The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - A Dialogue with Tom Amarque

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00:00:50.980 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

00:01:01.080 You can support these podcasts by donating the amount of your choice to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account,

00:01:07.040 which can be found by searching Jordan Peterson Patreon, or by finding the link in the description.

00:01:14.440 Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, Self-Authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com.

00:01:20.980 This week's episode features Tom Amark, a German philosopher, writer, publisher, and podcaster.

00:01:30.520 With his podcast, Lateral Conversations, he seeks out new developments and perspectives in philosophy, psychology, and spirituality,

00:01:39.660 trying to overcome the pitfalls of what is known as post-modernity.

00:01:43.620 You can find him at tom-amark.de.

00:01:47.380 Dr. Peterson, thank you very much for joining me in this podcast.

00:01:55.080 It's a pleasure.

00:01:57.180 You know, identity politics and gender and the whole issues about gender pronouns,

00:02:05.100 there's a heated debate on that here in Europe, in Germany, as well as I noted in Canada and the United States.

00:02:12.980 So you posted some videos about your refusal to use this gender pronouns and about the problems of political correctness.

00:02:23.740 So can you, in short, elaborate a little bit on this?

00:02:27.880 Yeah, well, I made videos back in September because there was a move afoot in Canada,

00:02:32.160 which is still progressing forward to make the use of these pronouns derived from post-modern philosophy,

00:02:41.940 like Z and Xur and so on, essentially mandatory if someone requests them under,

00:02:50.040 and the failure to use them, let's say, is punishable by a variety of rather punitive measures,

00:03:01.660 including potentially jail time if the charges work their way thoroughly through the system.

00:03:09.300 But at minimum, the possibility for being brought before the Human Rights Commissions in Canada,

00:03:14.800 which have become social justice tribunals, essentially brought before the Human Rights Tribunal,

00:03:20.520 not the Human Rights Commission.

00:03:23.340 And these are, I would say, kangaroo courts that have been set out outside the standard traditional legal system

00:03:30.660 to enforce these more radical neo-Marxist policies that are becoming extraordinarily prevalent in the legislative system.

00:03:39.120 So I made some videos about that, and also about the University of Toronto and other large institutions' attempts

00:03:47.140 to essentially diagnose their workers using the implicit association test,

00:03:52.220 which is hypothetically a test of unconscious racial bias,

00:03:57.060 and then to re-educate them out of that unconscious racial bias.

00:04:00.660 So those videos caused a lot of commotion, to say the least.

00:04:05.660 So that was back in September, and I've been involved in a, I suppose, philosophical battle that has political implications ever since.

00:04:16.100 So these are the political aspects, but from a more psychological or sociological perspective,

00:04:23.220 what are the main problems of the obligation to use those gender problems?

00:04:27.980 Well, there's never been legislation in Canada.

00:04:32.260 Our legal code is basically derived from English common law,

00:04:35.960 although we also, we have a province that uses the French civil code,

00:04:39.780 and so there's a bit of a conflict between the legal traditions in Canada.

00:04:43.300 But basically, it's English common law derived,

00:04:45.440 and there's never been legislation in Canada that compels the use of certain language.

00:04:50.300 I mean, there are restrictions on free speech, like you can't incite someone to commit a crime, for example,

00:05:00.400 and you can't make a direct threat to someone's safety or life.

00:05:04.560 But there's never been legislation that actually demands use of a certain kind of language,

00:05:09.300 and that's a border.

00:05:11.140 See, I don't really care so much about the gender pronoun issue.

00:05:14.020 It just happened to be the, what would you call it, the issue where this sort of thing came to a point.

00:05:22.540 But I don't believe that the government should be in the business of compelling speech on any issue.

00:05:27.740 I think it's an unbelievably dangerous line to cross,

00:05:30.200 and I especially object to crossing it in service of a postmodernist ideology

00:05:36.520 about the socioculture determination of such things as so-called gender identity.

00:05:44.980 I very much object to having that viewpoint instantiated in the law.

00:05:49.440 So, in the relevant legislation, not only is there moves afoot to make certain kinds of speech mandatory,

00:06:02.640 but there's a view of human identity that's also being instantiated into the legislation and the surrounding policy,

00:06:09.320 and that view is extraordinarily philosophically paradoxical and poorly formulated.

00:06:16.520 At best, it insists that sexual identity, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity vary independently,

00:06:31.260 which they most certainly do not, even though there are exceptions.

00:06:34.960 And that's being taught as dogma in schools, in secondary schools now.

00:06:39.980 That idea is invading the secondary schools because of a conscious push on the part of the postmodern ideologues

00:06:46.880 who are pushing this sort of thing.

00:06:49.700 And they've actually even weakened that to some degree,

00:06:52.520 because you can make a coherent case that gender identity,

00:06:57.620 which is a phrase I'm not very fond of, but we'll use it for the time being,

00:07:03.280 you can make a case that gender identity has sociocultural,

00:07:07.540 that sociocultural phenomena play a role in determining gender identity and gender expression, of course,

00:07:13.360 because that's merely fashion.

00:07:15.180 But the legislation, the way it stands now, the wording of the surrounding policies insists,

00:07:22.120 A, that there's no biological determination of such things whatsoever.

00:07:25.720 B, that it is actually more dependent on personal choice and whim,

00:07:32.080 even than on sociocultural determination.

00:07:34.380 So they weren't even able to make a coherent case for pure sociocultural determination.

00:07:40.880 They had to water that down so that such things as gender identity

00:07:44.140 have now become something that you can transform by mere fiat of your own accord

00:07:50.240 at any place or time for any reason,

00:07:52.640 and that everyone is required to go along with that.

00:07:55.200 Yeah, but where does the notion come that we don't have a biological base for our gender?

00:08:01.740 Yeah, well, that's, well, apparently, you know, the people who are pushing this,

00:08:05.000 I had a debate with a lecturer at the University of Toronto named Nicholas Matt

00:08:10.380 on Canadian Public TV, and he stated forthrightly that

00:08:14.120 there's no biological differences between men and women,

00:08:17.860 and said that that was the scientific consensus of research conducted over the last four decades.

00:08:22.380 And, of course, nothing could be farther from the truth than that.

00:08:25.460 There are innumerable biological differences between men and women,

00:08:29.720 even though there is substantial overlap, obviously, given that we're the same species.

00:08:34.440 So, but there's no admitting that, because to admit for any sort of biological,

00:08:40.520 it's not even biological determination, right?

00:08:42.780 It's not the right way to think about it.

00:08:44.280 It's biological influence.

00:08:46.820 And, I mean, if you put enough cultural pressure on a biological organism,

00:08:50.780 you can transform it in all sorts of different ways.

00:08:53.280 But you're still transforming it within a set of, you might describe as universal human attributes.

00:09:00.780 I mean, a good example of that, a good analogy is language.

00:09:05.540 Human beings have an innate proclivity for language, whatever that happens to be.

00:09:11.260 Whatever that innate proclivity is, we don't really understand it.

00:09:14.060 And then, of course, the form that language takes, the specific form, depends on the sociocultural surround.

00:09:21.980 But the fact that language is created socioculturally doesn't mean that the proclivity for language doesn't have biological roots.

00:09:30.020 And the idea that, I mean, the idea that there's no biological influence on human behavior is pretty much the same idea as there's human beings have no body,

00:09:42.480 which is, of course, a completely absurd proposition.

00:09:46.040 We have two eyes.

00:09:47.360 That's biologically determined.

00:09:49.020 You know, we are hungry.

00:09:51.000 We're thirsty.

00:09:52.120 We have sexual desires.

00:09:54.000 We have defensive aggression.

00:09:55.160 There's all sorts of inbuilt systems way low in the brain that determine or that shape our behavior.

00:10:02.400 So it's a crazy idea.

00:10:05.320 Yes.

00:10:06.260 I'm sorry.

00:10:06.900 But I just had a thought.

00:10:08.080 Do you think there is a relation between this denial of the realm of the physical body, of those gender theories on the one side,

00:10:17.640 and on the other side, this crazy aggressiveness which those people exhibit?

00:10:22.460 Like, I don't know if you have seen this video of the German university in Magdeburg where there's supposed to be a gender conference,

00:10:29.880 and the guy was supposed to be having a lecture, and there were, like, these radical leftist students who behaved more or less like Nazis.

00:10:37.880 And I just remembered the idea of Wilhelm Reich, who observed this relation between suppression of sexuality and of body, in a way, and this aggressiveness.

00:10:52.120 So do you see there also a relationship, or is that something?

00:10:55.500 Well, I think there's – that's an interesting question.

00:10:58.600 I think there's two things happening.

00:11:00.040 One is that if the facts don't support your ideology, then all you have left is to enforce it as force or legal fiat,

00:11:09.460 and that's what's happening in Canada, certainly, is the reason the postmodernists have taken the legal route is because they've failed on the scientific front.

00:11:19.160 They've failed dreadfully on the scientific front.

00:11:21.460 I mean, one of the best examples of that is that there's a very good literature now on personality differences between men and women,

00:11:29.440 personality differences and differences in intrinsic interest.

