In this episode, Dr. Jordan Peterson sits down with Sam Harris to discuss their long-standing friendship, and to discuss his new series, Depression and Anxiety. Dr. Peterson and Sam discuss how they came to know each other, and what they have in common, as well as how they differ in their views on the nature of God and morality, and how they try to distinguish between dogma and knowledge, and their approaches to meditation and meditation-based meditation practices. They also discuss what it means to be a Christian and an atheist, and why it s important to separate religion from the rest of the world, especially when it comes to our understanding of morality and morality. This episode is sponsored by Daily Wire Plus, where you get 20% off your first month with discount code: DEPRESSIONANDANxiety at checkout. Let s take the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Go to DailyWire.plus/DEPRESSIONand/or start watching my new series on depression and anxiety on Dailywire Plus now. I hope you enjoy this episode and that you find some solace in knowing that you are not alone in your journey. Peace, Blessings, Cheers, Eternally grateful, Elyssa. -Dr. Jordan B. Peterson -EDUCATION AND SUPPORTED by: Dr. J.B. Peterson, MD, PhD, MA, MA - FREE MEDITATION: Click here for more information on Depression and Anxiety: and . Click here to become a supporter of DailyWire Plus Subscribe to Dailywireplus. Thank you're listening to this podcast! Learn more about your ad-free version of the podcast, your ad choices can help spread the word of this podcast, wherever you get it. You can get the best listening experience, and access to more information about the podcast and support it! ...and much more! Thanks for listening to the podcast by becoming a fellow patron can be found here: bit.ee/support us on social media support, subscribe to our podcast, and we'll get a discount on the show that helps spread the message out there more like it's a little bit more like that helps you reach more of your voice out there. , and more like this everywhere you can help us reach more people like it helps us more reach out to others like you can reach out more of that potential to reach you in the world.
00:00:00.960Hey 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.
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00:00:57.420Hello everyone. Today I have the opportunity to talk to Sam Harris once again.
00:01:14.720Sam and I have spoken many times, and usually publicly, in the past, trying to sort out our mutual understanding
00:01:23.340in relationship to such topics as morality, both Sam and I are convinced, to the core of our beings, you might say,
00:01:33.480that there is a true and not merely relative distinction between good and evil,
00:01:40.100although we differ to some degree in how that distinction might be characterized
00:01:45.300and what the fact of that distinction means with regard to belief.
00:01:51.380And so every time I talk to Sam, I'm interested in trying to understand, for example, what he really means
00:01:58.360by objecting to the religious propositions that he does object to as one of the horsemen of the new atheist movement, so-called.
00:02:07.500Especially given that Sam is also committed to what you might describe as a religious practice.
00:02:16.480He's an avid meditator and certainly believes that spiritual experience is not only real,
00:02:24.940but perhaps the most real form of experience that's available to us.
00:02:30.120So we're going to hash through that, again, to try to distinguish between dogma and knowledge,
00:02:36.660to try to distinguish between religious experience per se, or the religious experience that's valuable,
00:02:43.200and a counterproductive totalitarian dogmatism,
00:02:46.520and to try to lay that all out with forays into the domains of, well, meditative practice,
00:02:53.560and with the occasional description and discussion of the political.
00:03:47.360I mean, my, my, in terms of just how I spend my time day to day, it's really has become a semi-seamless machine for producing well-being.
00:04:01.740I mean, it's really, I'm doing what I want to do moment to moment and finding lots of people who want me to do it.
00:04:09.980So it's just, there's not much distance between what I have to do, certainly professionally, and what I would do anyway, just because I want to do it.
00:04:19.760So it's, I mean, I just, I count myself as extraordinarily lucky to have found my, my path here and that it's working.
00:04:30.460I mean, I just have, I have no, I have no complaints.
00:04:32.700It would be indecent to complain about anything personally at this point, except for the passage of time and the implications of that, which I, which I know all too well.
00:04:42.940Well, I would say that you look both younger and happier than you did the last time I saw you.
00:04:48.020And, you know, I, I got quite attuned in my clinical practice to watching people's faces, obviously, but also seeing to some degree the way that they're set habitually, you know.
00:05:03.360And so I'm, I'm very happy to hear it.
00:05:05.360You said something I think that is of particular interest to me is that you have managed and also attribute this to some degree to good fortune to bring together what you have to do with what you would want to do.
00:05:19.040And that seems to me a sign of optimality of function, well, as well as the good fortune that we just described.
00:05:26.080And so what is it that you think that you're doing that's enabled you?
00:05:31.080I mean, I know that you've been concentrating to a large degree on meditative practice, for example, but what is it that you think you've done to the, to your attitude, let's say, to your patterns of attention that have enabled you to bring what you need to do and what you want to do in alignment?
00:05:49.780Well, I mean, this has been happening for quite some time.
00:05:54.620It's, you know, this is, I would say that this has been, you know, it's taken me 20 years to fully get my, my professional life and my core interests to gel.
00:06:07.200And so part of that is having built out platforms where I can just follow my interests as, and follow the needs of the moment, you know, whether it's responding to something that's in the news or just figuring out what, what I'm most want to pay attention to in a given day or week.
00:06:25.540Uh, so, I mean, as you know, I have, I have both my podcast making sense.
00:06:30.440I have the app waking up, which is, you know, started at narrowly focused as a, a meditation app, but it's much more of a, an applied philosophy app at this, at this point.
00:06:41.140It's just expanded beyond meditation and it's expanded beyond, well beyond my contributions to it.
00:06:48.480So it's, um, there are many other people on it.
00:06:50.820And so I can, I can bounce between those two platforms, you know, however I see fit and they're, and they're, while superficially they're similar because they're just me pushing MP3 files out to the world.
