Author, columnist, and political commentator Douglas Murray joins me to discuss his new book, The War on the West, and why he thinks we should all be looking for meaning in the world. We talk about the need for a sense of purpose, and why it s important that we all seek to understand why we are the way we are and why we do what we do, and how we do it in order to make sense of the world we live in. We also discuss the role of the messianic stage in human development, and the role that it plays in shaping our understanding of the nature of purpose and the search for meaning, and what it means to be a child of God and a human being. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and offers a roadmap towards healing. He provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you re suffering, please know you are not alone. There s hope, and there s a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson s new series on Depression and Anxiety. Let s take the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. -Let s take a step towards feeling better, and let s make a brighter future that you deserve! - Dr. P.B. . Subscribe to Daily Wire Plus to get immediate access to all the newest episodes of The Dark Side of the Dark Side Podcasts Podcasts wherever you get your most up to date news and information. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Subscribe on Audible Subscribe on Podchaser Become a supporter of our new podcast Become a Friend on iTunes Subscribe on PODcaster Connect with PODCAST Connect with your fellow podcaster Connect with me on social media Learn more on this Podcasts and Podcasts Subscribe at Podcharity Connect with Meghan R. Murray and more! Subscribe & Share the Podcasts on the Podchronicity on Social Media to our new Podcasts & Podcasts! Subscribe to my Insta-Friendship v=Q&t= & more
00:00:00.940Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420Hello everyone watching and listening.
00:01:11.200Today I'm speaking with author, columnist, and political commentator Douglas Murray, who's been on my podcast a number of times.
00:01:19.060We talked about his latest book not so long ago, The War on the West.
00:01:22.660We discuss how a misguided purpose leads to abject misery and hopelessness, the cowardice of experts who choose silence, experts and others, let's say, who choose silence in the face of malevolence, the psychology of fear, and the necessity of willful exposure to combat that fear.
00:01:44.100So we went out for dinner last night to Royal 35, which was very good.
00:01:49.100That's a steakhouse that looks like a classic mafioso place, as far as I'm concerned, but they make great steaks.
00:01:55.200And one of the things we talked a little bit about was your burgeoning interest in purpose.
00:02:03.040So the first question I have, I guess, is why you think that's attracted your interest, that particular topic?
00:02:09.760I think it's because I just increasingly notice, as I'm sure you do, that it's the question underneath almost all questions in our day.
00:02:18.540A lot of the things that you and I spend a considerable amount of our time railing against are things we critique, criticize, find holes in, push back against.
00:02:30.820But you're always confronted by the fact that you're dealing with somebody who believes that they find their sense of purpose from the thing that we find, you know, untruthful, irritating or worse.
00:02:44.280And you see all of these versions in our day, I think, of misguided purpose, purpose used to the wrong ends, meaning found in places that really don't give much satisfaction, but give people the drive to get up in the morning.
00:03:06.380And act sometimes well, often malevolently, more often than not, perhaps malevolently.
00:03:14.060But it seems to me that this sort of meaning crisis is one that many of the people that you and I have problems with, should we say, are actually addressing.
00:03:25.320I mean, in their own inept and sometimes malevolent way, they are sort of speaking to a depth.
00:03:31.420Well, one of the things the left does very well, there's a developmental psychologist named Jean Piaget, who was a great psychologist.
00:03:40.000And he called himself a genetic epistemologist, actually, because he was interested in knowledge structures and how they developed.
00:03:48.720And so he really thought he was a practical philosopher.
00:03:50.820But in any case, he noted that human children, as they develop, go through stages of development, each stage was in some ways a different, you could say, a different theory of being.
00:04:05.060And that the last stage that he identified was the messianic stage.
00:04:09.760And developmental psychologists haven't paid much attention to that because they tended to shy away from anything that smacked of, let's say, religious thinking.
00:04:17.300Even though Piaget was motivated fundamentally by the desire to bridge the gap between science and religion, which, by the way, I think he did quite well, the messianic period is late adolescence.
00:04:29.260And you might think about it anthropologically, I suppose, as associated with the need for individuals of that age to move away from their immediate local friendship group, which would have been the bridge from dependence on their parents, to identification with the broader culture.
00:04:49.560And so what they're trying to find at that point is something like a sense of universal purpose, right?
00:04:57.500And that touches on this issue of purpose, obviously, and meaning.
