Rule 1: Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement. This episode is a compilation of every single rule in Beyond Order by Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Ben Shapiro, and more. This episode discusses Rule 1, "Do not casually denigrate Social Institutions or Creative Achievement." This rule is from the first chapter of Beyond Order, which is titled "Do Not Carelessly Denigrate Social Institutions and Creative Achievement: A Handbook for a Creative Mind." It is written by the author of the book, "Beyond Order: A Guide to a Creative Life" and is available for purchase in Kindle, iBook, Paperback, Hardcover, and Audio Book format. If you don't have a Kindle device, you can download a free eReader app from Amazon so you can read the entire book on any laptop, desktop, smartphone, or tablet device, free of charge. Kindle $9.99, or buy it for 99.99 at amazon.com/beyondorder. iBook $99.99. Kindle Free eReader is Free with an Audible membership trial, which includes unlimited eReader membership and access to all other third-party and podcasting services such as Audible, and Audible free of course, Audible. Audible is Free for Audible memberships! Kindle Free with Audible $9,99, Kindle Free, or Audible Free, $99, $24.95, and Vimeo Free, Free, & Audible 4 Provenible Free. Audio Book is Free! Book Recommendation is Free, too! Music: "Novelist Book: "Book Recommendation" by John Chamberlain or "Book recommendation: "The Best of Myths and Legends" by John Chamberlain, by and All Rights Reserved Recorded Recorded in Los Angeles, CA, $19.99 Copyright 2019 by Pondels, Inc., Published in 2019 Download Free on All Previous Podcast Epilogue (Coming Soon . Learn more about John Chamberlain and his new book: "Beyond order" Available in Kindle Freebie: "The Art of the Creative Mind" and Other Goodness and Goodness (Coming soon, $5,000, $6,000 , $7,500, $895,00,00
00:00:01.000Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
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00:00:52.000Welcome to episode 260 of the JBP podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson.
00:00:59.000We've created a compilation episode for every rule in Beyond Order.
00:01:03.000So this episode discusses rule one, do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement, and features Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Ben Shapiro, and more.
00:01:14.000I've also released my 150th episode on YouTube featuring my dad.
00:01:20.000If you want to check it out, look it up on YouTube.
00:01:23.000He talks about his response to the recent Sports Illustrated cover on there and more.
00:01:28.000Without further ado, please enjoy rule one of our Beyond Order series.
00:01:32.000Rule one, do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.
00:01:59.000This paragraph is from a section entitled, What Should We Point To?
00:02:04.000It is worth considering deeply just how necessity limits the universe of viable solutions and implementable plans.
00:02:13.000First, a plan must in principle solve some genuine problem.
00:02:19.000Second, it must appeal to others, often in the face of competing plans, or those others will not cooperate and might well object.
00:02:30.000If I value something, therefore, I must determine how to value it so that others potentially benefit.
00:02:38.000It cannot just be good for me. It must be good for me and the people around me.
00:02:46.000Which means that there are even more constraints on how the world must be perceived and acted upon.
00:02:51.000The manner in which I view and value the world, integrally associated with the plans I am making, has to work for me, my family, and the broader community.
00:03:02.000Furthermore, it needs to work today in a manner that does not make a worse hash of tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year, even the next decade or century.
00:03:13.000A good solution to an important problem must be repeatable, without deterioration across repetitions.
00:03:20.000Iterable, in a word, across people and across time.
00:03:24.000These universal constraints, manifest biologically and imposed socially, reduce the complexity of the world to something approximating a universally understandable domain of value.
00:03:40.000Although there are an unlimited number of problems, as well as an unlimited number of potential solutions,
00:03:47.000there are a comparatively limited number of solutions that work practically, psychologically, and socially simultaneously.
00:03:57.000The fact of limited solutions implies the existence of something like a natural ethic, variable, perhaps, as human languages are variable,
00:04:07.000but still characterized by something solid and universally recognizable at its base.
00:04:13.000It is the reality of this natural ethic that makes thoughtless denigration of social institutions both wrong and dangerous.
00:04:21.000Wrong and dangerous because those institutions have evolved to solve problems that must be solved for life to continue.
