05.360 we aren't power-mad demons at the core, even though we may be tempted by such things, and that we find

00:30:12.200 the genuine meaning that offsets genuine suffering in the genuine service to others. And I think it's a

00:30:19.860 big mistake to be cynical, especially prematurely, about such things as political activity, because

00:30:25.500 they're necessary, despite, let's say, their adversarial and party-centered nature, partisan nature.

00:30:36.760 You have to be clear about what you serve and why. And that has to be held higher always than mere

00:30:45.060 victory, mere operationalized victory or instrumental victory. And it's a very, very difficult thing to

00:30:52.440 negotiate, particularly because in the political realm, in some sense, you have to defeat your

00:30:58.780 enemy, right? Because you have to win the election and the other people have to lose. It's a binary

00:31:03.280 choice. But so often I see in partisan discussion, the proclivity to assume that all the ill will and

00:31:10.400 malevolence resides on the other side of the chamber. And that's a big mistake. And you could think about

00:31:16.500 that more deeply, too, is that we all have to put, we all need a place to place the existence of

00:31:22.540 malevolence, right? Because malevolence clearly exists, and we're all suffer from the weight of

00:31:29.220 malevolent history, right? Because even the grounds we walk on here, which this is a remarkable and

00:31:35.300 wonderful place, I mean, English soil is soaked with blood, just like the soil of every place in the

00:31:40.800 world. That's part of the human heritage. And all of us bear the marks of that conflict, in some sense,

00:31:46.980 in our souls, partly because of the possibility for us to engage in that, but also partly because

00:31:52.180 part of the reason we're here in all this privilege is because of all that catastrophe.

00:31:56.660 Well, the best way to localize that malevolence is inside you, right? And to remember that the enemy

00:32:02.960 that you're fighting with, the greatest enemy that you ever fight with, is in your own heart.

00:32:07.320 And that'll also stop you from confusing that true source of malevolence, let's say, with your

00:32:13.860 mere political enemies. And that isn't to say that you won't encounter malevolent behavior, although

00:32:18.740 most of it in the political sphere, as it is everywhere, most of it is more ignorance than

00:32:23.500 malevolence, although willful blindness certainly plays a large role. And so you need to know what it

00:32:29.780 is that you're serving. And I would say one of the ways to do that practically, or a couple of ways to

00:32:34.360 do that practically, is you need a good team around you, the people you really trust, and who can

00:32:38.720 watch you, and who do it with a certain degree of impartiality, and who are disagreeable enough to

00:32:44.900 talk to you when you do something wrong. So you need trusted advisors. And then the other thing I

00:32:50.600 would say is, you really need to listen to your constituents, because they will tell you what the

00:32:56.800 problems are if you listen to them. And if you really listen to them, well, then you'll have your feet

00:33:01.580 on the ground, which is where they should be. And you'll know what the problems are. And you will win

00:33:07.000 elections. Because what people really want from their leaders is to be listened to, and then for

00:33:13.080 those leaders to articulate what they've heard in the halls of, let's say, influence and power.

00:33:19.240 And so if you know those things, if you know you need to listen, you need to get in touch with the

00:33:23.740 people you're representing as regularly as you possibly can, and mostly to listen.

00:33:27.840 I knew a man in Canada who started a political party, which is a very difficult thing to do.

00:33:33.760 And not only did he start it, but he wrote it to sufficient success, so that he became the leader

00:33:38.840 of the opposition in Canada within about 10 years. And I asked him how he did that, because it's like,

00:33:44.880 well, really, how did you do that? That's actually really hard. And he said he would go out from

00:33:49.520 constituency to constituency and make his stump speeches. But what he really liked was the Q&As,

00:33:54.660 because people would tell him what their problems were. Then he knew what the problems were. And

00:34:01.160 out of the dialogue would also emerge the answers that the audience found compelling. And so not only

00:34:07.240 would they tell him what the problems were, but they would tell him the answers they would like to

00:34:11.080 have what instituted to solve those problems. It's the same thing that comedians do when they

00:34:18.200 finesse their acts in front of live audiences before they practice them in front of a large audience.

00:34:23.640 They tell jokes, and the audience either laughs or they don't. And if they laugh, then you keep

00:34:29.560 that joke. And if they don't, you throw it out. And soon you're just as funny as the audience can

00:34:34.000 possibly manage. And it's the same thing. You can also do that in a dark manner, by the way,

00:34:39.500 which is what Hitler did. So he could utter terrible things and wait for a response and collect those. 0.89

00:34:46.700 And so then you become the embodiment of the shadow of your people. 0.98

00:34:49.520 So I would recommend that you probably don't do that.

00:34:56.240 Thank you very much.

00:34:57.300 You're welcome.

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00:37:52.300 Thank you, Dr. Peterson. My question is, what does this listening posture look like over time?

00:37:59.920 And with your knowledge of personal psychology, I think we can all say we've somewhere encountered

00:38:07.700 one of those relationships where one person does all the work and the other person can't engage in

00:38:13.980 this, even if they have been listened to over and over and over again. But at our society level,

00:38:20.440 if that does happen, now let's try it. I totally agree with you. Let's listen. If we wind up in

00:38:28.980 this, sometimes it's always listening and it never turns into listening back.

00:38:36.200 Right.

00:38:37.760 What's that look like over time?

00:38:39.260 You do test for reciprocity. So children, for example, when children are investigating play,

00:38:45.700 potential play partners on the playground, they'll come up to a child, let's assume a child of roughly

00:38:52.480 the same age, because that would be the most common situation. Maybe we're talking about kids who are

00:38:55.880 four or five years old. And they'll throw out a play gesture that's rather simple, so maybe that a

00:39:01.980 two-year-old could manage. And then if the person manages a proper response, then they throw out a

00:39:06.200 little more sophisticated gesture. And if the person responds appropriately, then they ratchet up to just

00:39:11.860 above their developmental level. And then they play like mad at that level, and that'll make them friends.

00:39:16.960 And so partly what they're testing for there continually is whether there's something approximating

00:39:21.780 reciprocal altruism, right? It's tit for tat in the positive sense. And I would say that, well, we know

00:39:27.940 there's actually a literature on this, which is quite interesting. This is also something very practical to

00:39:32.240 know, and I'll get to another practicality here. So there have been psychologists who've done

00:39:37.620 empirical investigations into what predicts the longevity of a relationship. And so here's one

00:39:42.480 experiment that was conducted multiple times, and I believe this is very reliable data. So imagine you

00:39:48.240 have the two partners in a marriage, each rate, the number of encounters they have with their other

00:39:54.000 partner a day, and it's kind of an arbitrary and subjective measure, but it doesn't matter. You might say,

00:39:58.660 well, I talked to my wife eight times today. We had eight different interactions. And then you'd say,

00:40:03.440 well, did you rate those for whether they're positive or negative? And then you can calculate

00:40:08.020 a ratio of positive to negative. And then you can use the ratio to predict the longevity of the

00:40:13.260 relationship. And the data show that if the relationship interactions fall below five positive

00:40:21.080 to one negative, then the relationship deteriorates and is generally doomed. And so five to one,

00:40:27.520 it's a preponderance of positive interactions, but we're wired so that negative interactions hurt us

00:40:32.900 more than positive interactions help us if they are of the same magnitude. So for example, people will

00:40:38.460 work harder to avoid a loss of five dollars than they will to attain a gain of five dollars. And you

00:40:44.760 might say, well, why is that? And the answer is, you can be absolutely dead, but there's only so happy

00:40:50.620 you can be. And so it's bare to err on the side of conservatism in the domain of negative emotion.