00:07:04.000They're just, just, just audio, uh, uh, platforms in the end, they're totally unlike one another with respect to the kinds of topics I tend to engage and the kinds of interactions with the world that provokes.
00:07:20.420So it's, it's, it's, it's really quite, it's almost like I'm living two lives simultaneously because I'm waking up the app.
00:07:28.780I get, I mean, it's, it's no exaggeration to say it.
00:07:32.940It's, it's, it's almost uniformly, uh, just pure positivity coming back at me, you know, apart from the occasional, you know, software glitch that crashes somebody's phone.
00:07:45.800It's just that there's no distance between what I'm intending to put out and the effect I'm hoping to have and the effect that I, in fact, seem to be having based on the feedback.
00:07:58.780So, and, and this was, you know, this has been, uh, it was launched almost exactly five years ago.
00:08:05.700So for five years, I've had this look at this kind of alternate life.
00:08:09.720It's almost like a, a counterfactual life to the one I, I hadn't managed to lead where I could sidestep all pointless controversy and annoying, uh, you know, bad faith criticisms.
00:08:23.920And just meet people at a place where what I have to give is found valuable by them in, in precisely the way that I would hope.
00:08:36.060So it's just, it's like a, a purely positive encounter with, with legions of people.
00:08:41.680Um, which again, because of my experience as an author and as a podcaster, I had lost sight of that even being a possibility, right?
00:08:50.660I just, I had lost sight of the fact that there are people in this world who have careers where they don't get any grief from the world because the world just understands what they're putting out.
00:08:59.920And they like, and people like it and they get paid for it.
00:09:02.440And it's just, it's a, it's a transaction that makes everybody happy.
00:09:05.160And so it's like opening a bakery where everyone loves the, the scones and, you know, it's, it's just, it's, you know, there's just nothing bad about it.
00:09:13.740Um, and, and yet I find that, you know, as, and this, you know, I'm sure you feel the same way.
00:09:20.440I can't stay merely in that lane because there are other topics of social importance that I feel a need to comment on.
00:09:27.440And, and so I have my podcast and public speaking or, or books or any other channel, but I wish to do that.
00:09:33.920And, and, you know, mostly I'm, I'm doing my podcast for that, but, so I still have a foot in the water of controversy.
00:09:41.400Um, and I'm sure we'll get into some of those controversy, controversies here, but it's to have both is such a, a, um, a source of sanity.
00:09:53.860I mean, I, cause I can, I can just swim in whatever waters I want to swim in on a daily basis.
00:10:02.760Um, so why do you, just out of curiosity, so while there's, there's a substantial parallel, I would say, between the situation you're in and the situation that I'm in, given what you just described.
00:10:14.740Because one of the reasons that I continue to tour continually, essentially, is because it's completely positive.
00:10:23.460And I, I engage in almost no political discussion, almost no culture war discussion.
00:10:30.440Almost all of it is, well, you're, uh, you talk about your waking up, uh, system.
00:10:38.700And I suppose I'm walking on a parallel line insofar as I'm encouraging people to aim up.
00:10:45.020And I don't know if there's any difference between waking up and aiming up.
00:10:48.260Perhaps there is, and we can talk about that, but it is a great relief to be in a domain that's entirely positive.
00:10:56.260And then, but then it is interleaved for me, as it is for you, with some degree of combat, let's say, on the more philosophical and culture war side of things.
00:11:08.840Because how, why have you concluded, sometimes I wonder, Sam, if it wouldn't be just as well to stay in the positive domain all the time.
00:11:19.320And I know that you are no longer on Twitter, for example, and so that's obviously one of the places where you've detached yourself from the proliferation of, you might say, unnecessary and polarizing conflict.
00:11:31.420But you just did indicate that you feel either a moral obligation or an intellectual pull towards keeping abreast of the domain of life that constitutes more problems.
00:11:45.400And so, why do you think that balance is necessary?
00:11:48.760Why don't you forego that entirely and stay within the domain of the positive?
00:11:52.520I mean, you seem to have concluded that balancing them is actually better for you in some sense, or maybe better in general.
00:12:00.180Yeah, well, it's a question I continue to ask myself, because you only have one life, or I would say you only have one life you can be sure of, and so why not live it in the happiest manner possible?
00:12:14.500But I do find that there are certain moments, first of all, my interests are wider than can be encompassed just by things like meditation and narrowly focusing on questions about how to live the most meaningful possible life.
00:12:34.980It's not all just about maximizing mental pleasure or even one's ethical wisdom moment to moment.
00:12:44.400There are things that interest me that I want to talk about that really don't belong over waking up, but they do belong on my podcast.
00:12:50.580So, talking about physics, say, right?
00:12:52.580That's just interesting, and I like to do that.
00:13:26.640I mean, there's a slight sense, certainly when the things in the news are really heating up, that I could be missing something, or I'm not party to the conversation that's happening at that kind of interval, where people are responding to things every 30 seconds.
00:13:43.400But the truth is, I don't have to be, because what I have found is that when you don't have an opportunity to just blurt out your instantaneous response to something that's happening in the news or something you saw in your timeline,
00:13:56.920And you have to let your response to it cure over the course of days, in my case, because I have to decide, okay, is this important enough for me to actually talk about it on my podcast?
00:14:09.100And I might not be podcasting again for another three days or even a week.
00:14:13.420And so many things don't survive that test.
00:14:16.92098% of things just fall by the wayside because the truth is you didn't have to broadcast your opinion about that thing that happened on that campus by that indiscretion committed by that stupid blue-haired person.
00:14:33.220Right. So it's just like you didn't, you didn't have to reap all of the attendant poison of having weighed in and you didn't have to worry about whether you should respond to that poison and those misunderstandings generated there.
