The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Being a victim

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:00:06.000 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.

00:00:12.000 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.

00:00:19.000 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.

00:00:27.000 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.

00:00:35.000 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.

00:00:41.000 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.

00:00:47.000 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:00:57.000 Welcome to Season 2, Episode 35 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.

00:01:04.000 I'm Mikayla Peterson, Dad's daughter and collaborator.

00:01:07.000 Today's episode is a 12 Rules for Life lecture, recorded in Oslo on November 9th, 2018.

00:01:14.000 This is a lecture on victimization that I really enjoyed.

00:01:17.000 Just a heads up, we needed to cancel the London event on November 30th.

00:01:21.000 Dad still needs time to recover, and I couldn't put him through the stress of traveling and performing quite yet.

00:01:26.000 I really hope this doesn't disrupt people's plans too badly, and we're definitely rescheduling it.

00:01:31.000 We're really sorry for the disruption, but healing comes first.

00:01:34.000 Then we'll be back at it.

00:01:36.000 On a completely unrelated note, I've been doing NAD IV transfusions.

00:01:40.000 I read ads for Elysium, which has a product that increases NAD, so you may have heard about NAD on this podcast.

00:01:47.000 Joe Rogan also had an episode with a Harvard professor named David Sinclair about NAD.

00:01:52.000 Anyway, I've had four of the IV infusions, and oh my god, I've tried a lot of weird things in the last four years for healing my autoimmune disorder,

00:02:01.000 and nothing other than this all-meat diet has been as effective as these infusions.

00:02:07.000 It's as if my entire body is filled with energy.

00:02:10.000 My mood is more varied, more highs and more lows, but it's better.

00:02:14.000 Usually I'm just stable like a python, or a lion, hence the name The Lion Diet.

00:02:19.000 But this is better, I think.

00:02:21.000 I'll be updating people on it on my YouTube channel,

00:02:24.000 Mikayla Peterson on YouTube and on Instagram.

00:02:26.000 I really think there's something to this.

00:02:28.000 Dad's going to give it a shot next week.

00:02:30.000 I hope you enjoy this episode.

00:02:37.000 Being a Victim, a Jordan B. Peterson 12 Rules for Life lecture.

00:02:41.000 Thank you, everyone.

00:02:43.000 It's only been a week since I've been here.

00:02:47.000 Something I've never said before about Oslo.

00:02:51.000 So, I had a bit of a conundrum today because I've been in Europe for,

00:03:01.000 I think this is the 13th lecture, and there's only 12 rules.

00:03:08.000 And so, see, I've gone through the rules many ways in the lectures that I've delivered,

00:03:14.000 sometimes one at a time, sometimes mix and match three or four of them

00:03:18.000 to play them off each other.

00:03:21.000 And when I came to Europe this time, I thought I'd go through them backwards. 0.97

00:03:26.000 And I landed on number one last night, two nights ago, in Birmingham.

00:03:33.000 And so, I didn't know what to talk about tonight.

00:03:38.000 So, I thought I would do something kind of more universal,

00:03:46.000 and more universal in that it's not tied to a specific rule,

00:03:50.000 and deeper in that I would like to go into the substructure of what I've been thinking about.

00:03:58.000 And so, I wrote this book a long time ago called Maps of Meaning.

00:04:04.000 It was published in 1999, but I'd been writing it since 1985.

00:04:09.000 And I spent a lot of time on that book, for what it's worth.

00:04:16.000 And it sort of laid the groundwork, I would say, for all the lectures that I put on YouTube,

00:04:24.000 and then for this 12 rules book.

00:04:26.000 And it took me 30 years of lecturing and working on those ideas

00:04:33.000 until I became fluent enough in discussing them

00:04:38.000 so that they became accessible, say, in written form to a larger audience.

00:04:44.000 But 12 rules is still grounded in the same metaphysical substructure

00:04:52.000 that I laid out in Maps of Meaning.

00:04:56.000 And I would say, discovered rather than invented, I hope.

00:05:01.000 The tension between those discovering and invention is real.

00:05:07.000 But I think I discovered something, and certainly not by myself.

00:05:13.000 So, I'm going to lay out a few propositions.

00:05:18.000 I want to talk to you tonight about the idea of victimization.

00:05:21.000 Like, that's the central theme.

00:05:23.000 You might not know that for a while, because I'm going to wander around a fairly large territory

00:05:28.000 before we get back to that concept.

00:05:31.000 But I want to go deep into that idea.

00:05:34.000 And so, you know, ideas have depth.

00:05:39.000 Like literature has depth, or art has depth.

00:05:42.000 And it's an interesting metaphor, because it isn't obvious what it means,

00:05:45.000 that something can be deep or shallow.

00:05:47.000 But we know what that means.

00:05:49.000 You know, you can have a shallow conversation with someone,

00:05:51.000 and then you think, well, it wasn't really about anything.

00:05:54.000 And if you have a deep conversation, well, somehow it's about everything.

00:05:59.000 And so, depth has to do with significance.

00:06:04.000 And, well, profundity is another way of thinking about it,

00:06:07.000 but that's just another way of thinking about depth.

00:06:09.000 The deeper a conversation is, the more it's about a topic that everything relies on.

00:06:16.000 So our thinking is hierarchical, and each thought depends on,

00:06:21.000 each layer of thought depends on a layer of thought underneath that that's more fundamental.

00:06:26.000 And then that depends on the layer of thought under that that's more fundamental.

00:06:30.000 And so on, all the way down to the bottom.

00:06:32.000 Whatever the bottom is.

00:06:34.000 And it's not easy to find the bottom.

00:06:37.000 Because we'd have to get to the bottom of ourselves.

00:06:40.000 And that's a very long way down the bottom of ourselves.

00:06:45.000 And it's not something that we can easily articulate.

00:06:49.000 Because we're complicated.

00:06:51.000 And so, we're unfathomable in some sense.

00:06:54.000 And so, I want to talk to you about as far down to the bottom as I've been able to get.

00:07:02.000 So the first thing, I'm going to talk about this.

00:07:05.000 I'm going to take a stance that's essentially biological.

00:07:08.000 I think in evolutionary terms, fundamentally.

00:07:11.000 The time span over which I consider human development is, well, it extends over, I would say, millions of years.

00:07:24.000 Because that is how I think about people.

00:07:27.000 Because I think in an evolutionary sense.

00:07:29.000 And I take that very seriously.

00:07:31.000 We're very old creatures, you know.

00:07:34.000 We have DNA within us that has been around for three and a half billion years.

00:07:40.000 And that's a very long time.

00:07:43.000 And so, that's part of what gives us that depth.

00:07:46.000 Now, as individuals, we're rather evanescent, you know.

00:07:49.000 We don't last that long.

00:07:51.000 But there are parts of us that are truly, for all intents and purposes, immortal.

00:07:58.000 And there are levels of our being that have been shaped.