00:11:33.740 And so large-scale studies have been carried out using psychometrically valid personality instruments,

00:11:43.200 and they've looked cross-culturally at temperamental and personality differences between men and women.

00:11:49.220 And the social constructionist hypothesis would basically be that as a culture moves more towards egalitarian social policies,

00:11:57.580 that the personality and interest differences between men and women would decrease.

00:12:02.180 But that's actually the opposite of what's happened.

00:12:05.120 And so there are large-scale population studies showing that the biggest personality differences between men and women in the world

00:12:11.560 are manifested in the Scandinavian countries.

00:12:14.280 And they've been increasing as their policies have become more egalitarian.

00:12:19.620 And the reason for that is that as you flatten out the sociocultural differences between men and women,

00:12:25.640 the genetic differences maximize.

00:12:28.460 Because that's all that's left.

00:12:29.800 The only source of variability that's left is biological.

00:12:32.680 And so there's reason for them to use increasing, let's call it political pressure,

00:12:37.760 to drive home their point because they can't do it any other way.

00:12:40.840 And then there's another factor that I think is very interesting.

00:12:44.840 This is more speculative, but I think it's relevant.

00:12:49.080 We've been looking at political correctness as a political ideology,

00:12:53.140 trying to understand its psychometric structure,

00:12:57.180 which means we've been examining how the set of ideas,

00:13:01.840 whether the set of ideas loosely identified as politically correct,

00:13:05.700 actually cohere in a regular manner.

00:13:09.460 Because if they don't, then there's no such thing as a set of beliefs that you could describe as politically correct.

00:13:14.480 So it's an empirical question.

00:13:16.220 We analyzed a set of about 400 questions that were derived from media reports of political correctness and so forth,

00:13:22.700 trying to establish the large network of potential relationships.

00:13:26.620 And we found that two tight sets of political ideas clump together.

00:13:31.700 So there's actually two forms of political correctness.

00:13:33.460 One we described as political correct liberalism and the other as politically correct authoritarianism.

00:13:41.220 But both of them are linked by a trait called agreeableness.

00:13:45.520 Now, agreeable people are compassionate and polite, and women are more agreeable than men.

00:13:51.340 And it looks like it's fundamentally the dimension of maternal behavior.

00:13:57.220 Now, the interesting thing about maternal behavior is that if you're operating on the maternal circuit, let's say,

00:14:04.580 you have a strong proclivity to treat the world like it's composed of predators and vulnerable infants.

00:14:10.720 And as far as we can tell, that accounts for the demonization of the opposition among the politically correct,

00:14:18.720 is that any group that's tagged with the vulnerable descriptor, so any group hypothetically that has been oppressed or that is suffering,

00:14:30.740 is instantly cast into the role of innocent infantile victim who can do no harm.

00:14:36.120 And then anyone who is outside of that protected group is treated as a predator.

00:14:43.240 And I think that people basically use the snake detection and eradication circuitry,

00:14:49.360 that's a deeply evolved part of our psyche, as the underlying metaphor for the predator.

00:14:56.060 And then the logical response to the presence of a predator is to eliminate it, essentially, however that might be necessary.

00:15:06.120 And so you see that manifesting itself.

00:15:07.960 It's one of the things that manifests itself in these political displays.

00:15:12.200 The idea that the opposition should just be shut down, terminated, never talked to, just eliminated.

00:15:20.020 And obviously, that's an unbelievably dangerous oversimplification.

00:15:24.800 That's now, I mean, that the opposition should just be shut down, because the opposition actually has something to say that might be relevant.

00:15:33.660 Partly, all groups that are not thriving are not innocent victims.

00:15:40.860 That's the first part.

00:15:42.300 And everyone who's outside of that group is not automatically a predatory demon.

00:15:46.240 So, I think it's comical, because the very people that deny the effects of biological determination are acting it out in their political action.

00:15:59.860 So, it's black and comical.

00:16:01.760 Exactly.

00:16:02.840 So, this is one of those performative contradictions of postmodernism, I guess.

00:16:07.340 But before we come to this, you know, you posted this video where you analyzed a little bit the game structure of the PC game.

00:16:14.820 You know, it reminded me a little bit about this old theory by Eric Byrne.

00:16:19.700 I don't know if you know him.

00:16:20.740 Games people play.

00:16:22.080 So, he had this basic structure.

00:16:24.300 You have a proposal.

00:16:25.180 For example, you identify yourself as a victim.

00:16:29.440 This is what you were characterizing.

00:16:32.260 And then there's a trick.

00:16:33.600 And you can accuse and threat everybody who doesn't behave in the way you want them to.

00:16:41.480 So, was it an inspiration for this?

00:16:46.780 Well, I don't think.

00:16:49.860 It's hard to say, because I read Byrne a long, long time ago.

00:16:52.880 It's probably 30 years or something like that now.

00:16:55.600 So, you never know what influences your thinking.

00:16:57.980 But it wasn't a conscious influence.

00:17:01.520 I've been thinking more in terms of political beliefs, especially oversimplified ones, as compression algorithms.

00:17:09.240 That's a way of thinking about it.

00:17:10.760 Because the world is a place that's so complex that it's really beyond human understanding.

00:17:16.780 And so, what we do as a consequence of that is use simplifying heuristics to clump diverse things into homogenous groups so that we can treat them as if they're one thing.

00:17:28.880 And that's very useful frequently.

00:17:31.120 Like, it's useful to have a category of dog, for example.

00:17:34.000 Which is, you can think about that as a low-resolution representation that averages the difference across all dogs into a single entity.

00:17:41.560 Now, you know, the category dog is a good category unless you face a mean dog, in which case the category dog needs to be differentiated into nice dogs and mean dogs.

00:17:53.500 And you don't want to differentiate your categories more than is necessary for functional utility.

00:17:59.620 But you do need to differentiate them enough so that you're not obscuring relevant differences.

00:18:08.500 Now, that's a very tricky thing, because what's relevant and what isn't is very, very difficult to calculate.

00:18:14.120 But these political beliefs are hyper-simplifying algorithms that can be applied not only to opinion.

00:18:26.300 That's the thing that's interesting, is that the simplifying algorithms actually structure perception itself.

00:18:32.660 And so, that's been exaggerated to some degree, I think, by the rise of the Internet.

00:18:37.960 But if you see the world through your temperament, say, and that hasn't been modified by strenuous logical thought,

00:18:46.060 then you're going to, your unconscious neural mechanisms are automatically going to highlight certain phenomena and suppress others.

00:18:55.360 Make them, truly make them invisible.

00:18:58.080 And it has to happen that way, because you need to make most of the world invisible.

00:19:02.100 Because otherwise, you can't operate.

00:19:04.860 But there's a danger in that, in that now and then, the things that you make invisible are the crucial phenomena.

00:19:13.540 That's often why people make mistakes.

00:19:15.380 But the problem is, is that it's happening at the level of perception.

00:19:18.920 And so, people, imagine that you could present yourself with an unbiased field of facts.

00:19:25.300 You can't, but you could just imagine that that was possible.

00:19:28.060 But then, when you view the field of facts, your temperament highlights some and filters out others.

00:19:34.040 And so, and then you might derive your conclusions based on those facts and feel that it's merely a consequence of logical operators.

00:19:40.860 But it's not.

00:19:42.200 It's the old problem, essentially, that Kant identified when he structured his critique of pure reason,

00:19:48.820 is that the facts don't array themselves in an unbiased manner,

00:19:53.440 because you bring a perceptual structure to your field of apprehension.

00:19:59.100 And that a priori structure is how the world manifests itself to you.

00:20:05.020 Now, you can change that, but it's very, it's hard.

00:20:07.660 It takes effort and training and thought and all of those things.

00:20:12.140 So, that's very interesting, because it leads us to another topic, namely postmodernism.

00:20:17.960 And that, I mean, there's no broad consensus about what postmodernism or postmodernity is,

00:20:22.740 but you can argue in a way that this thinking, which is in a way derived from Piaget and a lot of other guys,

00:20:31.060 that this is like a discovery of postmodernism.

00:20:34.560 You know, like, okay, we are constructing in this way, by our temperament, our own subjective reality.

00:20:43.040 That doesn't mean the objective reality, but our way, how we perceive it.

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00:23:35.280 Sure.

00:23:36.000 Yeah.

00:23:36.600 So...

00:23:37.120 No, go ahead.

00:23:39.080 So, no, and my question was because you are in a way critical about postmodernism.

00:23:45.020 But in my understanding, you know, postmodernism is a worldview which emerged out of the horrors, so to speak, from modernity.

00:23:55.500 You know, like feminism and constructivism, all the good things that emerged in that time span of the last hundred years, more or less.

00:24:04.220 So, but then something happened, and Habermas spoke about those performative contradictions.

00:24:10.140 But now what is happening that those contradictions invade our life in a way which we have never known before.

00:24:18.780 You know, like constructivism leads to fake news and feminism is deconstructing itself.

00:24:24.560 What is your take on that?

00:24:27.300 Well, first of all, I mean, I understand what the postmodernists...

00:24:32.440 The postmodernists got caught up in a very complicated technical problem.

00:24:38.420 And the technical problem is essentially that there's a very large number of ways to categorize any set of entities, even a small set of entities.