00:14:47.260And I noticed in retrospect that, and I dimly, I dimly knew this when I was on Twitter, but I didn't fully appreciate it until I was off, that it was no exaggeration to say that basically every bad thing in my life, you know, apart from, you know, the sickness of the people close to me, was a result of something I had done on Twitter or something that I had seen on Twitter.
00:15:15.440So it was just this kind of hallucination machine that I had invited into the center of my life.
00:15:23.520And getting rid of it really modified my sense of not just what I have to do on a day-to-day basis and what I should do, but just of my own existence, right?
00:15:37.000Like, there was something about my digital existence that was claiming too much real estate in my conception of myself as a person, right?
00:15:47.880Well, you might have put your finger on it, at least to some degree there, with something like your observation about whether or not you're willing to put time into it.
00:16:01.080You know, I've had many discussions with my family about Twitter in particular, and I would tend to agree with you that much of the negativity that I do run into in my life is a consequence of Twitter.
00:16:20.680Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:16:27.260Most 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?
00:16:35.020In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:16:39.980Every 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.
00:16:49.480And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:16:52.660With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:17:00.060Now, you might think, what's the big deal? Who'd want my data anyway?
00:17:03.700Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.
00:17:07.560That's right, there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.
00:17:56.960I use Twitter to stay abreast of the sorts of things that you describe that you might be able to get access to on Twitter as well, current events.
00:18:09.820And there is that temptation to respond immediately.
00:18:13.780But you intimated that maybe a good rule of thumb is something like, if you're not willing to sit down and think about it for an hour, let's say, then perhaps it's not important enough to share your opinion with millions of people and reap the consequences.
00:18:36.380You know, and Twitter is, although it's a social media platform that facilitates impulsivity, it's also a broad scale publishing platform.
00:18:45.700And it's not obvious that you should be publishing all your instantaneous responses to cultural events.
00:18:53.860And it's a funny thing for me because it's not that easy to dissociate that from responsibility.
00:18:59.180You know, I feel that I have a responsibility to bring to light, let's say, certain elements of the culture war that are going on at a deep level.
00:19:08.960And part of the reason that I use Twitter the way that I do use it is to do that.
00:19:13.980But then it does have that problem of intense negativity.
00:19:17.800And I learned from walking through airports with my wife, we had this discussion a couple of times.
00:19:24.960Airports have bothered me a lot ever since 9-11.
00:19:27.700I review them as, they're like the, for me, they're the bleeding edge of the totalitarian incursion into general day-to-day life.
00:19:38.120And they've always made me very uncomfortable.
00:19:40.580I don't like lining up for the, you know, for the screenings, the theatrical screenings and so forth.
00:19:48.420And that made me very bitchy and hard to get along with in airports.
00:19:52.200And, you know, I had a conversation with my wife, a fairly detailed conversation.
00:19:56.940And our decision was, if I'm in an airport and something happens that annoys me but isn't important enough to actually sit down and write about, then I should, I have to just ignore it or shut up about it.
00:20:09.060And this has also helped me calibrate my responses.
00:20:11.560And it's the same problem with Twitter, right, is that something can be irritating and be genuinely irritating.
00:20:18.980But that doesn't necessarily mean that the most appropriate way to deal with it is to share your irritation in the moment.
00:20:24.420And part of the reason Twitter is so pathological, perhaps, and is such a snake pit of polarization is because it does encourage that kind of impulsive and immediate response to things that are perhaps of sufficient seriousness so that they should only be taken seriously.
00:20:42.300Yeah, it encourages many things that I think are ultimately producing some consequential delusions for us individually and at scale.
00:20:54.600I mean, so it is, it provides a kind of an illusion of conversation because, you know, you'll tweet something at me, I'll tweet something at you, and we seem to be talking.
00:21:06.120But as you know, we're primarily talking in front of our respective audiences, which are different, which are largely different, right?
00:21:13.740So when I say something to you, you know, it's, my audience is at my back and vice versa.
00:21:20.100So, so much communication becomes performative, and that starts to degrade the, you know, the kind of the good faith characteristics of a real conversation, and people just wind up scoring points on each other.
00:21:42.260Like, there's an ethic where, you know, very few people feel a real need, and certainly anyone who's any kind of activist, politically, left or right, doesn't feel much of a need to really get their opponent's position correct before savaging it.
00:21:59.420They don't mind distorting it, especially if they can use clips of their opponent that have been artfully edited so as to make them seem to be saying something they weren't, in fact, saying in context.
00:22:10.900They will use that as a way of just smearing the person.
00:22:15.340You want to hold someone accountable for the worst possible version of what they might have said, however implausible it really is, as long as that can be made to stick.
00:22:26.600And people just see what can be made to stick, and they almost never go back and clean up their, you know, apologize for their errors and go back and clean up their mess.
00:22:36.940And people do this, you know, people, you know, when blue check marks meant something, there were a lot of blue check marks who would behave this way, right?
00:22:42.840And you have journalists or people who are treated as journalists.
00:22:46.400And I, you know, as a point of principle, really have always tried to avoid that.
00:22:51.140I mean, whenever I get somebody, somebody's views wrong, however odious I find their views or how odious I find them as a person, I, you know, I apologize for that and correct the record.
00:23:03.560But I found myself continually in dialogue with people who didn't play by those rules.
00:23:07.740So it's set up to bring out the worst in us and to degrade conversation way more fully than it's ever degraded in person.
00:23:18.300I mean, the thing that convinced me to get off Twitter is that I was seeing people behave like psychopaths by the, you know, the tens of thousands.
00:23:27.180And I knew there couldn't be that many psychopaths, right?
00:23:29.260I knew there were, I knew these people couldn't be this dishonest or malicious in their lives.
00:23:34.020And in fact, in many cases, I knew this because I knew some of the people.
