The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast


449. Trauma and the Demolition of Faith ｜ Ronnie Janoff-Bulman


Summary

Dr. Ronnie J. Janoff-Bullman is a social psychologist and the author of two books, one from about 30 years ago, called Shattered Assumptions, and the other, The Two Moralities: The Origin and Fall of Right and Left Politics. In this episode, she discusses her work on shattered assumptions and the political divide, as well as her experiences with trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, and how they have shaped her understanding of the nature of trauma and PTSD. She also discusses the political and cultural divide, and what it means to be a victim of trauma, and why it's important to understand the root causes of these conditions and how we can work toward a better understanding of how they affect us and the people we interact with in the world. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. We 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. 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. In his new series, 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, and there s not alone. Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. J.B. Peterson's new series on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Let This be a step towards a brighter, more positive, brighter future that you deserve! Dr. Bullman and a life you deserve to be free of depression and an understanding of your worth and opportunity to feel better, a life that s a brighter and a better future you can live in a better world you deserve a brighter future. -Dr. Jordan Peterson - DailyWire Plus Subscribe to Dailywire Plus on your favorite streaming platform so you can be more fulfilled, more fulfilled and more connected to your truth and a more meaningful life. . Thank you for listening to this podcast and sharing it on your social media platform? Thanks for listening and sharing this episode with your fellow humans? - Dr. Jonoff-Buckingman and I hope you re not alone! - Thank you so much for listening


Transcript

00:00:00.940 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740 We 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.
00:00:20.100 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420 Hello, everyone. I'm talking today with Dr. Ronnie Janoff-Bullman.
00:01:14.300 She's a professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
00:01:20.420 She's a social psychologist and the author of two books, one from about 30 years ago called Shattered Assumptions,
00:01:28.640 and the other called The Two Moralities, The Origin and Fall of Right and Left Politics.
00:01:36.000 Why did I want to talk to Dr. Janoff-Bullman?
00:01:39.040 Well, I'm very interested in both angles of her work.
00:01:42.560 First, because the notion of shattered assumptions is associated with the idea that there's something like a hierarchy of values in our beliefs,
00:01:55.540 in the structure of our beliefs, that we have some beliefs that are more fundamental than others.
00:02:01.260 Those would be beliefs that many other beliefs depend upon.
00:02:06.040 And so I wanted to talk to her about what it might mean that the assumptions that orient us in the world are organized hierarchically, right?
00:02:15.680 So that some things are deep and other things peripheral.
00:02:19.020 And so that the deep things are, in some sense, the most real and vital.
00:02:23.820 All of those topics we're going to talk about in the discussion with Dr. Ronnie Janoff-Bullman.
00:02:30.380 So I'm interested in your two major works.
00:02:37.120 I want to talk to you about Shattered Assumptions, and I want to talk to you about The Political Divide.
00:02:41.440 And I think we'll start with Shattered Assumptions.
00:02:43.600 And so why don't you start by letting everybody who's watching and listening know what you meant when you discussed Shattered Assumptions
00:02:55.620 and why you felt that was a reasonable way of approaching the problem of traumatic injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, right?
00:03:06.940 Profound disillusionment, even.
00:03:09.500 Okay, I mean, that's work that's now 30 years old, I should say that.
00:03:15.680 But I'm a social psychologist, not a clinical psychologist.
00:03:19.800 And I did a great deal of research on victimization back 30 and 40 years ago.
00:03:26.820 And what I was finding was some commonality, actually a great deal of commonalities across victimizations,
00:03:33.440 things that we would now call trauma, rape victims, loss of loved ones early, accident victims, natural disaster victims.
00:03:42.880 And at the time, the clinical literature really was somewhat problematic from my perspective
00:03:49.200 because it was looking at people as pathological as opposed to the situations as pathological in some sense.
00:03:55.820 And I kept hearing the same thing from people across these domains, which was, I never thought it could happen to me.
00:04:07.980 Which was kind of surprising at the time because, you know, we assume people know bad things happen, right?
00:04:12.640 But it led me, actually, to do some work and further research.
00:04:22.600 And I posited this notion of shattered assumptions based on a sort of people's finding that what we now know as implicit cognition,
00:04:35.260 at the time there was no work really, or very little work on implicit cognition,
00:04:39.360 but finding that basically people's beliefs about, these fundamental beliefs about the world seem to have gotten shattered.
00:04:46.460 That beliefs about the world being meaningless, meaningful, not random, benevolent, people being worthy,
00:04:54.700 all of a sudden people really questioned these very, very basic beliefs that they didn't even necessarily know they had.
00:05:01.700 And it led me to this notion of shattered assumptions, which now, if I wrote the book now, would be a little easier to claim
00:05:12.520 because of all we now know about implicit cognition, right?
00:05:16.440 These are implicit beliefs.
00:05:19.200 And these beliefs actually were not necessarily illusions.
00:05:26.020 I mean, they were these sort of working models of the world, a good enough world.
00:05:32.500 And after these negative events, they did seem to get shattered.
00:05:36.700 People had a sense of their own fragility, their creatureliness.
00:05:41.580 You know, we're humans and species with symbolic systems, and yet we're food for worms.
00:05:47.660 You know, that notion of fragility, terror, so forth and so on.
00:05:51.880 So basically, I was writing it in some ways as a corrective to much that was out there in these very distinct domains.
00:06:00.480 So there would be a literature on rape victims, for example, or literature on natural disasters.
00:06:04.880 Now, I should say there were wonderful people working at the time, clinicians who certainly, you know,
00:06:12.480 knew certainly as much as I did and probably lots more.
00:06:16.580 But they had a very different perspective.
00:06:18.240 Social psychology, I think, is a very healthy way of viewing the world because it normalizes as opposed to pathologizes.
00:06:24.500 And that's where I was coming from.
00:06:26.400 I don't know if that sufficiently responds to your question.
00:06:29.380 Okay, okay.
00:06:29.800 Oh, yeah.
00:06:30.440 Yeah, well, it's definitely a good start.
00:06:32.660 Okay, so now you mentioned something that I'll just get you to clarify a bit.
00:06:37.940 You said that if you were writing this book today with what we know about implicit cognition,
00:06:43.720 that your argument would be easier to justify.
00:06:45.880 So just, like, flesh that out a bit before I ask you some other questions.
00:06:50.700 Well, the notion—well, the fact is that now we have implicit beliefs that people don't necessarily know they have.
00:06:57.080 So it's easy to argue that when something happens and the inner world gets shattered,
00:07:03.520 that these very fundamental beliefs now, which really are at the base of our conceptual world,
00:07:10.020 can be impacted by real-life events, even though we don't know we hold them.
00:07:16.400 Do you see?
00:07:16.640 Okay, okay, got it.
00:07:18.020 Yeah, see, at the time, that wasn't necessarily clear.
00:07:21.280 People would say, well, we know what we believe.
00:07:23.400 Everybody knows what—
00:07:24.500 Yeah, yeah.
00:07:24.640 You know, what—do you see?
00:07:25.880 Sure.
00:07:26.360 So that's all I meant by that, Jordan.
00:07:28.040 Yes.
00:07:28.220 Okay, okay, okay, good.
00:07:29.380 Well, that's—I presume that's what you meant.
00:07:31.120 Okay, so now, let me run an idea by you, and you tell me what you think about this and see if it's in accordance with what you believe.
00:07:38.340 So I've been trying to think about this, in part, neurologically,
00:07:44.380 because I'm interested in why anxiety and terror might be radically—anxiety and terror and pain radically disinhibited by the shattering of belief and hope destroyed at a fundamental level.
00:08:00.240 Okay, so now you believe in something approximating a fundamental level.
00:08:04.460 So let me explain what I think that might mean, and then you tell me what you think about that.
00:08:10.740 Okay, so in the landscape of implicit cognition, there are hierarchical dependencies.
00:08:19.760 There are some presumptions that we make.
00:08:22.940 They might be implicit, upon which many other presumptions rest.
00:08:30.240 That's like—that's a good definition of fundamental.
00:08:32.600 Here's a way of thinking about it.
00:08:36.060 Imagine that you track the citation count of a scientist's work.
00:08:41.960 Well, the more—if the discipline hasn't become corrupt, the more citations, broadly speaking, that a given scientist has, the more their work is fundamental to the field.
00:08:57.060 And the reason for that is because much other work in that field depends on those publications.
00:09:05.880 Otherwise, they wouldn't be massively cited.
00:09:08.880 And so then you can imagine that in a system of belief, there are levels of dependency.
00:09:16.020 Those levels of dependency have a bedrock.
00:09:21.360 And at that bedrock, everything rests.
00:09:25.160 That seem reasonable to you?
00:09:27.100 Absolutely, absolutely.
00:09:28.120 Oh, okay, good.
00:09:29.080 So let's—okay, so let me go a little farther with this, and you tell me if you object to any of this.
00:09:34.680 Okay, so I've come to understand that that implicit structure through which we see the world is equivalent to a weighting system.
00:09:48.960 It looks to me like it's equivalent to the statistical weights that large language models extract.
00:09:56.100 Yeah, that makes sense to you, too.
00:09:57.440 Okay, okay, so then we have to filter the world through a system of weights.
00:10:05.020 That's how we prioritize our attention.
00:10:07.220 We have to prioritize our attention because there's too much information.
00:10:11.180 There's way too much information.
00:10:12.400 There's way too many possibilities.
00:10:14.240 So we prioritize, and we do so in keeping with our axiomatic assumptions, and they have a hierarchical structure, structure of dependency.
00:10:26.080 Now, if something happens to us that violates those assumptions, then it blows the weighting system.
00:10:34.360 It demolishes the weighting system that we use to prioritize our attention, and everything comes flooding back.
00:10:41.860 Okay, do you know Carl Fristen's work, by any chance?
00:10:45.200 Not well, so—
00:10:46.820 Okay, okay, well, this is an exciting thing.