00:24:47.960 So, for example, if you wanted to categorize a set of six books, there's a virtually unlimited number of ways you could do it.

00:24:55.600 You could do it by height, thickness, width, date of publication, alphabetically by author, alphabetically by name, topic, number of E's, number of A's, length of the average word, length of the average sentence, length of the average paragraph, etc.

00:25:15.300 You can multiply the number of categorical schemes that you could apply to that set of entities by all the properties of the entities.

00:25:24.540 There's endless numbers of properties of the entities, especially when you also consider them as elements of a larger set, right?

00:25:32.920 So there's the problem.

00:25:35.140 And that's back to the problem of the infinite complexity of the world.

00:25:39.000 Now, to deal with that, you have to impose an interpretive structure.

00:25:42.940 And so the postmodernists ended up thinking, well, if you have to impose an interpretive structure, who's to say which interpretive structure is correct?

00:25:53.460 There's an endless number of them.

00:25:55.460 Well, that's a big problem.

00:25:57.140 I mean, it's also a problem that's bedeviled artificial intelligence.

00:25:59.940 So for a long time, the artificial intelligence researchers assumed that perception was a relatively straightforward matter and that the problem that needed to be solved with regards to building, like, say, intelligent robots that could act autonomously was to determine how to act upon the entities that were perceived.

00:26:21.220 But as they started to build machines that could perceive, they discovered, and this was back in the early 60s, that perception was such a complicated problem that it actually looked impossible.

00:26:31.480 So what's happened, the way that's been solved, essentially, is that robots, artificial intelligence entities, have had to become embodied and instantiated with specific purposes so that the problem of perception could be solved as a consequence of goal-directed action.

00:26:51.020 So, because what happens is that it's goal-directed action that sets the pragmatic frame for perception.

00:26:59.440 Perception is a tool used to attain certain goals.

00:27:04.200 It's not a way of observing, dispassionately observing, an infinite set of variables.

00:27:12.640 And so the postmodernists stumbled across that problem.

00:27:15.800 It's, oh, my God, there's an infinite set of interpretations.

00:27:18.520 Well, then, for example, how can we be sure that any interpretation of a text is canonically correct?

00:27:24.040 And if we can't be sure that we're interpreting a text in any canonically correct manner, how can we be sure that we're interpreting the world in a canonically correct manner?

00:27:32.900 And the answer to that is, well, that's complicated.

00:27:37.160 But part of the answer is you can't be sure.

00:27:39.060 But then you can't say, well, just because interpretation is extraordinarily complex, all interpretations are therefore equal, which is the next postmodernist move, or that all interpretations are arbitrary, or that all interpretations necessarily only serve political ends.

00:27:59.700 And that's where the postmodernists see.

00:28:01.600 What happened with postmodernism is that if you take the philosophy to the logical conclusion, you can't act.

00:28:07.980 Okay, but you can't not act, because then you die.

00:28:12.860 So that's not an option.

00:28:14.260 And so what's happened is that postmodernism has remained nested inside the neo-Marxism, out of which it partially emerged.

00:28:24.360 And with the postmodernists' default to Marxist presuppositions, value structures, whenever they need to act, and they just cover that over with a wave of the hand.

00:28:33.700 It's like, well, yeah, everything's an interpretation except the idea that there are oppressed and oppressors.

00:28:38.680 That's true. That's a canonical truth.

00:28:41.560 And now we can use that to guide our action, and we're not going to brook any criticism of that idea, because, well, then we would be paralyzed into inaction.

00:28:50.960 And the fact that that's logically contradictory, we'll just wash that away with the hand-waving movement that claims, well, logic is a tool of the oppressor anyways.

00:29:01.660 So it's an appallingly contradictory philosophy, but it doesn't matter, because the postmodernists do claim that logic, they claim this forthrightly, Derrida in particular, that logic is part of phallogocentrism, and that it's just the way that the patriarchal structure justifies its claims to power.

00:29:22.180 So the postmodernists said that they dispensed with interpretation, but they kept a few basic axioms.

00:29:30.440 This is also true of Foucault.

00:29:32.180 It's like, well, everything's interpretation except power.

00:29:36.700 Power's real.

00:29:38.760 And that's derived directly from the underlying Marxism.

00:29:42.460 It's an appallingly incoherent philosophy, and it's extraordinarily dangerous.

00:29:46.180 But these people also build themselves little airtight enclaves to keep inconvenient contradictions from themselves or other people hidden.

00:29:59.340 And so then they act out their contradictions in the world.

00:30:03.260 Interesting.

00:30:04.280 Okay, so you talked a lot about Piaget in your lectures and the stages of development.

00:30:11.120 So, and I guess he stopped with a formal operational level of adult development.

00:30:18.640 So, but I was wondering how much your worldview is informed by more differentiated stages models,

00:30:27.800 because there are like models who say, okay, there's like a pluralistic or even more postconventional,

00:30:37.980 or there are more postconventional stages, up to being construct aware, how we deal with narratives and all that stuff.

00:30:46.520 How much are you influenced by those?

00:30:48.900 Well, I'll talk about Piaget a little bit.

00:30:52.300 So Piaget believed that children basically entered the world with sets of reflexes at hand,

00:30:57.540 and that the reflexes were the precursors to a bootstrapping operation that brought the child into being as a fully-fledged entity.

00:31:08.640 And so, in some sense, he viewed the world as a field of information that the child could interact with and absorb the information,

00:31:19.520 model it, imitate it, both in an embodied sense and also then in a conceptual sense.

00:31:26.480 Embodiment first, and then conceptualization.

00:31:30.700 So, for Piaget, the fundamental embodiment of a cup would be this, right?

00:31:35.160 Because that's how you grip a cup, and so a cup is something to grip.

00:31:38.840 And then once you've got the grip-cup relationship, then you can conceptualize the grip relationship,

00:31:44.540 and you can start talking about grip as an abstraction, but it's basically embodied.

00:31:49.580 Okay, so now there's a problem with that, and the problem is that Piaget didn't give enough credence

00:31:57.020 to the underlying psychophysiological structure of the brain in addition to the reflexes.

00:32:03.260 He thought about the reflexes as a set of, say, motor tendencies that were built in, or even sensory motor tendencies.

00:32:08.920 But we know a lot more about the underlying biological substructure of the brain than we did when Piaget was formulating his theories.

00:32:17.920 And we know now that there are sets of hypothalamic circuits, essentially,

00:32:23.340 but other subcortical circuits that we share with animals going way down the phylogenetic chain,

00:32:28.720 some of them as far back as crustaceans, so that's 350 million years.

00:32:33.200 That would be the systems that keep track of dominance relationships, the serotonergic systems, which are extraordinarily ancient.

00:32:40.160 And so Piaget didn't understand, I don't think, that the child who's constructing his or her world

00:32:49.020 is constructing it within axiomatic games whose rules are already set to some degree.

00:32:55.460 And one of those would be hunger, for example.

00:32:58.700 Inbuilt value structures like hunger or thirst or temperature discomfort or pain.

00:33:05.220 Those things are there to begin with.

00:33:07.020 Those aren't constructed.

00:33:08.700 Now, those loose, you could call them loose, low-resolution categories, like things to potentially eat.

00:33:17.420 Meaning the child, when the child is putting things in its mouth, which it does,

00:33:21.120 or mouthing things before it can even put things in its mouth.

00:33:23.860 It's basically using an inbuilt schema to categorize the world.

00:33:28.580 Things you can put in your mouth and things you can't.

00:33:30.760 You can think about that as the lowest resolution representation of the world.

00:33:35.220 You know, so, and then once you get things you can put in your mouth,

00:33:38.520 you can use your mouth and your tongue to start to differentiate those things into subcategories.

00:33:42.980 Okay.

00:33:43.460 Okay, so that's the first thing.

00:33:45.660 So, Piaget's theory suffers from a lack of grounding in these,

00:33:52.000 in a lack of consideration of these underlying deep biological structures

00:33:58.020 that act as a priori categorizers of the world.

00:34:03.220 And the world is categorized in terms of the thing and its implication for action.

00:34:08.940 Because that's the basic category structure.

00:34:10.960 It's not objective reality.

00:34:15.080 There isn't an objective reality for human beings.

00:34:17.820 What there is is a pragmatic reality.

00:34:19.780 And the pragmatic reality is the functional utility of category structures.

00:34:26.680 And it's pragmatic because we want to use our category structures to aid our survival

00:34:30.960 and aid our reproduction.

00:34:32.520 If you want to think about it from a Darwinian perspective,

00:34:35.080 it's value laden right from the beginning.

00:34:37.980 Okay, so there's that.

00:34:39.060 And then, so that's a nice modification of Piaget.

00:34:42.300 And it's necessary because otherwise it just becomes arbitrary construction.

00:34:45.440 But Piaget was also smart enough to know that the constructivism,

00:34:50.100 the construction project wasn't arbitrary.

00:34:53.340 And the reason for that was that it was social.

00:34:56.800 And so, for example, while you two, you and I are having this conversation,

00:35:01.860 we're mutually constructing the category systems that we're using to structure the conversation

00:35:07.680 because otherwise we wouldn't be able to understand each other.