00:04:29.000They are by no means perfect, but making them better rather than worse is a tricky problem indeed.
00:04:36.000Well, so this book, the first chapter is do not casually denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.
00:04:46.000And I picked that quite carefully because, again, the liberal types are more likely to criticize social institutions.
00:04:52.000You don't want to do that casually because they structure things and protect you in a way that you are likely not even aware of.
00:05:04.000And the conservative always says, look, be careful when you change something because you're changing a bunch of things and you don't know what's going to happen.
00:05:11.000So be careful. But social institutions can become corrupt even just as a consequence of aging.
00:05:18.000And so they have to be updated. So they can't stay static.
00:05:21.000But that doesn't mean you shouldn't respect them.
00:05:23.000And then creative achievements on the other side and conservatives, for example, they have a harder time with open people, creative people.
00:05:31.000You know, the best personality predictor of liberalism is high openness, which is a creativity dimension.
00:05:37.000Well, it's easy to dismiss art, for example, as especially if it doesn't exactly speak to you.
00:05:46.000But it's through artistic endeavors, through creative achievement that the process of update occurs.
00:05:51.000And so regardless of your political temperament, you need to see these these forces.
00:05:59.000You need to see the value in these forces and have some respect for them.
00:06:03.000I think what happens if you get educated, hopefully, is that you get educated beyond the confines of your temperament.
00:06:11.000So so so that's why I thought you're the ordering.
00:06:15.000It's so interesting that you said you intentionally, of course, you intentionally did it.
00:06:19.000But that so do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievements.
00:06:22.000So that's chapter one. And I thought it was interesting because, you know, one of the things that I've been talking about for the last couple of years, but especially in the last year.
00:06:30.000And our friend Ben Shapiro wrote a whole book about it is the disintegration of so many of our institutions.
00:06:36.000And that I think the great debate right now is can some of these institutions survive or do we need all new institutions?
00:06:45.000Now, I know you're talking about social institutions, not just academic institutions or, you know, we're talking about cultural institutions.
00:06:52.000What do you what do you what do you feel in that in that argument, whether can some things just be left to disintegrate and we rebuild or do we do we constantly end up in a destruction and a rebirth?
00:07:08.000Because right now we're watching so many institutions just just crumble.
00:07:12.000Well, I tend to start local when I'm thinking, you know, so the because it simplifies things.
00:07:18.000Well, the first institution is the sovereign individual. We don't want to let that crumble.
00:07:23.000And the more that you're able to live in a relationship with truth, I would say the better job you're doing of protecting your integrity as a sovereign individual, start with that.
00:07:37.000It would be a shame to lose the family.
00:07:41.000People derive a tremendous amount of the meaning of their life from their family and then those intense relationships.
00:08:15.000I think part of the problem, of course, is that everything is changing so rapidly that it's very difficult to say what should be kept and what shouldn't be.
00:08:52.000How much of this do you think has to do with the speed?
00:08:55.000Because actually, I remember on sort of the last maybe quarter of the tour, one of the things that you talked about a lot was how the internet was changing us.
00:09:03.000How the speed of information was changing us.
00:09:05.000How you as a random person, no matter where you are in the world, you might be able to send out a tweet or create a meme that could change the world like that.
00:09:16.000So how much do you think the speed is all part of this in ways that were literally unimaginable three decades ago?
00:09:56.000So that puts a tremendous amount of stress on everyone.
00:10:02.000When you talk about the creative achievement part of this, one of the things I've been thinking about lately is that I don't remember the last time I heard a new musician that I really loved or saw a piece of art that was new that I really loved.
00:10:17.000You know, it seems so rare because of what's happened with cancel culture that the people that should be showing us things are not showing them.
00:25:57.000And that has to be your fundamental ethos.
00:25:59.000And it's a decision that despite all of the calamities of being, that your primary ethical obligation is to work for the betterment of yourself and others.
00:26:14.000And that's a very complex decision because there's so much of you that's twisted and turned against existence itself because of its suffering and complexity.
00:26:24.000It's very hard to get your head straight about that.
00:26:27.000And so you get warped and twisted by resentment and deceit and temptations of various sorts.
00:26:34.000So that has to be straightened out so that you are aiming in the right direction.