00:10:49.800 Okay, so Carl Fristen has a model of perception that's very well-developed, and he's a very well-sighted neuroscientist.
00:10:58.140 He invented most of the—what would you call it?
00:11:02.140 The procedures that people use to investigate MRI images, for example.
00:11:08.380 Right, okay.
00:11:08.780 Okay, so Fristen's a very well-established neuroscientist, and he believes that both anxiety and positive emotion are related to entropy control.
00:11:22.900 So this is different than terror management.
00:11:25.420 It's a very different idea, although they're analogous in some sense.
00:11:28.880 Okay, so anxiety signals the collapse of a system of orientation so that hierarchical weighting is no longer possible, so that way too many things impinge upon you at once.
00:11:45.160 And anxiety is actually the signal that that happens.
00:11:48.260 Technically, it's the signal that that's happening.
00:11:51.280 And so it's the flooding back of chaos, right?
00:11:54.060 Right, right.
00:11:54.540 Enough—okay, now, the consequence of this, we know the psychophysiological consequences of this.
00:12:00.380 The psychophysiological consequences are accelerated—an acceleration of the stress response, right?
00:12:07.280 Stress response, right.
00:12:07.660 Exactly.
00:12:08.740 Hyper-preparation on the psychophysiological side, right?
00:12:12.780 And that is sufficiently stressful to be physiologically and neurologically damaging.
00:12:19.660 Right, the hyper-vigilance that comes with trauma is clearly consistent with that.
00:12:26.580 Right, right, precisely.
00:12:27.580 The thing that I would say is—the thing I would say that's interesting is one doesn't even need to—I mean, obviously, there is a weighting system.
00:12:33.300 And, you know, the accuracy at the very top levels is absolutely essential.
00:12:38.060 And at the fundamental levels, at some level, you can have some illusory beliefs because, I mean, if—it's very dangerous.
00:12:44.900 I believe I can swim, and I'm a great swimmer, but I go into a pool and I can't swim, I'm in trouble.
00:12:50.480 If I think the world is sort of more benevolent than it really is, that's not going to get me—you know, that's really a fundamental belief that's not going to get me into as much trouble, but can guide me in a positive way, okay?
00:13:02.380 One of the things I was going to say is I'm not sure you need to even pause the weighting system in the case of trauma because I think what—although I don't think we would disagree about this—what is being shattered and disrupted is the base of the fundamental—of the system, the conceptual bedrock of the system.
00:13:20.860 Yes, absolutely.
00:13:21.620 That's shattered. And the anxiety is really a double-duty anxiety. First of all, living in a world that does seem more dangerous all of a sudden when you've been sort of—horrible things have happened to you, right?
00:13:35.640 There's this real-world phenomenon, and on top of that, you have lost the guideposts to survive it, right?
00:13:42.760 The conceptual system that orients you, as you would say Fristin's work would talk about.
00:13:46.660 So you've kind of—so you now have this double—this anxiety that's quite remarkable that leads to really a sense of terror.
00:13:53.960 It's not—
00:13:54.300 Yeah, well, there's two things that happen in Fristin's conceptualization, and I wrote a paper about this with some students of mine, too, when we were trying to tie anxiety to entropy.
00:14:03.480 It's not only that anxiety mounts. That's bad. That's terrible, right?
00:14:07.580 And it does result in this state of psychophysiological hyperpreparation, which is physiologically devastating across time, right?
00:14:15.820 It can cause brain damage. It can make you—it does, in fact, make you old because you're burning up excess resources.
00:14:22.120 The other thing that happens, though, is that it destroys hope, and that's also an entropy problem.
00:14:27.580 So Fristin characterized positive emotion as a signal that entropy in relationship to a valued goal had decreased.
00:14:38.540 So imagine that you posit something of value, and then you move towards it, and you see yourself moving towards it, and that's happening validly.
00:14:48.080 Then the diminution of the distance between you and the goal is signaled by dopamine release, and it shows that the probability that you're going to attain that goal is increasing, and that's what hope is.
00:15:03.460 Now, if you blow out your value structure, or if it's pulled out from underneath you because your assumptions are shattered, then your conceptualization of—or even your belief in the possibility of a valid goal also vanishes.
00:15:20.580 So not only are you subsumed by anxiety, you're overwhelmed by hopelessness.
00:15:25.940 Yes. No, there's no question. I mean, and I talk about that, actually, in the book.
00:15:30.040 But I don't talk about—I only have a few pages on the neurophysiology of trauma because you have to remember it was published 30 years ago.
00:15:39.420 Right, of course.
00:15:40.040 So the research was 35, 40 years.
00:15:41.600 We have learned—or trauma researchers, and I haven't, by the way, done research on trauma for many years, but trauma researchers have learned a great deal, as you're pointing out, about some of the physiological, neuropsychological bases of—or ramifications and consequences of trauma.
00:16:00.800 Which is not something that, you know, that long ago we knew much about.
00:16:05.640 It is interesting, though, that from social psychology, we do think about emotions as signals.
00:16:11.400 I mean, you don't even have to posit the physiology or neuroscience.
00:16:16.300 You can say, you know, your emotions are sort of the experiential, automatic signals about how you're operating in the world.
00:16:23.960 Yeah, they're navigation guides.
00:16:25.740 Yeah, yeah, navigation guides.
00:16:27.140 So we're just very similar, but we're talking about at different levels of analysis there.
00:16:31.480 Yeah.
00:16:31.680 Yeah.
00:16:32.240 Okay, so now let's go to the idea of the shattering.
00:16:37.720 So there's something else I want to weave in.
00:16:42.840 So imagine that you have an aim and that it's predicated on a set of values.
00:16:50.420 Now imagine that those values have a hierarchical structure in the way that we just described.
00:16:56.000 So there's something at the bottom.
00:16:57.380 Now that—the question is, how would you characterize that structure?
00:17:03.840 So I have a hypothesis for you, and you can tell me what you think about this.
00:17:08.120 It's a hypothesis that I've developed fairly extensively, but I'm working on in detail in the new book that I'm working on right now called We Who Wrestle With God.
00:17:19.480 So I think that a description of the structure through which we look at the world, the hierarchy of values through which we look at the world, I think that's literally what a story is.
00:17:37.160 See, a story—so, okay, so a story—if you go to a movie and you watch the protagonist, hero or villain, here's what you'll see.
00:17:49.480 You'll see a sequence of situations in which the aim of the character becomes clear.
00:18:01.100 Right.
00:18:01.620 Now, when you watch that, what happens is that you infer his aim and you adopt that.
00:18:08.780 You embody that.
00:18:10.020 This is literally how you understand it.
00:18:12.020 You embody it.
00:18:12.920 You come to see the world through that perspective, and you experience the emotions that are part and parcel of that aim, right?
00:18:22.280 So that's a form of exploration, right?
00:18:24.320 Because it means you can go to a movie or you can watch a piece of fiction.
00:18:28.400 You can adopt a temporary aim.
00:18:31.520 It's like a game.
00:18:32.600 You can adopt a temporary aim.
00:18:34.100 And in consequence, you can explore the consequences of that aim, but also have the experience that goes along with it.
00:18:41.020 It's the same thing that people are doing, by the way, when they go to a sports stadium.
00:18:45.700 And they watch someone aiming at the goal, right?
00:18:49.880 And being skillful in their approach, right?
00:18:52.040 They adopt the aim, which is the goal.
00:18:53.960 That's why they identify with the team.
00:18:55.660 And then they embody the emotions that are appropriate to that aim.
00:19:02.640 Okay, so I think this is a fundamental...
00:19:06.800 See, I figured this out in part 30 years ago when I was looking at the neuropsychology of expectation, right?
00:19:16.620 There's a big cognitive psychology literature on expectation.
00:19:21.360 Social psych is all about it, right?
00:19:23.480 Right, right.
00:19:24.060 All expectations.
00:19:24.480 But there's something about that that's wrong because we don't expect in the world.
00:19:30.760 We desire.
00:19:32.700 We desire, right?
00:19:34.260 Our expectations are specified by our desires.
00:19:37.460 And that's a useful twist because it brings in...
00:19:41.680 It integrates motivation.
00:19:43.620 You see, if it's cold cognitive expectation, we're prediction machines.
00:19:47.580 But we're not.
00:19:48.680 We're motivated machines.
00:19:50.240 We're pursuing our desires.
00:19:51.480 And so our aims are motivated.
00:19:55.300 Right, right.
00:19:55.860 And so we're upset when the outcome doesn't match our desire, not when the outcome doesn't match our expectation.
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00:21:43.160 That's very interesting.
00:21:44.540 I guess I agree in part.
00:21:48.160 I do think that, I mean, there's such a huge literature in psychology on expectation that doesn't necessarily,
00:21:53.860 let's assume you're responding to somebody on the basis of a stereotype, for example.
00:21:59.120 You're responding based on expectation.
00:22:01.500 You generally operate to confirm it, but I'm not sure that's based on a desire.
00:22:05.540 So I'm not sure all of it is motivated.
00:22:07.740 I think some of it is, some, much is motivated.
00:22:10.400 I agree with you.
00:22:11.340 But I think much is, there is a great deal that's not motivated cognition.
00:22:15.820 The bulk of our human functioning is.
00:22:18.120 Okay, well, so I think we can solve that conundrum, given the framework we're already using.
00:22:25.200 So imagine that we're seeing the world through a hierarchy of value, right?
00:22:30.840 With something, okay.
00:22:31.720 The farther down the assumption hierarchy you go towards the base, the more motivation is involved.
00:22:40.000 If you're just playing on the periphery, where things don't matter, then it's expectation.
00:22:46.420 But if you go down into the depths, then it starts to become highly motivated.
00:22:52.080 And part of that motivation is the fact that as you go down into the depths, the world, like,
00:22:58.840 your stability depends on what you desire making itself manifest, or at least not being radically violated, right?
00:23:10.480 Right, that's right.
00:23:11.260 Your stability depends on your working models actually working, right?