00:40:55.700 And so, but interestingly enough, if the interactions rise so that they exceed 11 positive

00:41:04.200 to one negative, the relationship also deteriorates. And so what that suggests is that there's some,

00:41:10.680 it's sort of like smiles with teeth, right? You want a fair bit of positive emotion and reflection

00:41:17.320 from your partner, but you don't want them to be a naive, dependent pushover who's afraid to stand up

00:41:23.200 for themselves. And so you want to, you know, because you're a nasty, horrible human being, and 1.00

00:41:28.260 now and then you poke your partner just to see if there's anything there, because that's what you're 0.99

00:41:32.260 like. And if you find out there isn't, you'll run roughshod over them. And you think you won't, but

00:41:36.560 you will, especially if they're very good at implicitly encouraging that, which dependent people

00:41:41.420 sometimes are. So you do assess for reciprocity. And the basic rule is you want approximately equal

00:41:52.740 reciprocity in relationships that you want to maintain. Now, maybe, you know, you have enough

00:41:57.980 additional resource to be the giver more often than receiver in some relationships, but I don't even

00:42:04.040 think that really works that well with children. You know, I mean, you obviously have to take care of

00:42:08.440 them, but it's not like they don't deliver the goods to you if you have a good relationship with

00:42:12.140 them. And you want to, to some degree, to enforce that reciprocity. Now, you might say, well, what

00:42:18.720 happens in relationships where that's impossible? And, well, I give you a practical piece of, a

00:42:25.120 suggestion on that front, and this is another thing you can do in your own household. This is so useful.

00:42:30.000 Man, if you get good at doing this, your life will get so much better, you can't believe it, is

00:42:34.440 watch the people around you. And whenever they do anything that you would like to see repeated on

00:42:41.300 a regular basis, tell them exactly what they did in detail with, you know, be positive about it,

00:42:48.880 obviously, and, and just indicate that you noticed. And because I saw this when I was grading student

00:42:55.380 essays, you know, and so I taught this seminar for a long time, and I was trying to teach kids how to

00:43:01.600 write. They were in their fourth year of university in the honors psych program. You'd think they'd bloody

00:43:05.940 well already know how to write, but they didn't. And so I'd have them write a four-page essay on a given

00:43:12.760 topic, and then they had to rewrite that to a six-page essay, and then they had to rewrite that to an

00:43:17.460 eight-page essay. And the first essay I graded, I was only five percent of their grade, and I told them, I'm going

00:43:24.060 to cut you into ribbons, but it doesn't matter because it's, you know, five percent of your grade, and so they

00:43:28.960 could tolerate that. And generally, by the third essay, they had written the best thing they'd ever

00:43:33.060 written in their life, and they learned so fast, it was unbelievable. But one of the things I noticed

00:43:37.320 was that they did a little testing with the first essay. They'd hand in something, it was just like,

00:43:43.160 God, formulaic, boring. They weren't in it at all, you know. There was nothing of the person in there.

00:43:49.800 There was no thought. There was just the kind of psychobabble that they'd learned, especially if they were in

00:43:55.160 faculties of education. And it was dry and dull, and everything about it was wrong. And so those are

00:44:02.400 hard to grade, right? What's wrong with my essay? Well, the words aren't right, the phrases, they're

00:44:07.440 not so good. They're not organized well into sentences. The sentences aren't sequenced well in

00:44:12.060 the paragraphs. The paragraphs don't make a coherent argument, and the entire thing is empty. But other

00:44:18.700 than that, no problem, it was often easier just to rewrite those essays than to grade them.

00:44:24.580 No, so in any case, though, one of the things I did learn was that even in an essay like that,

00:44:29.780 there is usually like one sentence or two sentences buried on like page three, that was an actual thought,

00:44:37.680 and reasonably clearly stated, and somewhat gripping, you know. It was like the person popped out from

00:44:43.800 all the background rubbish and said, well, what about this? And if you saw that and checked it and

00:44:51.720 said, hey, you hit the mark right there, the next essay would be like two-thirds that. And that was

00:44:57.780 really fun to see. And then maybe by the third essay, maybe it was all like that. And then they were

00:45:02.240 really thrilled. It's like, wow, I wrote this, you know. And sort of the culmination, well, it was a

00:45:06.620 fourth-year seminar. It was the culmination of their career as a psychology undergraduate. So that was

00:45:10.860 great fun. But you can do that in your own household if the envious part of you isn't jealous 1.00

00:45:20.080 of the revelation of the goodness of the person. And so here's the opposite tack if you want to do

00:45:26.000 this. So imagine that you're a man who's managed to attract a mate, and he believes he's punched

00:45:32.300 above his weight. So this woman is more attractive, let's say, more vivacious, more desirable than he

00:45:37.500 deserves. So that's going to grate on his soul a fair bit, right? Partly because her shining casts a

00:45:44.840 dim light on his lack of utility, let's say. And so you can imagine someone like that being prone to

00:45:53.280 jealousy, for obvious reasons. And so the best tack to manage in a situation like that, if you're that

00:46:00.840 man, is to wait till your wife dresses herself up in a particularly attractive manner, and then either

00:46:06.280 fail to notice by occupying yourself with something trivial while she's attempting to gain your

00:46:12.160 attention, or by criticizing her directly for what she's just managed to do. And if you do that 50

00:46:19.840 times, let's say, you can be sure that she'll never reveal her attractiveness to anyone else

00:46:24.560 for the rest of her life, including you, and you'll get exactly what you deserved.

00:46:29.980 So that's the opposite of watching people carefully. Now, I learned this in part from Skinner,

00:46:36.900 B.F. Skinner, the famous animal behaviorist, because he used all sorts of reinforcement

00:46:42.020 contingencies to shape animal behavior. And Skinner was unbelievably good at this. He trained

00:46:47.560 pigeons in World War II to guide missiles by pecking at photographs, so they could map the photographs

00:46:55.240 onto the missile trajectory, viewing the territory underneath, and peck accurately enough to guide

00:47:00.840 the missile to its destination. That was discontinued as the technology for guided missiles

00:47:05.760 developed. But Skinner could do that. And, you know, we think pigeons, well, they're not that bright.