00:26:39.000And once you manage that, or perhaps in conjunction with that, you have to watch what you say.
00:26:47.000You have to say what you believe to be true.
00:26:50.000Not because you're trying to accomplish something specific with what you're saying, but because you're attempting to represent what's happening in front of you as accurately as you possibly can and let go of the consequences.
00:27:05.000And so, and then you search for this, you search for this, you search for the engagement that that produces.
00:27:15.000And this is one of the things I love about long form podcasts is that when a conversation takes off properly and it's dynamic and unscripted, both of the participants are striving to keep that sense of engagement constantly at play.
00:27:32.000And if they do that, then the conversation is engaging and deep and gets as deep as the people involved can manage.
00:27:38.000And they'll pull the entire audience along for the ride.
00:28:53.000Because they'll be the first ones on the chopping block.
00:28:55.000And so, you know, you're a comedian and an open person and not likely to have a great taste in some ways for pure conformity.
00:29:06.000And I'm someone who enjoys artistic creation and revolutionary ideas.
00:29:14.000But by the same token, I'm not someone who despises conformity, you know.
00:29:21.000Well, you said in the book, I mean, you said that we're always going to have as humans, we're always going to be searching for revolutionary ideas.
00:29:27.000It's something that is constantly the way that we've always been.
00:29:32.000And it's the way of like just a liberal way of thinking is to keep moving forward and progress and try things that are new and want to do that.
00:29:41.000But I just feel like you have to have a foundation of comfort to be able to do that from because some of that is a luxury of being comfortable.
00:29:58.000And when things get really uncomfortable, that feels a lot scarier place to be creative from almost.
00:30:04.000Well, the first thing we should point out is that being a conformist isn't the highest of moral virtues, but being unable to conform is worse.
00:30:16.000Now, refusing to conform, that's in a different category.
00:30:19.000You might have valid reasons, especially if you're exceptional.
00:30:22.000And, you know, you could say, well, virtually everyone is exceptional in some regard and should perhaps not be conformist there.
00:30:31.000And we could say, fine, but the rest of the 95% of them should go along with the crowd because that's going along with peace.
00:30:41.000And we also don't ever want to confuse the inability to conform with the ability to produce revolutionary ideas.
00:30:51.000Because just because you can't conform or are rejected doesn't mean you're a genius.
00:30:56.000What it most likely means is that you're just incapable.
00:31:00.000And then you're going to be highly motivated to confuse your incapability with creativity.
00:31:30.000Yeah, to have some more sense of, yeah, like, I guess I worry on like a bigger like picture as a nation that like if we start to like, if the fabric of some of the textile of the past, if some of the tapestry kind of, I guess, or tapestry of the past starts to come apart.
00:31:48.000Like I'm all for making new tapestry, but I just feel like I just get scared.
00:31:54.000I don't know if I feel, but it's more a fear.
00:31:57.000I get scared that if we do that, that things could just tear and I just don't know what's going to happen.
00:32:04.000I guess I'm just, I'm scared a little bit.
00:32:06.000I don't know what the future of this country that I live in looks like.
00:32:11.000And I used to feel like I had a little bit better idea, but I don't know if the idea of what I thought it looked like was just a comfort based upon like my skin tone and growing up with at least food in my house.
00:32:29.000You know, I, you know, some stuff like that.
00:32:31.000I just don't know if, I don't know if maybe my idea was just a luxury or something.
00:32:42.000That's a question that everybody's being driven to answer, partly because there's intense moral pressure to ask yourself that question, you know, to what degree was your privilege unearned?
00:32:52.000Well, there's an easy answer to that, actually.
00:33:24.000They're in the top 1%, generally speaking.
00:33:26.000And they're certainly in the top 1% by historical standards.
00:33:30.000The problem with, with hammering home the idea of undeserved privilege is that there's no one who can't be crucified on that particular cross.
00:35:00.000I mean, I feel like a lot of what I've had in my life has certainly been earned.
00:35:05.000Um, I felt disadvantaged in a lot of ways.
00:35:08.000Um, you know, emotionally in some, there's always, yeah.
00:35:11.000I think everybody would have their own, uh, discussion, their own, like, not their own parameters, but yeah, I could see how everybody would have pluses and minuses.