00:23:16.540 And I do agree, you know, it's interesting when you talk about motivation,
00:23:20.560 because when I was doing the Two Moralities book, of course, all of that is funneled right through motivation.
00:23:26.820 I mean, the fundamental notions of approach and avoidance, I mean, that is really how we organize our lives, right?
00:23:34.760 Sure, that's the root of emotion.
00:23:35.900 I believe in motivation, believe, for sure.
00:23:38.020 Okay, okay, okay.
00:23:39.280 So, the expectation model came out of the cognitive and the neurophysiological literature of the early 60s,
00:23:55.020 and it came out of cybernetic modeling, and it came out of neuropsychological modeling and early cognitive science.
00:24:04.520 And the notion there, again, as I said, was that people were rather cold prediction machines, expectation machines.
00:24:12.000 That's where the notion of something like working model came from.
00:24:16.840 But I believe that there's a serious flaw, the fact that that doesn't incorporate motivation,
00:24:22.780 the fact that it's expectation rather than desire, it does two things.
00:24:29.860 It's a fundamental flaw because it takes motivation out of the picture, and that's a big problem because, like, we're highly motivated.
00:24:35.860 And the second thing it does is it obscures the fact that we're not modeling, we're telling a story.
00:24:42.860 Those aren't the same thing.
00:24:45.080 And this is rather—
00:24:46.420 Okay, okay.
00:24:47.700 Now, I was going to say, I agree in part.
00:24:49.600 I just wouldn't paint the entire picture that way.
00:24:53.580 I do think there is much where we are not—you know, so many things are operating without our awareness, okay?
00:25:01.980 And I'm not talking about Freudian, you know, unconscious.
00:25:04.980 We have automatic, you know, mind time, you know, system, one system, two kinds of operations.
00:25:09.800 So much of that, it won't necessarily—it is automatic.
00:25:15.800 Now, you can still say that automaticity derives from a system that's fundamentally motivated, okay?
00:25:21.300 But I do think in its operation, there's a kind of automaticity to so much that we do, that so much, you know, that at least, you know, I don't have any problem saying it's consistent with a motivational model.
00:25:35.620 But I feel like that, in fact, as it operates, it does look like pure cognition in many cases.
00:25:42.580 And that we're just—we're confirming expectations because that's how we can operate in the world, you know?
00:25:51.360 Okay, okay.
00:25:51.740 And that is motivation.
00:25:54.300 Okay, so let me take that a little part bit because I'm going to reformulate it, and I'll tell you why.
00:25:59.400 And I'll tell you why I think that's in keeping with your theory.
00:26:02.040 So, confirming an expectation, no, testing our fundamental narrative hypotheses.
00:26:14.520 And why?
00:26:16.560 Because we want to make sure that the foundation is remaining intact.
00:26:20.880 Is that automatic?
00:26:22.340 It's automatic until the assumptions are shattered, and then automaticity—
00:26:25.820 That's right.
00:26:26.520 Well, so that's the thing.
00:26:28.020 So that's the key that shows you that even the automaticity is dependent on the integrity of the model that's motivated, right?
00:26:39.000 No, that's right.
00:26:39.640 It's automatic within the assumption.
00:26:41.920 It's automatic within the maintained assumption.
00:26:45.960 But the story's invalidated when the—
00:26:48.420 Okay, so let me tell you a story, and you tell me what you think about this,
00:26:52.540 because I think this is a story, it's a fundamental story, and it's germane to your hypothesis.
00:26:58.860 I want to put forward the hypothesis that the framework of meaning that's shattered in the case of trauma is a—
00:27:07.340 It's a naive framework.
00:27:09.240 Now, it might be implicit.
00:27:10.600 It's a naive form of faith.
00:27:12.340 And we know that naivety is a risk factor for trauma, because we know that people who are dependent are more likely to be traumatized.
00:27:23.980 So, okay, so here's the naivety element of it.
00:27:28.480 I want to tell you—I want to bring in a fundamental story, since I think these assumption networks are stories.
00:27:37.360 Okay, so I've been studying the story of Job, and the story of Job is the story of suffering.
00:27:44.140 Yes, and meaningless, right.
00:27:46.580 Right, right.
00:27:47.220 What seems like random events, right.
00:27:48.880 Well, or worse than random, malevolent.
00:27:52.000 Malevolent.
00:27:52.540 Right, so worse than random.
00:27:54.440 Okay, so this is how the story sets itself up.
00:27:56.940 So, we're told at the beginning of the story that Job is a good man.
00:28:02.280 And so—and we have the testimony of God himself on Job's account.
00:28:06.580 And so, God is up in heaven, bragging away, so to speak, about how good Job is.
00:28:13.020 And his sons come to observe, and one of whom is Satan.
00:28:17.400 And Satan says, I don't think Job's that good.
00:28:21.020 I think he's just fortunate.
00:28:23.380 And God says, no, I think he's good.
00:28:25.620 And Satan says, why don't you let me have a crack at him, and we'll see if he's good.
00:28:30.380 And so, God says, yeah, okay, do your worst.
00:28:36.500 And in consequence, and that's the malevolent element, let's say, at least the arbitrary
00:28:43.780 element, but perhaps the malevolent element, Job loses everything that he's worked for,
00:28:49.060 virtually everything he works for.
00:28:50.920 He loses much of his family.
00:28:52.880 He becomes very ill, and not just ill, but ill in a way that's disfiguring and shameful.
00:29:02.780 And then his friends come along, his friends, and tell him that, well, you know, if he had
00:29:08.660 been a better guy, none of this would have happened.
00:29:11.420 So, really, it's his fault.
00:29:12.740 And then Job has a response, and this is why I'm bringing up this story.
00:29:20.080 Job's response is to insist that despite proximal evidence, it's a requirement to maintain faith
00:29:31.580 in the essential goodness of the individual, especially an individual who's been conducting
00:29:37.580 himself ethically, which Job has been, by his own testimony, by God's testimony.
00:29:43.220 We know Job is a good man.
00:29:45.320 And Job's wife tells him when she observes his suffering, she says, there's nothing left
00:29:50.420 for you to do but shake your fist at God, curse him, and die.
00:29:54.860 And Job says instead, and he insists this to his friends, he refuses to lose faith in his
00:30:00.880 essential goodness, and he also refuses to lose faith in the essential goodness of God.
00:30:06.280 And there's something, it's something like this, and this is what's relevant to the shattered
00:30:11.440 assumptions notion, is that in order to stabilize the structure through which you view the world,
00:30:19.940 it is necessary to adopt as axiomatic the notion that whatever happens to you if you conduct
00:30:27.580 yourself ethically is the best thing that could happen, regardless of the proximal evidence.
00:30:33.120 And also, it's necessary for you not to lose faith in the essential goodness of being
00:30:40.240 itself.
00:30:41.760 And those are religious proclamations, right?
00:30:44.880 They're proclamations of a kind of religious faith.
00:30:46.980 Right.
00:30:47.580 Right.
00:30:48.000 Well, and it seems to me, too.
00:30:49.820 And tall orders at that, right?
00:30:52.200 Oh, God.
00:30:53.660 Yes.
00:30:54.400 The tallest.
00:30:55.100 In fact, the tallest of orders.
00:30:56.320 Tall, tallest.
00:30:56.980 Exactly.
00:30:57.500 Well, it's interesting, eh, because the book of Job is one of the books that really sets
00:31:03.880 the stage in the biblical corpus for the story of the crucifixion, right?
00:31:07.960 Because the crucifixion story is the story of Job expanded even more thoroughly.
00:31:13.740 Right.
00:31:14.540 Right.
00:31:15.060 Now, these shattered assumptions that you described, they seem to me to be identical
00:31:23.440 to axioms of faith, conceptually speaking, right?
00:31:27.940 They're a priori commitments.
00:31:29.920 Except, yes, at some level, except, you know, they developed, you know, the way we think we
00:31:36.020 should need to think about them is these developed from early infancy, from childhood.
00:31:39.740 I mean, these are, they're based in, you know, it's not like somebody's taking a leap of faith.
00:31:44.520 Faith is based on, you know, you don't need sort of, validity in the world is irrelevant.
00:31:51.620 Do you know?
00:31:52.100 That's what faith is about, right?
00:31:54.340 You don't, things don't have to, there's no proof, right?
00:31:59.380 It's, it's, it's, you take a leap, an act of faith.
00:32:03.120 These are fundamental beliefs based on experience.
00:32:06.180 They're not, they're not just, you know, sort of.
00:32:09.740 Pie in the sky.
00:32:10.600 They're not things that, you know, I, I, I want to believe that.
00:32:13.880 These are not desires.
00:32:15.180 They're based on, let's say, the infant who is getting good enough parenting, not great
00:32:19.160 parent, good enough parenting, realizes the world is predictable.
00:32:22.280 The child cries, the mother, the father come and help.
00:32:25.160 The world becomes meaningful, becomes benevolent.
00:32:27.460 You know, it's good world.
00:32:28.640 I'm getting fed.
00:32:29.740 I must be worth something.
00:32:31.080 I mean, these are very, you know, rudimentary kind of beliefs, but it starts there and it
00:32:37.360 builds.
00:32:37.720 And, you know, what comes first obviously gets confirmed.
00:32:41.680 I do think, though you were calling them naive, at one level, it's what allows us to wake
00:32:47.360 up in the morning and approach the day, okay?
00:32:49.960 Yeah, assuming our assumptions haven't been shattered.
00:32:53.240 They haven't been shattered.
00:32:54.400 That's right.
00:32:54.840 But even if they have been shattered, the, the, the, the, what we, what is also important
00:33:03.080 to recognize is people that started with these positive assumptions actually do better in
00:33:08.600 coping with the shattered beliefs because they actually have something to kind of move
00:33:13.340 back to, okay?
00:33:14.520 If you start with very negative beliefs about the world, if you start with, you know, you
00:33:19.180 are going to be more prone to possibly the, a realistic view of the world being bad, if
00:33:25.300 that's what, you know, uh, when bad things do happen in the world, right?