00:08:03.000 All of the levels of our being have been shaped over unimaginable spans of time.

00:08:08.000 And that's made us what we are.

00:08:11.000 And to understand people properly, you need that deep biological orientation.

00:08:17.000 So, you don't have enough respect for what you're looking at otherwise.

00:08:21.000 Unless you have some sense of the immense spans of time that you're dealing with.

00:08:25.000 You know, you, every single one of you people, are the descendants of life that has managed to replicate itself without failure for three and a half billion years.

00:08:37.000 You know how unlikely that is?

00:08:39.000 It's just, it's impossible that each of you are here.

00:08:42.000 That's so incredibly unlikely over that extended span of time that there could be that much success that you could actually exist.

00:08:51.000 It's just a staggering miracle of impossibility.

00:08:55.000 And that's only one of many staggering miracles of impossibility.

00:08:59.000 Now, you know that human beings have only been looking at the world as if it was a place of objective reality for a short period of time.

00:09:10.000 Now, you can quibble about how long that's been the case.

00:09:14.000 You know, if you're, my sense is it's about 500 years.

00:09:17.000 It's about since the time of Francis Bacon and Descartes.

00:09:21.000 And, and, but you could push it back.

00:09:25.000 You could say, well, we started to conceptualize something approximating an objective reality.

00:09:29.000 Perhaps back at the time when philosophical discussion was first put forward as a mode of being.

00:09:36.000 So perhaps you could stretch it all the way back to the Greeks.

00:09:39.000 That's more rationality, I would say, than objective thinking.

00:09:43.000 I would say it's, it's a half millennia is more accurate.

00:09:48.000 And so you've got to think about what that means is we've only been thinking scientifically.

00:09:53.000 Because science, science is a real method, right?

00:09:55.000 It's a very formal method.

00:09:57.000 And it's new.

00:09:59.000 It's unbelievably powerful.

00:10:01.000 But it's unbelievably new.

00:10:03.000 We've only been thinking that way for 500 years.

00:10:05.000 And most people still don't think that way.

00:10:07.000 It's actually very difficult to think scientifically.

00:10:09.000 In fact, scientists can't even do it.

00:10:11.000 Which is why you have peer review if you're a scientist.

00:10:14.000 Because if you're a great scientist, you wouldn't need peer review.

00:10:17.000 Because you'd just write your paper and it would be properly objective and properly laid out.

00:10:22.000 But you need peer review because your peers have to find out if you used the method right.

00:10:27.000 And if you used the rationale right.

00:10:29.000 And then if you didn't let your biases interfere with your results to too great a degree.

00:10:34.000 So even if you're a scientist and a trained scientist, other scientists still have to hit you continually with a stick.

00:10:41.000 And a fairly thick one to make sure that you stay thinking scientifically.

00:10:46.000 And it takes a long time to be trained to think that way.

00:10:49.000 So the reason I'm saying that is because that isn't the way that we think.

00:10:53.000 That isn't the way that human beings think.

00:10:55.000 We think some other way.

00:10:57.000 And obviously that way works because we made it all the way to 500 years ago with that other mode of thinking.

00:11:04.000 Whatever that is.

00:11:06.000 Now psychologists have been very interested in part of this mode of thinking.

00:11:11.000 A certain group of psychologists.

00:11:13.000 They study a form of thinking called social cognition.

00:11:18.000 And social cognition is thinking about other people.

00:11:23.000 And I believe that our fundamental cognitive architecture is social cognitive.

00:11:31.000 Okay, so why?

00:11:33.000 Well, first of all, you've got to think about what the environment...

00:11:38.000 You know, when you think about the environment, you think about nature.

00:11:40.000 And maybe you've got like, especially if you're sort of romantic, you have like a picture of a French impressionist landscape in your imagination.

00:11:46.000 It's like, there's nature.

00:11:48.000 It's like, and that's the environment.

00:11:50.000 It's like, that's not the environment.

00:11:52.000 The environment's a very strange abstraction.

00:11:55.000 But the environment is what confronts you most of the time.

00:11:58.000 And the environment is even more technically what selects for reproduction over long spans of time.

00:12:07.000 That's really what the environment is.

00:12:09.000 That's really what nature is.

00:12:10.000 And for human beings, nature is culture.

00:12:15.000 Because we're social creatures.

00:12:17.000 We're not individual creatures.

00:12:19.000 We are.

00:12:20.000 But we're not isolated individual creatures.

00:12:25.000 We're not like male grizzly bears that just wander around alone except for short periods of time.

00:12:30.000 I mean, look at...

00:12:32.000 Here you all are.

00:12:33.000 In a big group.

00:12:35.000 You know, and you have your friends and you have your family.

00:12:38.000 And like you're nested in groups of all sorts.

00:12:40.000 So you're deeply social.

00:12:42.000 And you've been deeply social for God only knows how long.

00:12:46.000 Millions of years.

00:12:49.000 You could go back 7 million years, let's say.

00:12:52.000 That's a fair estimate.

00:12:54.000 Although, it's an underestimate.

00:12:58.000 That's approximately when we separated from the ancestor that we shared with chimpanzees.

00:13:05.000 You can kind of tell how long ago that was if you're a geneticist.

00:13:09.000 Because you can mix the DNA of two species together.

00:13:13.000 And they'll half strands.

00:13:15.000 And the strands will bond.

00:13:17.000 And the degree to which the...

00:13:21.000 This is an old technology, but it's an easy way to explain it.

00:13:24.000 The closer the relationship between the species, the tighter the cross-species DNA will bond.

00:13:31.000 And the more energy it takes in the form of heat to separate the strands.

00:13:35.000 And so you can get a pretty good estimate of genetic relatedness.

00:13:40.000 Now they have better techniques than that.

00:13:42.000 But it doesn't matter.

00:13:43.000 That was used for a long time.

00:13:44.000 And then you can calculate the similarity and the difference.

00:13:48.000 And if you know something about how stable mutation rates are.

00:13:51.000 And we know something about how stable they are.

00:13:54.000 Then you can calculate over what span of time mutation rate would have had to occur.

00:13:59.000 To produce that much difference.

00:14:01.000 Not only mutation, but genetic alteration in general.

00:14:05.000 And then you can estimate how long ago the divergence was.

00:14:09.000 And so with chimps it seems to be about 7 million years.

00:14:13.000 Even chimps are highly social.

00:14:16.000 Right?

00:14:17.000 They exist in structured hierarchies.

00:14:19.000 They have troops.

00:14:20.000 You know, they have their mother-child pairings. 0.99

00:14:24.000 And they exist in troops inside hierarchies.

00:14:27.000 And so...

00:14:28.000 And it's the same for most primates.

00:14:31.000 Most primates are very social creatures.

00:14:34.000 Not all of them.

00:14:35.000 But most of them.

00:14:36.000 And the ones that we're closely related to are highly social.