00:35:10.240 And so you can't just arbitrarily construct the world.

00:35:13.380 You have, insofar as you're living with other entities,

00:35:17.420 you have to engage in a joint construction strategy

00:35:20.400 because otherwise you're autistic, philosophically.

00:35:25.460 And if you take the fact of the necessity of joint construction,

00:35:31.460 then that imposes certain limitations on the category structures that are going to be imposed.

00:35:37.120 And so that's partly a solution to the postmodern dilemma.

00:35:40.120 It's like, okay, so I read Dostoevsky.

00:35:44.220 Well, how do I interpret it?

00:35:46.120 Well, there's an infinite number of ways to interpret it.

00:35:48.760 Okay, what if I want to interpret it and communicate with other people in a meaningful manner?

00:35:54.360 Aha!

00:35:55.200 Well, then all of a sudden all sorts of limitations on the interpretation start to emerge.

00:35:59.660 So I have to interpret it in a language we both share to begin with.

00:36:04.440 And then I have to interpret it in ways that you're going to find relevant.

00:36:08.420 So I'm not going to talk about the thickness of the pages, even though I could.

00:36:13.160 You're going to look at me like there's something wrong with me

00:36:15.360 because I've stepped outside of our implicitly shared axiomatic framework.

00:36:19.540 And I'm off on some tangent that no sane human being would regard as relevant.

00:36:28.100 The postmodernists don't understand that these shared networks of relevance are deeply biologically grounded

00:36:34.160 and socially instantiated, even though they should understand that.

00:36:37.740 And that that puts unbelievably strict constraints on the interpretive framework.

00:36:43.700 Now, Biagé said one more thing, which was absolutely brilliant.

00:36:47.720 And this is part of the reason I admire his work so much,

00:36:50.180 is that you can consider the construction of one of these shared frames of reference as a game.

00:37:01.020 Now, the game and games have certain rules.

00:37:04.420 And one of them is that, for example, that we both have to want to play it.

00:37:08.600 And the fact that we both have to want to play it means that the net or the space of all possible games is radically limited.

00:37:19.200 You're going to want to play a game that has utility for you,

00:37:22.380 and I'm going to want to play a game that has utility for me.

00:37:25.900 And the intersection of those two desires is where we can play a joint game.

00:37:31.560 And the space of all joint games is actually quite highly regulated,

00:37:36.180 as you can tell even by playing with a child.

00:37:38.200 Like, there's instant rules that emerge when playing a game.

00:37:42.700 And one of them is reciprocity.

00:37:45.620 The other is something like an equal chance to win.

00:37:49.500 Another is that the one who's more skilled gets to win.

00:37:53.380 And without having those expectations built into the game,

00:37:57.360 then people will reject the game.

00:38:00.000 And that's partly how Biagé started to conceptualize the emergence of a genuine morality.

00:38:05.440 Because a genuinely moral system consists of a set of hierarchically arranged games

00:38:12.700 that everyone is playing voluntarily.

00:38:15.040 And then he went one stage further, which was absolutely brilliant.

00:38:19.300 He said, a set of playable games of that sort will beat another set of games that's imposed by force.

00:38:27.600 Because the set of games that's imposed by force requires extra energy to enforce.

00:38:34.720 So it's less efficient.

00:38:36.380 It's like, God, it's brilliant, you know, because it gives you a way of conceptualizing the organization of moral systems

00:38:43.100 as they emerge in a socially interactive space

00:38:47.000 and describes the constraints on the emergence of those systems.

00:38:50.560 And you can see that echoed in animal behavior, in the construction of animal dominance hierarchies,

00:38:56.560 especially in complex animals like wolves or chimpanzees.

00:39:00.280 There's a finite space within which the chimpanzees can organize playable games.

00:39:06.860 And so Franz de Waal, for example, has documented quite nicely, and so have other primatologists now,

00:39:11.420 that brute force on the part of the most dominant chimpanzee is an unstable dominance hierarchy game.

00:39:18.660 The brute force chimp gets torn apart by his subordinates.

00:39:24.000 Very much like, you know, tyrants tend to die a painful death.

00:39:29.640 It's a non-stable game across large-scale spans of time.

00:39:34.660 It reminds me a little bit, there are quite a few post-modern theories and philosophies,

00:39:41.620 and what they have in common, like performatism and metamodernism and digimodernism and all that forms,

00:39:49.180 is that they are solving that problem of post-modernity, what you just laid out.

00:39:53.980 So everything is being relative, and you don't have a frame of reference,

00:39:59.260 but the post-modern philosophies say, argue, well, you can create some new meaning,

00:40:07.540 although you know you can't find any truth.

00:40:10.700 You can create some truth together, in a way, and this is like a similar argument.

00:40:16.240 Right, well, okay, so that's part of the issue.

00:40:19.820 But it's lacking the biology, that perspective.

00:40:27.080 Because the other thing is that the truths that you construct jointly have to,

00:40:37.520 they're practical truths, roughly speaking.

00:40:40.820 They have to be able to act them out in the world,

00:40:44.380 in a manner that produces what they intend.

00:40:47.440 And that intention is going to be grounded in desire.

00:40:52.380 And so it isn't merely the idea that you and I have to agree on what the truth is.

00:40:57.880 Say you and I come up with a plan.

00:41:00.940 Okay, so we've constructed the plan jointly.

00:41:04.840 But now we have to go implement it in the world.

00:41:08.060 Any category scheme is a plan.

00:41:10.860 That's the thing.

00:41:11.720 Any category scheme is a plan.

00:41:13.480 It's not a description of the objective entities in the world.

00:41:17.120 That's a mistake.

00:41:18.300 And it's a bad mistake because it actually rests, for example,

00:41:22.340 it rests on a misapprehension of human perception from a scientific perspective,

00:41:26.280 but also from a practical perspective.

00:41:28.620 Okay, so you and I conjure up a plan.

00:41:31.320 And that's a way of viewing the world.

00:41:33.000 And it's a value structure at the same time.

00:41:34.760 Because if it's a plan, it's oriented towards an aim.

00:41:37.000 And we're always going to be oriented towards an aim because otherwise we're not going to be interested in the plan.

00:41:43.140 And the reason for that, from a neuroscience perspective, is that interest only manifests itself in relationship to a goal.

00:41:50.820 Roughly speaking, if it's interest that you're going to act upon.

00:41:55.340 Because the system that mediates interest is the dopaminergic system.

00:41:59.340 And it's grounded in the hypothalamus.

00:42:01.100 And it's an exploratory circuit.

00:42:03.480 And so it kicks in when you specify a goal.

00:42:06.420 And then it's the system that produces the positive emotion necessary to move towards the goal.

00:42:11.840 And it's monitoring the environment to ensure that the category system that you're using to orient yourself towards the goal is functioning properly to move you towards that goal.

00:42:22.200 So then we take the shared truth that we generated and we act it out in the world.

00:42:27.720 And if the action in the world invalidates the theory, then we have to return to the drawing board.

00:42:34.000 So it doesn't have to be correct, the theory.

00:42:37.720 Because it isn't going to be.

00:42:38.960 It's never going to be 100% correct.

00:42:42.140 It just has to be good enough to get you to where you're going.

00:42:46.520 So, for example, if you have a map of the world, which is what your category scheme is, it's not a representation of the objective world.

00:42:54.480 It's not finely differentiated enough to be that.

00:42:57.540 If it was, the map would be the same size as the territory.

00:43:01.180 And then it would be unwieldy because the map wouldn't provide a functional simplification of the territory.

00:43:06.060 So you might say, well, is the map that you have of the territory correct or is it interpretation?

00:43:12.300 And the answer is, well, it's interpretation because you're leaving all sorts of things out.

00:43:16.540 But it's correct insofar as if you use the map, you get to where you're going.

00:43:21.180 See, that's what the North American pragmatists realized at the end of the 19th century.

00:43:28.200 They were brilliant.

00:43:29.360 And they knew that Darwinian theory was partly the key to the problem that the postmodernists were trying to solve.

00:43:34.500 Is that category schemes are subordinate to goal-directed action.

00:43:39.120 And so they're constrained.

00:43:42.480 My category schemes are constrained by the necessity of formulating them in a shared social space with you.

00:43:49.400 But then, for example, one of the things that we will figure out post hoc, both you and I, is whether the category scheme that we applied to this conversation not only served the function of our conversation, but when released into the world, finds an audience.

00:44:07.000 And if it doesn't find an audience or people find it incomprehensible, then that's evidence that the category scheme that we used to structure our conversation was insufficient.

00:44:18.400 Sure.

00:44:19.920 And there's no escaping from that because you can't step outside motivated frames.

00:44:24.540 You can to some degree if you apply scientific methodology because you're kind of averaging across motivated frames then.

00:44:30.300 But even then, you know, scientists don't spend time looking for, generally speaking, looking for useless facts.

00:44:37.460 They're generally motivated.

00:44:39.060 Sure.

00:44:39.580 So science allows you to jump outside of it to some degree.

00:44:43.160 But but and this is something that I've been arguing about, say, with Sam Harris, who's one of the one of the people who made atheism, you know, a kind of what intellectually hot topic, again, in America.