00:47:10.880 It's like, they're smarter than you think, pigeons. That's why they can live in cities. That's not easy

00:47:16.620 for a bird to pull off, you know. It's not their natural habitat. And so, but Skinner, although he would

00:47:22.800 use punishment, technically speaking, which is the application of a certain amount of pain, or threat,

00:47:30.500 which is the use of anxiety, but what he believed was most effective was reward. But it required a

00:47:36.160 tremendous amount of attention. So, for example, if Skinner was trying to train a rat to climb up a

00:47:42.200 little ladder, and then across the ladder, and then maybe do a pirouette and come down, which he could do

00:47:46.640 with no problem, he'd wait, he'd just watch the rat, and then when it got close to the ladder, he'd give

00:47:52.720 it a food pellet. Now, his rats were starved, by the way, down to three quarters of their normal body

00:47:57.180 weight, so they were pretty eager to work for food. It's not something you necessarily saw in the

00:48:01.580 methodology section of the papers, but, well, and that's not a critique of Skinner. It's just an

00:48:08.700 indication of how simplification takes place in laboratory experiments. But in any case, he'd wait for the

00:48:13.640 rat to get near the ladder and give it a food pellet. And soon, the rat would be hanging around

00:48:18.780 the ladder quite a lot. And then now and then, just more or less randomly, the rat would put a

00:48:23.680 paw up on the ladder. It's a food pellet. Well, then the rat would hang around the bottom of the ladder

00:48:28.040 with paw up. Well, if he did that continually through observation, he could get the rat to do pretty much

00:48:34.340 anything that you could imagine a rat could do, and then maybe some things you couldn't imagine. And

00:48:39.580 this isn't a manipulative technique, by the way, although it can be used that way.

00:48:43.920 It's not effective unless you do it with a certain degree of wisdom. You want to think, well, what do

00:48:48.240 you want in your house? How about peace, tranquility, happiness, and humor? Something like that. That's

00:48:55.500 not a bad first-pass approximation. And you want to get that in your head. It's like, do you want that,

00:49:00.880 or do you want the delights of endless martyrdom? Because you have to make a choice, and you might think,

00:49:05.720 I wouldn't pick martyrdom. It's like, really? Really? You wouldn't, eh? You'd pick peace and

00:49:11.780 happiness and humor. And so everywhere you go, that's all you're ever surrounded with.

00:49:16.940 It's like, highly improbable. So don't be so sure you're aiming up. But if you can orient yourself

00:49:23.600 in that direction, and then, and carefully, and knowing full well what the hellish alternative is,

00:49:29.920 because you need to know that, then you can watch and see, well, when is this manifesting itself in the

00:49:36.640 people around me? And then you can tell them in detail, I noticed, son, I noticed. Today, we're

00:49:42.180 having a discussion at dinner, you know, and you made a spectacularly witty remark right at the right

00:49:47.440 time. And it was provocative, but not annoying. And so, good work. And then the kid thinks, oh my god,

00:49:53.860 did he notice? And then he's like twice as funny the next day, and maybe not in some unbearable manner.

00:49:59.420 And that really works. It really works. But like I said, you have to quell the envy that would

00:50:04.920 otherwise beset you, and you have to want to aim up, and then you have to not be jealous of the

00:50:09.580 other person's goodness, and you have to be extremely attentive. But man, as a transformation

00:50:14.940 technique, even in extraordinarily difficult relationships, which goes back to your point,

00:50:19.960 there isn't anything I know of that's more effective. And I've been working with moderate

00:50:24.140 Democrats in the United States recently, and with a number of Republicans, and suggesting that

00:50:29.240 to the Democrats, that when the Republicans do something that isn't absolutely 0.98

00:50:34.540 malevolent and stupid, in your opinion, you might want to just say something. Like, 0.99

00:50:41.220 that's not as bad as it could have been, you know? Something at least. And the same for the

00:50:46.280 Republicans in relationship to the Democrats, and that because it's also one of the ways that you

00:50:50.500 can reduce the tit-for-tat proclivity, right? You want to give the devil his due, especially when

00:50:56.340 you're not actually talking to the devil, but just the person who's sitting across you,

00:51:00.180 let's say in the house. And people, that's another issue. I mean, if you want people to

00:51:06.780 appreciate having you around, learning how to listen, that is a skill that is absolutely

00:51:12.300 unbeatable. And this technique of summarizing to their satisfaction, that works like a charm.

00:51:21.680 And it's not, you know, you might be a little awkward when you first try it, and might feel a

00:51:25.980 little manipulative because you're not that good at it. But if you get, if you get expert at it,

00:51:32.020 it's, and you have the greatest conversations with everyone. You know, I had people in my clinical

00:51:37.460 practice who were extraordinarily impaired intellectually and suffering from all sorts

00:51:42.400 of assorted pathologies in addition to that. And if I was listening to them properly, they were as

00:51:47.160 fascinating as anybody I had on the, say, more able and competent end of the spectrum. And you learn so

00:51:52.920 much because there is nothing that people won't tell you if you listen. It is absolutely amazing

00:51:59.960 what people will tell you. And so quickly, they'll reveal things they didn't even know about themselves.

00:52:05.720 And they need to know those things often. They've been hidden for years. It's so rewarding. And then

00:52:11.600 this, this use of attentive reward, that's also, it's, it's, it's a, it's, it's fun in a game-like

00:52:19.840 sense once you learn to play it because you're watching. You think, I'll just wait. This person's

00:52:23.900 going to do something good sooner or later. It's like, pap, good work. And people are so thrilled

00:52:29.100 that that little manifestation of goodness in their heart that managed to sneak out past their cynicism

00:52:36.760 and boredom was recognized. They're so, what is it, what is it, it, it, it, it, it restores their faith

00:52:45.220 in what's good inside them. It really does. It's unbelievably powerful. And so that can work if

00:52:51.820 you're, if you're embroiled in a difficult relationship, you know, and you can't escape

00:52:55.720 easily, or maybe you can't escape on moral grounds. That listening, that's, that helps a lot. You might

00:53:02.420 have to listen a lot. But that use of judicious reward, man, that's a powerful technique. So.

00:53:08.220 Dr. Peterson, thank you so much for your work and your passionate defense of free speech. In relation

00:53:17.500 to, and therapy as well, the UK government's currently consulting on banning so-called conversion

00:53:23.380 therapy. And I wondered what your view was as a therapist on that in relation to talking therapy

00:53:29.140 in particular.