00:05:01.600And you, in the way that you laid this out when we began this discussion, you implied a number of presuppositions of that there are malevolent purposes, that there are fractured purposes, that there are counterproductive purposes, that there is purpose.
00:05:24.400I presume you would also agree that there are shallow purposes and deep purposes.
00:05:29.820I mean, like, there are shallow enjoyments and deep enjoyments.
00:05:33.820One of the things that Burke says in his work on The Sublime is that, of course, there are things you immediately know to be enjoyable, and there are acquired pleasures.
00:05:43.780And that's just on the level of pleasures.
00:05:45.380I mean, he gives the example, I think, of cigar smoking or whiskey, I think, as an example of a pleasure you don't get straight away.
00:05:52.020And so, yes, I mean, there are things that can drive people and give also an ephemeral sense of purpose.
00:06:00.960But the issue of deeper purpose is one I just see as being very dangerously unaddressed in our day.
00:06:08.220And I think it's – I referred to this recently in a speech in London saying if, for instance, the left approach you with the opportunity to spend your life rampagingly campaigning to provide, you know, cosmic social justice on this earth now.
00:06:37.560And also are driven by things like envy, resentment, very, very deep, deep human instincts, ineradical human instincts, that if you don't like what they're doing and what they're suggesting, you can't just answer on a technicality.
00:06:53.860And the example I gave quite – or I gave in that speech in London was, you know, if you have people telling you you can get a burning sense of meaning in your life by being resentful, a conservative or somebody on the right cannot simply say, well, we've got a tax break we've discovered.
00:07:27.700Which is doable, but you need to work at that more than you need to work at resentment.
00:07:34.200Yeah, well, that – okay, so there's a bridge there between the idea of longer-term and acquired purposes and practice and work.
00:07:41.540You said that you have to work at gratitude, right, and so that makes it a practice.
00:07:45.460And I don't think that – I think that people generally presume that a sentiment or state of mind like gratitude is something that descends upon you rather than something that you acquire through effort.
00:07:57.320And I think that that's a real mistake, right?
00:07:59.580I mean, you and I, I think, both probably have the same attitude on this, which is that we know that, you know, we're very lucky today to be sitting in a city which has its problems but is very successful.
00:08:12.000You've got some chance of being mugged in the street, but not all that much.
00:08:43.020Now, you can take that for granted or you cannot, and you can think even for a second about the amount of labor and devotion that went into that.
00:08:50.520But that is something that some people need to be reminded of.
00:08:54.060My suspicion is that the societies we live in now in the developed West, you do have to work at it.
00:08:59.020And the reason why is that there's this massive context collapse whereby we assume that the state that we are in is the natural state of mankind.
00:09:16.700Because the conservatives, and I would say the wiser people, tend to be more influenced, you might say, by Thomas Hobbes than by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
00:09:25.400And we assume that, let's say, that the state of brutish natural life is brutish and short and miserable rather than some pre-industrial paradisal state where everyone lived in harmony with nature.
00:09:40.780Well, I gave the example in my last book, In the War on the West, of this rather delicious but savage lesson that a group of French sailors learned after Rousseau.
00:10:35.600And I know a school teacher who says that the single biggest thing that will change the behavior of a child is if they are of an immigrant background and go back in a school holiday to their country of origin.
00:10:59.680Well, that also touches on part of the reason that you laid out for ingratitude the way you conceptualized it to begin with, say, talking about walking down the streets of New York, being unable to compare that with anything outside of New York in this present.
00:11:16.000So, ignorance is actually one problem, is that if you don't know anything about history.
00:11:21.060And there's also, I suppose, as well as ignorance, there's willful blindness and the unwillingness to put in the effort that it would require to be grateful.
00:11:33.020So, you know, I've been considering the book of Job in some depth recently, and it's a very interesting book, and it pertains to purpose, I would say.
00:11:42.000So, by the time the book of Job is written and eventually introduced into the biblical corpus, there's a real transformation in the conceptualization of God.
00:11:54.820And there's a key figure in that transformation, which is extraordinarily interesting.
00:12:11.540And Elijah, compared to Moses, is a relatively minor figure.
00:12:15.060And so, there's some chapter or some verses devoted to his story, but not a lot.
00:12:20.420But here's the key psychological significance, let's say, of Elijah.