00:44:58.740 Even scientific truth is bounded by Darwinian considerations in some complex manner.

00:45:03.860 I mean, Sam argues for the existence of objective facts.

00:45:07.400 And and I buy that.

00:45:08.880 But this was an interesting conversation.

00:45:10.880 Your point basically was you can't derive an art from an is.

00:45:14.240 And he said, well, you can.

00:45:15.780 This was amazing.

00:45:16.700 Well, the reason you can't is because there's too many ises.

00:45:20.240 Exactly.

00:45:20.840 But that's the argument was that you can.

00:45:23.440 Yeah.

00:45:23.760 But he never says how.

00:45:25.160 That's the problem.

00:45:25.840 So this is something we never got to in the conversation, because Sam says, for example, while we should work to to increase the well-being of human beings, it's like, OK, Sam, no problem.

00:45:36.880 I agree.

00:45:37.600 Try measuring it.

00:45:38.700 See how far you get, because I know the measurement literature on well-being and it's appalling.

00:45:43.040 It's unbelievably oversimplified.

00:45:44.960 It basically boils down to extroversion minus neuroticism, which is to say that happy people who aren't sad are happy.

00:45:52.220 It's like, yeah, no kidding.

00:45:54.140 But like that's not useful.

00:45:55.840 And so the well-being problem becomes unbelievably difficult technically, because here's the set of problems.

00:46:03.080 OK, good for you.

00:46:05.080 All right.

00:46:05.620 Good for you when?

00:46:07.380 Today?

00:46:08.260 Like this minute, this hour, today, this week, this month?

00:46:12.440 Those are not the same issues, because cocaine is really good for you right now.

00:46:16.580 But it's probably not good for you over a five-year period.

00:46:19.120 And, you know, the thing about impulsive pleasure is that impulsive pleasures put before you the problem of time frame.

00:46:28.300 OK, so Piaget would say something like that.

00:46:31.520 If it's good, it has to be good across the set of time frames.

00:46:34.980 So it has to be good for you now in a way that's good for you in an hour, in a way that's good for you for a day, etc., up to the limit of conceivable time frames.

00:46:44.480 So that puts stringent restrictions on what constitutes good.

00:46:49.760 And then we might also say, well, it has to be good for you now in a way that's good for you tomorrow and in a week and in a month.

00:46:57.600 But that's also good for your family, in a way that's good for the community, in a way that's good for the polity, and then out from that.

00:47:06.100 And so then what you get is a stacking of ethical requirements.

00:47:10.560 And once you stack up those ethical requirements, the number of games that you can play to meet those ethical requirements becomes extraordinarily limited.

00:47:18.320 And it's my contention that it's the solutions to that set of stacked ethical games that's expressed in religious mythology that's evolved across millennia, millennia.

00:47:30.620 So one example would be for, and this is something the ancient Mesopotamians figured out when they were trying to figure out who should be, which deity should rule.

00:47:40.280 Imagine that a bunch of tribes come together and they all have gods, and the gods are representations of their moral structure.

00:47:46.240 They're more than that, but we'll call them that for now.

00:47:49.220 Then the question becomes, whose god will rule?

00:47:53.600 But even more practically, which god should rule?

00:48:00.120 And so see this idea emerge in Mesopotamian mythology, which actually describes the battle of the gods for supremacy and the emergence of the metagod.

00:48:10.120 And their metagod, the name of their metagod was Marduk.

00:48:13.500 And Marduk had eyes all the way around his head, so the Mesopotamians realized that visual attention was one of the highest virtues.

00:48:23.160 And he could speak magic words, and so the Mesopotamians realized that the capacity for voluntary speech associated with the ability to pay attention was in the realm of the highest virtues.

00:48:34.980 And then Marduk was also the god who would go out and fight the dragon of chaos.

00:48:41.040 That was Tiamat, who was one of the ancient gods who was one of the two primal forces that created the world.

00:48:48.980 She's actually the goddess of chaos.

00:48:51.720 Her husband, Apsu, was the god of order.

00:48:54.300 So there's order in chaos that produce everything.

00:48:56.900 And then chaos sometimes re-emerges to pull everything back down.

00:49:02.100 Okay, so Marduk goes out to confront chaos voluntarily.

00:49:06.080 And he cuts Tiamat into pieces and makes the world.

00:49:09.000 And that's a constructivist idea.

00:49:11.260 So the idea is that the highest god should be the capacity to pay attention, the ability to speak voluntarily, and the willingness to confront chaos and generate order.

00:49:20.660 That idea is implicitly, that idea becomes implicit in Genesis, because the opening lines of Genesis, where Yawa creates the world, he creates it out of something called Tohu Wabohu, or Teom.

00:49:37.480 And that's derived from the word Tiamat.

00:49:39.880 And so there's the idea in the Old Testament that it's the word of God that extracts order from chaos.

00:49:44.940 Do you think we're facing now like a chaotic time?

00:49:51.900 I mean, when you look at the world, you have like a crazy person in the White House.

00:49:56.060 You have nationalistic populist movements everywhere, basically.

00:50:00.740 You have no great narratives how to describe our social reality.

00:50:08.240 So, and everything, everybody tries to figure out what is going on.

00:50:11.520 So do you think this is like the beginning of the end of postmodernism, the chaos reigns?

00:50:18.240 And, okay, well, how do you...

00:50:20.320 Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

00:50:22.460 I mean, you see this in this strange idea that's become current among people obsessed with the Internet,

00:50:30.940 that the current god is Keq, K-E-K, Egyptian god of chaos, who is a frog.

00:50:36.820 And the frog is something that doesn't fit into categories, right?

00:50:41.200 Because it transmutes as it grows, because it starts as a tadpole, but it's half in the water and half on the land.

00:50:47.980 And so, yeah, we're in a time of extreme chaos.

00:50:51.240 And we're trying to sort out whether we're going to degenerate further into chaos,

00:50:56.460 whether we're going to, what would you call it, devolve into a state of strict order.

00:51:01.060 That's the call from the right, I would say.

00:51:04.440 Or, in my estimation, whether or not we're going to follow the pathway of logos,

00:51:09.000 which is the pathway that's laid forward in the ideas that I just described.

00:51:17.200 Individuals have to confront the chaos with their own character and parse it back into habitable order.

00:51:23.640 But that's a matter of individual characterological development, in my estimation.

00:51:28.200 And that's the alternative to the radical left-wing post-modernist chaos

00:51:33.160 and the call to a return to restrictive nationalistic identities that's characteristic of the call from the right.

00:51:41.820 Yes, a very dangerous time.

00:51:43.460 Yes, isn't, I mean, the danger, which may lie ahead, may be tremendous.

00:51:49.860 You know, it's like a time where a whole worldview collapses, in a way,

00:51:53.520 and all the good things that post-modernism started with, you know, I mentioned this,

00:52:00.060 are now tumbling down, and you said this in your book,

00:52:04.340 OK, the culture is always describable with these two archetypes,

00:52:09.820 the good king and the biotech tyrant.

00:52:13.540 Now, when I see post-modernism, it's like, OK, feminism is eating its children now.

00:52:19.820 Yeah, well, Tiamat has come back.

00:52:21.540 Tiamat's a female god, right, in the Mesopotamian creation myth.

00:52:25.660 And she decides to eat her children.

00:52:27.660 That's what happens.

00:52:29.020 She's tired of all the noise they're making.

00:52:30.780 So it's like a feminist critique of the patriarchy, fundamentally.

00:52:34.760 That's what's acted out in the Enume Lish.

00:52:37.000 But the problem is, is that chaos is just as destructive a force as order.

00:52:42.100 And the balance has to be struck between them.

00:52:45.160 And I believe that, well, the classic story when chaos reigns

00:52:50.020 is that the hero goes to the underworld to rescue his father.

00:52:53.620 And what that means is that you go back into your culture,

00:52:56.120 and you find the values that have been lying dormant, and you revivify them.

00:52:59.660 And the value that's lying dormant in our culture is logos, essentially.

00:53:04.540 Because that logos, the idea that logos was the ultimate deity,

00:53:08.240 was criticized out of existence by the scientific revolution, roughly speaking.

00:53:13.220 Because the scientists confused, and so did the religious people.

00:53:16.980 The scientists and the religious people confused the idea of logos

00:53:21.100 with a scientific description of a set of facts.

00:53:23.800 And it's not.

00:53:25.540 Look, one of the things that Piaget said was that when you look at the history of facts,

00:53:31.020 you find that facts dissolve and change as time transforms.

00:53:35.480 Now, it's kind of a view that Thomas Kuhn shared.

00:53:38.220 Now, that's not exactly true, because some facts are more robust across time than others.

00:53:44.540 Like, the idea that things are made of protons is a pretty damn robust fact.

00:53:49.380 And it's true across almost all possible frames of reference.

00:53:52.980 So, Piaget was wrong, and so was Kuhn, I think,

00:53:56.580 because they failed to take into account that some sets of propositions

00:53:59.880 are more robust to transformation than others.

00:54:02.840 But be that as it may, there is still the case that sets of facts tend to transform.