00:53:29.620 Well, the first thing I would say about that is that as soon as it's termed conversion therapy,

00:53:39.100 the argument's already over. Right? Because this is one of the things, conservative politicians

00:53:45.520 are particularly bad at this, by the way. They're, they're, that's why I mentioned at the beginning

00:53:50.320 that you should never discuss a viewpoint diversity. I mean, you think about what you're doing when

00:53:54.940 you discuss viewpoint diversity. You think, you're conservative, let's say, that you've

00:53:59.540 just pulled a fast one on the lefties. It's like, you're so, you know, gung-ho about diversity.

00:54:04.680 What about viewpoint diversity? And you don't even notice that you just subordinated the highest

00:54:10.900 value in the hierarchy of values to diversity. You lose, buddy. It doesn't matter what argument

00:54:18.760 you make after you've done that. It's like, I define the terms of the debate. I established

00:54:24.900 the questions. I, you ceded the terminological ground. You can flap your lips all night, but

00:54:30.680 you're not going to change that. And so the conversion therapy issue right there is the

00:54:36.180 way, as soon as that's framed in that manner, it's a lost cause. Like I had a client, a young

00:54:41.740 man who was being pressured quite intensely into a homosexual relationship by someone who

00:54:47.480 was attracted to him. And he was genuinely confused about his sexuality and certainly about

00:54:52.300 how to respond. Well, I wasn't going to do conversion therapy. I mean, I don't know what's

00:54:58.000 up with this kid. I have no idea. And neither did he. And so the goal there is if someone comes

00:55:03.220 to you who's confused about their sexuality and like, have you met someone who isn't confused

00:55:09.000 about their sexuality? It's really complicated, especially when you're 16, you know. Well, you

00:55:15.480 listen and you try to sort them out. And if you have any sense, you realize that you have

00:55:20.140 enough trouble with your own destiny to not bother imposing your viewpoint, moral or otherwise,

00:55:27.300 on this teenager, you want to help them come to their own conclusions. And it's an axiom

00:55:32.340 of clinical practice that only those formulations that come from the client themselves will result

00:55:39.600 in anything approximating lasting behavioral change. So, you know, you could come to me and

00:55:44.680 I could give you advice. And you might even think it was good advice, but you're not going

00:55:48.880 to take it because you can't even give yourself advice and take it. How are you going to take

00:55:53.740 it from a relative stranger? But if you go through the process of thinking it through, like really

00:55:59.180 deeply thinking it through, and you draw your own conclusions, and then maybe you practice

00:56:04.440 their implementation, there is some possibility of change. And you just can't do that by, what,

00:56:09.880 like conversion therapy. So, and it's partly because there is enough temperamental variability

00:56:16.440 in people that you don't know what the right answer is for the person who comes to see you,

00:56:21.580 no more than you know what the right answer is for your children or for your mate. And hopefully what

00:56:25.900 you do is, in this process of dialogical relationship and mutual revelation, the person's pathway becomes

00:56:35.000 clearer. And I do believe that the goodwill exchange of thought does in fact, well, constitutes that

00:56:45.660 process. So, yeah, as soon as it's conversion therapy, the game's already lost. But there's a fair bit of

00:56:55.920 fluidity in human sexuality. And people have to come to terms with that. You know, you might say as a rule

00:57:01.440 of thumb, and I think this is true, your life is going to be a lot simpler if you adopt something 0.96

00:57:06.340 approximating traditional sexual roles. And so you step outside of that confine at your peril. But it

00:57:13.760 might also be your necessity. Who's to say? So, and you help the person, in humility, you help the person

00:57:20.760 discover that for themselves. And so, so I think the talk of conversion therapy, you know, if someone's

00:57:27.820 saying, well, I'll cure you, cure you of your homosexuality, it's like, well, it's not a 1.00

00:57:33.440 disease, first of all. And so it doesn't need a cure. And probably you can't do that anyways. And 0.96

00:57:38.060 it's not, it's not the proper way to advertise clinical services, let's say, because that isn't

00:57:44.300 really how a clinical relationship works. So the argument in some sense is beside the point as far as

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00:59:12.800 Thank you so much for such an amazing talk and the definition you gave of freedom of speech I think

00:59:21.480 is not heard enough. Something I would like you to perhaps talk about is many people talk about the

00:59:28.600 failure of the university as the failure of the marketplace and many say the failure of their

00:59:33.400 leaders? Or the university setting as a failure of the marketplace and some say it is because freedom

00:59:41.560 of speech has fallen out of fashion and is not used enough and being criticized too much. My question

00:59:49.000 is do you think the marketplace of idea if you believe in such a thing can be fixed by imposing,

00:59:56.200 I mean posing, putting more up front what you've been redefining as freedom of speech? Or is there

01:00:03.280 something in the marketplace of idea that is broken and perhaps we should fight specifically some ideas

01:00:09.640 all the time and it's not good enough to have them on the marketplace of ideas that are very evil and

01:00:15.160 bad themselves? Is there something?

01:00:17.300 Well it might not be good enough but it's the best we have. That's the thing you know and it's also the

01:00:23.440 case that substitutions tend to make things worse. We don't have anything well what do we have except for

01:00:30.220 the free expression of ideas? We have tyranny and conflict because the alternative to politics is war.

01:00:37.460 It's not peace that's for sure. Peace that's hard man that's a hard thing to attain and so you have the

01:00:44.580 intense battleground of ideas and you know the people who are concerned about let's say offense

01:00:51.800 like they have their point you know words can hurt and they can hurt deeply but they don't hurt as much

01:00:57.060 as sticks and they don't hurt as much as knives. So it's a little bit of what ails you use you might say

01:01:04.020 to stave off something far worse and that doesn't mean that the intensity of discussion

01:01:08.920 I mean you can have discussions that are incredibly upsetting but the question is well what do you have

01:01:16.680 when you don't have them? And if you think that what you have by not having those discussions is peace

01:01:21.680 then you're either naive, willfully blind or malevolent. Those are the options. So I mean I've seen in my

01:01:30.100 clinical practice one thing I got deeply convinced of and it wasn't something I wanted to be convinced

01:01:35.720 of I would say is I never saw anyone in my clinical practice ever get away with anything not even once

01:01:42.240 you know so they'd come because they were miserable for one reason or another and sometimes deeply

01:01:46.460 miserable and we would trace back the genesis of the misery. There's always almost always an act of

01:01:53.420 deception at its root either their own deception of themselves or some other some other person who

01:01:58.840 putatively loved them deceiving them and so it was unbelievably painful to walk through that in this

01:02:06.380 free speech sort of manner but the alternative which was living with the insane tension that accompanies

01:02:14.200 the unrevealed truth let's say in the bosom of a dysfunctional family like as terrible as it is

01:02:21.320 wading through the monstrosities living with them endlessly as they grow that is no solution.