00:35:19.000Well, that's why I think the right level of analysis is the individual, you know, and when you move away from that, it gets dangerous, it gets dangerous quickly and it gets dangerous for everyone.
00:35:31.000And, and the, the reason why is the reason that you just laid out, you take any individual person, you can point to the advantages that they had.
00:35:40.000Now, look, I understand that some people, I mean, I was a clinician for a long time and I saw people who had lives that were so hard that you can, you could barely even imagine it.
00:35:52.000You know, I had one client who was impaired intellectually.
00:35:57.000Um, uh, she had a, she lived with an aunt who was schizophrenic, who had an alcoholic boyfriend who was extremely violent and also schizophrenic, who used to bother her about being possessed by Satan.
00:36:13.000Satan, she was so, um, uh, shamed, ashamed that she couldn't look anyone in the eye.
00:36:21.000She would walk down the street with her hand like this, sort of bowed down because she felt so, um, so unworthy.
00:36:31.000She looked like a street person, so people treated her badly, all things considered.
00:36:36.000Now, look, she, I saw her at this hospital that I was working at where the inpatients were people who were in even worse shape than her.
00:36:46.000They were people so hurt that they couldn't be deinstitutionalized.
00:36:51.000And I saw her because she had decided that she wanted to take one of these institutionalized people for a walk when she was out walking her dog.
00:37:01.000So despite all her, her catastrophes, which were plenty, you know, she could still see outside of herself to someone who had it even worse.
00:37:34.000But if we only look at the victim side of things anyway, even as a human, if I only see myself as a victim, I'm really going to have a tough time.
00:37:41.000I can see myself, I can respect that I'm a victim of some things, but if I only see myself as a victim, it's going to make the rest of my life pretty tough.
00:38:13.000Well, that was a very complicated problem.
00:38:15.000And it's one that, you know, I think is particularly relevant to your particular country at this particular time and place because the, the tapestry is under assault.
00:38:26.000And the thing is, it's a lot easier to burn something up or to cut it up than it is to knit a new tapestry.
00:38:34.000And has there been times, I mean, is it, is it okay where we are right now from an outsider's perspective?
00:38:41.000Is it scary, like based on like historical civilizations and stuff?
00:38:46.000Like, do you think we're in a place that is like still kind of safe judging from an outside, like, or from a, you know, I mean, you're still in Western civilization.
00:38:56.000Canada is not extremely different than the U.S.
00:38:59.000Do you feel like we're in a scary place or do you feel like it's just a lot of pomp and circumstance and at the root of things we're, we're, we're still at a very realistic place?
00:39:11.000I think there are always dangers that threaten the stability of societies.
00:39:30.000I think that those dangers are real, but I think they're always there.
00:39:36.000I think that I have faith in the robustness of, say, American institutions, all things considered.
00:39:46.000It seems to me that you, your country has weathered crises of at least this magnitude and often far worse many times in the past and, and that's worked out.
00:39:59.000Um, so I think there's reason to be alert, but not hopeless.
00:40:06.000I mean, on the broader scale, the broad scale, world scale, let's say, it's hard to make a case that things were ever better than they are now.
00:40:17.000And it's almost impossible to make the case that there was ever a time in the past where things were getting better faster than they are now.
00:40:25.000So it's reasonable to assume that everyone on the planet will be out of abject poverty as defined by the UN by the year 2030.
00:40:51.000I've been seeing less poor people, I feel like, honestly.
00:40:53.000Well, there's, there's, there's variance because in the Western countries that the working class hasn't kept up as well as they were in the sixties, let's say in some ways.
00:41:03.000But globally speaking, there's lots of reasons for optimism, but it's a difficult problem to settle because there's always the possibility that any given problem will get completely out of hand.
00:41:15.000You know, and that's the, the case that people make with regards to climate change, you know, while there's a small percentage of complete catastrophe, a small percent probability of complete catastrophe.
00:41:26.000Well, we don't know what to do with a problem like that, because it's impossible to calculate how many resources you devote to something that's absolutely catastrophic, but that has a small probability of occurring.
00:41:56.000And plus we're still, a lot of people are still surviving.