00:54:09.220 And so it's difficult to say what fact is permanent.

00:54:12.460 But Piaget performed a sleight of hand in respect to that,

00:54:16.420 and he said, okay, the facts themselves might not be able to be regarded as permanent,

00:54:22.220 but the process by which we derive the facts is permanent.

00:54:27.320 Okay, and he thought of that as this exploratory tendency

00:54:30.900 that underlied the constructivist act.

00:54:35.240 There's something in you that's constructing.

00:54:37.300 Okay, well, that thing that's in you is a permanent fact.

00:54:41.840 That's the Logos.

00:54:43.560 And the question is whether or not the fundamental question,

00:54:46.400 and this is something Christianity has been putting forward as the cardinal question

00:54:49.960 for thousands and thousands of years in imagistic and implicit form.

00:54:55.760 Are you going to identify with the Logos?

00:54:58.320 That's the key to salvation.

00:55:00.200 And the Logos is the thing that uses communication to balance order and chaos.

00:55:04.860 So, for example, in the classic dragon slayer type Logos myths,

00:55:12.120 the hero is the person who goes out beyond the confines of the community,

00:55:16.420 comes into contact with the dangerous unknown, often given predatory form,

00:55:22.240 because that's the circuit we use to conceptualize the unknown,

00:55:25.960 and receives something of great value which is then distributed to the community.

00:55:30.780 Okay, that's one of the oldest stories of mankind.

00:55:34.240 You can think about that as the central story of mankind.

00:55:38.400 It's the expression in narrative of our evolved being.

00:55:45.100 And then there's an adjunct to that story, which is, well,

00:55:48.340 sometimes the hero goes out and confronts chaos and generates order,

00:55:52.540 but sometimes the hero goes out and confronts a too rigid order,

00:55:56.800 demolishes it and recasts it.

00:56:00.240 And so, like the Mesopotamian hero, for example, that's Marduk,

00:56:06.760 is basically a St. George dragon slayer type.

00:56:10.500 But Christ is more of a social reformer.

00:56:13.580 Even though Yahweh in the Old Testament is more like Marduk,

00:56:17.720 he's the force, the Logos force, that creates order out of chaos using the divine word.

00:56:24.020 But when Christ emerges on the mythological scene, let's say,

00:56:27.840 he opposes the tyrannical state,

00:56:30.140 and opposes the notion that it's adherence to truth and to spoken,

00:56:37.180 it's adherence to spoken truth and orientation towards the highest good

00:56:41.180 that's actually superordinate to the state.

00:56:45.000 And that makes the state subordinate to the individual,

00:56:48.260 to the Logos element of the individual.

00:56:49.860 And that's the fundamental proposition upon which Western culture rests.

00:56:55.100 If you confront radical leftists and you want to confront the problems of postmodernity

00:57:01.800 and all we have spoken about,

00:57:04.120 so what is your solution to be that hero,

00:57:08.880 to enact that Logos and speak the truth?

00:57:12.820 Yeah, that's exactly it.

00:57:14.500 Well, and I could say to the postmodernists and the identity politics people too,

00:57:19.280 you can say, you can just take their argument and push it to its logical conclusion.

00:57:24.000 It's like, you fractionate group identities until you come down to the level of the individual.

00:57:29.400 See, the problem with the group identity idea is that the group identity,

00:57:33.520 so that's identity politics, is predicated on the idea that

00:57:36.340 a group of people is a homogenous unit.

00:57:39.720 But that's incorrect, because you can take your homogenous unit,

00:57:42.900 let's say black people, okay, black people, a homogenous unit.

00:57:46.240 Well, it's a racist proposition to begin with that that constitutes a homogenous unit.

00:57:50.460 It's actually the key element in racism is to treat a group of individuals

00:57:56.900 as if they're isomorphic using a single category structure.

00:58:00.540 It's the definition of racism.

00:58:02.040 But anyways, forget about that for a moment.

00:58:04.400 Okay, black people.

00:58:06.140 All right, fine.

00:58:06.800 Well, what about women and men?

00:58:08.140 Okay, black women and men.

00:58:10.100 Okay, well, what about middle class versus lower class?

00:58:13.760 Okay, lower class black women and lower class black men and upper class black women

00:58:19.520 and upper class black men.

00:58:21.060 It's like, well, okay, what about people with health problems?

00:58:23.920 Okay, well, how many health problems?

00:58:26.020 Okay, well, let's say there's 40 serious health problems.

00:58:29.040 Okay, so now we fractionated that.

00:58:31.000 Okay, what about attractiveness?

00:58:32.740 Okay, what about age?

00:58:33.880 What about physical prowess?

00:58:35.100 What about intelligence?

00:58:36.180 What about temperament?

00:58:37.440 It's like, yeah, those are all relevant.

00:58:39.420 Okay, where do we stop?

00:58:40.620 That's easy.

00:58:41.180 We stop at the level of the individual because you can't fractionate past that.

00:58:46.340 And so if I'm going to take your identity seriously, I take all of the differentiation

00:58:51.980 that characterizes you and treat that all as relevant.

00:58:55.180 Okay, how do I do that?

00:58:56.580 I meet you as an individual.

00:58:58.400 We meet logos to logos, right?

00:59:02.460 Right.

00:59:03.080 And so I don't see any way out of that from a logical perspective unless you're willing

00:59:07.740 to say, no, there are certain categories that are canonical.

00:59:11.420 Well, what are those?

00:59:12.360 Race.

00:59:13.020 Okay, you want to say race is canonical, do you?

00:59:15.480 Well, welcome to the world of white suprematism.

00:59:18.800 Because that's an inevitable consequence of that perspective.

00:59:21.600 And you can see that playing itself out right now.

00:59:23.900 If there are black people, there are white people.

00:59:26.740 Sure.

00:59:26.960 And first of all, you know, people aren't black and white.

00:59:30.400 They're actually brown and tan.

00:59:33.520 Really.

00:59:34.120 I mean, you think about that.

00:59:35.200 You think about that.

00:59:36.440 I know that seems only...

00:59:40.960 Jung wrote kind of a good deal about that, no?

00:59:45.460 Yeah.

00:59:45.840 About the representation of the uses of the word black and what black...

00:59:50.300 Yeah, absolutely.

00:59:51.400 I mean, obviously, it's an insane oversimplification.

00:59:56.740 And so it's not like there isn't utility from time to time in considering people's ethnic

01:00:01.980 origins.

01:00:02.580 Sometimes you have to do that even if you're looking at the effects of drugs on biological

01:00:07.080 systems.

01:00:08.620 So there's places, you know, there are situations where one categorical scheme is more appropriate

01:00:13.540 than the other.

01:00:14.660 But to privilege, to use the postmodernist phrase, to privilege race above all other

01:00:20.220 distinctions is to fall prey to the precise error that the postmodernists were complaining

01:00:25.760 about.

01:00:26.180 Okay, privilege race.

01:00:27.560 What does that mean?

01:00:28.520 Oh, you're not privileging a bunch of other things.

01:00:30.720 Well, what if they're relevant?

01:00:32.000 It's like, yeah, what if they are?

01:00:33.560 Because they are.

01:00:35.520 So it's a crazy game.

01:00:38.440 And part of the reason that the radicals are playing it is because it enables them to divide

01:00:43.760 the world up into people they can hate and blame.

01:00:46.140 And that means that they don't have to take responsibility for their own lives.

01:00:49.420 They don't ever view themselves as, okay, you're a perpetrator.

01:00:52.540 It's like, okay, that means I'm not.

01:00:54.820 Well, that's a problem because I'm a perpetrator too.

01:00:57.920 All these Western postmodernists who are complaining about the unfair division of resources,

01:01:03.060 they're already in the top 1%.

01:01:05.500 Right?

01:01:07.780 Because they live in North America.

01:01:09.120 They live in Europe.

01:01:09.940 Sure.

01:01:11.080 So then they say, well, what about the 1% that's above me?

01:01:14.180 It's like, yeah, well, why don't you clean up your own house first?

01:01:16.700 That's true.

01:01:20.240 One last question I had.

01:01:24.180 The Maps of Meaning videos, were they already that popular before you started the Professor

01:01:31.340 Against Political Correctness?

01:01:33.120 No, no.

01:01:34.160 There's been an absolute skyrocketing of their popularity since I released these.

01:01:41.140 Well, I think what happens is that people, people, look, I've been accused of over-exaggerating

01:01:51.060 the importance of the pronoun issue.

01:01:53.260 Okay, well, fundamentally, the pronoun issue is a tiny sideshow in a very massive game.

01:01:59.160 I think the reason that it attracted attention when I opposed it was because I actually said

01:02:03.440 there was something I wasn't going to do no matter what.

01:02:05.740 I wasn't going to use this language that the postmodernists created.

01:02:08.980 And so I took something universal and large and made it concrete and specific, and that

01:02:15.620 made it real, and it made it dramatic.

01:02:19.340 I mean, I didn't intend that.

01:02:21.520 What I intended was to clarify my thoughts on the matter, but also to state that there

01:02:26.420 was no way I was going to use that language, just to make it public, partly to clarify my

01:02:31.940 own thinking, but also to indicate that there was some opposition to this idea, that I thought

01:02:38.460 it was reprehensible.