01:02:28.840 And so we don't want to be Pollyanna about this like there's nothing

01:02:34.380 free speech does not lack savagery

01:02:39.760 but compared to the alternative it's it's infinitely better and it's the only

01:02:46.340 valid pathway to peace except maybe the peace of the grave you know I mean if you and I disagree

01:02:53.700 and I kill you well that's the end of that argument but it's not so good for you you know and it's

01:03:01.160 really not the end of the argument anyways because the probability that you are revealing in your 0.98

01:03:06.960 opposition to my thought something that will then reveal itself within me in opposition to my thought

01:03:12.080 is almost certain and so we have to hash through the ideas to make peace and you know the idea of

01:03:19.000 free speech you say free speech has fallen out of fashion it's like was thought fallen out of fashion

01:03:23.900 because they're the same thing like most people I would say 95 percent you know six percent of people buy

01:03:32.100 books okay how many people engage in internal dialogical critical self-evaluation

01:03:38.300 10 percent maybe you you it takes a lot of training you think what you have to do

01:03:44.820 a thought has to reveal itself to you in the theater of your imagination

01:03:48.760 and so that happens to everyone to to a lesser greater degree you know some people have a thought a month

01:03:54.740 and some people are just flooded with them constantly it's a temperamental variable and a variable

01:03:59.560 associated with intelligence but once the thought emerges you can either accept it as a revealed truth

01:04:06.180 which is the general course of action you know thought occurs to you and because you're a naive thinker you just think well

01:04:12.440 that's how it is but let's say you're a bit trained you can divide yourself into two avatars one takes the pro side and

01:04:19.340 one takes the con side and you can have the debate internally but you have to be

01:04:23.740 unbelievably highly trained to do that now all of you people the vast majority of you do that as a matter of course but don't be

01:04:30.080 thinking that's the way people work because it isn't most of what passes for thought and i'm not being cynical about this and i'm not

01:04:37.580 looking down on people you know people all people have their their their talents and and and and their abilities and some people are good

01:04:47.180 at dialogical dialectic thinking some people don't have that skill particularly the way that most people think is by talking you know

01:04:56.080 you know they and you see this if you have a close relationship with someone perhaps who isn't as intellectually inclined as you

01:05:02.820 they'll be pondering something and they'll sort of offer a thought in a in a questioning sort of manner and

01:05:08.760 it's an invitation it's like well i thought of this and i'm kind of scared of it or i'm doubtful about it and

01:05:15.540 what do you think of it and then you play the role of what would otherwise be an internal avatar and

01:05:22.920 they play the opposite role and maybe you switch you know from time to time if it's kind of playful

01:05:27.220 and you evaluate the thought well that can't fall out of fashion it's like that's like reading a map

01:05:34.960 has fallen we need to get somewhere but reading a map has fallen out of fashion it's like well we're not

01:05:40.580 going to get anywhere then are we because that's how you get places and there's no that's why i said

01:05:45.940 earlier freedom of speech is not just another freedom among freedoms and certainly not another right

01:05:51.320 among rights it's certainly not and that right is certainly not granted to us by the social contract

01:05:57.920 or a derivative of government fiat that's an absolute misapprehension which is why i think as

01:06:04.000 well that there has to be something like for atheists and believers alike a divine hierarchy of value

01:06:10.240 outside the political process to which the political process refers and one of the wonderful things

01:06:15.480 about the english law common law tradition is it's grounded in such a metaphysical reality such that

01:06:21.320 we have all the rights there are except those that are expressly forbidden to us by the common law tradition

01:06:28.900 it's like yes good work english people so you know as opposed to french civil law let's say

01:06:35.640 so because there you're granted the rights by the state and that's just

01:06:39.300 your rights are not a social construct that's just simply not the case it's not the case psychologically

01:06:45.960 or physiologically for that matter so

01:06:48.740 hi um first of all i'd like to say thank you for having the courage to pursue the truth and i'm very

01:06:57.440 proud that you're canadian especially since truth has been so fraught lately in canadian politics

01:07:02.740 my question is what would you say to someone who has been through a traumatic experience and wants

01:07:09.380 to avoid the culture of victimhood that encourages people to identify with their trauma and capitalize

01:07:15.820 off of being the most victimized person okay well there's two things that i addressed there

01:07:22.560 people say this courage they say they talk to me about my courage fairly frequently and that's not

01:07:28.720 right exactly i i just learned to be afraid of the right thing and i really mean that i mean i saw

01:07:37.140 an endless repetition in my clinical practice and in my own private life when my eyes were open

01:07:43.200 the consequences of not saying what was true it's like whatever hell you might fall into by opening

01:07:50.800 your mouth when you have something to say that isn't popular it's nothing like the hell that you're 0.69

01:07:54.720 going to envelop yourself in if you lose control of your own tongue and mind and i like i said in my

01:08:00.800 clinical practice i never saw anyone get away with anything even once and so all you have in a

01:08:08.520 situation like that is what is the truth now you know of course you only have your approximations to

01:08:14.500 the truth but that's better than nothing and so you need to be afraid of the right thing and you

01:08:20.760 should be afraid of contaminating your soul with deceit that's what you should be afraid of that 0.94

01:08:26.200 will definitely do you in and i know exactly how what happens is you know garbage in garbage out the 0.98

01:08:32.340 old programmer saying goes and so you'll fill your head with nonsense and no one will call you on it

01:08:38.000 except you but you can still that voice if you try hard enough you just wait until you get in real

01:08:43.380 trouble you know one day there'll come a point where you have to make a decision and the decision is the

01:08:49.640 difference between life and death or worse between someone else's life and death or worse between

01:08:55.500 health and the suffering that's worse than death and because you've compromised yourself to such a

01:09:01.920 degree you will not be able to rely on your judgment and you will make the mistake you shouldn't make

01:09:06.980 and then you're done and that will absolutely happen so you tell mistruths voluntarily at your

01:09:17.760 exceptional peril and you avoid the unpleasant truths that you might have to delve into in all their

01:09:23.820 messiness at your absolute peril and the peril of everyone around you and so if you see that you become

01:09:30.700 afraid of that that's hell and hell is worse than death so and i mean that most sincerely so okay and so

01:09:40.400 that's the courage issue and then you asked about sorry i'm sorry i obliterated the last part of your question

01:09:48.000 traumatic experience and wants to avoid the culture of victimhood um or identifying as a victim

01:09:56.980 yeah well well well the first the first thing is well if you want to avoid that you're sort of on the

01:10:03.680 right path already right because you have some vision of what it might be like not to be traumatized

01:10:08.460 to not be a victim well first of all i mean in some sense there's no shortage of victimhood i mean

01:10:14.980 no the existential psychotherapist in the 50s taking a page from heidegger talked about thrownness right

01:10:22.180 the arbitrary nature of our existence i mean here you are you you have the ethnicity and race that was