00:41:58.000A lot of, I think there's still that a heavy survival instinct in a lot of people where it's more of a short term survival that I don't even think it's, it's our fault for thinking that way.
00:42:07.000It's just built into like our limbic system or our brainstem or something like it's hard.
00:42:53.000So what is the template for constructive criticism of a social institution?
00:42:59.000In other words, if there is a wrong way to do it, where you're creating a void and not offering a better solution, what is the, what is the better approach or what might be?
00:43:11.000You know, I got well known, I suppose, in part because of my injunction to people that they clean up their room.
00:43:22.000I haven't been able to clean it up for like three years.
00:43:24.000So there's this English common law principle with regards to the distribution of power.
00:43:31.000I think it's English common law that there are certain responsibilities of the family and the community and the town and the state and the, and the federal government and the international organizations.
00:43:44.000And, but you want to have the most proximal level possible take responsibility for a given enterprise.
00:44:37.000And that doesn't mean you shouldn't be involved in the community.
00:44:40.000But I believe that you, you have to earn that right.
00:44:43.000Not only, not because there's something more wrong with you than wrong with anyone else.
00:44:49.000It's just that you don't want to, if you, if you operate at a level that's beyond your competence, all you're going to do is make catastrophic mistakes.
00:45:00.000Practice locally till you're competent.
00:45:03.000And then if you dare or move out a little bit, you know, as you mature and you gain some, when I, when I used to work for the NDP, the socialists back when I was 14 or 15.
00:45:14.000One of the things I came to realize, I think I realized this when I was 16 and went to university.
00:45:20.000It's like, I woke up one day and I thought, I have this ideology in my mind, you know, about how the world should be structured.
00:45:27.000And I woke up one day and I thought, what the hell do you know?
00:46:49.000And so that put a lot of cognitive dissonance that filled me with cognitive dissonance.
00:46:55.000One of the things that disturbs me constantly about ideological representations of the world, broadly speaking, is that their fundamental danger is that they always contain a too convenient theory of evil and malevolence.
00:47:13.000And for me, any theory that locates the fundamental problem of evil somewhere other than inside you is dangerous.
00:47:23.000Now, that isn't to say that social structures can't be corrupted and aren't corrupt.
00:47:30.000It's that's an existential problem in and of itself.
00:47:32.000It's it's always the case that our social institutions aren't what they should be.
00:47:36.000And they're outdated and they're predicated to some degree on deceit.
00:47:40.000And people who use power can manipulate them sometimes successfully.
00:47:44.000That problem never goes away and it never will.
00:47:47.000But the when when the evil can be easily located somewhere else, then you have every moral right to allow your unexamined motivations to manifest themselves fully because you can punish the evildoers and always remain on the moral side of the fence.
00:48:07.000There's a huge attractiveness in that.
00:48:10.000I think I mean, this is something you've explored a lot with the idea of Solzhenitsyn's idea about the good and evil cutting through the heart of every human, every human being, because that, that to me, it really gets to the heart of a lot of what I would call a kind of infantile culture.
00:48:26.000I think this is a symptom of of of of childishness.
00:48:30.000You know, whenever I was learning about literature and what constituted more sophisticated literature and what didn't Disney films, childish films.
00:48:48.000And if you have a more complex novel, like a Mervyn Peake novel, where people aren't necessarily good or bad, they're both they struggle within themselves and with other people.
00:48:56.000That is a mark of a kind of adult novel as opposed to a a childish novel.
00:49:00.000Right. And that's quite an important distinction.
00:49:02.000And I think most of the political and ideological battles that I find myself in the middle of, and I'm sure you do as well, are because people are just reducing everything to this binary of good versus evil and putting themselves on the side of good.
00:49:14.000It is a very infantile, almost almost like a caricature of religion.
00:49:21.000You know, it's it's it's and I see it again and again.
00:49:24.000We had it in this country with the Brexit vote.
00:49:26.000Effectively, what happened in the vote here and the reason why it became so toxic and families fell apart and, you know, you wouldn't believe I know it wasn't reported very much elsewhere.
00:49:34.000But it was like a kind of ideological civil war here, but not a very sophisticated one, because it came down to this narrative that if you voted to leave the EU, you were evil, racist, stupid.