00:14:40.000 And so there's an idea that the fundamental architecture of our cognitive ability.

00:14:48.000 Including our perception is actually...

00:14:50.000 It actually evolved to conceptualize social relationships.

00:14:55.000 Because you think, well, what's your environment?

00:14:58.000 Well, mostly it's other people.

00:14:59.000 You know, it's other people.

00:15:03.000 It's not nature.

00:15:05.000 And certainly not nature as an objective storehouse of riches that could be investigated scientifically.

00:15:13.000 Because that's a new idea.

00:15:15.000 You know, and you know that too.

00:15:16.000 Because you've seen the rate of technology just expand exponentially since the dawn of the scientific revolution.

00:15:22.000 Right?

00:15:23.000 So, people were able to exploit nature, so to speak, prior to the dawn of the scientific revolution.

00:15:30.000 But we've got way better at it since we developed this new methodology.

00:15:34.000 But that shouldn't fool you into thinking that that's how we think.

00:15:39.000 Because that isn't how we think.

00:15:40.000 And it's certainly not how animals think.

00:15:42.000 So, and there's plenty of affinity between our basic perceptual structures and the basic perceptual structures of animals.

00:15:51.000 Now, it's very important if you're a social animal to keep track of what all the other social animals are doing.

00:15:56.000 So, now imagine this.

00:16:01.000 So, here's another proposition.

00:16:03.000 So, one of the things we know about evolution is that it's a pretty conservative process.

00:16:08.000 So, if evolution manages to cobble something together, let's say, that works, then it tends to stick with it.

00:16:14.000 So, I saw an interesting example of this.

00:16:17.000 I went to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington.

00:16:20.000 And they have a collection of mammalian skeletons there.

00:16:23.000 It's like a skeleton zoo.

00:16:25.000 And it's really a cool place to see.

00:16:28.000 Because what you see is just endless variations on a theme.

00:16:33.000 You know, like a bat and a human being don't look very much the same when you see like a bat and a human being.

00:16:39.000 But when you see a bat skeleton, and you see a human being skeleton, you think, oh, they're exactly the same. 0.98

00:16:45.000 The bat has longer fingers, but the skeletal structure is exactly the same.

00:16:49.000 You can even see it in whales, although in whales it's modified a lot.

00:16:53.000 But it's still basically the same skeletal plan.

00:16:55.000 It's like all this diversity of mammals, same skeletal plan.

00:17:00.000 Just extensions.

00:17:02.000 You can take a human skull and just transform it in terms of its morphology into a chimp skull without very much problem at all. 1.00

00:17:10.000 With only quantitative adjustments.

00:17:15.000 And so, in fact, a chimpanzee skull, an infant chimpanzee skull, looks almost exactly the same as an adult human skull.

00:17:23.000 It's very cool.

00:17:24.000 That's a consequence of an evolutionary phenomenon called neoteny.

00:17:28.000 Which is the tendency of animals over time to evolve toward their juvenile form.

00:17:37.000 And so, human beings are, in some sense, chimps that maintain their juvenile nature.

00:17:43.000 So, that's quite interesting.

00:17:45.000 Even the morphology.

00:17:46.000 So, in any case, evolution is a conservative process.

00:17:50.000 And so, once you have something that works well enough so that you can reproduce, you keep it.

00:17:57.000 And you tinker with it, that's it, but you keep it.

00:18:00.000 And so, once we developed the perceptual architecture to understand the social world,

00:18:10.000 we built our understanding of the world beyond the social world on top of that.

00:18:15.000 So, what that means.

00:18:17.000 Now, you kind of know this already, you know.

00:18:20.000 Think about this as a strange, this is a strange fact.

00:18:25.000 When you read stories to your kids, your little kids,

00:18:31.000 you know, it's very common that all the things in the picture books,

00:18:34.000 this is for really little kids, are animated.

00:18:36.000 Right?

00:18:37.000 Cars have faces.

00:18:38.000 Trains have faces.

00:18:40.000 The moon has a face.

00:18:41.000 The sun has a face.

00:18:42.000 Like, the tree has a face.

00:18:44.000 Everything is, everything manifests itself in animated form.

00:18:50.000 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:18:52.000 And it's not exactly like the world is personified for a child.

00:18:56.000 Because that implies that the child sees the world,

00:18:59.000 and then imposes this personification on top of it.

00:19:04.000 But that isn't what happens.

00:19:05.000 What happens is the child sees the world as if it's personified,

00:19:09.000 and only with great difficulty separates out the idea that,

00:19:14.000 well, there's an objective reality that doesn't have a personality.

00:19:17.000 So, the perception of the world as personality is primary.

00:19:22.000 Now, that's really worth knowing.

00:19:24.000 Because one of the things that's kind of mysterious about,

00:19:27.000 to modern people is,

00:19:28.000 what were all the ancients thinking about when they were thinking about gods?

00:19:32.000 It's like, because we, even if some of us have the remnants of religious belief,

00:19:37.000 it's usually a monotheism.

00:19:39.000 It isn't like there's a god of the bedroom,

00:19:41.000 and a god of the, you know, the altar.

00:19:43.000 And like there was in Rome, there was a god for everything.

00:19:46.000 Everything had this personified form.

00:19:49.000 You think, well, the Romans personified everything. 0.98

00:19:51.000 No, they didn't.

00:19:53.000 They saw the world as if it was a collection of personalities.

00:19:57.000 That was their mode of cognition.

00:19:59.000 And they had no other way of doing it.

00:20:01.000 And it took us forever to even start to hypothesize that there was a kind of a dead material world

00:20:09.000 that didn't have an animating spirit.

00:20:12.000 You know, and we're still not sure that that's true.

00:20:15.000 But treating it that way has turned out to be an extraordinarily powerful technology.

00:20:20.000 Might kill us all, still.

00:20:22.000 Well, it might.

00:20:23.000 You know, that's also something to think about.

00:20:25.000 I mean, the scientific mode of thinking is unbelievably powerful.

00:20:29.000 But, you know, you want to be careful with what's unbelievably powerful.

00:20:33.000 So we've already created a fair number of things that could do us in quite handily.

00:20:38.000 So it might have been better if we would have just stuck with the personification

00:20:42.000 and left the technology behind.

00:20:44.000 But I'm not saying I believe that.

00:20:48.000 But you can make a case for it.

00:20:50.000 You know, deviating from that age-old mode of apprehension

00:20:55.000 is something that certainly has its dangers.

00:20:58.000 Okay, so we perceive the world in a personified manner

00:21:03.000 and only with difficulty detached from that

00:21:06.000 so that we can be trained as scientists.

00:21:09.000 And even then, we have to do that collectively because it's so difficult.

00:21:12.000 So then the question is, well, two questions.

00:21:16.000 The first would be, well, what is the nature of the personified world that we perceive?

00:21:23.000 And the second is, why does it work?