01:10:28.820 bestowed upon you you had no choice in that you're the victim and the beneficiary of this particular

01:10:34.100 historical moment you know you and you're the victim and beneficiary of all the atrocity and

01:10:39.480 the wonders of the past you deal with your own emotions you deal with the fact of this specific

01:10:45.060 time and place all of that and there is a sense of well there's a sense of mortality certainly that's

01:10:52.920 associated that with finitude and mortality and you can easily say in some sense that we're all

01:10:57.300 victimized deeply by our own susceptibility to vulnerability and tragedy and i think that's true

01:11:03.960 but but then the question is well what's the best way of dealing with that and falling prey to it

01:11:12.180 when my daughter was young she was very ill and one of the things we told her repeatedly in which i

01:11:18.280 think she did very well to her credit was often she was too ill really to be able to go to school

01:11:24.120 because she couldn't wake up in the morning and she was in pain and but she needed to go to school

01:11:28.040 and well one of the things we told her was don't use your illness as an excuse

01:11:33.580 right because you're already in trouble kid you know you got your problems and they're serious

01:11:39.500 but if you can hold on to the distinction between the part of you that can in spite of this and the

01:11:45.520 part that can't because of it and not blur that distinction then that's one more thing you have on

01:11:51.060 your side while you're attempting to struggle through this and to her credit she managed that

01:11:56.660 and quite pristinely and that was extraordinarily helpful it was very difficult at times

01:12:01.240 after she had had her hip replaced she she couldn't get around that well and so we decided to put her 0.99

01:12:10.080 in a motorcycle course which was rather terrifying thing to do since she just had a hip replacement but

01:12:15.060 she needed to have a scooter to get around and so she went with her mother to this motorcycle

01:12:20.360 course and they were driving motorcycles not scooters and at one point one of the people who

01:12:27.600 was being trained wiped out on the motorcycle and you know it was rather traumatic let's say and

01:12:35.500 she woke up the next day and was too afraid to go to the course

01:12:40.080 and so we said well you know it's understandable why don't you just get in the car and go to the

01:12:46.620 course and see when you get there if you can manage it and she got herself out of bed and 1.00

01:12:51.100 went and managed it and then she passed the course and then she had a scooter and could zoom around the

01:12:55.700 city for the next couple of years and so that was really good but it was it was very hard to draw that

01:13:02.240 line right because in some sense she'd been victimized by this arbitrary illness and you know you you tend as a

01:13:08.620 parent to have an outpouring of empathy the empathy that can destroy under those circumstances because

01:13:13.580 you you coddle the person more than is absolutely necessary right and you have every reason to because

01:13:20.340 they're suffering like mad but you want to be a victim and be a tragic figure you know and you might say

01:13:29.060 yes but you wouldn't if you thought it through so and then if someone asked me that question say

01:13:36.140 in a clinical setting i would do a little analysis of it's like okay well you're suffering from this

01:13:41.080 traumatic experience you want to get over it we'd have to figure out what the practical steps might

01:13:45.680 be and that might be finding somebody to talk to or there's other ways of dealing with it but you

01:13:50.100 delve into the practical realm to sort of address that so

01:13:53.300 thank you so much for your talk on a couple of occasions you mentioned judeo-christian values

01:14:06.940 during the talk and in the recent question you talked of the english common law which sort of alludes

01:14:13.080 to the divine one in every six people in the world live in india today india has a democratic secular

01:14:22.520 constitution and yet the culture is vedic and caste is central to society how would you speak

01:14:33.280 about the freedom of speech into a culture that has that in its faith and beliefs

01:14:41.360 and at the same time in certain fringes of the political movement certain radical ideological

01:14:51.520 movements there's a belief that these freedoms are a western import so how would you healthily

01:15:00.600 speak into that culture about upholding the freedoms well the first thing i would want to do if i was

01:15:08.660 doing that practically speaking is i would like to talk to as many people who hold those particular

01:15:13.480 views as i possibly could to find out why they think the way they think you know when they say

01:15:18.720 that it's a western import well what do they mean because in some sense it is a western import i mean india

01:15:24.040 has a body of laws that at least in part is derived from the english common law tradition and so

01:15:28.720 it was imposed upon or introduced into that culture now it took to a large degree and i don't believe

01:15:39.040 that you can import a propositional structure without the underlying imagistic ethos and behavioral

01:15:46.680 proclivity it just won't work right because the infrastructure so to speak isn't there and so the fact that it has

01:15:53.980 worked at least to some well i would say some remarkable degree because india is really a remarkable

01:15:58.860 success story indicates that there is some correspondence between the english common law

01:16:03.920 tradition which emerged gradually and in some sense incrementally and organically out of the will of the english

01:16:11.080 population and it matches the same strivings and proclivities that you might find elsewhere

01:16:16.980 i would also say that the the relatively radical comparative economic success of states settled by

01:16:24.240 england in in its in its history of colonization let's say also points to a decent fit between the english

01:16:31.900 common law tradition and a whole variety of other cultures now that doesn't mean the match is perfect

01:16:36.800 and so to some degree the argument is correct it's imposed at least as a set of propositions but

01:16:43.140 it's incorrect because i think it reflects something that's fundamental at the level we've been

01:16:48.060 discussing today but if i was trying to mediate those disputes and i've been having increasing

01:16:53.560 numbers of conversations with people on the islamic side of the world trying to do exactly that is

01:16:58.800 the first thing i want to do is listen a lot because i don't know what i'm so ignorant about such

01:17:04.540 things i just don't know what people actually think and so you can't begin to address a question like

01:17:10.400 that till you find out why those who stand in opposition to your claims let's say why they

01:17:16.160 think the way they think now the probability that there's no tradition say within indian families that

01:17:22.780 approximates free speech and flourishing families it's like that's zero because it's not possible

01:17:29.860 you know and if it's just a tyranny let's if it's a tyranny well tyrannies aren't sustainable

01:17:35.640 chimps can't even sustain tyrannies you know and i'm saying that for technical reasons you know

01:17:41.660 because there is this idea that's quite promoted that complex animals like chimpanzees live in

01:17:47.660 dominance hierarchies and it's the meanest toughest male chimp that rules the hierarchy right and he's 1.00

01:17:53.900 like stalin except in chimp form which actually places him somewhat higher on the evolutionary scale 0.86

01:17:59.580 than stalin and so but franz de wal has investigated the structure of those societies in great detail and

01:18:06.300 it's simply not the case that the most tyrannical chimp is on top in fact the chimp males who sustain 1.00

01:18:12.620 leadership across reasonable amounts of time are unbelievably reciprocal in their interactions

01:18:17.760 especially with other males but they're also particularly attentive to the females and the infants

01:18:23.040 and part of the reason for that is well let's say you're you know joe brute chimp and you're