00:49:44.000And if you voted to remain, you were you were good and progressive and and all the rest and noble and virtuous. Right.
00:49:50.000And of course, there are all sorts of good reasons to have voted either way.
00:49:53.000And this kind of caricature and it happens again with what you described, you described it as a caricature of of of religion.
00:50:01.000And I think that's what an ideology is.
00:50:03.000And this is one of the reasons that I've been inclined, let's say, to go to have my shot at the rational atheists, much as I'm a fan of enlightenment thinking.
00:50:16.000I mean, I was convinced as a consequence of reading Jung as primarily, but also Dostoevsky and also Nietzsche primarily and Solzhenitsyn, I would say as well that.
00:50:28.000And then biology as well, as I studied that more deeply.
00:50:35.000There's no escaping a religious framework.
00:50:40.000And you if you eliminate it, say, as a consequence of rational criticism, what you inevitably produce is its replacement by forms of religion that are much less sophisticated.
00:50:59.000It's like, you know, if I look back to my Catholic upbringing, actually acknowledge you acknowledging your own capacity for sin is at the heart of Catholicism.
00:51:19.000And because it was so common, like a common part of Catholicism, it can be passed over without notice.
00:51:26.000And so religious the religious structures that we inherited.
00:51:31.000I'm going to talk about Christianity most specifically because it's the dominant form of it's the it's the form of religious belief that primarily undergirds our social structures.
00:51:44.000My my producer came up with that term the other day, and I thought it was apt.
00:51:48.000And it does localize the drama between good and evil inside and makes you responsible for that and and makes you in encourages you, let's say, to attend to the ways that you fall short of the ideal.
00:52:04.000And when you criticize a structure like that out of existence, you don't criticize the questions that gave rise to it out of existence.
00:52:13.000And the questions might be, well, what's the nature of the good?
00:52:48.000All these things that are outside the realm of easy criticism.
00:52:52.000And then some of that's translated into, you know, comprehensible, explicit dogma.
00:52:58.000And that's the part that's most susceptible to rational criticism.
00:53:01.000But when that disappears, I've been thinking about this a lot this week because of what happened to Richard Dawkins recently.
00:53:09.000You know, and I have my differences with Dawkins and the rest of the rational atheists because I think that they underestimated the danger of dispensing with what they were attempting to dispense with.
00:53:20.000And I see the influx of religious fervor associated with political ideas as a direct consequence of of the lack of separation, let's say, between church and state psychologically.
00:53:34.000There is a claim quite common at the moment that the central animating principle of Western culture is power.
00:55:39.000Because I'm a man and my wife's a woman.
00:55:40.000Therefore, I must be motivated to have power over my wife and I must feel something in common with other men because we're all men.
00:55:45.000We're all trying to maintain the power structure.
00:55:47.000I mean, this is far wackier than saying there was this guy and he was killed and he came back to life three days later.
00:55:53.000I mean, you know, it's this is just a matter of faith.
00:55:57.000And so the fact that it is intruded so deeply into the academy now, again, not in most departments, but in some of the departments that you and I both know, this is the religion.
00:56:53.000So it's a radical critique of enlightenment thinking.
00:56:55.000It's also an attempt to identify enlightenment thinking specifically with Western European thinking, which I think is a great mistake, but it doesn't matter.
00:57:02.000I don't think that those, it isn't obvious to me that those merely rational responses are going to do the trick.
00:57:12.000But something that I've begun to think a lot about is the importance of specifying the institution or the domain before you say anything else.
00:57:23.000And so we can talk about will a rational argument persuade people.
00:57:27.000And if we're talking about like on planet Earth, you know, or just, you know, out on the public square, not your odds are not very good.
00:57:34.000And so the trick to having a good society is one in which there are domains within which people have a set of the professional norms or norms about how we do things.
00:57:44.000And so the norms in a college seminar class should be very different and much more generous and much more about building on each other's arguments and critiques than it is on Twitter.
00:57:56.000And part of what's changed, part of why I keep saying the world is so different after 2012 than it was before 2009, is that social media knocked down all the walls between different domains.