00:21:26.000 Like, if the world isn't personified, then why does our ability to see it that way work?

00:21:32.000 Well, I think the reason it works is because most of what we interact with really is other people.

00:21:38.000 You know, and so if you tend to see things as personified, that works.

00:21:44.000 Because 95% of what you do is with yourself, with your partner, with other people.

00:21:50.000 And so, and you know, even if you conceptualize the state, you know, people will go look at the Queen of England.

00:21:59.000 And you think, well, why?

00:22:01.000 Well, she embodies the state. 1.00

00:22:03.000 So it's really easy for people to personify the state and they see the Queen.

00:22:06.000 And I mean, the Queen is just a person. 0.81

00:22:09.000 But she's the Queen at the same time.

00:22:11.000 And so she's just a person and she's something else at the same time.

00:22:14.000 And when you go to look at the Queen, you don't really go to look at the person.

00:22:17.000 You can just go across the street and look at a person.

00:22:20.000 You go look at the Queen.

00:22:22.000 And you actually see the Queen, which is a strange thing, because the Queen is just a person.

00:22:26.000 And what you see is the personification of the state.

00:22:30.000 You know, and this is very deep perception.

00:22:34.000 So you know, Queen Elizabeth, for example, in England is getting quite old.

00:22:37.000 And at some point, she'll pass away.

00:22:40.000 And the entire nation will grieve for that.

00:22:43.000 And that's an indication of how powerful that proclivity to perceive personification actually is.

00:22:53.000 And you know, if we talk about a state or a country, we often talk about it as if it's an individual.

00:23:01.000 And no one finds that strange.

00:23:03.000 You know, you say that you treat the collective as if it's an individual with all of the attributes of an individual.

00:23:14.000 And that's also partly why states can get angry at each other so quickly, because the same relationship that might obtain between two individuals can easily be used to represent the relationship between two states.

00:23:29.000 And so, and you know, that makes a certain amount of sense, because a state is a collective of people.

00:23:35.000 But then, by the same token, it doesn't make any sense at all, because the state is something that's quite different from an individual.

00:23:41.000 It doesn't matter.

00:23:43.000 What matters is that's how we see the world.

00:23:45.000 I think that's part of the reason why we developed the idea of a monotheistic God.

00:23:50.000 And this isn't a metaphysical statement, by the way, and it's not a religious statement, okay?

00:23:55.000 I'm just speaking as a biologist here, an evolutionary biologist.

00:23:58.000 We leave the metaphysics out of this for the time being.

00:24:01.000 What's a good way of representing the collective other?

00:24:07.000 Well, judgmental father.

00:24:10.000 That's pretty damn good.

00:24:12.000 Why?

00:24:13.000 Well, you know that you extend across time.

00:24:17.000 And so, and then you face a collective.

00:24:21.000 That's all the people that you know.

00:24:23.000 And they track your reputation across time, that collective. 0.57

00:24:27.000 And they do a damn good job of it.

00:24:28.000 People are unbelievably good at remembering ethical transgressions. 0.86

00:24:33.000 You can destroy your reputation very rapidly.

00:24:36.000 In fact, there are evolutionary psychologists who think we have a specific cognitive module

00:24:40.000 just to remember getting screwed over.

00:24:44.000 And we don't forget.

00:24:46.000 And so, you might imagine that you need to conduct yourself as if there's a great being,

00:24:55.000 which would be the personification of the collective, watching you all the time

00:25:01.000 and writing down everything you do in a great book in the sky.

00:25:05.000 Because that is essentially the relationship that you have with other people across time.

00:25:11.000 You know, so, I figured this out.

00:25:14.000 I wrote about this a bit in 12 Rules.

00:25:16.000 When I was thinking about hunting, it's like, if you're a hunter, let's say a Stone Age hunter,

00:25:21.000 you might say, well, what's the purpose of hunting?

00:25:25.000 And the answer is, well, to obtain food, right?

00:25:30.000 So, the greatest hunter is someone who is the most effective at obtaining food.

00:25:34.000 It's like, okay, so maybe that's the strongest spear thrower or the bravest person who can stand up against a mammoth with a spear.

00:25:43.000 That's a brave person, right?

00:25:45.000 You're just an Arctic monkey and you're after a mammoth with a stick, man.

00:25:49.000 That's, there's some courage in that.

00:25:51.000 And, like, that's mammoth for today and mammoth for next week, but you still stuck with the problem of next month.

00:26:00.000 And so, then you might say, well, what's the greatest way to be a great hunter?

00:26:05.000 And the answer might be, well, not only to be able to hunt, but to be able to share.

00:26:10.000 So, you bring something down and it's more than you need and then you distribute it among the people that you're around.

00:26:17.000 And then, you distribute that, it's, you trade the food itself for a moral obligation in the form of promises from others.

00:26:27.000 And so, if you're effective at what you do and you share, then you can store the excess in the form of promises from others.

00:26:35.000 And so, basically, what you're doing is trading, you're trading for your reputation.

00:26:41.000 And so, then you might say that it's actually even better, it's better to have the reputation of being a great and generous hunter than it is just to be good at taking down an animal.

00:26:52.000 And that's really worth thinking about.

00:26:54.000 Because what it means is that even to be a hunter, in the, in the truest sense, across a long span of time, means that you're bargaining in some sense with the future.

00:27:04.000 You have to treat the other people around you, in your tribe, properly, in order to store any excess value across any reasonable amount of time.

00:27:14.000 Well, and if you think about that in some sense as a contract with a patriarchal God, if that's the way that that, that you imagine that relationship, then it's going to work.

00:27:25.000 It's your, you don't sully your reputation if you want to, if you want to eat forever.

00:27:31.000 And that can easily be abstracted up into an ethical principle that goes beyond mere, the mere provision of food.

00:27:39.000 Because as, as it has been said, man does not live by bread alone.

00:27:44.000 And so, it could easily be that the greatest hunter is someone who pursues the most ethical aim, right?

00:27:51.000 Who aims at the most ethical target.

00:27:53.000 And so, well, that's, that's a bit of a casual, quick outline of how the notion of monotheism could emerge from a biological perspective.

00:28:05.000 It's a projection of the collective personality of future society into one entity and the establishment of a relationship with that.

00:28:17.000 You know, and maybe the father is a good metaphor for that, because fathers can be rather judgmental.

00:28:23.000 And so, if you can use the image of the father to represent the judgmental crowd, then you have a bridge between what you've already experienced as a child,

00:28:32.000 and, and this more abstract ethical relationship that you have to establish with the collective.

00:28:38.000 So, anyways, my point is, well, there's more to it too, because it also justifies the idea of sacrifice in some sense.

00:28:46.000 Because, you know, to sacrifice is also to ensure the future, is to let go of something in the present that's of value,

00:28:54.000 so that you can obtain something of value in the future.

00:28:57.000 And who do you sacrifice to?