00:23:38.860I had had dinner with some of the people.
00:23:39.940You and I have, you know, have mutual friends and colleagues among these people.
00:23:45.220And yet I was seeing the absolute worst in them in terms of how they were engaging on Twitter, not just with me, but with other people who, you know, they felt they needed to slam.
00:23:57.780I mean, I think there's something like this happening.
00:23:59.740I haven't really followed it, but over the Daily Wire, I mean, you're very close to you.
00:24:03.120You've got Candace and Ben attacking each other.
00:24:07.680I would argue that that kind of thing is not only spilling out onto Twitter, it very likely wouldn't happen but for the existence of Twitter.
00:24:18.760And there are many things happening out in the real world that happen in response to something that's seen on Twitter, but then the, you know, like some of the, many of these protests, these pro-Palestinian protests that have become so, such concern to many of us, especially on, you know, college campuses where you have otherwise very educated people expressing solidarity with, with, you know, true ethical monsters in Hamas.
00:24:48.220What we're seeing is something that's seen on Twitter, however, half-baked, and then the response to it in the streets is performative because it's meant for the streets, but it's really meant to be broadcast back on Twitter, right?
00:25:09.020I mean, that people wouldn't be doing these things but for the omnipresence of cell phones that can be broadcast back onto social media.
00:25:16.140And so I just think we have built this reinforcement cycle for ourselves, this kind of feed-forward loop that has eroded our capacity to speak rationally to one another and to have good-faith debates and even strong arguments.
00:25:32.460And it's produced a machine for amplifying the narcissistic tendency of everyone wanting to just manufacture outrage.
00:25:45.440Yeah, well, that's, well, you know, I think there's something, and you're pointing at this, I actually think there's something that's technically going on, particularly with Twitter.
00:25:58.340And maybe it's proportionate to the degree to which a social media communication system capitalizes on immediacy of response.
00:26:08.440Like, I'm afraid that we're setting up virtual environments, they're virtual perceptual environments and communication environments that aren't well-matched to the underlying reality, which means they're delusional.
00:26:20.760And the delusional direction of Twitter is in the direction of enabling psychopathic behavior.
00:26:28.520Now, there's a research literature that's emerging on that.
00:26:31.320So you see the people who are most likely to troll online, so to cause, to post things that they know perfectly well will do nothing but cause trouble, are dark tetrad types.
00:26:45.460They're Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and sadistic.
00:26:49.060And then, so it does bring those people out of the woodwork to a much greater degree than might be otherwise expected.
00:26:58.420But I also think, as you pointed out, that it does the same thing to those fragmentary psychopathic tendencies that exist in everyone.
00:27:21.040Because my online life and my real life are so different that they almost bear no relationship to one another.
00:27:27.520Like, and I suspect this is something that you said you've been discovering, particularly as a consequence of working in the waking up space.
00:27:36.300You know, I mean, all the interactions I have with people in public, in my actual life, are unbelievably positive, with the exception of perhaps one in 5,000.
00:27:47.400Now, the one in 5,000 can be quite unpleasant, but it's statistically negligible.
00:27:52.540But if you derived your expectation of my experience from the online world, you'd expect that, you know, half the people that I ran into would be people that hated me.
00:28:04.740And simply, the lack of concordance is so remarkable that it does look like the difference between a delusion and reality.
00:28:15.080And I think it's unbelievably dangerous.
00:28:17.320Like, we have no idea what it means to compress people to the point where their communication tilts heavily in the psychopathic direction.
00:28:25.220We have no idea what the broad-scale social consequences of that might be.
00:28:30.600So, I feel, so I share your experience.
00:28:33.060Again, my encounters in public are almost uniformly positive.
00:28:36.580I think the, obviously, there's a possibility of a selection effect there that the only people who are likely to come up to you are the people who have something nice to say.
00:28:45.040And then you have other people who are recognizing you who are just, you know, holding their tongues and they don't like you.
00:28:52.040And, you know, we're both controversial figures.
00:28:54.540And I have to think that some percentage of the people who notice us in public are people who are not fans and just don't say anything.
00:29:01.520But still, I've seen the effect, you know, I've joined the two groups.
00:29:10.480I know what it's like to deal with the same person on Twitter in front of their fans versus over dinner.
00:29:17.680And it's, you know, they're miles apart.
00:29:20.240And I just see there's, so it is corrosive even when, even in the best case,
00:29:28.220when we're not talking about anonymous trolls who are hiding behind, you know, their anonymity and just savaging you.
00:29:33.920These are people with real reputations who you actually know and will likely meet again in person.
00:29:40.920And yet Twitter brings out the absolute worst in them.
00:29:44.660I mean, for me, the very large, the 800-pound canary in the coal mine for me is Elon.
00:29:51.520I mean, look at what Twitter has done to Elon's life, right?
00:29:55.340It's just, you know, Elon used to be a friend.
00:29:58.920You know, he's somebody I knew reasonably well.
00:30:03.800You know, his engagement with Twitter has been catastrophic for him as a person from my point of view.
00:30:10.800I mean, it's just, it's clearly a compulsion.
00:30:13.280I mean, he was so addicted to it that he felt he needed to buy the platform.
00:30:16.920But it is a, you know, his use of it has been so irresponsible and produced such, I mean, forget about the harm he's produced in other people's lives.
00:30:29.440And nothing I'm saying now relates to changes he's made to the platform.
00:30:35.900I mean, that's a separate thing that we can talk about.
00:30:38.240You know, I've always been agnostic as to whether or not he could actually improve Twitter as a platform.
00:30:44.880But I'm just talking about the way he has personally used it as a user of the platform and the way he's interacted with people and boosted, signal boosted massively the profiles of anonymous QAnon lunatic trolls, right?