00:58:07.000And now the norms within which a reasoned discussion among people who have basic respect for each other and are tied together, at least as fellow students or fellow jury members or whatever.
00:58:21.220When that goes away and everything is just the public square.
00:58:25.220Well, then, yeah, we're not really able to have reasoned conversations anymore.
00:58:30.220I'm not saying all activism is bad by any means, but it can create a community that can become fanatical, basically, which is a danger.
00:58:45.220I'm not so sure that that activism isn't just bad altogether, you know, well, it's obviously the idea that you need to pay attention to your institutions and that sometimes they need criticism and reform.
00:58:59.540It's like, obviously, institutions ossify and they become corrupt and everyone has to be alert to that.
00:59:09.500And there are steps you can and should take and are morally obligated, I think, to take.
00:59:14.300But the thing about activism is that it's almost always predicated on the idea that you're right, you're morally superior and you've identified the people who are wrong.
00:59:25.280And to me, that's one step away from mob and it's one step away from punishment.
00:59:29.760And one of the things that appalls me and makes me ashamed in relationship to the universities is that universities are pretty good at teaching young people that being an activist is a good thing.
00:59:44.360And I'm not so sure at all that it's a good thing.
00:59:47.160I think it's pseudo responsibility, especially because it always comes with an easy identification of just who the enemy is.
01:00:14.700And I think, you know, if you're going to attack our institutions, you know, I have a lot of problems with establishment institutions, but you can't just attack them.
01:00:26.620What are we going to have left when we've got no institutions?
01:00:44.300That's, you know, that's why I think, you know, attacking institutions has to go hand in hand with building new ones.
01:00:51.820And lots of people, you know, I know quite a few people who are trying to build new institutions.
01:00:57.860But, yeah, I agree that there's something about social media and social media enabled activism that makes finding an out group, dehumanizing the out group and attacking them very easy.
01:01:13.520Well, OK, let's dive into that for a minute.
01:01:15.760OK, so how many times have you sworn at somebody when you're walking down the street versus how many times have you sworn at someone when you're in your car and they're in their car?
01:01:26.820I don't think I've sworn at anyone ever.
01:01:31.240Well, OK, well, then you're very you're much more polite than me, let's say.
01:01:36.560But it's much more probable when there's a barrier like that, that that people will manifest aggressive behavior.
01:01:44.440You know, we don't know exactly what inhibits aggressive behavior.
01:01:47.440But one thing that does is rather rather close personal proximity, real proximity.
01:01:53.540Now, when you take the person and you you place them in a shell, let's say that's a car, you place yourself in a shell.
01:02:00.420Well, all of those cues, those subtle and complex cues aren't there.
01:02:05.660And so online, well, every you don't even have an avatar.
01:02:10.480You only have your hypothetical fantasy about the person that you're attacking.
01:02:15.560Yeah. So and we don't know what that does to people at all.
01:02:20.160I mean, we see some of that on Twitter and we have no idea if this hypothesis that you laid out is true.
01:02:25.980You know, is if there's a tendency for those who are more committed to dominate certain types of institutions because the moderates bail out.
01:02:36.160And then if it's also true that that's sped along by social media, which is a possibility, not a certainty, but it could be.
01:02:43.520And then it's also easier to dehumanize people in social media circles, particularly if you're so inclined.
01:02:51.340And maybe even if you're not, then, well, that can be a perfect storm.
01:02:56.340I mean, I just read an article by Jonathan Haidt today where he I've been noticing what seems to be developing into something like a runaway positive feedback loop in.
01:03:07.620In the political landscape, particularly in the U.S.
01:03:10.980And, you know, I I spent a fair bit of time thinking about what a mental disorder actually was.
01:03:17.660And the most common description now, I think it's from Wakefield, I think, is that it's the it's the deviation of a complex mental function from its evolutionarily signified path.
01:03:30.100And I don't like that at all, because it's very difficult to specify the evolutionarily signified path.
01:03:35.400And it it violates the is ought distinction.
01:04:28.300And you have to fight, figure out how to stop that spiral from continuing.
01:04:32.600Well, we are getting we're getting into a situation.
01:04:35.660Imagine this domination of the radical groups on both sides and they have an outsized voice and outsized you ability to utilize punishment effectively.