00:28:59.000 Well, you know, if I work now, and you, you pay me, and I put my money in the bank,

00:29:04.000 then what I've done is sacrificed my immediate gratification to the promise of the future.

00:29:12.000 Well, that, that, we figured that out religiously to begin with, with the idea of sacrifice.

00:29:17.000 And so, and there's a deep idea there, which is that you can, in fact, forego what's pleasurable in the present to ensure the stability of the future.

00:29:28.000 And you do that by establishing a certain kind of relationship with a, with a, with a, with a personification of the collective.

00:29:36.000 A straight biological rationale. And I'm not saying that that accounts for monotheism in its totality, because I don't believe it does.

00:29:44.000 But, but as a straight biological rationale, it's not a bad start.

00:29:48.000 But it also shows you how that kind of thinking can actually be practically useful.

00:29:53.000 It could be evolutionarily significant.

00:29:55.000 Lots of biologists, many of them are enlightenment types, evolutionary biologists.

00:30:01.000 And you actually can't be an enlightenment type and an evolutionary biologist.

00:30:05.000 Because if you're an enlightenment type, you think over spans of like 200 or 300 years.

00:30:09.000 And if you're an evolutionary biologist, you think over spans of like a hundred million years or longer.

00:30:15.000 And so, the conclusions you draw aren't the same.

00:30:20.000 It's certainly plausible.

00:30:22.000 See, the enlightenment types like to think of the religious impulse as something that's rather shallow, secondary consequence of higher order human cognition.

00:30:31.000 And I think that's just, that's just a non-starter.

00:30:34.000 It's just seriously wrong.

00:30:36.000 It's exactly backwards, is that higher order human cognition to the degree that we have that capacity for abstract rationality.

00:30:43.000 It's embedded in something far, far, far more ancient and deeper.

00:30:48.000 That has this personified structure.

00:30:51.000 And that has something approximating a religious grammar.

00:30:54.000 And so, they've got the cart before the horse.

00:30:57.000 And then some people like Nietzsche knew that.

00:30:59.000 Dostoevsky as well.

00:31:00.000 Pretty much puzzled that out by the latter part of the 1800s.

00:31:06.000 Nietzsche in particular.

00:31:08.000 So, anyways, that's the way I look at things.

00:31:11.000 And so, I think that, you know, we live in a conceptual structure that's personified.

00:31:18.000 And what comes out of that are the stories of the interactions between these personified entities.

00:31:24.000 And then what sits on top of that is our abstract, practical, and moral reasoning.

00:31:32.000 And even nested within that is our scientific enterprise.

00:31:36.000 So, that's the hierarchy of cognitive structure as far as I can tell.

00:31:41.000 And I think the evidence for that is very strong.

00:31:45.000 Certainly, some of the evidence for that is our overwhelming love of stories.

00:31:51.000 And the self-evident proposition that we're so deeply...

00:32:01.000 We're so deep in our relationship with stories that we can absorb information that way through pure enjoyment.

00:32:10.000 Right?

00:32:11.000 I mean, if you go to listen to a very difficult lecture, for example, on a very abstract topic,

00:32:16.000 you may really have to concentrate.

00:32:18.000 You read a scientific paper, the same thing.

00:32:19.000 It doesn't just pull you in.

00:32:21.000 But if you go see a well-crafted movie or you read a well-crafted piece of fiction,

00:32:25.000 it's like, not only is it in some sense effortless, it's also unbelievably enjoyable.

00:32:30.000 And what that shows you is that there's an affinity between your...

00:32:34.000 the biology of your attentional structures and the form itself.

00:32:38.000 And that shows you how old that form of knowledge provision really is.

00:32:43.000 It's also grounded in imitation.

00:32:45.000 One of the things that's very interesting about human beings,

00:32:48.000 that's underestimated in terms of what differentiates us from animals,

00:32:52.000 is we're unbelievably imitative.

00:32:53.000 You know, you hear monkey see, monkey do, right?

00:32:55.000 It's like, no. Wrong.

00:32:58.000 Even higher-order primates, even chimpanzees, transmit virtually nothing through imitation.

00:33:04.000 They cannot copy one another.

00:33:07.000 Whereas us, man, we're so good at that, it's just absolutely unbelievable.

00:33:11.000 Like, we can mimic each other's posture.

00:33:13.000 You know, a good comic can mimic voice, intonation, character.

00:33:17.000 Like, we can run other people as a representation on the computational platform of our body

00:33:23.000 in a miraculous manner.

00:33:25.000 And so, we're unbelievably good at moving information from one person to another,

00:33:30.000 merely through imitation.

00:33:31.000 That's obviously, in large part, how children learn.

00:33:33.000 And then we can even do that abstractly,

00:33:35.000 because when we tell a story, or lay out a movie, or a play, or something like that,

00:33:41.000 what we're doing is, we're actually copying multiple people

00:33:46.000 to make the character in the drama.

00:33:49.000 Because you don't want to just see, you don't want to go see a play

00:33:51.000 where it's exactly what you did with your family at breakfast.

00:33:55.000 It's like, no one wants to see that.

00:33:57.000 What you want to see is, like, a meta-character.

00:34:00.000 So it would be a character composed of many characters.

00:34:02.000 Or a set of characters composed of many characters, acting out something deep.

00:34:07.000 And so, you know, if you watch a, I don't know, was Breaking Bad popular in Norway?

00:34:13.000 Okay, so there's some pretty good bad guys in Breaking Bad.

00:34:16.000 It's like, they're not your ordinary bad guys, they're sort of super bad guys.

00:34:20.000 They're the essence of evil, right?

00:34:23.000 Not just the common, sort of boring, second-rate evil that you run across in day-to-day life.

00:34:28.000 It's sort of purified.

00:34:30.000 And that makes it much more interesting, and much more salutary, much more powerful.

00:34:34.000 You see that in great literature, too, in Dostoevsky's books, for example.

00:34:38.000 The characters are bigger than life, right?

00:34:40.000 And they have to be, because they wouldn't capture your attention.

00:34:43.000 And so they're abstractions of personality away from normality.

00:34:47.000 They're condensations.

00:34:49.000 That's another way of thinking about it.

00:34:51.000 So it's more...

00:34:53.000 See, I think of fiction not as the opposite of fact, but as hyper-reality.

00:34:58.000 It's more real than real.

00:35:00.000 It's super-reality.

00:35:02.000 And that's partly why fiction is so useful for us.

00:35:05.000 It's a form of abstraction.

00:35:07.000 And abstraction can be very real.

00:35:09.000 Numbers are abstract, and they're very, very real.

00:35:11.000 You know something about numbers.

00:35:13.000 It makes you very powerful and allows you to get a grip on the world.

00:35:16.000 And the abstractions that we produce in fiction have the same power.

00:35:21.000 And the ultimate abstractions of fiction are religious representations.

00:35:25.000 That's another way of thinking about it.