00:12:26.120So, Elijah set himself up against Jezebel, who was a queen, at that time a foreign queen of Israel, who had introduced the worship of Baal into the Israeli culture.
00:13:56.300So, it's the first marked internalization of the notion of the deity, is that whatever the highest deity is, is something that you can commune with internally, that is roughly equivalent, let's say, to the voice of conscience.
00:14:55.020And so, Job loses everything, and in the most painful possible manner.
00:14:59.920And what he does, as far as I can tell, is that he uses that internal guide of conscience, which was now, say, allied with the voice of God, in some sense, against these terrible external forces that are conspiring to bring him down, right?
00:15:30.920Now, you might say, and this is where the story, I think, transcends something like mere rationality, but we can argue about that.
00:15:39.100You might say that the logical consequence, the logical conclusion from that misadventure is that Job has every rational reason to shake his fist at the sky and curse God, right?
00:15:53.820He maintains faith in the goodness of being despite the fact that he's suffering dreadfully.
00:15:59.360And despite what the voice on the whirlwind says to him, which is the least comforting thing that the voice could say.
00:16:06.780Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:16:12.780Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:16:20.740In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:16:25.700Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:16:35.180And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:16:38.380With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:16:45.760Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:17:49.720But this is, you see, this is such an interesting issue here because I've watched people in the deep throes of misery.
00:17:57.020And I can tell you that one of the things that will make misery hell is ingratitude.
00:18:01.220And so part of the story of Job seems to me to be an injunction, and that is that no matter what happens to you, and that means in some sense, no matter the facts at hand, that you are called upon never to lose faith in the essential goodness of being.
00:18:16.840Right, to conduct yourself as if, what would you say, the cosmos itself is well-structured, despite the evidence that happens to be being presented to you within the confines of your life.
00:18:28.720And I think that's the same as, I think that's the same as the practice of gratitude.
00:18:33.360Thank you, I'd agree, by the way, bringing that to a rather, maybe not obvious segue, but we were also talking last night about the fact, I saw you discussed recently the question of euthanasia and the way in which Canadian authorities have been doing this.
00:18:50.320I mentioned to you that some, some years ago, I went to speak with euthanasia doctors and the patients in Belgium and the Netherlands.
00:19:03.360But actually, one of the reasons why I've always remained exceptionally suspicious of legalized dying, as I call it, I have, as we all have, friends who you think at the end, I wish that suffering could just stop.
00:19:19.680So I recognize that that, do you want it to be in the hands of the government or any more in the hands of a doctor than it already is, let alone in the hands of the family or anything?
00:19:29.960That allow the crossover of physical suffering to be equated with mental suffering and you start putting down depressed youths as they are on the continent.
00:19:41.640Or, for example, I have been giving recently.
00:19:44.620And you're moving towards that in Canada.
00:19:53.580And she was put down with euthanasia by the Belgian state last year at the age of, I think, 24.
00:19:58.760Now, apart from the insanity of a society that will not, out of principle, execute the perpetrator of an attack, but will kill a victim, apart from the insanity of that, and all we know about the genuinely slippery slope in this area,
00:20:16.760one of the instincts I realized I had that I just couldn't let go of was that there was something fundamental about us as human beings that means that it is deeply ungrateful to what we have to give it up even a minute earlier than you have to.
00:20:33.260And that, you know, in the end, I quite often revert to literature, but I think it's Gloucester who says in King Lear, you know, man must endure his going hence, even as his coming hither.
00:20:46.400And that actually endurance, endurance of birth, endurance of death is part of the cycle.
00:20:53.220But there is something, but the resentment you feel, for instance, when somebody commits suicide, and people around somebody who commits suicide very often do feel resentment as well as deep guilt, is partly you've broken the pact at a fundamental level.
00:21:08.900You've made all of us see something we didn't wish to see or conceive something we didn't need to see.
00:21:41.360Or passport delivery or some of the roads, I don't want to give them life and death.
00:21:47.640Particularly not over mentally ill people.
00:21:49.660So when you see people suffering, I mean, I saw this in my clinical practice a lot, is that if you, and I saw this with my daughter, you know, we talked to her too about this one because she was very, very ill as a child.
00:22:04.320And we did everything we could to stop her from being bitter.
00:22:08.140And the reason for that, and this is an interesting, it forces an interesting consideration of the relationship between facts and values.