00:33:28.720 To good people, right?
00:33:30.160 Bad things happen to good people.
00:33:31.360 Um, then nevertheless, you are going to be more prone to depression and anxiety.
00:33:36.060 Just, you know, living in the world is harder.
00:33:38.340 So some of these are what seem like illusory beliefs are, you know, are what allow us to
00:33:43.680 be, you talked about motivation.
00:33:45.220 It allows us to get, be motivated on a daily basis to function and operate and, you know,
00:33:51.220 love and care.
00:33:52.620 And, you know, so I do think, and, and they have long-term, um, consequences when bad things
00:33:59.900 happen because what happens if, after the shattering is people try to rebuild these assumptions
00:34:05.260 in the best cases.
00:34:06.900 And by the way, most cases, not the cases that all go to psychologists and whatever.
00:34:11.300 If you, if you did huge community surveys, which we did, you find lots of people have
00:34:17.240 gone through some really horrible things and don't necessarily go to a clinician.
00:34:21.080 You know, now everybody goes to clinicians 30, 40 years ago.
00:34:24.420 That wasn't the case.
00:34:26.200 Um, people, people coped.
00:34:28.880 They did well.
00:34:29.320 No, they had people who cared around them.
00:34:31.400 They, their own, um, sort of internal worlds allow them to, to try to deal.
00:34:37.620 One thing that I found that was fascinating, for example, is that self-blame was remarkably
00:34:42.940 common after all of these things.
00:34:45.360 Even when I, I, I was, I, I did some work with, um, people who are paraplegics or quadriplegics
00:34:52.360 from being shot randomly on the street or, um, just, um, you know, ran, truly random events.
00:34:59.400 You and I would unquestionably call random when, as a, for, for, for the victim.
00:35:05.060 And, um, these people would still engage in some self-blame.
00:35:08.920 Now, why?
00:35:10.040 It's, it's not, and by the way, the only literature that talked about self-blame were rape victims
00:35:14.660 because everybody was blaming the women anyway, right?
00:35:17.840 Which was, just because victims blame themselves doesn't mean they're blameworthy, okay?
00:35:22.780 So, why, why blame, why engage in this in, in, you know, in ways that seem inappropriate
00:35:29.920 given the true situation?
00:35:31.720 It's because that allowed people to get some sense of control, to start believing the world
00:35:36.440 isn't random, to start believing the world is not as bad as they thought, taking some
00:35:41.020 of the blame on themselves.
00:35:42.000 Now, the sad part of that is, of course, other people could then blame them more if they were
00:35:46.920 blaming themselves when that is not appropriate or legitimate.
00:35:50.680 But what we do in terms of our own coping, I think, is really kind of fascinating, and
00:35:55.400 that was something that was surprising to me, seeing all this self-blame.
00:35:58.960 But there are lots of other ways people coped, you know, um, they think of worse cases, um,
00:36:05.280 but people would, you know, sort of try to rebuild assumptions.
00:36:09.000 Of course, initially, there's a lot of numbing, and people can't kind of deal with the situation,
00:36:15.220 but over time, you get all the intrusive thoughts, right?
00:36:18.680 Not the denial, but the intrusive thoughts when you're ready to work on it.
00:36:22.420 And our brains, our human species systems are remarkable at working on things that need
00:36:29.320 to be solved, even when we're not consciously doing it, right?
00:36:32.960 And over time, what I found is people did remarkably well.
00:36:37.160 That doesn't mean they, they rarely return to the same, as you would say, naive assumptions,
00:36:43.200 but they turned to more positive assumptions about the world and were sadder but wiser,
00:36:48.840 and now felt that they could, could basically incorporate the negative events in a broader
00:36:54.700 sort of belief system that was still fundamentally positive, right?
00:36:58.780 Okay, okay.
00:36:59.620 So let's, okay.
00:37:00.520 So let's take a bunch of that apart.
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00:38:12.580 The first issue I'd like to address there is probably the notion of illusion.
00:38:20.340 So, I spent a lot of time looking at Shelley Taylor's work, The Necessity of Positive Illusion.
00:38:30.060 Yeah, well, I am not a fan of the idea of positive illusions, in the least.
00:38:35.220 I think it's one of the most dangerous philosophical ideas ever put forward by academics.
00:38:40.720 That, and I know it's allied with terror management theory, too, that we need to inhabit a world of something like necessary fiction.
00:38:51.000 It's predicated on the idea that reality itself is so unbearable that if we ever saw it in its unvarnished form, it would demolish us.
00:38:59.060 No, I'm not there either.
00:39:00.540 Okay, okay, so a better model, perhaps, is—
00:39:07.540 Well, go back, yeah, okay.
00:39:09.000 No, no, go ahead, go ahead.
00:39:09.900 No, I was going to say, one thing is, you were talking about the hierarchy of belief earlier.
00:39:13.620 Go back to that.
00:39:14.900 Illusory beliefs at the very fundamental level, which allow you to have some positive motivations, getting up in the morning, dealing with life and so forth, those actually could be very good.
00:39:24.880 They're a very strong, positive motivation to move ahead, to act in the world.
00:39:30.540 You don't want illusions at the higher levels, right?
00:39:33.360 You can't.
00:39:33.780 If you do, you actually will not be able to deal with the real world.
00:39:38.440 As I was bringing up before, if I have an illusion about what a good swimmer I am, and I jump into a pool and I can't swim, that's pretty damn unfortunate, right?
00:39:48.240 So I do think, you know, Shelley and others didn't make this distinction about using hierarchy, but go back to what you were talking about earlier.
00:39:57.200 If you incorporate it into a hierarchical system, illusions at the bottom could be wonderfully and positively motivating.
00:40:04.820 As you move up, they're very, very dangerous, right?
00:40:07.720 Okay, so let's focus on that, because I don't think that the proper replacement for a naive optimism is a functional illusion, because I don't think that the retooling produces an illusion.
00:40:29.260 So let me explain why.
00:40:33.240 If you are dealing with people with an anxiety disorder, you could have them organize a hierarchy of fear, things they'll avoid, right?
00:40:45.140 And then you can take, you can get them to rank order the severity of that fear, and then you can get them to start working on, let's say, the least severe fear.
00:40:55.520 And you can start to expose them to that, right?
00:40:59.260 You can have them imagine them being in that situation, or start acting it out.
00:41:04.100 Now, that exposure is predicated on the idea that if they face what plagues them, they'll prevail.
00:41:14.640 And that's a faith in learning itself, because we learn on the edge.
00:41:21.240 Everything we learn is on the edge.
00:41:22.920 Everything we learn is in consequence of some minor confrontation with something we don't understand, some minor retooling of our assumptions, and some growth.
00:41:36.360 Okay.
00:41:36.680 Right.
00:41:36.920 Go back to assimilation, accommodation, right?
00:41:39.060 Exactly, exactly.
00:41:40.220 Yes, of course, yes.
00:41:41.140 You do that with a certain degree of trepidation and excitement.
00:41:45.560 Right.
00:41:45.840 You learn when you need to accommodate and assimilate, right.
00:41:48.200 Okay.
00:41:48.480 Right, right.
00:41:49.200 Okay.
00:41:49.620 So here's a fundamental assumption that's not illusory.
00:41:52.580 If you face the world forthrightly and voluntarily, with faith in your ability to prevail, the pathway forward will make itself known to you in the best manner possible.
00:42:09.220 It's the axiom of learning itself.
00:42:12.940 It's what we facilitate in our children.
00:42:15.860 And you can make an assumption that it's not unreasonable to make the assumption that the cosmos itself is established on that principle.
00:42:26.900 And I mean that in that deep sense.
00:42:28.480 So the terror management theorist characters, right, deriving their theories from Ernest Becker.
00:42:35.260 I loved Ernest Becker's book.
00:42:36.720 I love Ernest Becker, too.
00:42:38.100 But he's also deeply wrong.
00:42:40.400 The hero myth that Becker lays out is not an illusion.
00:42:45.100 It's actually the fundamental principle by which adaptation takes place.
00:42:50.020 Because confronting a sequence of minor traumas, let's say, is exactly what fortifies you.
00:43:02.180 Right?
00:43:02.820 It's the principle of medicine itself.
00:43:05.800 A little bit of the poison is what strengthens you.
00:43:09.260 And it's also, but it's also the nature of learning.
00:43:11.880 And so to have faith in that capacity, above all, is not illusory.
00:43:18.600 In fact, it's faith in the fundamental mechanism by which people formulate their adaptation.
00:43:23.920 And that's, see, Becker, Becker, there was a whole literature that Becker didn't know of, eh?
00:43:29.720 That he didn't pay any attention to.
00:43:32.060 And so he went astray in his fundamental presumptions.
00:43:35.620 And so did the terror management theorists in consequence.
00:43:37.600 But you've got to say, you've got to believe also that not everything works on faith.
00:43:41.960 I mean, there, if, you know, the fact that you can't swim, I'm going to go back to this example again.
00:43:46.660 And you jump in the water because you think you can do it, you don't, faith is not going to allow you to survive.
00:43:54.700 That's stupidity.
00:43:56.780 Yeah.
00:43:57.160 Well, that's stupidity, but that's what you're saying.
00:43:59.900 But it sounds like stupidity, but that's what you're saying.
00:44:01.860 I mean, the fact is, I think, you know, it's all a matter of opinion.
00:44:05.640 But I think we learn by being exposed to situations that are new, that we are able to assimilate if it is too different, you know, assimilate or we, you know, we can assimilate it because it works.
00:44:19.040 Or we can accommodate our structures to basically incorporate it.
00:44:23.220 If there is too much of a disconnect, it doesn't, it can't happen.
00:44:27.040 Right, because we don't know, that's right, we don't know how to manage the reorganization.
00:44:29.800 That's what's happening in trauma.
00:44:30.900 Exactly.
00:44:31.220 But in trauma, the disconnect is at the bedrock level, whereas in much daily life, the disconnect, you know, I don't want to talk about small traumas.