01:02:39.940 Well, obviously, that struck a nerve, because, I don't know, maybe 20 million people have

01:02:47.240 watched on YouTube some derivation of the consequences of that, perhaps more.

01:02:55.100 All right.

01:02:55.660 And so then people have come to my website to figure out what's going on.

01:03:00.920 And then they watch something else that I'm doing, and they think, oh, I see, there's

01:03:04.440 more to the story than meets the eye, which is, of course, the case.

01:03:07.540 And everyone knows it, because if it was just a matter of preferred pronouns, this would

01:03:11.460 have been a 15-minute flurry of activity.

01:03:14.400 Yeah, I think so, because the philosopher Czicek, he posted a similar five-minute video about

01:03:21.200 the totalitarian character of political reckons, and it doesn't create that a stir, you know,

01:03:27.040 so.

01:03:28.020 Yeah.

01:03:28.320 Yeah.

01:03:28.520 Well, I thought for a long time about why it caused such a stir.

01:03:33.620 And I do believe that, you see, I made an archetypal statement, but an archetypal statement has

01:03:41.600 no meaning unless it's confined to a particular time and space.

01:03:46.000 See, I can give you an example of that.

01:03:48.000 This is a very strange example.

01:03:49.480 But, see, there's an archetypal reason why Christ was a carpenter in the Middle East.

01:03:56.760 Okay.

01:03:57.280 And the archetypal reason is because the Logos is a transcendent reality.

01:04:01.720 But it's so abstract that unless you embody it, it doesn't have sufficient meaning, because

01:04:07.400 it's not localized.

01:04:08.540 Okay.

01:04:08.620 And you could say that on the grandest of all possible scales.

01:04:12.520 The Logos is meaningless without embodiment.

01:04:14.780 Hmm.

01:04:15.840 Right.

01:04:16.260 And so that's a key to the secret of being itself.

01:04:20.240 So each of us is an embodiment of the Logos, and that's what makes it real.

01:04:23.740 It's the Logos is something of infinite power, but it has no reality until it's limited.

01:04:29.960 Strangely enough, it's like a genie.

01:04:32.420 Okay.

01:04:33.380 You know, a genie has to live inside that little lamp.

01:04:37.220 Genie is the same word as genius.

01:04:39.740 Sure.

01:04:40.180 And that's another manifestation of the idea of the Logos.

01:04:43.760 Well, I took a universal problem, which is, let's say, this postmodern chaos.

01:04:49.320 That's one way of thinking about it.

01:04:50.800 And I made it concrete.

01:04:52.180 I said, here is something I will not do.

01:04:55.060 And that turned the political, philosophical issue into a human drama.

01:04:59.100 Exactly.

01:05:01.060 This is what I was thinking, and it's kind of a personal question you don't have to answer.

01:05:06.140 But when I was thinking about this, it seems to me that the attraction stems from the fact

01:05:11.780 that this is like a representation of an eternal fight.

01:05:15.980 You know, the hero against that bad tyrant and that everybody recognizes that fight

01:05:22.380 because it's like so deep grounded and that you, in a way, embody that archetype.

01:05:30.840 Well, without that, you can be sure that when something receives wide attention

01:05:34.920 that there's an archetypal story at the bottom of it,

01:05:37.220 because otherwise it's archetypal.

01:05:39.940 Archetypal stories are always the stories that receive wide attention by their nature.

01:05:44.580 I mean, you can see that.

01:05:46.440 Go ahead.

01:05:47.440 Did you choose that knowingly, or was it something that happened?

01:05:52.640 It's hard to know what you know and what you don't know.

01:05:55.600 Okay.

01:05:56.440 You know, big well, and I'm not, I mean, so I can tell you what the phenomenology was.

01:06:02.880 Sure.

01:06:03.280 Like, I can feel, and I have felt for several years, this bubbling up of intense opposition

01:06:11.400 to what's been happening in the political landscape.

01:06:14.580 So, for example, I just finished a book, and in one of the chapters,

01:06:17.480 one of the chapters deals with, the chapter is called Don't Bother Children When They're Skateboarding.

01:06:23.260 Okay.

01:06:23.920 And it's actually a discussion of, I would say, to some degree,

01:06:28.180 the repression of exploratory masculinity.

01:06:30.280 And so I was thinking hard about that for several months.

01:06:35.120 And so that, but that's also an extension of things that I've been thinking about for decades.

01:06:40.200 And so that, I've been working on this underlying set of ideas intensely for 30 years, for longer than 30 years.

01:06:48.000 And so part of the reason that I was feeling so intensely opposed to what was happening politically was because of what I had done philosophically.

01:06:57.180 Now, the way that manifested itself was as an inarticulate frustration.

01:07:03.100 Okay.

01:07:03.940 And so I decided to make these videos.

01:07:05.780 I thought, well, this is really bugging me.

01:07:07.240 I better say what I have to say so that I can figure out what I have to say.

01:07:10.760 And I thought, from a, let's call it, marketing perspective, you know, that was more exploration.

01:07:19.920 I had this YouTube channel.

01:07:22.620 By September, it had attracted about a million views.

01:07:25.660 And that was nearly from what I had posted from my classes.

01:07:29.380 And, you know, that was also bubbling around in the back of my mind because I thought, wow, you know, that's,

01:07:34.280 if I sold a million books, I'd be doing the same dance that football players do when they score a touchdown.

01:07:40.320 You know, it's like, that's a big deal.

01:07:42.020 And now my lectures have been watched by a million, or they have been watched a million times, perhaps not by a million people.

01:07:47.980 I thought, wow, that YouTube, that's a whole new phenomena.

01:07:51.720 That's a good revolution because now the spoken word has as much reach as the written word.

01:07:56.860 Never happened before in human history.

01:07:58.940 So that was bubbling around in the back of my mind too.

01:08:02.040 And so I thought all these things came together in this sense of frustration.

01:08:05.480 And I thought, well, I'll make these videos.

01:08:07.660 I've got something to say.

01:08:08.920 Okay, I'll throw them on YouTube and see what happens.

01:08:12.260 And so then you say, well, did I know what I was doing?

01:08:15.100 Well, I would say 70% yes and 30% no.

01:08:21.680 And then, you know, I launched a product or maybe I put a note in a bottle and I launched it out onto an ocean.

01:08:28.720 And I thought, well, see what happens.

01:08:30.400 And, of course, my supposition was very little will happen.

01:08:34.560 And, you know, people will watch it.

01:08:36.560 They'll agree with me or not agree with me.

01:08:38.160 But at least I'll have said my piece.

01:08:40.160 And I'll know more about that actually has two meanings to say your piece.

01:08:45.960 And then that will move me to whatever will be next.

01:08:50.480 Well, you know.

01:08:52.580 Sure, and then everybody reacted to this.

01:08:55.800 Yeah, it's absolutely crazy.

01:09:00.660 It's crazy what's happened.

01:09:02.760 And but that also indicates that something deeper has been stirred.

01:09:07.580 That's the you know.

01:09:09.040 And one of the things that's so interesting about this, that one of the things that I can really it's really been difficult for me to wrap my head around.

01:09:16.680 And I've been there's a there's a political party Congress that's going to occur in Canada in a couple of months where the the second major party in Canada, which is the Conservative Party, is going to elect a new leader.

01:09:27.860 And I've been talking to a number of the people who are running for the leadership about observations that I've made.

01:09:32.660 OK.

01:09:33.020 So this is something that's really cool.

01:09:37.100 So about 90 percent of the people who watch my YouTube videos are men.

01:09:41.340 And that was true even before the the political issue hit.

01:09:45.300 It tilted a little harder to men after the political issue hit.

01:09:49.480 But even before it was about 85 percent men.

01:09:52.060 And that's interesting because most psychology classes are radically female dominated.

01:09:57.680 Hmm.

01:09:58.660 So the fact that it was men between the ages of 18 and 40 that were watching, I was watching that and thinking, hmm, that's really interesting.

01:10:04.760 I don't know what's going on exactly.

01:10:06.260 But then I've been talking to more and more groups of people.

01:10:09.340 And most of the people who come out and see me are men.

01:10:12.660 So I thought, hmm, that's interesting.

01:10:14.580 There's something going on there.

01:10:15.920 And then I've been talking to them about responsibility, not rights.

01:10:21.040 Right.

01:10:21.320 The opposite of rights, responsibility.

01:10:23.560 And what's really cool is that their eyes light up.

01:10:26.180 You know, and you can see that if you're lecturing to an audience, when you make a point, people make a little like it's a little flash of recognition and you can see it.

01:10:34.560 It's like a surprise or it's a moment of insight.

01:10:36.520 You can see it registering on people's faces.

01:10:39.160 And the more I talk about responsibility to these groups of people, the more excited they get, the more focused they get.

01:10:47.800 And so, and so, and so, so one of the things that I've learned is that we've talked about rights and freedom for so long.

01:10:58.920 That there's a counter requirement emerging.

01:11:03.740 And the counter requirement is going to look for two things.

01:11:06.040 It's either going to look for order or it's going to look for responsibility.