00:35:28.000 So anyways, you might ask yourself, well, what are these fundamental personifications?

00:35:32.000 And this I figured out mostly from reading the psychoanalysts.

00:35:37.000 Especially Carl Jung.

00:35:39.000 Freud a fair bit.

00:35:40.000 And also another person named Eric Neumann, who should be way better known than he is.

00:35:45.000 It would be much better for Western civilization if the literary departments, especially at Yale,

00:35:51.000 had turned to Eric Neumann to flesh out their literary criticism instead of Derrida and Foucault.

00:35:58.000 Because Newman got it right, and that was back in the 1950s.

00:36:01.000 And Camille Pellia has just written, she wrote an essay about that about 20 years ago,

00:36:06.000 saying the same thing about Eric Neumann.

00:36:08.000 He wrote a great book called The Origins and History of Consciousness.

00:36:11.000 It's a very hard book.

00:36:12.000 It's on my reading list on my website.

00:36:14.000 I'd highly recommend it.

00:36:15.000 It's a great book.

00:36:16.000 It's the book that Carl Jung wrote a forward to and said that he wished he would have written.

00:36:20.000 Which is a hell of a thing to say.

00:36:22.000 And Neumann was one of his students.

00:36:24.000 And he also wrote another book called The Great Mother, which is also a great book.

00:36:29.000 It's an analysis of the fundamental cognitive category, cognitive perceptual category of the feminine. 0.94

00:36:37.000 It's brilliant.

00:36:38.000 It's a brilliant book.

00:36:40.000 And it outlines the positive feminine and the negative feminine,

00:36:44.000 and in a very thorough and compelling and somewhat terrifying manner.

00:36:49.000 And so it's a great book.

00:36:51.000 And it's great because it describes the perceptual architecture of the human psyche,

00:36:56.000 but it also gives you a template that you can use to investigate the structure of literature and ideology.

00:37:06.000 And so what I would say about people, one of the things I've tried to do for years is to inoculate my students against ideology.

00:37:14.000 And sometimes I receive the criticism is, well, how do you know that your inoculation isn't just another ideology?

00:37:20.000 Which is a perfectly reasonable potential criticism, although it happens in this case to be seriously wrong.

00:37:28.000 And I'll try to outline my case for that.

00:37:32.000 So part of the reason that I believe that the system that I derived in part from the psychoanalytic thinkers that I just described,

00:37:42.000 who were responding, by the way, to Nietzsche's challenge about the death of God.

00:37:46.000 That's the intellectual pathway.

00:37:49.000 Nietzsche, in the late 1800s, announced the death of God, right?

00:37:53.000 The collapse of the Westerners' straightforward belief in the Judeo-Christian substructure of our culture, right? 0.67

00:38:04.000 And perhaps as a consequence of the developing tension between science, rationality, and traditional belief.

00:38:12.000 And Nietzsche was not celebrating that when he announced the death of God.

00:38:16.000 He knew it would be an absolute bloody catastrophe that what it would produce was, on the one hand,

00:38:21.000 an absolutely soul-devouring nihilism, and on the other, incredible proclivity for possession by totalitarian ideology.

00:38:30.000 And he laid that all out by about 1850, in an amazing feat of precognition.

00:38:36.000 And Nietzsche's solution to that was that we would have to become like gods ourselves, that we would have to create our own values.

00:38:46.000 And Jung, for example, Carl Jung, was a very astute student of Nietzsche, at least as much as a student of Freud.

00:38:54.000 He certainly took from Freud the idea of the act of unconscious, which was a very crucial, crucial discovery.

00:39:00.000 But Jung, for example, did a seminar on Thus Spake Zarathustra, which is one of Nietzsche's most famous, but also most impenetrable books,

00:39:08.000 and certainly not the one I would recommend that beginners to Nietzsche start with.

00:39:13.000 It's like the last book of his you should read.

00:39:15.000 Jung did a seminar on Nietzsche that, if I remember correctly, was 2,700 pages long, and it only covered the first third of the book.

00:39:23.000 So, yeah, so that's quite something.

00:39:26.000 Now, so, see what Freud determined, this is the interesting thing about Freud,

00:39:32.000 and modern psychologists, especially the cognitive types, have not taken this seriously enough.

00:39:37.000 Freud figured out that the sub-components of your psyche are personalities.

00:39:44.000 They're alive.

00:39:46.000 So, you're a unity, but you're a diverse, and you're a diverse, you're a unity that's composed of a diverse plurality.

00:39:54.000 And the plural things that you're made of are best conceptualized as active personalities,

00:40:01.000 not as drives, and not as deterministic mechanisms, but as things that have their own imagination,

00:40:07.000 and their own thoughts, and their own rationale, and, in Nietzsche's terminology, even their own philosophy.

00:40:14.000 Nietzsche, in quote,

00:40:15.000 every drive attempts to philosophize in its spirit.

00:40:18.000 And you all know that.

00:40:20.000 You all know that perfectly well, because that accounts, in some sense,

00:40:23.000 for that sense of profound disunity that you often experience in your own life.

00:40:28.000 You know, maybe you're overwhelmingly attracted erotically to someone, 0.99

00:40:33.000 and you make a complete bloody fool out of yourself. 0.99

00:40:36.000 And you can't stop. 1.00

00:40:37.000 You tell yourself, you're making a complete fool of yourself. 0.98

00:40:41.000 And counter-productively as well. 0.97

00:40:43.000 It's not like it's even working, but, oh no, you can't stop yourself, man.

00:40:47.000 That thing has you, right?

00:40:50.000 That eros.

00:40:52.000 That's a personality.

00:40:53.000 That's an old one.

00:40:54.000 It's a transcendent and divine personality.

00:40:57.000 And it inhabits you.

00:40:59.000 And now and then you come under its sway.

00:41:01.000 And good luck regulating that.

00:41:03.000 And so, the same thing happens when you fall under the sway of rage.

00:41:08.000 You get angry, right?

00:41:10.000 And some of you are more prone to that than others.

00:41:12.000 And have it less integrated than others.

00:41:14.000 And God only knows what you might do when you're angry.

00:41:17.000 It depends on how disintegrated you are.

00:41:19.000 You might kill someone, and then regret that for the rest of your life.

00:41:24.000 At least you might say terrible things to people that you love.

00:41:27.000 Because in the heat of that rage, all you can see about them is every way that they're wrong,

00:41:32.000 and all the ways that they should be defeated, and all the ways that you're right.

00:41:37.000 And then you wake up out of that afterwards, and you think,

00:41:39.000 what the hell was I thinking?

00:41:41.000 It's like, no, something was thinking in you.

00:41:44.000 And it's not well integrated into you.

00:41:46.000 And now and then, it gets control.

00:41:49.000 And so, that's a Freudian observation.

00:41:54.000 It's brilliant.