00:22:17.720So she had 40 deteriorating joints and each of them were painful.
00:22:21.680And that's a lot of joints and that's a lot of pain.
00:22:24.260And that was only a few of the things that were wrong with her.
00:22:27.260And, but, had she become resentful and bitter, then she would have had all those problems, plus she would have been resentful and bitter.
00:22:37.240And as far as I can tell, the way you turn tragedy into hell is by becoming resentful and bitter.
00:22:47.720So you tell me what you think about this.
00:22:49.240So I, she could have said to me, you know, dad, given the facts at hand, the logical conclusion to derive, so that's an induction, let's say, the logical conclusion to derive is that, you know, life is terrible and unjust and it would be irrational of me not to be bitter.
00:23:06.480And, you know, I think, and this is the conundrum that you see in Job too, is that, you know, when you set up a story so that someone loses everything, you set up the story so that they have lost everything.
00:23:19.060And the conclusion to derive from the loss of everything, the logical conclusion seems to me almost pro forma, given that you've lost everything, is that you have every right to shake your fist at the sky.
00:23:29.800Yes, but the oddity of it, and the oddity is, you know, about resentful people or bitter people.
00:23:36.480Is that, and again, it's a point I've made a lot since the War in the West came out, is we are, I think we probably all have the same experience, everyone watching and you and I, which is we've probably all come across very bitter and resentful people in our lives who seem to have quite a good lot.
00:23:53.500I mean, for instance, who are financially secure.
00:24:10.920But one of the reasons I'm interested in this is because it seems fascinating to me that you can have an attitude which every socioeconomic thing doesn't actually matter.
00:24:26.260You know, if you're a resentful person and you're given a million dollars tomorrow, you will be a resentful person the day after or the week after as well.
00:24:37.680Well, so does that imply, see, I'm trying to wrestle with the distinction, let's say, between faith and reason, let's say.
00:24:47.880And so, like, it seems to me, first of all, I don't think faith is the willingness to believe in superstitious nonsense for which there's no evidence.
00:24:56.220Which is the definition that is mainly written through the last few decades.
00:25:32.000You know, and he was devastated by that and was on the street for a good while drinking and doing drugs and, like, tearing himself into pieces.
00:25:41.100And he had great-grandparents who really loved him, and he was an inheritor of his cultural tradition, a genuine inheritor.
00:25:49.140And so he made a decision that he wasn't going to live a bitter and resentful life, that he certainly wasn't going to pay that catastrophe forward with his children.
00:26:01.580He learned to look at himself in the mirror again.
00:26:04.200You know, and he's conducted himself as a good man for decades now.
00:26:08.160And that's—you already made the case, you know, that you see people who have everything in some real sense and who are bitter and resentful nonetheless.
00:26:17.820And then you see people who have nothing who aren't.
00:26:20.220And so you can take the same set of facts or even an opposing set of facts and derive different conclusions.
00:26:25.980And this points at the fact-value problem, right, is that the facts don't speak for themselves in some deterministic manner.
00:26:33.800And it seems to me that there has to be something approximating, something we've always defined as a leap of faith in the positive direction.
00:26:42.240And that's tied to—it's tied in a strange way to something you said earlier, which is that, you know, there are shallow pleasures and meanings and deep pleasures and meanings.
00:26:53.500Yes, and I'd add one other thing to that, which is—and the faith that the recognition of the depth is telling you something.
00:27:08.640Yeah, well, so I've been trying to puzzle through what depth means, technically, let's say.
00:27:13.860Okay, so in the scientific literature, your work is more—is deeper, that's one way of thinking about it, the more other people cite it.
00:28:52.140Or it speaks at a register that speech can't do.
00:28:54.480If you say, why did you find this particular piece so moving?
00:28:57.460It's often extremely hard—even harder if you're a musicologist—to explain why.
00:29:02.240There are certain ways you can explain why, um, certain things to do with harmony, tonality, um, a phrase of music returning to its natural home.
00:30:59.220Yeah, well, and I would say that's an embodied phenomenon rather than a conceptual phenomenon.
00:31:08.460See, I think one of the problems that we have in the West in our conceptualization of meaning is that we're so obsessed with the semantic and the descriptive that we presume that meaning itself is secondarily derived from the semantic and descriptive.
00:31:22.620I mean, the postmodernists make this case when they say that everything is encapsulated, say, in language.