01:04:46.400And now they're upsetting the hell out of each other.
01:05:07.860And he thinks that at least in part, this was driven by Facebook like and Twitter adoption of like.
01:05:15.520And, you know, this is we were talking about conservatism and liberalism.
01:05:20.040And, you know, one of the things conservatives always say to liberals is don't be thinking that your stupid invention is only doing what you think it is.
01:05:33.280And if you've done any sort of laboratory experiments, you get very, very sensitive to that because things don't go the way you predict they will.
01:06:33.840You know, like I I put a fair bit of the responsibility for this mess that we're in on faculty members at universities who let the administrators take over by.
01:06:49.140Kowtowing 300 times over a 30 year period.
01:06:55.860So the administrators took over the universities and then the D.I.E.I. people took over the administrators.
01:07:01.320And yeah, well, I know that's an oversimplification, but but but and then these ideas, these poisonous ideas, just away they go out into the culture.
01:07:11.440And yeah, and I think Haidt is probably correct when he says that these bad ideas.
01:07:19.980So we're talking about the postmodernism, the, you know, intersectionality, all of that, those rubbish ideas, they would have stayed enclosed within the walls of these quite marginalized university departments.
01:07:36.220They would have stayed enclosed if it weren't for social media.
01:07:41.000Yeah, you know, the IAT, the IAT had a fair bit to do with that, too.
01:07:47.000So because it did what you said with regards to consultants, right, it gave them this scientifically valid quasi clinical tool where they could go into institutions and claim, hey, we can we can ferret out your prejudice.
01:08:01.540Yeah, I mean, so it's not it's not wholly because of social media, but it's certainly allowed bad ideas to spread very quickly.
01:08:12.500And we could see that with I mean, there's there's so many.
01:08:16.900Yeah, there's the pandemic we should really be worried about.
01:08:19.380Thank you so much, Dr. Peterson, for what you've given us this evening.
01:08:25.020You've spoken now in a very complimentary way about English common law, and I'm very pleased to hear it.
01:08:32.100But freedom of speech is something novel largely in in our civilization.
01:08:42.700You just have to think about how dissenters and Catholics were treated in this country not too long ago.
01:08:51.040You couldn't go to this institution if you were not a communicant of the Anglican Church.
01:08:55.700I'm not an Anglican, but I sympathize with them, because if you've got something good, you want coercive and directive measures to protect that thing.
01:09:07.580And in fact, you might be committing a very serious injustice if you don't put the context and structure in place to prevent people who want to repudiate that good thing from invading and corrupting what has taken so long to put together.
01:10:13.780And so he was the, he was the representation of conservative order.
01:10:17.760That's a good way of thinking about it.
01:10:19.180But the Egyptians portrayed him as old and willfully blind, specifically willfully blind, which is extremely interesting, and subject as a consequence of his willful blindness to the evil machinations of Set.
01:10:37.340And so that's how you know the Egyptians thought about the sun and Set.
01:10:42.420And so Set was the evil uncle, essentially.
01:10:45.660And he cuts Osiris up into his pieces, which were also, by the way, the provinces of the Egyptian state, and sentences him to the underworld, and then rules in his stead.
01:10:58.400That's the danger of an unthinking conservatism, because all our cognitive and social structures deteriorate with the passage of time, because time changes all things.
01:11:08.220And so we're always fighting to maintain what we have, and that includes our categories of perception themselves, in the face of a continual onslaught of novelty at virtually every level of analysis.
01:11:20.200While the second god of the Egyptians, this is a very cursory overview, obviously, was Horus.
01:11:27.100And Horus was the son of the, he was the rightful son of the true king, raised outside Egypt.
01:11:33.780And alienated, in some sense, from the tradition that gave rise to him.
01:11:38.920But he was simultaneously the falcon and the Egyptian eye, that famous Egyptian eye, that open eye.
01:11:47.160And his mother is Isis, and she's the chaos that arises when order disintegrates, gives rise to the hero.
01:11:56.320Horus goes to the underworld to rescue his father.
01:11:59.220And the Egyptians conceptualized the soul of the pharaoh, so that would be the proper source of sovereignty itself, as the union of Osiris and Horus.