00:41:55.000 And I know that rationalist, cognitive psychologist types,

00:41:59.000 who like to think of the brain as something like an information processing machine.

00:42:03.000 Think of us like computers.

00:42:05.000 They've just never come to terms with the psychoanalytic reality.

00:42:09.000 That you're the habitation place of multiple spirits.

00:42:15.000 And perhaps you can, what would you say,

00:42:19.000 meld those together into a functioning unity with a fair bit of moral effort and difficulty.

00:42:24.000 But it's no trivial thing.

00:42:26.000 And you better have help to do it.

00:42:28.000 And you can see this in little kids, especially in two-year-olds, you know,

00:42:32.000 who are very behaviorally dysregulated.

00:42:34.000 First, they're angry.

00:42:35.000 Then they're crying.

00:42:36.000 Then they're laughing.

00:42:37.000 Then they're hungry.

00:42:38.000 Then they're hot.

00:42:39.000 Then they're cold.

00:42:40.000 Then they're tired.

00:42:41.000 Then they're running around, enthusiastic beyond belief.

00:42:43.000 And like, all of that can happen in ten minutes.

00:42:45.000 And so, it's just one motivational state after the other.

00:42:49.000 And then they're curious and exploring.

00:42:51.000 And then they're playing.

00:42:52.000 And so, it's all these underlying spirits that are deeply, deeply rooted in our biology.

00:42:58.000 All coming to manifest themselves sequentially.

00:43:01.000 And what you're doing when you socialize your children is you're trying to help meld all those sub-components

00:43:07.000 into a functioning psychological and social unity.

00:43:12.000 And that's the emergence of a higher order.

00:43:15.000 That's why you have the whole top part of your brain is to manage that.

00:43:19.000 You can't get by on two-year-old impulsivity.

00:43:22.000 Even though each of those circuits, each of those sub-personalities have their limited utility.

00:43:29.000 They have to be melded together into something that can operate iteratively over a long period of time in a social collective.

00:43:37.000 And that's the necessity for socialization.

00:43:40.000 But also the reason for the existence of the more complex parts of your brain.

00:43:45.000 So, okay.

00:43:46.000 So, you're a collection of sub-personalities.

00:43:51.000 And you look at the world as if it's composed of personalities.

00:43:53.000 So, I'm going to tell you what the personalities of the world must be, as far as I can tell,

00:44:02.000 in order for you to see things sufficiently clearly.

00:44:06.000 To have sketched out the mythological landscape so that you can orient yourself properly in the world.

00:44:13.000 So, I'll tell you a little story, first of all.

00:44:15.000 To give you a sense of this.

00:44:17.000 So, most of you have seen the Disney movie, Sleeping Beauty.

00:44:20.000 Yes?

00:44:21.000 How many have seen that?

00:44:23.000 Okay.

00:44:24.000 So, great.

00:44:25.000 Great.

00:44:26.000 So, I'm going to tell you a bit of the first part of the story.

00:44:28.000 So, there's a king and a queen.

00:44:29.000 And it's a good king and a good queen.

00:44:32.000 Alright?

00:44:33.000 So, those are two characters.

00:44:34.000 Good king and good queen.

00:44:36.000 Positive masculine, positive feminine.

00:44:38.000 Now, they're a little desperate to have a child.

00:44:40.000 Which is what you'd expect the positive and masculine, feminine and masculine to get at producing. 1.00

00:44:46.000 And they eventually manage it.

00:44:47.000 And so, they have a daughter a little late.

00:44:49.000 Her name is Aurora.

00:44:51.000 And they're all thrilled to death about the fact that she's popped into existence.

00:44:56.000 And so, they decide to have a christening.

00:44:59.000 And they invite the whole kingdom except for one guest.

00:45:05.000 They don't invite the evil queen. 0.91

00:45:07.000 Maleficent.

00:45:08.000 Maleficent.

00:45:09.000 Interesting name.

00:45:10.000 Because it partly means malicious.

00:45:12.000 And it partly means malevolent.

00:45:14.000 But there's a bit of beneficent in there too.

00:45:17.000 And so, it's a very well chosen name.

00:45:20.000 And Maleficent is the negative feminine. 0.99

00:45:24.000 She's the terrible representation of nature itself. 0.99

00:45:28.000 In all its brutality.

00:45:30.000 And well, no wonder they don't want to invite her to the christening.

00:45:35.000 It's like, what do you want to do?

00:45:37.000 You invite the evil queen to the birthday party? 1.00

00:45:39.000 To the christening?

00:45:40.000 Well, of course not.

00:45:41.000 You protect your daughter from the terrible aspect of the natural world.

00:45:46.000 Let's say, it is something that you do as a parent, right?

00:45:48.000 You put a wall around your children.

00:45:50.000 And you don't expose...

00:45:51.000 You don't...

00:45:52.000 You don't...

00:45:53.000 You likely don't take a four-year-old to a catastrophic funeral.

00:45:57.000 And maybe not to a funeral at all.

00:45:58.000 Now, maybe you do.

00:45:59.000 And I'm not saying that you shouldn't.

00:46:00.000 And if you did, I'm not saying that's wrong.

00:46:02.000 But that's something that parents often choose to shield their children from.

00:46:07.000 It's just too bloody brutal, right?

00:46:09.000 You think that four-year-old just can't handle death.

00:46:11.000 And so, you keep that at bay.

00:46:14.000 And fair enough, man.

00:46:16.000 But you keep too much at bay.

00:46:18.000 You weaken your child.

00:46:20.000 And so, that's what happens in Sleeping Beauty.

00:46:22.000 They don't invite the evil queen to the party. 0.76

00:46:25.000 And so, the princess, who's overvalued in some sense,

00:46:29.000 and whose purity and innocence is overvalued,

00:46:32.000 doesn't get to encounter the negative aspect of reality with sufficient intensity.

00:46:38.000 And that makes her weak and dooms her to unconsciousness.

00:46:43.000 And that's part of what that story is about.

00:46:45.000 You have to take the evil queen into account.

00:46:48.000 And even more importantly, you have to invite her to the party.

00:46:51.000 And maybe even more importantly, you have to invite her to your children's party.

00:46:55.000 And why?

00:46:56.000 Well, because you show by doing that that you can handle her and so can the child.

00:47:01.000 And that's one of the ways of awakening some courage.

00:47:04.000 And so, you forget about the evil queen at your extreme peril.

00:47:07.000 And if you remember, when that story unfolds completely,

00:47:11.000 the evil queen has the hero of the story, the prince, trapped in a dungeon.

00:47:16.000 And she's going to keep him there until he's old.

00:47:18.000 And she's laughing at him madly.

00:47:20.000 And when he finally does escape,

00:47:22.000 she turns into the great dragon of chaos itself.

00:47:26.000 And it's a scene basically from hell.

00:47:29.000 It's a very, very intelligently crafted fairy tale

00:47:32.000 and a very intelligently crafted film and dead bloody accurate.