00:31:29.300I mean, that's a game they've been playing since the last war.
00:31:33.220And my explanation of it, I gave a few books ago, my explanation for that is that it was very important after 1945 to keep philosophy behind police crime cord and tape.
00:31:44.980So, what do you do in the philosophy departments?
00:41:41.800When I worked at the Douglas Hospital in the 1980s, there were still people there who had been on the wards,
00:41:49.120who hadn't been deinstitutionalized, who had been on the wards for like four decades.
00:41:52.760And they would kind of lurk in the corridors that were underground at the Douglas Hospital,
00:41:58.300because it was like a university campus that was connected by underground passageways.
00:42:04.240And it was like Dante's Inferno down there.
00:42:06.700I mean, and you could easily go there and make the case that, you know,
00:42:12.220oh my God, is a life of being on a back ward in a psychiatric hospital, you know,
00:42:17.360wrapped up in a straitjacket for three decades worth living.
00:42:22.660And, well, that brings that whole terrible conundrum up in front of you.
00:42:30.520And there's no simple answer you can jump to there.
00:42:37.360But one of the answers, the answer that that is something that should therefore be handed to the state to deal with in some efficient manner,
00:44:30.020When the Inquisitor leaves the door open for Christ, right?
00:44:33.280Even though he's doomed him to, hypothetically, to death because he's no longer necessary.
00:44:37.760Well, you know, in the story of Cain and Abel, Cain puts God on trial because Cain is making these sacrifices, which are second rate.
00:44:48.820Abel's sacrifices are lauded in the stories, but Cain's aren't.
00:44:52.320And there's an intimation that they're not of the highest quality.
00:44:55.700Now, Abel offers up animal material to God and Cain vegetative material, and that plays into it as well.
00:45:03.980But Cain calls out God and says, essentially, something like, you know, I'm breaking myself in half here, working on my life, and nothing's going my way.
00:45:17.960And your favored son, Abel, for reasons that I can't really understand, is thriving on all fronts.
00:45:25.340What the hell is the problem with the cosmos you created?
00:45:28.600And God says, and I got this from reading multiple translations, God says, first of all, he says, if you do well, will you not be rewarded?
00:45:41.100And the second rejoinder is something like, sin crouches at your door like a sexually aroused predatory animal, and you've invited it in to have its way with you.
00:45:52.000And so, and I've read a lot of the diary material of serial killers and sexual slayers and that sort of people, and you can rest absolutely assured that they invited that spirit of resentment in and have been creatively interacting with it.
00:46:07.900So, I was thinking, too, you know, this issue of suffering and death, you know, imagine that you have a parent.
00:46:15.380Let's particularize it, because maybe the question isn't, what should the state do about exceptional suffering?
00:46:23.460Maybe that's the wrong level of analysis.
00:46:25.480Maybe the right level of analysis is something like, what would you do if your father was dying a terrible death?
00:46:30.980And I would say, what you should have done was live the life that you should have lived, so that at that point of unbelievable complexity, you'd be wise enough to make the appropriate decision and to see your way through.
00:46:42.960But that there would be no way that you could generalize that decision.
00:46:46.800It would only have to be made in a particularized manner.
00:46:59.720So, one of the things that frightened me, again, as a clinician, was that, especially when I saw people deceiving themselves, I thought, well, why not deceive yourself if you can escape from responsibility and pain and anxiety?
00:47:14.520And if you can gain things through minimal effort, why not deceive yourself and other people?
00:47:20.280And one reason to not deceive yourself is that there will come a time when you're called upon to make a judgment of exquisite delicacy.
00:47:28.360And if you're fuzzy-minded and demented enough because of your own lies that you're incapable of such judgment, you'll make the wrong decision and you'll regret being alive as a consequence.
00:47:41.440Well, that's one good reason not to do something that you're going to regret.
00:47:46.640I mean, I've said for a long time that there should be a category.
00:47:53.320Somebody watching can describe it to me.
00:47:56.300But I've thought for a long time there should be a category of argument which is recognized cannot be solved because somebody involved in the argument has done the thing and regrets it deeply.
00:48:08.420But at such a deep level that they could never face up to it.
00:48:12.600So the example I've always had in my mind is, if you have an argument like the ethics of abortion, if there's one person in the room who's had an abortion, you're very unlikely to get anywhere in the discussion.