00:44:40.160 It's sort of interesting, Jordan, that the word trauma gets so overused now, right?
00:44:44.960 Yes, yes, that's for sure.
00:44:45.860 You know, I get a call from a podcaster in England that wants me to talk about all the people being traumatized by the queen's death.
00:44:54.600 This is an old woman that you could expect would die, you know?
00:44:58.940 That's really, I don't call that trauma.
00:45:01.220 Right, right, and you probably wouldn't either.
00:45:03.660 We now live in a world where the word has gotten so overused that I feel it demeans it in a way that people who really are traumatized and go through your trauma, you know, sort of aren't being recognized for what they have to go through.
00:45:19.360 Right, of course, it's careless.
00:45:20.580 It's very careless.
00:45:21.200 Yeah, it's careless.
00:45:21.580 Okay, so let's go back to the notion of assimilation and accommodation.
00:45:25.060 Okay, so I want to put a neurological spin on that in relationship to what we're discussing.
00:45:32.440 Okay, so you said, and rightly so, you said that we can bite off more than we can chew and we can neither assimilate nor accommodate.
00:45:41.780 We can't digest and we can't adjust ourselves because the mouthful was too big, right?
00:45:48.480 Yeah, yeah.
00:45:48.940 We've taken on, okay.
00:45:50.100 The challenge is too great.
00:45:51.440 Okay, so here's something.
00:45:53.340 You tell me what you think about this because I think this is like the coolest idea ever.
00:45:57.320 So, we're attracted towards optimal challenge by the sense of meaning.
00:46:06.280 It grips us.
00:46:07.460 Okay, so instinct is the, no, meaning is the instinct that puts us on the edge of optimal change.
00:46:14.780 Okay.
00:46:15.860 If we talk about meaning as assimilation, yes, yes, okay.
00:46:19.400 Well, I would say meaning is the motivation that puts us on that edge.
00:46:24.280 Okay.
00:46:24.500 Right, and it's something like, okay, so now it grips our attention, right?
00:46:29.700 It activates positive emotion, right?
00:46:33.320 And it does something like optimize anxiety because zero anxiety isn't the right amount.
00:46:40.880 You want to be a little on edge.
00:46:43.640 Yeah, a little bit, optimally, optimally, right?
00:46:46.180 Just like you are when you're preparing to play a game with an optimal opponent, right?
00:46:51.240 There's a challenge, okay.
00:46:52.360 Okay, meaning signifies the presence of an optimized challenge.
00:47:00.380 Okay, and that meaning, that's not the illusory consequence of a delusional belief designed to protect us from the anxiety of death.
00:47:11.780 Instead, that meaning is a signal that we're on the developmental edge that will best prepare us for all challenges that we might confront in the future.
00:47:22.200 That's fine, yes.
00:47:23.420 Okay, okay.
00:47:24.440 But that, all right, but that, so, in a hero story, back to Becker, in a hero story, the hero takes on something like a maximal challenge.
00:47:35.380 Now, Becker claimed that we identify with those heroes in an illusory manner to fortify ourselves against the anxiety of death, sort of narcissistically elevating ourselves.
00:47:47.380 But the alternative view is that no, as a proper sojourner forward, what we're doing is taking on exactly the optimized challenge that expands our skill, that expands our knowledge, that retools our maps, and that makes us optimally prepared when all, for the future, even if all hell breaks loose.
00:48:10.720 I agree.
00:48:11.140 That seems reasonable to you.
00:48:12.500 I mean, I don't think we go through, I don't think all these things we do in life is based on trying to deny death, which is, of course, Becker's notion.
00:48:20.280 So, I do agree with you.
00:48:21.300 I mean, there is this sense of, yes, the challenge, we like the hero stories, we learn from them, we kind of, life is not simply on a daily basis about denying death.
00:48:31.860 There's no point that we do, I mean, I think we frequently do deny death, but it is not the essence of motivation,
00:48:38.520 which, of course, is what he would claim.
00:48:40.960 Okay, so I'm somewhat disagreeing with you that the challenge is extremely important in terms of moving forward, both as individuals and as species, you know, so I don't disagree at all.
00:48:51.260 Okay, well, the model that I talked about earlier, the Friston model, the model that I worked on with my students as well, the entropy control model,
00:48:59.340 that's also an interesting and compelling alternative to the death anxiety model, because the fundamental enemy in the entropy model isn't death per se, death is a consequence of unconstrained entropy.
00:49:13.260 Too many things going wrong at once, do you in, right?
00:49:16.600 And so, we're trying to constrain and regulate the chaos of our lives, and we do that.
00:49:22.260 The question is how we do that?
00:49:23.680 Well, we can do that with illusory and naive beliefs, but they're subject to shattering, or we can do that.
00:49:32.080 So, let me offer you, let me tell you another.
00:49:34.780 Okay.
00:49:35.360 I think the key to shattering is not that they're illusory, it's that they're bedrock.
00:49:40.280 That's the, the shattering of illusions at the upper level wouldn't matter.
00:49:45.820 I mean, that would be very, very unfortunate for dealing with everyday life, but it wouldn't shatter our assumptions.
00:49:53.920 I mean, that, that, you know.
00:49:55.220 Right, well, I meant that they're illusory.
00:49:57.540 The only reason I meant that they were illusory is because they're susceptible to shattering under dire circumstances, right?
00:50:06.740 That's all I meant.
00:50:07.640 That's right.
00:50:08.080 No, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
00:50:09.640 And they are, to some extent, illusory because they're, they tend to be positive, right?
00:50:13.760 Well, they tend to be naively positive.
00:50:16.380 Naively positive.
00:50:17.320 Naive, okay.
00:50:18.280 So, so let me tell you another story.
00:50:20.180 This is a cool story.
00:50:21.500 So.
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00:51:38.940 So there's a story at the end of the Exodus adventure, and the reason I'm bringing these stories up is because I believe that the assumption structure that we see the world through is a story.
00:51:59.240 And so I'm looking at the bottom of stories, at the most fundamental stories.
00:52:03.640 Well, our lives are narratives.
00:52:05.140 I mean, there's a very good—there's no question.
00:52:07.580 Our lives are narratives, right?
00:52:08.640 Right, right, right.
00:52:09.780 Yeah, the question—that's—well, and that's a hell of a thing to say, because it begs the question, you know, is life itself a narrative?
00:52:17.700 That begs the question of whether reality itself is best construed as a narrative.
00:52:22.300 It seems to me that it's highly likely.
00:52:24.700 Yeah, okay.
00:52:25.600 Yeah, I meant we live our lives as narratives, and when something doesn't fit, we have to make the plot work.
00:52:30.940 Right, right, right, right.
00:52:32.020 So the Exodus story, yes.
00:52:33.720 Okay, okay.
00:52:34.360 So, yeah, so there's a—there's an event that occurs at the end.
00:52:39.200 It's quite—it's a remarkable story.
00:52:41.580 So the Israelites are—they've made it most of the way through the desert, and they're—but they're still bitching and whining and complaining.
00:52:49.380 They're longing for the previous tyranny, right?
00:52:52.720 So that's the previous set of assumptions.
00:52:55.140 They don't like to be lost, which is where they are in the desert when their assumptions are shattered.
00:53:01.080 Yeah.
00:53:01.800 Right, that's exactly right.
00:53:03.160 The desert, that desert sojourn is the shattered assumptions that are a consequence of leaving the tyrannical state.
00:53:11.280 It's exactly what that represents.
00:53:12.720 I mean, I might not say they were traumatized.
00:53:15.100 I would say that they are—but they are very anxious.
00:53:17.280 Well, they're lost.
00:53:17.600 But nevertheless, go ahead.
00:53:18.500 They're lost.
00:53:19.500 They're lost.
00:53:20.160 That's right.
00:53:20.600 They turn to Moses and Aaron, and yes, okay, right.
00:53:23.500 Right.
00:53:23.760 They're lost, and they're out of water in this scene.
00:53:27.140 Okay, and they get all bitchy about this.
00:53:29.900 They're sick of eating the food that they have, and they're lost, and they're hopeless, and they're longing for tyranny.
00:53:36.600 And God gets tired of their complaining, their faithlessness, let's say, their rebellion against movement forward.
00:53:47.080 And he sends a bunch of poisonous snakes in to bite them.
00:53:51.160 And so the Israelites get bitten by all these poisonous snakes, and they get kind of sick of it after a while.
00:53:58.900 And they go ask Moses, who they know to have a connection with God, to intercede.
00:54:04.160 And Moses agrees, and he goes and has a chat with God.
00:54:10.820 And then what should happen is that God calls off the poisonous snakes, and the Israelites move forward.
00:54:16.820 But that's not what happens.
00:54:19.440 And what happens instead is insanely profound.
00:54:23.700 And do you know that healing symbol of the physicians that's a staff with a serpent around it?
00:54:28.480 Okay, so this is one of the variants of that symbol.
00:54:32.540 Okay, so God tells Moses, take the bronze of the Israelites and cast a staff.
00:54:40.440 So that's like the rod of tradition.
00:54:42.020 That's like the fundamental axiomatic assumption.
00:54:46.200 Put that in the ground.
00:54:47.580 And on that, put a bronze serpent.
00:54:51.960 And have all the Israelites look at this.
00:54:55.380 And if they look at it, then the poison won't affect them anymore.
00:54:59.200 Now, this is very interesting.
00:55:00.600 It's very interesting, because God could just call off the snakes.
00:55:05.000 But that isn't what he does.
00:55:06.780 He fortifies the Israelites against poison.
00:55:10.060 And he does that by voluntary exposure.
00:55:14.020 Right, okay.
00:55:14.920 Like aversion therapy, right.
00:55:16.820 Precisely like that.
00:55:17.800 Precisely like that.
00:55:18.640 And that is the therapeutic approach.
00:55:21.940 That approach of exposure.
00:55:23.960 That every single psychotherapeutic school has converged on in the last hundred years.