01:18:28.400 strutting around like a fullback and in georgia constantly showing off your physical prowess it's like

01:18:34.120 well one day you're a little sick or a little tired and two chimps that you've tyrannized will tear you into 0.98

01:18:40.100 pieces and that happens quite frequently in chimpanzee disputes where a two tyrannical male will be

01:18:47.480 literally torn to pieces because chimps are very brutal when they get their mind to it and they're just taken out

01:18:54.300 and so this this there's a principle of reciprocal altruism let's say that's associated with the free

01:19:02.340 exchange of ideas and something like mutual valuation and that's recognition of the soul i would say on a

01:19:09.060 metaphysical level that's a precondition for peace everywhere not just in the west and that's been

01:19:15.860 propositionalized and formalized into law in different ways in different cultures and sometimes

01:19:21.080 not formalized so much yet let's say because in many cultures are governed primarily by ritual and

01:19:28.840 custom rather than you know a fully articulated body of laws but the fact that that does not mean by any

01:19:36.260 stretch of the imagination that english common law is somehow purely arbitrary social construction

01:19:41.600 it's like that that's such a it's a preposterous claim so i would start by listening and find out exactly what

01:19:50.360 the issues are and then well then proceed from there

01:19:53.360 thank you so much dr peterson for what you've given us this evening um you've spoken now in a very

01:20:06.460 complimentary way about english common law and i'm very pleased to hear it um but freedom of speech

01:20:15.460 is something novel uh largely in in our civilization um you just have to think about how dissenters and

01:20:26.700 catholics were treated in this country not too long ago you couldn't go to this institution 0.99

01:20:31.400 if you were not a communicant of the anglican church um i'm not an anglican but i sympathize with them

01:20:38.400 because if you've got something good you want coercive and directive measures to protect that thing

01:20:46.440 and in fact uh you might be committing a very serious injustice if you don't put the

01:20:57.000 context and structure in place to prevent people who want to repudiate that good thing

01:21:03.580 from invading and corrupting what has taken so long to put together and spoken like a true conservative

01:21:12.200 and i died and that's not ironic or denigrating i mean yes absolutely so how do you reconcile that

01:21:19.660 well there is no permanent reconciliation of that conundrum right because and i've traced the

01:21:28.480 development of that paradox back as far as i'm concerned back into mesopotamia passed through

01:21:35.000 egypt the egyptians had two primary fundamental male gods and one of them was osiris and osiris was the

01:21:44.960 founder of the egyptian state mythologically speaking kind of like george washington but he

01:21:49.660 was also the spirit of stone and so he was the he was the representation of conservative order that's a

01:21:56.900 good way of thinking about it but the egyptians portrayed him as old and willfully blind specifically

01:22:04.900 willfully blind which is extremely interesting and subject as a consequence of his willful blindness

01:22:11.580 to the evil machinations of set and the sun sets and so that's how you know the egyptians thought

01:22:18.620 about the sun and set and so set was the evil uncle essentially and he

01:22:25.320 cuts osiris up into his pieces which were also by the way the provinces of the egyptian state

01:22:33.180 and sentences him to the underworld and then rules in his stead that's the danger of an unthinking

01:22:38.960 conservatism because all our cognitive and social structures deteriorate with the passage of time

01:22:45.280 because time changes all things and so we're always fighting to maintain what we have and that includes

01:22:50.920 our categories of perception themselves in the face of a continual onslaught of novelty at virtually

01:22:56.980 every level of analysis while the second god of the of the egyptians this is a very cursory overview

01:23:03.840 obviously was horus and horus was the son of the he was the rightful son of the true king

01:23:10.100 raised outside egypt and alienated in some sense from the tradition that gave rise to him

01:23:17.500 but he was simultaneously the falcon and the egyptian eye that famous egyptian eye that open eye

01:23:23.300 so he was the god of attention and he his mother is isis and she's the chaos that arises when order

01:23:31.580 disintegrates gives rise to the hero horus goes to the underworld to rescue his father and the egyptians

01:23:39.520 conceptualized the soul of the pharaoh so that would be the proper source of sovereignty itself

01:23:45.340 as the union of osiris and horus the living union of of osiris and horus so they would celebrate the

01:23:53.120 pharaoh like you do when when a new king is is uh crowned in the aftermath of the death of a

01:23:59.000 a reigning monarch the king is dead long live the king right the kingship passes and that's osiris

01:24:05.780 the tradition passes but it has to be the tradition has to be living it has to be allied with attention

01:24:11.900 and the mesopotamians put a modification on that which was also magic speech so tradition always has to

01:24:19.320 be allied with attention and it's like you know this is true if you own a house you know especially

01:24:25.400 if it's an older house well the four walls are there and they're necessary and you want to protect

01:24:30.100 and and uh and preserve them but you have to maintain them and sometimes you have to replace them

01:24:36.540 and how do you tell and the answer is with a careful and judicious eye with some humility and

01:24:43.180 gratitude for what you already have but with some understanding that in the face of continual

01:24:47.720 transformation some change is necessary and then you might ask well how do you decide when change

01:24:53.100 is necessary and the answer is by engaging in political dialogue mediated by free speech

01:24:59.100 that is literally because this is an insoluble problem the conservatives are not correct but

01:25:06.800 neither are the progressives it takes a dialogue between them to specify the target and it's partly

01:25:13.160 because the environment itself shifts and and changes literally unpredictably and so all we have is

01:25:20.320 well consciousness itself is the mechanism that mediates between order and chaos and and political

01:25:27.540 dialogue when it's done in goodwill is the manifestation of consciousness in the repair of mechanisms that

01:25:34.200 need to be sustained and transformed and so there's no end to the necessary dialogue because

01:25:39.920 the future differs from the past and that's the limit of conservative thinking right it's like

01:25:44.960 well the noble traditions it's like fair enough man if you can walk down a road that's already been

01:25:49.800 walked down successfully that's a wise choice but sometimes you know there's a flood and the road

01:25:57.520 has changed the underlying topography has shifted and then you wander blindly into into a cliff or into a pit

01:26:04.640 so even as a conservative and conservatives have more of the temperamental proclivity let's say to preserve and to

01:26:12.340 respect but they still have to be open to the transformations that are necessary to keep abreast of the times

01:26:19.000 and so we try right we winnow through the wheat and the chaff of the past and we attempt to garner the wheat and

01:26:26.440 dispense with the chaff and the only way we can do that is through continual dialogue with ourselves honest dialogue with 0.99

01:26:32.840 ourselves and with others so

01:26:35.080 um you speak about the concept of the soul um do you associate this with any psychological constructs

01:26:48.240 not any psychological constructs that are more valid than the notion of the soul

01:26:55.840 no there's there's i would say what we mean by soul is something like animating spirit and you might