00:31:00.260I mean, he's been completely cavalier in who he interacts with, all the while knowing that anyone he boosts suddenly gets, you know, a million followers and has a platform that they otherwise couldn't imagine having.
00:31:13.680So I look at him and I think, all right, if someone of his talent who has so many other good things to do with his 24 hours in any given day, is this derailed by this platform?
00:31:31.140You know, is using it this compulsively to the obvious degradation of his reputation in most circles that count, right?
00:31:42.840I mean, he's, you know, he's not, he can't be canceled because he's produced so many useful things, you know, and he's just too embedded with things that everyone still wants.
00:31:53.900But man, if he, if, if he were a little less productive, you know, in space and, and on the ground, um, we would never, you know, he'd be, he'd be the next Alex Jones in terms of the way mainstream culture would view him.
00:32:12.120Um, and it's, it's been terrible to see, right?
00:32:27.620I blame, I blame, I mean, for whatever reason, he has found this to be the most addictive thing in his life.
00:32:33.760And, um, and he's, he's been willing to totally torch relationships over his use of it.
00:32:40.820Yeah, well, it's definitely the case that one of the cardinal dangers of Twitter is its propensity to bring out the worst in people and, and the worst in the culture.
00:32:51.780I mean, I guess it's an open question whether or not Musk's takeover of Twitter will result in the dramatic improvements to the platform that might justify the risk inherent in engaging with it.
00:33:09.640I, I want to, I want to turn my attention, our attention, if you don't mind, to some of the deeper issues that you and I have discussed.
00:33:16.760And I have a bunch of questions for you.
00:33:18.960So, the first thing I want to do is clarify something.
00:33:21.740My recollection of, particularly our last conversation, and it was one that I found clarified my understanding of your thought to a greater degree than our previous conversations I had, we had, probably because I listened to you more,
00:33:35.000was that, and so correct me if I get this wrong, because I want to use this as a platform to ask you some other questions.
00:33:42.200My understanding after that conversation was that you were driven to search for a, an objective foundation for moral claims,
00:33:55.440primarily because you had become convinced of the existence of, for lack of a better term, of evil in the world,
00:34:03.360and were looking for a, for solid ground to stand on in your attempts to both understand and combat the most malevolent proclivities of,
00:36:23.180And we should talk about that honestly.
00:36:25.620What I was getting, mostly from the left, was, you know, what struck me as pure masochistic delusion,
00:36:34.760but it was on its own side a very sophisticated philosophy of, you know, postmodernist truth claims about the relativity of everything,
00:36:44.000which, you know, in the minds of its adherents left us with no solid ground to stand on ever when making claims about right and wrong and good and evil.
00:36:55.100So, you know, the point where it became, and this is something that I, this is actually a scene I wrote verbatim in my third book,
00:37:03.820The Moral Landscape, which is where I laid out, you know, my argument on this topic.
00:37:07.980I was at the Salk Institute at a conference that had been organized, it was either in 2006 or 2007, I believe,
00:37:17.940and I had said something disparaging about the Taliban in my remarks about, you know, the relationship between moral values
00:37:27.560and our growing scientific understanding of the human mind and human well-being.
00:37:32.980And I said, you know, something, you know, that I should have been uncontroversial in that context.
00:37:39.240And I'm at the Salk Institute, this, you know, preeminent scientific institution down in La Jolla, which is, you know, one of the nicest places on earth.
00:37:49.100And, you know, with an auditorium filled with, you know, well-heeled people who appear to be enjoying their political freedom
00:37:58.400and their freedom of speech and freedom of everything, and I said something about, well, you know,
00:38:04.840we just know, whatever remains to be discovered about the nature of morality and human value and human well-being,
00:38:14.140we know that the Taliban don't have it perfectly right.
00:38:19.280So whatever the optimal way of living is, we know that the Taliban haven't found it, right?
00:38:24.760We know that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags and beating them or killing them when they try to get out
00:38:30.720is not an optimal strategy for maximizing human well-being.
00:38:36.400And then a woman academic, and she actually happened to be, or was later a scientific advisor to President Obama
00:38:46.400for medical ethics, came up to me, and said, well, that's just your opinion, right?
00:38:52.520And so then this led me to realize just how far the rot had spread, you know, that even here is someone who is, you know,
00:39:01.760a woman academic who's enjoying all the freedom of, you know, however hard won that can be found in Western society.
00:39:11.060Presumably, this is a person who would be, who would have responded to the Me Too movement and all its moral urgency with alacrity.
00:39:22.320She was still open-minded, at least in the context of talking to me, about the treatment of women and girls under the Taliban, right?
00:39:29.300And, you know, I detail our further conversation, again, verbatim in my book, because I literally, I was so astounded by the exchange that I turned on my heels,
00:39:41.600literally in mid-sentence, walked straight back to my room and wrote down exactly what the two of us had said,
00:39:46.340because I just could not believe what had happened.
00:39:49.500So the moral confusion here is that you have many well-educated people who will make very fine-grained distinctions about moral norms in the context of, you know, living, you know, in 21st century America.
00:40:10.100You know, they'll, they'll consider words to be violence and, you know, the misgendering of people to be a profound microaggression, you know, Halloween costumes that culturally appropriate, et cetera, et cetera, are anathema.
00:40:26.020This is, this is how finely calibrated their moral scruples are over here, you know, in the quad of an American university.
00:40:32.640But you ask them to consider whether, you know, someone like Malala Yousafzai was badly treated by the Taliban and they become tongue-tied, right?
00:40:44.720They, they, they, and they will even say things like, well, who are we to criticize an ancient culture?
00:40:49.100So that, so anyway, so that motivated me to say, all right, the smartest, most well-educated people in our society have become unmoored to any vision of objective moral values, right?