00:48:24.220Because there is somebody who has everything on the line, everything at stake, and either they regret it, in which case nothing, you can't get anywhere in the discussion because you don't want to open up that pit.
00:48:38.660Or they have to pretend not to care, in which case you have another glimpse into a pit.
00:48:46.160Now, actually, again, you and I talked about this last night.
00:48:48.400Helen Joyce made this brilliant observation about the trans issue recently, which was that we, for the rest of our lives, will all be facing a certain type of person who cares more about that issue than anyone else in the world because they've done the worst possible thing to their child.
00:49:13.240But moving away from that negative, if I may, I mean, we get back to this thing of people deceive themselves very often unless somebody comes along and says exactly that.
00:49:28.640That's one of the things I'm fond of Nietzsche about, the person of resentment, is Nietzsche's observation that the secular priest would be required to stand over the person's life and say, you are right.
00:49:38.120There is somebody who has destroyed your life in this world.
00:49:41.840Now, our mutual friend, Anthony Daniels, said that when he was a prison doctor, he was one of the few people who actually used to do this with his.
00:50:01.520He told me once that he quite often in prison would have people coming to him saying, oh, doctor, I think I need some pills, some antidepressants.
00:50:11.220Why would you, why do you want antidepressants?
00:53:23.160And if you say instead, well, it's no wonder you're miserable because the cosmos and the patriarchy are structured such that you're a victim of circumstance without recourse.
00:53:34.520I had this recently, I was on a program the other day where there was a black British woman on who claimed to have suffered hurt from slavery.
00:53:51.220And no one alive has caused you the hurt.
00:53:52.980Now, of course, a lot of people would say, who are you to say that?
00:53:56.280You're just another privileged white guy or something.
00:54:00.000But I actually think it's necessary to say that to people because, as Clarence Thomas points out in his recent Supreme Court judgment on affirmative action,
00:54:10.520if you don't get that out of the way, the rest of history is going to be a competitive grievance competition.
00:54:17.180And so you actually need people to say, no, I'm not falling for this.
00:54:48.900There's something missing in our societies of people saying that, of just saying, you know, we're not going along with your self-perception.
00:55:00.580We're not going along with your self-perception and agreeing to it, not just because it's bad for you, but it's bad for all of us.
00:55:09.200It's bad, yeah, it's bad for them and for all of us simultaneously.
00:55:12.040And, you know, that, one of the things I've been really shocked by, I would say, with regard to my fellow therapists, is their absolute cowardice, and almost universally so, on the self-identity.
00:55:27.480I assume cowardice on behalf of almost everybody.
00:55:30.140So, I don't expect heroism in our age.
00:55:33.080It's wonderful when it happens, but you should assume cowardice.
00:55:35.180I think, I think it's particularly egregious on the therapeutic front with regard to self-identity.
00:55:59.940By three, you negotiate your identity.
00:56:02.580And if the whole, the definition of being a civilized person is that you negotiate your identity, and you do it constantly.
00:56:10.700I mean, you and I, sitting here in open dialogue, are negotiating our identities, right?
00:56:16.880Because we're attempting to modify the manner in which we perceive ourselves and present ourselves as a consequence of exchanging information.
00:56:26.080Well, of course, the people who push the self-identity mantra also claim that there's no such thing as free speech, right?
00:56:33.160There's no honest exchange of ideas between men of good faith, let's say, or goodwill.
00:56:40.320So, that's one thing psychologists know, and they absolutely know this.
00:56:43.860And part of what you do as a psychologist, if you have any sense at all, is you teach people how to negotiate their identity more effectively.
00:56:51.540And so, the second thing that psychologists know is that you expose people voluntarily to the things that frighten them, instead of protecting them, you know, in this trigger warning fashion.
00:57:08.980And all psychologists know that that kind of overprotective attitude is definitely a pathway to psychopathology.
00:57:19.100And yet, no one will stand up and say that.
00:57:22.520I have a habit, which I learned from a late friend who was a journalist, which I've tried to stick with throughout my adult life, of always going to one dangerous country a year.
00:57:38.140Another, I suppose, is that it is one of, to go back to what we were saying earlier, one of the best ways to actually feel a sense of gratitude about where you're from and what the good things are in your society.
00:57:48.120Because unless you've seen a society at war, you don't understand quite how blessed a state of peace is.