01:27:04.780 say well what's a spirit and well that's actually rather easy to answer so when a child of four is

01:27:12.240 playing house let's say when a child of four is playing house she acts out the role of the mother

01:27:19.740 but acting out that's a strange thing right because she doesn't literally duplicate in her 0.97

01:27:25.800 actions or her perceptions in the game what she observed her mother literally doing so for

01:27:33.140 example she didn't go into her mother's bedroom when her mother awoke and watched her turn her head

01:27:37.720 in a particular way to awaken and count the number of blinks so that she could mimic that in her play

01:27:42.680 and you know you think that's absurd but it's not absurd if it's just mimicry it's not it's unbelievably

01:27:49.640 sophisticated so what the girl does is she watches her mother manifest maternal behavior across a vast

01:27:56.380 array of instances and she integrates that with the image of the mother she's received from all the

01:28:01.320 books she's been read and all the little movies she's watched the disney movies and so forth and

01:28:05.700 she abstracts out the animating principle of the maternal and then she embodies that in play and

01:28:12.140 usually with a little boy and that's practice for what's going to come later it's unbelievably

01:28:16.500 sophisticated and she's embodying a spirit and the spirit there is the abstraction of the central

01:28:22.920 animating principle from multiple embodiments of its manifestation and if you think children can't

01:28:29.840 do that well then you don't know anything about children because they do that all the time

01:28:33.640 in their pretend play which is a necessary precursor to healthy psychological development

01:28:38.800 and so part of what we refer to as the soul is the presence of that spirit or maybe even the capacity

01:28:45.720 of embodying such spirits and it's very difficult to know how deep that goes you know i had a vision

01:28:51.860 at one point of all the men in my life who've been particularly influential in a benevolent way

01:28:57.760 you know and so and you think well just the mirror notion of the idea that there could be a benevolent

01:29:04.140 way that would unite the acts of benevolence across a series of men that's all comprehensible to you

01:29:10.580 that's you take that as a matter of course when you say that there are such things as good men and you

01:29:17.340 can identify them right something stable about whatever is good across multiple manifestations of

01:29:22.780 of incarnation let's say and i saw that transform into the the father person of the trinity as the

01:29:30.580 embodiment of that benevolent spirit now i don't have any idea what that means metaphysically because

01:29:35.540 who does but but that that spirit manifesting itself within is certainly part of what we refer to when

01:29:44.340 we talk about the soul and you can see that shine through people i mean it's part of what gives someone

01:29:49.600 charisma it's part of what elicits the instinct to imitate in you you know when you see that even in

01:29:56.780 simple things when you see a remarkable athlete do something incredibly athletic to put the goal

01:30:04.220 to put the soccer ball the football ball through the net to score the goal and everybody leaps to

01:30:09.800 their feet in celebration of that well that's that's a celebration of the divine capacity to hit the target

01:30:15.580 dead on and it grips you at such a low level way down inside your soul that you're compelled to your

01:30:22.240 feet to cheer and you don't even know what you're doing but you enjoy it that's for sure and that

01:30:28.460 enjoyment is also a sign of the depth and utility of that response you see this in all all the things

01:30:35.360 that people do that are you know so-called popular entertainment it's unbelievably sophisticated

01:30:42.680 the soul is participating in that in the fullest extent and you know you can say well there's no use

01:30:48.540 for the religious there's no necessary use for the religious terminology it's like well until you

01:30:53.620 come up with a better word there's plenty of use for it because it's a very complex and deep phenomena

01:30:58.700 and to you know just cast it into the realm of superstition in some casual manner is it's just not

01:31:06.960 helpful not in any possible it's not helpful scientifically it's not helpful ethically it's not helpful

01:31:12.320 existentially try treating someone for a while as if they don't have a soul just really i mean it just

01:31:20.080 you know treat them like a deterministic machine if that's your belief really act it out you'll be

01:31:27.720 like the most hated person in town in about 15 minutes well i mean what do you make of practical

01:31:33.420 evidence like that i mean you interact with people as if they're free souls capable of choosing between

01:31:40.040 good and evil that's what you do all the time and maybe you can addle yourself out of that by some 0.98

01:31:45.460 ridiculous rationalist ideology but that just means you're kind of a gabbling fool and it's just going 0.99

01:31:51.600 to make you trip over things you don't even notice in all of your social interactions and you tell me 1.00

01:31:57.760 i don't care how you think philosophically or ideologically you bloody well know that what i just said

01:32:02.880 is true so and that's true even when you're interacting with an infant or a small child it's true when

01:32:08.760 you're dealing with someone who's elderly and virtually incapacitated in every way you still see 0.99

01:32:14.340 that divine spark for lack of a better term and we do lack a better term by the way you see that

01:32:21.220 everywhere if your eyes are open and if you're willing to see it and to the degree that you're

01:32:24.980 responsive to that then your actions are guided by love and your words are guided by truth

01:32:30.460 thank you very much

01:32:34.200 thank you very much

01:32:39.780 thank you very much

01:32:45.360 so

01:32:47.360 well ladies and gentlemen that concludes the formal part of the evening's proceedings thank

01:33:17.020 you so much for coming along uh it would have been so easy for our speaker tonight never to set foot

01:33:24.760 uh in this university ever again uh it would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to go

01:33:32.640 to any of the other hundreds of universities that that would have rolled out the red carpet and

01:33:38.140 had him back after his marathon bout with all sorts of difficulties over the last two or three years

01:33:44.440 and i think it's a testament to the caliber of his character uh his generosity

01:33:51.180 and above all his graciousness that he was willing not only to come here and speak to us this evening

01:33:57.600 but but to spend the best part of two weeks with us opening up all his views to scrutiny to criticism

01:34:04.820 to debate

01:34:06.080 and i've been going at him pretty much all morning

01:34:09.060 and he's he's got more of that to come

01:34:12.300 uh and this is just just a slice of some of the engagements that that he's going to be undertaking

01:34:18.480 uh here and i think it's quite quite remarkable that he's got that kind of resilience stamina that that raw

01:34:25.960 authenticity that has moved and changed the lives of so many so it's been a great privilege for me to

01:34:33.980 be part of this and i hope that the same is true for you thank you all so much for coming i believe that

01:34:40.320 uh colin hewlett here will be taking uh photos uh with jordan as he may be tempted to come out

01:34:46.680 uh so you won't have to uh fumble awkwardly with your iphones and i'm sure he'll be around for a few

01:34:51.580 minutes just to to speak if if you would um uh be be uh cognizant of his time um but but i'm sure

01:34:58.380 he'd like to say uh hello to as many of you as possible if the last few days walking around the

01:35:02.960 streets of cambridge are anything to go by thank you all so much

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - March 31, 2022

240. Why Free Speech is the Antidote to Ignorance and Corruption ｜ Cambridge University Speech

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