00:41:04.340They have, you know, worse, they have it, they have become anchored to a belief that objectivity with respect to moral values is impossible.
00:41:13.720And certainly science will never have anything to say about it.
00:41:16.140And so they've ceded this ground to dogmatic religion, right?
00:41:20.660And someone like Stephen Jay Gould did this when he had this conception of the non-overlapping magisteria between religion and science, right?
00:41:27.760So science talks about facts and, and what is, but religion talks about what should be and, and all, and the totality of human values.
00:41:35.700And I think that's never been a tenable way of dividing the pie.
00:41:40.300Um, and it, but has this obvious defect that where people who lose their religious convictions are then left standing on apparently nothing when it, when it comes time to say something like slavery is wrong.
00:41:53.980I mean, you literally have professors saying, well, you know, I don't like slavery.
00:41:58.580I wouldn't want a slave, but you know, I can't, you know, I can't really say it's wrong from the point of view of the universe, right?
00:42:05.340I mean, it's, that's, that's not the, that's not what science does.
00:42:08.880And my point is that morality, and this is perhaps something you're, you're going to want to, to, um, disagree with, but in my view, morality, morality has to relate to the, the suffering and wellbeing of conscious creatures.
00:42:25.800I mean, not even limiting it to humans, but just whatever can possibly suffer or be made happy in this universe is some, is a, a possible theater of moral concern.
00:42:35.720And we know that my, that conscious minds must be arising in some way in conformity to the laws of nature.
00:42:45.460I mean, so whatever is possible for conscious minds is a statement about, at bottom, a, a final scientific understanding of what minds are and what consciousness is and how those things are integrated with the physics of things.
00:43:00.100Um, and so there, there have to be right answers to the question of how to navigate the,
00:43:05.720from the worst possible suffering for everyone to places on the moral landscape that are quite a bit better than that, where there's, there's beauty and creativity and joy of a sort that we can only dimly imagine.
00:43:16.800And the question of how to do that and what that landscape looks like, those are, those are, it's a fact-based discussion about science at every level that could be relevant to the conscious states of conscious minds.
00:43:30.860And so it's, it's a statement, it's a statement, it's a discussion about genetics and psychology and neurobiology and sociology and economics and, and any, and, and sciences as yet uninvented with respect to causality in this place.
00:43:44.820And so that's, and so that's, that's, that's my argument that there's, we need a, we need a spirit of consilience, um, across this, this, this, this, the domain of facts and values.
00:43:54.920And, um, yeah, there's more to say there, but I'll, I'll, I'll stop.
00:44:00.500Well, so I'm going to, I'm going to pick up a couple of themes there.
00:44:03.560So one of the things that you pointed to was the incoherence manifested by this woman and, and like people in relationship to micro narratives and macro narratives.
00:44:19.700So you said that it was your, in your opinion that she or the people who she might represent would be perfectly willing to be upset about some relatively minor issue that might arise on a university campus, like the wearing of inappropriate Halloween costumes, but are incoherent in relationship to making broader scale, um, moral claims.
00:44:45.280Now, one of the claims of the post-modernists, this was, um, put forward most particularly by, who was it now, who said that there were no meta-narratives.
00:44:57.380The post-modernism is fundamentally disallowance of the idea that any uniting meta-narratives are possible.
00:45:24.840Okay, so here's the problem with that.
00:45:27.580Well, the problem with that in part is that there's no united action and perception at any level without a uniting narrative.
00:45:40.280So, for example, if I just move, if I pick up a glass to move my, a cup from the table to my lips, I have to organize all those extraordinarily complex actions, right, which cascade up from the molecular level through the musculature of my body.
00:45:58.960I have to organize that into something that's coherent and unified in order to bring about any action whatsoever.
00:46:06.160And what that implies is that there's a hierarchy of uniting structure.
00:46:10.700And what the postmodernists do is arbitrarily make that halt at a certain level.
00:46:18.060It's like, so you're allowed a uniting narrative or structure up to a certain level, but beyond that, you're not allowed it at all.
00:46:24.720And that's the point at which the meta-narrative emerges, and those are now forbidden.
00:46:31.360And I don't understand that because I think that it's a distinction between a narrative and a meta-narrative.
00:46:50.500I'll add one other, which I think is a simpler defeater, which is that the claim is that there can be no universal values, right, or universal truth claims with respect to right and wrong and good and evil.
00:47:07.540And yet they tacitly make the universal claim that tolerance of this ethical diversity is better than intolerance, right?
00:47:17.940So the demand is we need to find some space in our minds to tolerate the difference of opinion offered by the Taliban or Hamas or some other group of that sort.
00:47:54.300Well, you see the same thing with the postmodern insistence.
00:47:57.460This is particularly true of people like Foucault, that nothing rules but power, right?
00:48:03.240Because Foucault saw power making itself manifest everywhere.
00:48:06.920And the fundamental postmodernist claim is that there's no uniting metanarratives.
00:48:11.500But that didn't stop the postmodernists for a second in making the claim that you could find power relations underlying every single form of human action and social interaction.
00:48:21.780So, but this, now this metanarrative, this uniting narrative, see, you point to it in a way that I think that points out to me a very fundamental element of agreement between the positions that you and I have taken, even though we've had so much apparent disagreement.
00:48:42.800You point to the Taliban and you say, at minimum, we can say with some degree of certainty that what the Taliban are doing is not optimal.
00:49:01.540Well, you know, I started in my investigations at a more extreme point, I would say.
00:49:06.720I looked at the camp guard in Auschwitz who enjoyed his work and thought, I don't know what good is, but at minimum, it's the opposite of whatever the hell that is.
00:49:21.280And so that was a starting point for me.
00:49:23.820And it seems to me that partly what you're doing is that you put your foot firmly on the head of evil and say, well, this is a starting point.