00:55:30.440 It doesn't matter with the origin, the psychoanalysts, the cognitive psychologists, the behaviorists, the existentialists.
00:55:37.040 They all come to the same conclusion.
00:55:38.420 Get your story straight and confront what challenges you.
00:55:42.780 That's the pathway to redemption.
00:55:44.240 Okay, so here's a cool twist on that story.
00:55:46.960 And this has to do with what beliefs are fundamental at the core, not illusory.
00:55:52.960 In the Gospels, Christ says to his followers that unless he is lifted up like the serpent in the desert, there's no possibility of redemption.
00:56:04.220 Now, this is a very weird narrative twist because, first of all, it begs a variety of questions.
00:56:11.800 The first question being, why in the world would Christ refer back to that story?
00:56:16.240 The second question being, why would he assimilate himself to that figure?
00:56:22.560 It's very unlikely, right?
00:56:24.420 A serpent on a pole.
00:56:27.120 Okay, so this is the conclusion.
00:56:29.960 And this has to do with the validity of beliefs, I believe.
00:56:33.660 And it's the antidote to the notion that we need illusion to survive.
00:56:37.220 So, a snake is a pretty bad thing.
00:56:43.000 And a poisonous snake is worse.
00:56:44.580 And a poisonous snake in the midst of a desert is even worse.
00:56:47.660 But it's not the worst thing.
00:56:50.260 What's the worst thing?
00:56:53.440 That would be like a meta snake.
00:56:55.320 What's the worst possible thing?
00:56:56.980 Well, the worst possible thing is something like an amalgam of the tragedies of life.
00:57:01.960 You could throw some malevolence in there just for spice, right?
00:57:06.440 So, the worst possible thing is the core of mortality and the fact of malevolence, all right?
00:57:14.020 It's the full confrontation with that that's illustrated in the gospel narrative.
00:57:19.840 And so, the notion—
00:57:20.880 Okay, well, I'll just close with that and then I'll let you respond.
00:57:24.180 The idea there, it's something like this.
00:57:26.740 The idea there is that faith in your ability, faith in the human ability to fully confront the limits of mortal experience
00:57:36.400 and malevolence is the proper foundational axiom.
00:57:42.660 And it allows for the existence of evil, right?
00:57:46.260 Okay, so—
00:57:46.820 That's right.
00:57:47.580 Yeah, no, I'm totally—I mean, so, you know, that's right.
00:57:52.580 You're saying, essentially, that these illusory or, as you're saying, naive beliefs at the fundamental level
00:57:58.580 allow us to function in the real world.
00:58:02.260 That's right.
00:58:02.840 I mean, that's a very—this is a very mundane way and simplistic way of saying what you've been talking about.
00:58:09.680 But one of the things I do want to bring up is when we're talking about sort of things that are illusory,
00:58:15.880 in part, they're illusory because they're overgeneralizations.
00:58:19.560 Okay, if you say the world is benevolent, you have these beliefs, part of it is just it's an overgeneralization of,
00:58:27.360 in general, things are right.
00:58:29.120 It doesn't take into account all the, you know, all the bad stuff that we know happen.
00:58:35.020 But so at the fundamental level, what we're talking about, these overgeneralized beliefs,
00:58:39.180 when people actually end up managing and coping successfully with trauma,
00:58:43.760 they still end up having some beliefs that are essentially less overgeneralized.
00:58:48.560 They're beliefs that are positive that now can account for, as you're saying, these negative events, okay?
00:58:57.020 But it's interesting to talk about it, that cognitively we cannot, as you know all too well,
00:59:04.740 you know, we all—we cannot actually sort of respond to every single little thing in the world.
00:59:10.040 Most of our beliefs and all of our knowledge involve some overestimation, overgeneralization, over—
00:59:17.560 You know, and when you get to that very top of that hierarchy, then you may be—the things may be very, very specific, right?
00:59:25.260 But the further down we move, the greater the generalizations.
00:59:29.580 Yeah, yeah.
00:59:29.820 Well, and you're pointing out that I don't think there's any difference between noting the undifferentiated and overgeneralized quality of those initial beliefs and naivety.
00:59:41.740 That's the same thing.
00:59:43.140 Right, right, right.
00:59:43.540 It's the use of a—it's the use of an insufficiently detailed map.
00:59:47.860 So the map that the—or a too optimistic and naive story.
00:59:54.260 So the problem with the belief structure that's amenable to disruption by trauma is that it doesn't take into account the existence,
01:00:04.320 let's say, of tragic randomness and outright malevolence, right?
01:00:09.440 And so—and that works fine until you encounter it, but it doesn't work at all once you do.
01:00:14.980 And once you encounter it, having those beliefs actually enables people to actually rebuild the assumptions.
01:00:21.120 And, you know, the only problem I have with the word naive, and even though it's, I think, sort of accurate,
01:00:27.520 is there is a kind of almost person-blaming, victim-blaming about—you know, so naivety feels like sort of pejorative.
01:00:38.540 Do you know what I'm saying?
01:00:39.420 As opposed to if we use the cognitive word overgeneralization instead, it doesn't feel quite so negative.
01:00:45.120 But yes, in terms of—but as a descriptor, I think you're right.
01:00:49.000 It's naive.
01:00:49.740 That's right.
01:00:50.200 Okay, well, so that's interesting, too, because this is an ancient argument, right?
01:00:57.620 That the difference between, let's say, ignorance and willful blindness.
01:01:03.460 Right, right.
01:01:04.220 Right, right, right.
01:01:05.160 And you can imagine that someone—okay, so let—God, let me tell you a story about that.
01:01:13.740 Okay.
01:01:14.640 But we will go to the other book sometime, right?
01:01:16.320 We will, right away, right away.
01:01:17.540 Because I really need to know what you think about it.
01:01:19.720 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:01:20.920 We'll do that.
01:01:21.400 We'll do that.
01:01:21.900 We'll do that right away.
01:01:23.840 Maybe we'll just close with this, with this part, with this.
01:01:28.120 Freud talked a lot about the Oedipal relationship that was characterized by an overbearing maternal presence and too much dependence, right?
01:01:40.600 Now, we know that people with dependent personality are more likely to be traumatized.
01:01:45.060 Now, but let me elaborate on that.
01:01:48.060 I'm not sure that's true, but okay, we'd have to deal with that.
01:01:51.680 That's a whole different discussion because you're traumatized if you experience basically sort of unusual, out-of-the-ordinary events, right, that super challenge you.
01:02:07.580 But people who have the most—people that already have negative assumptions actually often traumatize less, right?
01:02:15.980 I don't think the negative assumptions are a sign of a more differentiated worldview, right?
01:02:22.560 I'm not a fan of the notion of depressive realism.
01:02:24.820 It also could be part of dependence, you know, dependent people.
01:02:29.540 But anyway, go ahead.
01:02:30.960 I'm sorry.
01:02:31.580 I apologize for interrupting.
01:02:32.340 Well, let's see if I can lay this out properly.
01:02:36.780 People maintain their undifferentiated viewpoints longer than they might because when they're faced with minor incidences of disconfirming evidence, they turn away.
01:02:55.680 They don't process it, right?
01:02:57.580 That's willful blindness.
01:02:58.540 Well, but here's—no, I'm not sure it's willful blindness.
01:03:00.660 Let's say that is cognitive conservatism.
01:03:03.020 If we changed our cognitive schemas every time there was something that didn't fit, it would be a problem, right?
01:03:08.640 I mean, things have to build up to change.
01:03:13.580 And that's what, like, you know, look at scientific revolutions, look at Cooney and stuff.
01:03:16.620 You know, the notion that we're not going to make a change every second based on one disconfirming stuff.
01:03:22.700 I mean, I actually love Karl Popper.
01:03:24.080 You know, the notion is we should be cognitively conservative when it comes to our schemas or our theories.
01:03:29.920 It should take a lot to turn them around.
01:03:31.960 But we should ultimately—but we should ultimately be willing to turn them, right?
01:03:35.920 That would be dependent on the degree of their axiomatic fundamental.
01:03:41.680 Yeah, fundamental.
01:03:43.420 Yes, exactly.
01:03:44.380 So the notion should be that the deeper you go into the axiomatic structure, the farther down you go,
01:03:51.340 the more absolutely overwhelming the evidence has to be in order to move that assumption.
01:03:56.860 Yes, okay.
01:03:57.660 We totally agree with him.
01:03:58.980 Okay, okay.
01:03:59.620 And so I think the cognitive conservatism, that's something like the—that's the stake in the ground, right?
01:04:07.880 That's the bedrock of something like tradition or cumulative experience.
01:04:13.540 Yeah, you can't let one deviation at the periphery destroy the center, right?
01:04:20.800 That's a catastrophic mistake.
01:04:22.720 But it isn't only that people are unwilling to change their central beliefs because they're cognitively conservative.
01:04:34.720 They're also prone to turning a blind eye even to repetitive information that indicates that there's an axiomatic error.
01:04:44.980 Right.
01:04:45.200 Okay, that's fine.
01:04:48.240 I mean, we could talk about politics now, how we turn our—
01:04:51.480 Yes, well, let's do that.
01:04:53.380 No, I was going to say, just segueing, the confirmation bias, we only want to listen to things on our side.
01:04:59.760 We don't want to actually be exposed to the other.
01:05:02.440 We kind of live in our silos.
01:05:04.380 We confirm what we believe.
01:05:05.920 I mean, this is part of how we live our lives, unfortunately, right?
01:05:11.660 Yes, I totally agree.
01:05:12.960 You know, the fact that we want to confirm what we already believe and expose ourselves to stuff that will confirm it is a very major part of how we construct and live our lives.
01:05:23.920 Right, right.
01:05:24.480 And that's not—well, you tell me what you think about this.
01:05:27.920 That's not merely cognitive conservatism.
01:05:30.680 That's also active turning away from—
01:05:31.960 Also motivational.
01:05:32.660 Okay, good, fine.
01:05:34.380 That goes back to what you were saying earlier.