01:11:10.580 If it looks for order, then we're in trouble.

01:11:14.760 Hmm.

01:11:15.760 Interesting.

01:11:16.260 Because that means the rise of the state.

01:11:17.900 Hmm.

01:11:19.080 But if it looks for responsibility, then that's great.

01:11:23.580 Because responsibility produces flexible and benevolent order.

01:11:27.660 Yes.

01:11:27.920 And so I've been agitating.

01:11:32.400 Thoreau writes a great deal about those things.

01:11:35.520 I'm just reading something from slavery in Massachusetts and some essays of them.

01:11:41.220 It's exactly this, you know, take responsibility and act from that logos.

01:11:47.600 Yeah.

01:11:47.840 Well, the thing about responsibility is people.

01:11:50.820 Okay.

01:11:50.960 So let's say the fundamental question in life is how to regulate suffering, suffering of others and their own suffering, because your own suffering can make you nihilistic, suicidal, resentful, genocidal, murderous, all those terrible things.

01:12:07.340 And you feel you have justification for it because of the suffering of yourself and other people.

01:12:12.280 Because you can say, well, the suffering of the world is an indication that the world should not exist.

01:12:17.680 And that's a very powerful argument.

01:12:19.200 It's actually the argument that Mephistopheles makes to Goethe, to Faust in Goethe's Faust.

01:12:25.920 It's like Satan is the spirit that eternally says, being is so corrupt it should not exist.

01:12:33.080 And that's a very powerful argument.

01:12:34.920 That's why he's the eternal adversary.

01:12:37.540 So the question is...

01:12:38.260 It's called nihilism, so...

01:12:38.840 Yeah, absolutely.

01:12:40.500 And worse than nihilism.

01:12:42.940 Nihilism is only the first step.

01:12:44.540 The next step is the destruction of things, including yourself.

01:12:47.220 That's why the school shooters who are nihilistic go out and kill people and then shoot themselves.

01:12:52.440 They've taken the nihilistic doctrine to its logical conclusion.

01:12:56.700 And so, well, so what's the antidote to suffering?

01:13:01.560 Well, non-being is one antidote.

01:13:04.080 But another antidote is the voluntary acceptance of suffering.

01:13:08.560 That's what it means.

01:13:09.340 That's what the Christian symbol of raising the cross means.

01:13:12.300 It's like, accept it.

01:13:14.260 Accept it.

01:13:15.580 See what happens if you accept it.

01:13:17.100 And that's the same as accepting responsibility.

01:13:19.360 It's because accepting responsibility is the same as accepting responsibility for the alleviation of suffering.

01:13:27.260 That's the same argument.

01:13:28.480 Sorry, that's the same argument from Jung.

01:13:30.400 He said, okay, psychology is not there to make you happy, but to be able to deal with stress and conflict and suffering.

01:13:39.440 So this is the thing.

01:13:42.520 Right.

01:13:42.900 Well, psychological integration is there to prepare you for the dragon fight or to the fight against the tyrant.

01:13:48.300 And the tyrant can be, the dragon can be outside or inside.

01:13:51.260 It's both.

01:13:52.440 And the tyrant is outside and inside.

01:13:54.440 It's both.

01:13:54.960 But the purpose of psychological integration is to strengthen you for that battle, not to eliminate the battle, because there's no eliminating the battle.

01:14:03.120 And so paradoxically, the meaning in life that will help you overcome the suffering in life is to be found in adopting voluntary responsibility for the suffering that being entails.

01:14:17.080 Sure.

01:14:17.140 And that's the implicit message in Christianity.

01:14:22.920 It's implicit because the story had to be formulated and acted out long before we could understand it explicitly.

01:14:34.140 Right.

01:14:35.020 But we need to understand it explicitly.

01:14:36.720 That's partly what Jung was trying to do.

01:14:38.380 He was trying to make the story explicit.

01:14:40.180 What does the story mean?

01:14:41.240 The story means you need to voluntarily adopt responsibility for the suffering of being.

01:14:47.000 And in that, you'll find sufficient meaning in life so that that will justify life.

01:14:52.640 And that's true.

01:14:53.820 I believe that.

01:14:54.780 But this is only possible on a specific stage of development that you can integrate that and that you can anticipate that dragon, you know, in any place in your life, you know, and not to run away, but to, you know, to embrace that and to know that.

01:15:10.780 That object, which hinders you as the way to go.

01:15:14.340 Yeah.

01:15:14.600 Well, it's very, well, you, it's very difficult to get to a point where you can formulate that abstractly and then use that abstract formulation as a guideline to your, to your action.

01:15:26.260 But people do that.

01:15:28.420 They do that performatively.

01:15:30.280 Right.

01:15:30.840 I mean, admirable people do that performatively.

01:15:33.400 What do you mean performatively?

01:15:34.780 Well, they act it out.

01:15:35.860 Okay.

01:15:36.140 And so you see kids, there are kids who, there are kids who are admired by other kids.

01:15:43.000 And if you ask the kids why they're admired, they don't, can't really tell you.

01:15:47.100 They say, well, he's cool.

01:15:48.120 Or, you know, I really like the way he acts.

01:15:50.080 It's like, it's very low resolution representation.

01:15:52.700 But those kids are usually courageous and forthright and brave and tough.

01:15:57.960 And so there's a, there's an affinity, there's an affinity for the next stage of development that underlies admiration.

01:16:05.960 Right.

01:16:06.100 That's hero worship, roughly speaking.

01:16:08.660 And that, that can occur mimetically, which is, of course, one of Piaget's ideas as well, is that you act out things before you understand them.

01:16:16.160 And, of course, people do.

01:16:18.880 For, for millions of years, we had no language.

01:16:22.260 Obviously, we're acting things out before we understood them.

01:16:25.980 Obviously, just like animals do.

01:16:28.560 So, now we need to understand as well, because we're passing.

01:16:32.120 You did it with the, with the videos.

01:16:33.720 You, you, you said that you acted that out to see what it's all about.

01:16:37.400 So, it's quite interesting.

01:16:39.360 Well, that, well, that, you know, and we're all, we're engaged in a process of self-regulation.

01:16:43.500 Obviously, there's far more to us than we can understand.

01:16:47.820 Otherwise, we wouldn't need a psychology or a sociology or any of the human sciences.

01:16:52.300 So, we're always trying to figure out what we're up to.

01:16:55.460 So, Dr. Peterson, what are your upcoming things?

01:16:58.780 I, I have heard that you will publish a book.

01:17:02.640 Yes, I, I have a book coming out in 2018 called 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos.

01:17:10.000 Okay.

01:17:10.240 And it's, it's actually, it's an elaboration of some maxims that I put forth on a website called Quora.

01:17:19.200 Okay.

01:17:19.520 In response to a kid who asked, what are the most valuable things that people should know?

01:17:25.160 Okay.

01:17:25.880 I made a list of about 40.

01:17:28.020 And then I, I thought I would write an essay on each of them, but that would have turned into, not a book, but a library.

01:17:34.660 So, I honed it down to 12, and that's in the process of being, of being edited and all of that.

01:17:41.320 Now, I'm done writing it.

01:17:42.560 Oh, you're done writing it for a bit.

01:17:43.540 Yeah, except for maybe a Polish.

01:17:47.120 And I'm going to Harvard in a week to talk there.

01:17:51.760 And I'm going to Oxford in June.

01:17:54.200 And, and I'm going back on the Joe Rogan podcast in May.

01:17:57.320 Oh, fantastic.

01:17:58.020 This was the best podcast I've ever heard, this Joe Rogan podcast.

01:18:01.940 Yeah, I was, we had a really good conversation.

01:18:04.160 It was, it was, it was good.

01:18:05.420 So, I'm looking forward to the second one.

01:18:07.160 And, oh, this one went pretty well.

01:18:10.220 Thank you.

01:18:10.840 Okay.

01:18:11.160 Yeah, I think so too.

01:18:12.240 Yeah, I think, I think we got a long ways with it.

01:18:14.440 So, that's really cool.

01:18:15.580 Sure, sure.

01:18:16.460 So, Dr. Peterson, thank you very much for taking the time.

01:18:19.940 I know you are, you have a full schedule.

01:18:23.420 So, I wish you all the best in, in your archetypal fight and, and in your endeavors.

01:18:31.040 Yeah, well, thank you for helping me push it forward.

01:18:33.140 You know, it was a good conversation.

01:18:35.520 And so, I think it'll be helpful to people.

01:18:37.520 And it was helpful to me because I got to clarify things a little bit more.

01:18:43.280 Thank you for listening to episode 14 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

01:18:49.140 This was a conversation with Tom Mark.

01:18:55.860 Dr. Peterson's self-development programs can be found at self-authoring.com.

01:19:02.460 Thank you.

01:19:03.140 Thank you.

01:19:09.560 Thank you.

01:19:10.200 Thank you.

01:19:10.380 Thank you.

01:19:10.820 Thank you.

01:19:11.920 Thank you.

01:19:12.020 Thank you.

01:19:12.120 Thank you.

01:19:12.780 Thank you.

01:19:13.700 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - April 02, 2017

A Dialogue with Tom Amarque

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