00:49:32.320And even though we can't define good, we can define it as the opposite of whatever this is.
00:49:39.380And so does that seem like a reasonable point of agreement between us as far as you're concerned?
00:49:44.880Yeah, although I think this is perhaps a different topic, but it's certainly adjacent to what you just said.
00:49:53.060I think there's some ethical paradoxes here, which would be interesting to consider,
00:49:57.380because I think most of human evil, of the sort that you and I are now describing, doesn't require the presence of actually evil people, right?
00:50:07.640I think there are true psychopaths and sadists for whom it is true to say that if evil means anything, it should be applied to their conscious states and their psychology.
00:50:18.020But so much of what we consider to be evil and so much of what produces needless human misery is the result of otherwise normal people psychologically behaving terribly because they believe fairly crazy and unsupportable things about what reality is and how they should live within it.
00:50:39.540So I would by no means ever want to suggest, in fact, I'm at pains to say otherwise whenever I can remember to, that all jihadists or even most jihadists or all Nazis or even most Nazis were psychopaths, right?
00:50:57.640I mean, the horror of these belief systems is not that they act like bug lights for the world's psychopaths and you attract a lot of people who would be doing terrible things anyway and they just happen to start doing it in this new context, let's say, under the Islamic State.
00:51:13.560No, certain ideologies attract totally normal people who would otherwise be totally recognizable to us psychologically and socially as good normal people, but for the fact that they got convinced that, you know, of whatever the relevant dogma is, you know, in the case of, yeah.
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00:52:51.000Well, so I would say that's another point of agreement.
00:52:55.640It seems to me that the pathological, the systems that produce rapid movement towards social and psychological pathology, both facilitate psychopathic behavior and attract the psychopaths.
00:53:13.340You can have both of those operating at the same time.
00:53:15.540Right, and so then what we have are people, we have systems of ideas working in the background, and those systems of ideas draw people into their orbit and motivate them to do things that, under the influence of other systems of ideas, they might not be inclined to do.
00:53:37.600And also, I just note, and you might want to leave this aside, but your description of a guard at Auschwitz who enjoys his work.
00:53:45.540I think it's tempting to imagine that that guard is incapable of all the ordinary forms of happiness and life satisfaction that we would recognize in ourselves because of what he is spending his time doing.
00:54:04.780And I would say that's obviously not the case.
00:54:07.880I mean, so the, and there can be virtues expressed toward evil ends.
00:54:13.360I mean, just, just imagine, just unpack the meaning of that phrase, the guard at Auschwitz who enjoys his work, right?
00:54:20.860So like, there's the, do you know the, I think it's just called the Auschwitz album.
00:54:27.720Did you ever see these photographs that were taken?
00:54:37.240Well, and I think your, your, your, your insistence that we can't merely write off that pathological behavior as a manifestation of a kind of a human psychopathy is extraordinarily important, right?
00:54:51.640Because we have to contend with the fact that these systems of ideas are capable of, I think, possessing is the best metaphor.
00:55:00.460And that's something I want to get into you, into you with you, that those systems of ideas are capable of possessing people who are in no way indistinguishable from the normal, from normal people.
00:55:12.840And sometimes not indistinguishable from, from people with all sorts of laudatory traits.
00:55:20.340I think you mean, not, not distinguishable.
00:55:28.400But I would just, just add one, sorry, sorry to keep derailing you, Jordan, but I would just add one more piece here.
00:55:32.400One thing that suggests is that mental pleasure, though it is, though it is often taken as a sign of the kind of moral rightness of, of our current preoccupation, isn't such a sign.
00:55:48.000I mean, you can, there's such a thing as pathological ecstasy, right?
00:55:56.640And so I, so I would just say that, so you can imagine the suicide bomber before he detonates his bomb, if he's, if like many of them, when he's doing that with the sincere expectation that in the next moment he will be in paradise, there is a kind of exaltation and, and even self-transcending quasi-spiritual positive affect there that you just have to grant.
00:56:24.460That is, that the human mind is capable of being pointed in the wrong direction ethically and, and feel very good about it.
00:56:32.900Well, positive emotion of the incentive kind mediated by dopamine is associated with movement towards a posited goal.
00:56:43.940And so what that means is that false goal produces false enthusiasm, false goals produce false enthusiasm, essentially by definition, right?
00:56:53.060And so that's actually, by the way, as far as I can tell, the moral of the story of the Tower of Babel, by the way, is that you can build pyramidal structures that reach to the sky that are predicated upon either false goals or false assumptions.
00:57:07.740And the consequence of that is, and the consequence of that is the creation of a state of disunity and misery so comprehensive that people can no longer communicate with one another.
00:57:16.400So, now, these systems, see, Sam, the reason I brought this up in part is because my meditations on the influence of systems of ideas, I thought about these as systems of animating ideas, that I saw a very strong concordance between the action of systems of animating ideas and archetypes.
00:57:39.840And so that's why I started to become interested in archetypes.
00:57:42.540And so, I would say that the one way of conceptualizing the possession, the ideas that possess people that motivate them in a pathological direction is that they're possessed by ideas that are archetypally evil.
00:58:01.500And so, and so, here's the question I have for you, and my sense is that you, and this is the same as Richard Dawkins, is that you guys identify the spirit that motivates people to act in a pathological direction, the Taliban.
00:58:23.380You identify that with the religious, with the religious impulse.
00:58:35.300Well, I would say that it's not exclusively religious, but insofar as it is religious, it gets even more leverage in that context and to worse ends.
00:58:46.500So, for instance, you know, what is worse about jihadism than, you know, ordinary forms of terrorism, in my view?
00:58:54.700It is the religious topspin it has based on its motivating ideas.