01:05:36.380 That's motivational, right?
01:05:37.820 Right.
01:05:38.140 That's part of a desire.
01:05:39.720 Right, well, why—first of all, you know, if we've organized ourselves politically, we have somewhere convenient to put malevolence, and it's not within us.
01:05:48.640 It's in the opposite of our ideological belief.
01:05:51.660 So that's a lovely thing to have.
01:05:53.660 Plus, we've organized the world in a relatively—what would you call it?—oversimplified manner.
01:06:00.680 And that means we don't have to think and that we're on the side of virtue.
01:06:04.540 So, you know, that's pretty convenient as well.
01:06:07.040 Let's talk about the political landscape then.
01:06:09.400 Now, so that takes us to your other major book.
01:06:13.280 Yeah, that's—yeah.
01:06:14.500 And actually, that's the one that I—that, you know, was recently published.
01:06:18.100 That's—
01:06:18.400 Yes.
01:06:18.540 —that's within the last few months as opposed to 30 years ago.
01:06:21.600 Right, right.
01:06:22.180 That's the two—that's the two moralities.
01:06:24.860 That's right.
01:06:25.120 Well, start—why don't you lay that out first?
01:06:27.580 Okay.
01:06:27.720 Lay out your thesis, and then we'll discuss that in some more detail.
01:06:30.440 And jump in when I overstate this or go on too long.
01:06:34.340 So, I—I do think that moral psychology is a very helpful lens, an invaluable lens for
01:06:42.480 understanding our political differences.
01:06:45.500 So, let's start with motivation.
01:06:50.560 When, you know, the fundamental motivational distinction for people—for humans is—or for
01:06:56.880 any—for any animal is approach and avoidance.
01:06:58.900 Very simply.
01:06:59.480 Pain, pleasure.
01:07:00.220 We approach the good.
01:07:01.500 We want to avoid the bad.
01:07:03.040 Okay?
01:07:04.020 Um, I am—um—I actually ended up using these two ways.
01:07:08.660 I—I first have to talk a little bit about morality and—and my—my understanding of
01:07:12.620 the moral map a little to—to move on to politics.
01:07:15.940 But—
01:07:15.980 Have at it.
01:07:16.640 Have at it.
01:07:17.080 Have at it.
01:07:17.680 Okay.
01:07:18.320 So, um, um, if you think about approach and avoidance, I—I sort of make a distinction in
01:07:24.340 morality between—two kinds of morality.
01:07:26.360 One is prescriptive and one is proscriptive.
01:07:28.520 Prescriptive is based in avoidance.
01:07:30.400 These are the things we shouldn't do.
01:07:32.180 You shouldn't lie.
01:07:32.840 You shouldn't steal.
01:07:33.680 You shouldn't cheat.
01:07:34.540 Right?
01:07:34.820 We all know that.
01:07:35.620 Right?
01:07:36.020 Is that the same as conscience?
01:07:38.280 That's proscriptive—that's proscriptive morality.
01:07:39.680 Well, conscience is sort of a—is a sort of a—a—an internal mechanism that allows us
01:07:45.960 to know the rules and the norms and—and pushes us in the right direction.
01:07:50.400 Yes.
01:07:51.000 But proscriptive morality is about not doing the wrong thing.
01:07:55.100 It's—it's based in inhibition, constraint, and so forth.
01:07:58.120 Prescriptive morality is doing the right thing.
01:07:59.900 It's a difference between not harming and helping.
01:08:02.340 Right?
01:08:02.820 That's—and our default morality is based on interpersonal interactions who we're interacting
01:08:08.340 with, don't harm, i.e., don't steal, don't lie, don't cheat, and help.
01:08:13.000 Right?
01:08:13.320 Be kind.
01:08:13.960 Respect others.
01:08:14.860 You know, help.
01:08:15.340 Right.
01:08:16.940 Now, that difference—and by the way, motivationally, they're—not harming and helping are not the
01:08:25.360 same thing.
01:08:25.960 They're not just opposite sides of the same coin.
01:08:28.020 They're opposite in many ways.
01:08:29.680 The child who doesn't, you know, is told not to take somebody else's toys and doesn't
01:08:34.740 take the toys isn't necessarily good at sharing his or her own.
01:08:38.420 Right?
01:08:38.800 So—so the prescriptive and the proscriptive are really quite different.
01:08:42.140 And in fact, children learn proscriptive morality, the do-nots, much more readily,
01:08:46.660 quicker than—more quickly than the do's.
01:08:50.040 Okay.
01:08:51.140 In—I've mapped the moral domain based on that, and I'm not going to go through the personal
01:08:55.620 and interpersonal domain, what I want to move to is the group domain.
01:09:00.020 So, group-based moralities that are proscriptive or prescriptive.
01:09:04.360 Proscriptive morality, the shorthand for that is protect.
01:09:07.580 Protect from harm.
01:09:08.920 Okay?
01:09:09.680 The morality of protecting from harm versus providing for well-being.
01:09:13.940 Okay?
01:09:14.260 Instead of proscriptive and prescriptive, they're very wordy words.
01:09:18.140 Right?
01:09:18.420 So, let's think about morality as rules and norms that facilitate group living.
01:09:27.780 In part, they're based on protecting from harm, the group, protecting the group from harm in
01:09:32.640 this case, and providing for the group.
01:09:34.640 Those are the two basic tasks for group living.
01:09:38.920 Right?
01:09:39.160 Defending and providing.
01:09:41.180 And when I've looked at this, these two moralities, which, by the way, I should also argue
01:09:49.060 motivationally, what is the most difficult part of do not, if your temptation has to be
01:10:01.420 inhibited in the case of the proscriptive or the protect.
01:10:05.500 In fact, the enemy of prescriptive morality, the providing, is not having to tamp something
01:10:12.260 down.
01:10:12.500 It's not temptation.
01:10:13.300 It's apathy.
01:10:13.880 It's not caring.
01:10:14.740 Right?
01:10:15.780 So, what I have, if you look at liberals and conservatives, they don't differ in terms
01:10:22.800 of how much they think you should be helping, or they may say you should help different people.
01:10:27.280 But, you know, both groups believe you shouldn't harm, and you shouldn't steal and lie and
01:10:32.240 cheat, and you should help your neighbor, and you should be kind and respect other people.
01:10:37.100 Where you start seeing huge differences is the group-based morality, which, in the case
01:10:42.880 of a proscriptive group-based morality, protecting the group looks like social order.
01:10:48.320 What people are after is social order, stability, and security of the group.
01:10:51.840 And, in the case of a prescriptive, it looks like social justice, providing for the group.
01:10:59.480 So, everybody is cared for, a shared communal responsibility.
01:11:04.020 So, we have this social order and social justice, which are quite different, but it turns out
01:11:09.280 those are not correlated.
01:11:10.600 They're negatively correlated.
01:11:11.780 Every other area of morality, protecting and providing, are highly correlated.
01:11:20.660 So, I want to move to this.
01:11:23.060 How did you determine that they weren't correlated?
01:11:26.460 Well, because we took large samples of self-described liberals and conservatives, okay?
01:11:32.280 And you can see their support for these various beliefs, beliefs that are social order.
01:11:38.980 We have, there are constructs that underlie that, and we, you know, have, I mean, in the book,
01:11:45.920 we talk about all the confirmed effect, all the statistics.
01:11:48.960 But, what's important for me to go back for one moment is, I actually believe that both
01:11:55.840 liberalism and conservatism are morally based.
01:11:58.880 Now, I'm on the left, so, but I believe very strongly that liberals and conservatives have
01:12:03.820 to work together to preserve our system.
01:12:06.680 I do believe-
01:12:07.020 Well, you said why.
01:12:08.480 You said why in some sense, right?
01:12:10.140 Because you need order and you need provision.
01:12:11.880 You need order and you need provision.
01:12:13.440 And, in many ways, you cannot, we're not going to preserve a democracy with just half
01:12:20.080 the country, you know, opting for it, right?
01:12:22.780 I mean, if you look at any presidential election, about half the country votes Democrat and half
01:12:27.960 a Republican.
01:12:29.280 Now, I do want to put a disclaimer here.
01:12:32.400 You know, I do think that the people that wield these ideologies are not necessarily moral.
01:12:37.880 And I want to say that, you know, if you are a MAGA conservative, where the core of your
01:12:47.100 political belief now is based in a big lie, I'm not opting for, I'm not saying that these
01:12:52.500 are moral, I'm already precluding morality there, okay?
01:12:56.820 But I think there are huge numbers of conservatives in our country that, and your country as well,
01:13:03.180 right?
01:13:03.360 Are you Canadian, correct?
01:13:04.580 No, I'm Canadian, yeah.
01:13:05.600 Canadian, right.
01:13:06.080 You know, lots of conservatives that I disagree with probably in terms of policy, but I'd be
01:13:11.940 happy to sit down and talk about it.
01:13:13.580 We'd find out there are lots of things that we'd agree about, okay?
01:13:17.760 We'd find out that we both care about family, we care about community.
01:13:20.620 I, you know, Liz Cheney's a great example of this.
01:13:24.560 Everybody I know on the left says, I'd be happy to sit down with Liz Cheney.
01:13:27.820 She has integrity.
01:13:28.740 I don't agree with her about any policy, but she has proven that she is a person that's
01:13:34.360 moral, okay?
01:13:35.780 So I want to take, I do want to say, I'm not talking about the MAGA conservatives right
01:13:41.140 now.
01:13:42.800 I, we only have to go to the global party system, global party survey of 2,000 international,
01:13:52.160 well, 2,000 experts on parties at elections who now have claimed that our Republican Party
01:13:58.300 in, in the U.S. is an alt-right party.
01:14:00.860 It is no longer considered a mainstream Republican Party.
01:14:04.600 The Democrats are considered a mainstream liberal party.
01:14:09.940 So, you know, we're now talking about a party that isn't even really a mainstream conservative
01:14:14.960 party.
01:14:15.880 But let's put all of that aside, all right?