00:57:55.760I mean, and how easily what happens to other people could happen to you.
00:58:12.940I mean, that's one of the things that Pinker's right on in the blank slate is deaths in tribal societies, pre-modernity, way higher, violent deaths, way higher even than the average violent deaths of a European male in the 20th century.
00:58:31.940So, yes, to some extent, this is a natural state.
00:58:35.760But I also do it just partly because I learn so much about how societies deteriorate.
00:58:45.160And as a sort of very, very minimal final thing, you always find out something about yourself.
00:58:53.300It's never the purpose of doing it, but there is something you find out.
00:58:58.080Well, okay, so here's a very interesting clinical finding.
00:59:01.980It was a revolutionary discovery in the 50s, 50s, that's about right.
00:59:10.220So, the psychoanalysts following Freud would walk people through what they wanted to avoid, and they did that autobiographically, right, by going back into the past.
00:59:25.340So, the behaviorists came along, and what they did instead was expose people to what they were afraid of here and now.
00:59:34.080So, for example, if you were afraid of balloons, which is rare but does happen upon occasion, a therapist would sit you down, have you relax, run you through a relaxation exercise, maybe show you a picture of a balloon, ask you to imagine it.
00:59:53.440Then put a balloon, you know, 15 feet away, and then 10 feet away, and 8 feet away, and then a balloon on your lap, and maybe that takes a number of sessions, and then the fear would disappear.
01:00:06.260Now, the theory was, the reason the fear disappeared was because you paired the exposure with relaxation.
01:00:29.200So, then the psychoanalyst's rejoinder to the behaviorists was, you know, the person isn't really afraid of a balloon or an elevator.
01:00:37.660They're really afraid of death, and if you eradicate the specific fear, it will just move locale because you're not dealing with the root cause.
01:00:44.920Okay, now that also turned out to be wrong, because what happened is if you exposed people to, say, three things they were afraid of, they would go out voluntarily and expose themselves to all sorts of other things that they were afraid of.
01:01:05.680And so, what you did with exposure therapy was, it was that you transformed people's conceptualizations of themselves.
01:01:13.240You transformed their conceptualization of themselves from passive victim of malevolent circumstances to active contender with challenge.
01:01:23.020Seriously, maybe I've been doing, maybe I've been unwittingly doing this to myself all my life.
01:01:30.420I remember the first time I was covering a conflict, there were rockets landing, and it was, as it actually is, it's quite exhilarating if you're in a, it isn't if you have no choice to be there.
01:01:47.520If you're a war correspondent or something, it's famously a problem at the job that you can find it exhilarating.
01:01:51.840Well, that's that distinction between voluntary and involuntary, too.
01:01:54.920And Winston Churchill famously said, there's no greater feeling than the feeling of being shot at without result.
01:02:02.500It's an enormously enlivening thing that you feel.
01:02:07.880You think, not today, death, not today.
01:02:10.200And, but the first time I was ever in a conflict where there were rockets landing, funnily enough, when I got back from the area where it was happening and got back on the first evening, my immediate instinct was a very strange one to me, which I thought about a lot afterwards, which was that I thought I could look my grandparents in the face.
01:02:31.460Now, what I mean by that is, and all my grandparents were long dead by then, but what I meant was, they'd all gone through the Blitz or the Second World War.
01:02:42.740And I'd always wondered how on earth you coped with that.
01:02:47.160And I suddenly sort of thought, oh, I see, it's like that.
01:02:50.600So, I would say what you did, okay, so there's a mythological tone to all of the things that you just related.
01:02:57.560So, the first thing you said was that perhaps you had been doing this unwittingly in some sense your whole life.
01:03:03.500Well, one of the things that psychologists eventually figured out was that, oh, people are unwittingly doing this their whole life because that's how you learn.
01:03:29.920And you may learn something about the world or where you are in the world, but you may also learn something about yourself or change as a consequence.
01:03:43.800But the grandfather, so that's the heroic path, by the way.
01:03:46.840But the grandfather comments extremely interesting, too, the grandparent, because one of the tropes, mythological trope, is that if you go into the belly of the beast, you can rescue your forefathers from the belly of the beast.
01:04:01.460Well, that's what you did in some ways when you…
01:04:03.740I think I just wanted to know if I could sort of stand – I just always thought that that generation, the heroism, what they went through.