00:59:00.500So, the fact that it is, in principle, otherworldly, the fact that it is, you know, just anchored to prophecy and belief in the supernatural,
00:59:10.580all of that potentiates it, you know, further in the wrong direction.
00:59:14.860So, like, you know, the troubles in Ireland would have been made worse had the Irish Catholics also been suicide bombers expecting to go straight to heaven because there was a passage in the New Testament which said, you know,
00:59:30.860if you die while killing pagans or Jews or any other non-Christian, you'll find yourself at the right hand of Christ in the next moment, right?
00:59:42.780So, like, it's better that there's not a passage like that in the New Testament.
00:59:47.620And it's better that that, you know, quasi-religious political source of terrorism in the UK was not potentiated by a clear connection to religious belief and religious expectation.
01:00:05.860Okay, so your claim is something like the possibility of religious justification for an unethical act has the side effect of elevating the status of that,
01:00:25.060of the claim to morality associated with that evil act to the highest place.
01:00:42.020That you're not to use the Lord's name in vain.
01:00:45.340And it's the same injunction that pops up a couple of times in the Gospels,
01:00:50.140where Christ tells his followers to not pray in public and to not be like the Pharisees where their good deeds can be seen in public.
01:00:58.440And so, the first injunction, the commandment, is pointing out a deadly sin.
01:01:08.180And the sin is to claim to be acting in the name of what is most high when all you're actually doing is pursuing either your own motivations or, even worse, your worst possible motivations.
01:01:23.740And your claim seems to be that the intrusion of religious thought into the ethical domain allows for those claims to be put forward, thus magnifying their dangers.
01:01:38.660Is that a reasonable way of putting it?
01:01:40.620Well, I think it depends on the specific instance we're talking about.
01:01:47.340But I think what I'm saying is even more pessimistic than that.
01:01:52.520It's that given the requisite beliefs, it's possible to create immense harm consciously, create immense harm without even having bad intentions toward anyone.
01:02:07.520I mean, it's not that your bad intentions and your hatred of others somehow gets a sacred framing by religion.
01:02:19.460I mean, that also happens, and that's a problem.
01:02:22.640But in the worst case, you can actually be feeling compassion while creating terrible harms, right?
01:02:31.340Like, you can feel nothing, certainly no ill will at all for the people you're appealing.
01:02:35.000So, I mean, to take the extreme case, there are cases where jihadists have blown up crowds of children, you know, Muslim children on purpose for a variety of reasons.
01:02:47.940I mean, there were cases in, you know, where there were Western soldiers handing out candy to crowds of children during the war in Iraq at one point.
01:02:58.540And, you know, a suicide bomber would blow that whole scene up.
01:03:03.240And the whole point is manifold, but it's obviously to kill the soldiers and produce those casualties.
01:03:11.200But it's also just to create the horror and apparent untenability of the whole project in Iraq, right?
01:03:18.800It's just like, well, these are people who are going to blow up their own children.
01:03:21.560And what possible good could we do here trying to build a nation, right?
01:03:28.500But just to close the loop there, I'm not imagining that the people who did that actually hated the children, right?
01:03:38.000They just believe, they believe that there's absolutely no possibility of making a moral error here because the children, they know, are going to go straight to paradise.
01:03:46.720They've actually done the children a favor by the light of their beliefs.
01:03:50.060Yeah, okay, so I'm perfectly willing to accept that modification.
01:03:55.700So you're basically saying that not only can you use the most high as a justification for your actions and as a consequence produce all the terrible dangers that are associated with that,
01:04:09.980but that that can actually twist your moral compass so that acts that are truly highness are seen as manifestations of what's best.
01:04:19.100Okay, so here's the problem as far as I see it, Sam.
01:04:22.220The contradiction here that I'm trying to work out is that on the one hand, we have this situation where if there is no reference to a higher good or a lower evil,
01:04:35.100because I'm going to assume those are basically the same thing, you end up in a situation where you can't do anything but take a postmodernist stance in the face of, let's say, the Hamas atrocities or the atrocities of the Taliban or the atrocities of Auschwitz,
01:04:50.660because there's nothing higher to point to against which to contrast those patterns of endeavor.
01:04:58.200But if you do posit something that's of the highest, then you run into the problem where, as you just pointed out,
01:05:07.440that you can use your hypothetical alliance with what is now deemed to be highest to justify your own evil actions,
01:05:17.620but also to skew your moral sentiments so that you take positive pleasure in this, let's say, in the suffering of others,
01:05:27.160even the suffering of innocent children.
01:05:29.060So, but, now, on the one hand, if you drop the notion of the highest good, you end up in the morass of moral relativism,
01:05:37.220and on the other hand, if you accept it, then you end up in a situation where you can justify the worst behavior in reference to the highest possible good.
01:05:45.420Is that a reasonable portrayal of a conundrum?
01:05:52.280I don't find it, I think that's a needle that we can easily thread.
01:05:55.680And so, and the way I would do it is just to say that there's obviously higher good,
01:06:03.060and it's also obvious that we don't know, we don't fully know its character, right?
01:06:08.740So that, like, we know that things can get better.
01:06:11.180They can get quite a bit better and quite a bit worse.
01:06:14.100And we know that better and worse, maybe that's as multidimensional as you want it to be, right?
01:06:21.040That it's not just one, it's not just, for instance, it's just not, it's not just a matter of more pleasure, say.
01:06:27.240It's not just a matter of more physical health.
01:06:59.620But we know, even within the context, and conversely, we know that there's just experiences of beauty and creativity and inspiration and love and gratitude that we, you know,
01:07:16.500those of us who have had them, you know, either in meditation or on psychedelics or in other peak moments in life,
01:07:23.560you know, we just find ourselves tongue-tied in the aftermath trying to capture what was going on there.