01:14:18.180 There is a reason to believe that half the world, half the U.S., half the Canadians probably
01:14:26.960 tend towards a conservative, half tend towards a liberal.
01:14:32.260 These are not, I don't believe, as Hibbing and his colleagues do, that politics is inherited.
01:14:39.520 I do think there are some temperamental differences early on that can lead people to one direction
01:14:43.920 or another.
01:14:44.360 You know all the literature on threat sensitivity for conservatives.
01:14:48.240 That's, threat sensitivity, we talk about that as if that's necessarily a bad thing.
01:14:52.180 That's not necessarily bad.
01:14:53.640 Somebody has to be sort of alert for threat, right?
01:14:56.540 We know when you look at eye tracking, for example, studies, conservatives are more likely
01:15:02.940 to look at the negative, et cetera.
01:15:05.040 Liberals are more likely to look at the positive or at least don't differentiate.
01:15:08.860 Liberals are more, the psychological attribute that defines liberals.
01:15:14.200 It's openness.
01:15:15.580 So you have openness versus a sensitivity to threat.
01:15:19.560 These do lead to very different kinds of policies and concerns, okay?
01:15:23.740 There's no question.
01:15:25.100 Unfortunately, you know, I think a lot of social order could, in fact, if you have an interest
01:15:31.860 in social order, you could actually believe in working towards greater equality, which
01:15:36.700 basically is really, would help social order a great deal.
01:15:42.700 But, in fact, what most conservatives move towards instead are abortion, social issues.
01:15:49.560 Abortion and same-sex marriage and, you know, doctor-assisted suicide and prohibitions.
01:15:55.300 These are based on constraint and they are based on prohibition.
01:15:59.220 That's exactly right.
01:16:00.280 Which is proscriptive?
01:16:02.400 Yeah, I'm sorry.
01:16:03.400 So, yes.
01:16:03.900 Well, so, so that, well, that's, I want to make sure that I'm, I've got the argument
01:16:09.840 exactly right here.
01:16:10.900 And so let me lay out what you said and tell me if I've got it correct.
01:16:16.240 The best evidence that I know of for distinguishing between conservatives and liberals is temperamental,
01:16:23.560 right?
01:16:23.780 The liberal types, the progressive types are higher in openness and lower in conscientiousness,
01:16:29.720 especially orderliness, right?
01:16:31.760 And then the conservatives are the reverse of that, low in openness and high in conscientiousness,
01:16:37.960 especially orderliness.
01:16:39.440 And so they see less possibility in potential compared to the liberals, which is why the liberals
01:16:46.220 tend to be open border types because they see beyond the constraints, something like potential
01:16:55.000 that can be creatively engaged with, whereas the conservatives are more likely to think,
01:16:59.520 no, that's a place where all hell can break loose.
01:17:02.220 And the problem is, well, the problem is they're both right, because what's beyond you can be
01:17:08.200 very promising and engaging and what's beyond you can do you in.
01:17:11.920 Well, let's think about what would be the attributes that conservatives will be looking for.
01:17:18.120 Strength and power, okay?
01:17:19.780 You're talking about threat, you know, trying to protect from the group, right?
01:17:24.360 Strength and power, socially defined roles.
01:17:27.840 Everybody knows where they fit, you know, for stability.
01:17:31.700 Tradition is looked at and culture, you know, as markers to fight self-interest, et cetera,
01:17:38.420 et cetera.
01:17:38.760 Concert, liberalism, it doesn't really, that's not what liberalism is about at all.
01:17:45.520 Liberalism is about equality, greater equality for groups, you know, providing resources for
01:17:51.620 groups.
01:17:53.280 Very different kinds of interests here.
01:17:56.320 Because liberalism wants regulation, liberals want regulation in the economic domain, right?
01:18:01.500 We want people to have, we believe in sort of entitlements that help people, you know,
01:18:09.600 social security and welfare if you need food and, you know, believe in trying to establish
01:18:17.760 greater equality, right?
01:18:19.540 That's the economic domain.
01:18:21.420 Conservatives actually really are more interested in unfettered capitalism, right?
01:18:27.660 The unfettered economy.
01:18:30.780 They want autonomy in the economic domain.
01:18:33.620 Conservatives, given the interest in socially defined roles, culture, tradition, and so forth,
01:18:39.260 they focus on norm adherence, strong norm adherence.
01:18:44.360 Norm adherence and strict roles really is a social domain.
01:18:48.120 They want regulation around things like abortion and same-sex marriage and things of this sort.
01:18:56.240 And they want autonomy, you know, because we have policies that are completely mirror image.
01:19:05.240 One group wants regulation in economics, liberals, and the other wants autonomy there.
01:19:11.260 And conservatives want regulation in social domain and liberals want autonomy there.
01:19:15.700 So you get this crazy thing, which is why people have always said, why is it that conservatives
01:19:20.420 really, you know, they want to be so strict about abortion, but, you know, don't touch the
01:19:25.620 economy.
01:19:26.320 Well, of course, it's not their domain.
01:19:27.780 It's not, you see, it's not where the morality, the morality doesn't touch that for them.
01:19:33.760 That's, it's not a relevant domain.
01:19:36.180 So, okay, so let me ask you, well, that's okay, that's okay.
01:19:38.600 Let me ask you this.
01:19:41.000 I'll put a good word in for the conservatives.
01:19:43.580 I know, I know you have been doing that as well with regards to the necessity of maintenance
01:19:47.640 of social order.
01:19:48.380 But there's also another difference that seems to me striking, and I don't think the
01:19:53.780 conservatives are very good at playing this out.
01:19:56.840 The reason that the conservatives with integrity want autonomy in economic matters is so that
01:20:04.860 individuals, rather than the state, can bear the responsibility for provision.
01:20:09.420 Right, well, why is, but why is that, okay, I understand the argument, but there, why is
01:20:16.180 that better?
01:20:16.740 People, here's the thing, the conservative mantra is equal opportunity, equal opportunity.
01:20:22.020 I get so very tired of hearing that because you never have equal opportunity if people
01:20:26.040 are not starting at the same place, right?
01:20:28.880 What's equal opportunity if somebody has a lot of money they've inherited from their parents
01:20:32.300 and somebody has nothing, you say there's equal opportunity.
01:20:35.020 There's not.
01:20:35.820 It's like running a race with some people starting, you know, a lap ahead, you know?
01:20:41.660 So even this notion of individuals should be responsible, it's not that liberals don't
01:20:46.600 think that it matters.
01:20:47.660 Well, it's not just individuals.
01:20:49.360 It's not just individuals.
01:20:50.440 It's not that liberals don't believe that, I mean, you're right, people are also responsible.
01:20:57.540 But, you know, I love, you know, the notion that picking people up by their own bootstraps
01:21:03.620 and how important that is, and you go back to Martin Luther King and he says, well, you
01:21:06.500 know, some people don't even have boots.
01:21:08.440 You know, it's important to remember that we just, you know, we start in very different
01:21:14.200 places based on social policies in the past, right?
01:21:17.900 So it's not as if people who work hard shouldn't also do well.
01:21:26.900 It's that lots of people who work very hard still can't get ahead.
01:21:32.680 So, you know, this notion of individuals should be responsible for those who can make it without
01:21:40.560 the help, great.
01:21:42.540 But you want, I think, I believe in communal, you know, sharing and communal, sharing community
01:21:47.520 responsibility.
01:21:48.680 I believe in that.
01:21:49.560 You know, maybe that's, that is a liberal belief, that it's not each person for him
01:21:54.440 or herself and you make it or you break, it's that we have a responsibility to each other.
01:22:00.540 We're in this game together.
01:22:01.820 We go around once in life, you know, help each other.
01:22:06.000 And that includes having a system, government, right?
01:22:11.820 That's what we got, helping those who need it, right?
01:22:15.100 And I don't think that's inconsistent with people also working hard, right?
01:22:22.000 Okay, so this is what I would recommend for the time being.
01:22:26.540 I think we should continue this discussion of the political on the Daily Wire Plus side.
01:22:33.860 I'm happy to do that.
01:22:35.020 Yeah, let's do that.
01:22:35.920 Let's do that.
01:22:36.640 And so that's a reasonable, we've covered a lot of material.
01:22:40.980 That's a reasonable place to draw this part of the conversation to an end.
01:22:45.580 For everybody watching and listening, thank you for your time and attention.
01:22:49.860 First of all, on the YouTube side.
01:22:52.900 Yeah, I didn't know it was already 10 or 6.
01:22:55.220 Thank you.
01:22:55.900 Yeah, well, there we go.
01:22:56.880 That's the consequence of an engrossing conversation.
01:23:01.240 Okay, so for everybody watching on YouTube, thank you very much for your time and attention.
01:23:05.040 I'm going to continue this conversation behind the Daily Wire Plus platform paywall.
01:23:11.180 And so if you want to join us there, please do.
01:23:13.200 And we'll hash out some more of our discussion with regards to conservatism and liberalism.
01:23:19.660 Thank you very much, Dr. Janoff.
01:23:23.140 Yeah, is it?
01:23:23.780 Sorry, Janoff-Bohrman.
01:23:24.960 No, it is Janoff-Bohrman.
01:23:27.340 It's Janoff.
01:23:28.060 Okay, yes.
01:23:28.960 Okay.
01:23:29.120 And, yeah, thank you very much for walking me through your thoughts on Shattered Assumptions and your political ideas.
01:23:38.320 My pleasure.
01:23:38.340 We're going to continue that.
01:23:39.840 And thank you to the film crew here in Scottsdale for making this possible and to the Daily Wire Plus people for putting this all together.
01:23:46.900 And feel free, everyone, to join us.
01:23:49.880 And the film crew here, yes.
01:23:52.320 Right, right.
01:23:53.300 So thank you, and we'll take five, and we'll re-establish contact on the Daily Wire Plus side.
01:24:00.640 All right.
01:24:01.160 Bye, everybody.
01:24:02.240 Yep, yep.