00:47:36.000 That's for sure.

00:47:37.000 And so, well, so what have we got for characters?

00:47:43.000 Well, we got good king.

00:47:45.000 We've got good queen. 1.00

00:47:48.000 We've got evil queen. 1.00

00:47:50.000 That's three.

00:47:51.000 Well, here's some more.

00:47:53.000 Hero.

00:47:54.000 That's a good one.

00:47:55.000 That'd be the prince.

00:47:56.000 Adversary.

00:47:57.000 Adversary.

00:47:58.000 That's another one.

00:48:00.000 That's at the individual level of analysis.

00:48:02.000 What's the best way to conceptualize?

00:48:04.000 If you're going to conceptualize individuals and you need a scheme to do that,

00:48:07.000 you have a good guy and bad guy.

00:48:09.000 And you have the hero and the anti-hero.

00:48:11.000 You have the hostile brothers, right?

00:48:13.000 You have Loki and Thor.

00:48:15.000 You have Batman and the Joker.

00:48:17.000 You have Superman and Lex Luthor.

00:48:19.000 You have Christ and Satan. 0.61

00:48:20.000 You have this, what speaks most positively out of the human soul, allied with this terrible,

00:48:29.000 malevolent, destructive force.

00:48:31.000 That's the individual.

00:48:33.000 And if you think that individuals are good and you don't know about the adversary,

00:48:37.000 well, good luck to you.

00:48:39.000 Because one day you'll meet someone who's fundamentally possessed by the adversarial spirit

00:48:43.000 and they will take you out in precise proportion to your naivety.

00:48:48.000 And that happens to people all the time.

00:48:51.000 And it's a reality.

00:48:52.000 Like, I've dealt with people who have post-traumatic stress disorder

00:48:56.000 and it's almost always the case that they develop it because they encountered something truly malevolent.

00:49:01.000 And sometimes it was another person, but sometimes it was a part of themself.

00:49:05.000 That often happens to soldiers in wartime, for example.

00:49:08.000 So you need to know that, you know, good as you could conceivably be

00:49:13.000 and reasonable and heroic as part of you no doubt is.

00:49:18.000 That's allied with something that is as dark as the light parts of you are light.

00:49:23.000 And you better keep an eye on it.

00:49:25.000 Because otherwise it can get the upper hand.

00:49:27.000 And if you're trying to explain phenomena like Nazi Germany or the Gulag camps

00:49:34.000 or what happened in the Soviet Union or what happened in Maoist China

00:49:37.000 or what's happening now in Venezuela

00:49:39.000 or any of the terrible episodes of absolutely appalling barbarism

00:49:44.000 that characterized much of human history and certainly the last century,

00:49:49.000 if you don't know about the adversary, then you have a very weak grasp on precisely what happened.

00:49:55.000 So you have the individual, you've got these two characters, hero and adversary.

00:50:00.000 That's Cain and Abel.

00:50:01.000 It's the oldest human story we have, Cain and Abel, right?

00:50:05.000 Hero, virtuous, God-fearing, beneficial to everyone, taken out by his jealous brother, right?

00:50:14.000 For no other reason than for his brother's failure to live up to the ideal.

00:50:19.000 That's why that story sits at the very core of the biblical corpus.

00:50:23.000 It's a warning and it's a smart one.

00:50:26.000 And so, well that's, you have the individual in its bifurcated, in its bifurcated, what would you say?

00:50:34.000 With its bifurcated essence.

00:50:36.000 And then surrounding the individual, you have society.

00:50:39.000 We already talked about the fact that we're deeply embedded in society.

00:50:42.000 And, you know, what's society?

00:50:44.000 Well, it's definitely the evil king.

00:50:47.000 I mean, we hear that all the time, right?

00:50:49.000 That's the patriarchal tyranny. 0.96

00:50:51.000 And what we've got at the moment in our public discourse is the domination of that discourse by a single mythological personification.

00:51:00.000 The evil king.

00:51:02.000 It's like, fair enough.

00:51:03.000 Societies can turn tyrannical.

00:51:05.000 Hierarchies can become corrupt. 0.61

00:51:08.000 Organizations of human beings can become dominated by power.

00:51:13.000 They can oppress people at the bottom of the distribution.

00:51:17.000 And they can misuse resources and lie and cheat and deceive and destroy.

00:51:21.000 Clearly.

00:51:22.000 And, to some degree, that characterizes even our highly functional modern western societies.

00:51:28.000 Because nothing's perfect.

00:51:30.000 And we need to be awake to make sure that the evil king is not the predominant force.

00:51:35.000 But that's allied, in a comprehensive mythological view, with the wise king.

00:51:41.000 And I see very little appreciation, especially in modern academic discourse,

00:51:46.000 for even the idea that the wise king might hypothetically exist.

00:51:51.000 And, to me, that smacks of an ingratitude and ignorance that's so deep that it's a miracle of sorts.

00:51:58.000 I mean, you think about a country like you people have.

00:52:01.000 This amazing country that's fundamentally peaceful.

00:52:05.000 Want is fundamentally a thing of the past.

00:52:08.000 You're all free.

00:52:09.000 You can pursue your destinies.

00:52:11.000 You're still oppressed by the catastrophic limitations of your own being.

00:52:16.000 But, you know, no one knows how to transcend that.

00:52:19.000 And, to consider...

00:52:20.000 Well, no one does.

00:52:21.000 And, to consider what you have best characterized as the evil king.

00:52:27.000 The totalitarian patriarchy is so blind that it can only be characterized as an ideology.

00:52:34.000 Which is precisely what it is.

00:52:36.000 And a motivated one, at best.

00:52:38.000 And it's even worse because the evil king, you think...

00:52:42.000 Well, the evil king is a social characterization.

00:52:45.000 But it's paired with a characterization of the individual.

00:52:49.000 If there's only an evil king, there's no hero.

00:52:52.000 There's just an adversary.

00:52:53.000 Because it's the adversarial action of the individual that produces the evil king.

00:52:59.000 And part of the reason that I believe that there's a hunger for encouragement, let's say.

00:53:08.000 And for enticement into responsibility among young men and even men who aren't so young.

00:53:15.000 Is because the implicit notion that they're best characterized as the adversary who serves the evil king has become, if not the dominant cultural narrative, I would say, the most centrally powerful intellectual cultural narrative.

00:53:32.000 And it's pathological to its core.

00:53:35.000 So, hero, adversary, wise king, evil king.

00:53:41.000 Great.

00:53:42.000 You need to know all those things.

00:53:43.000 What's left?

00:53:44.000 Good queen.

00:53:47.000 Well, we don't debate the existence of the good queen, I wouldn't say.

00:53:51.000 Because I would say all things considered, the positive aspect of femininity is on the ascendance.

00:53:58.000 And people recognize it.

00:54:00.000 And that would be associated with the emancipation of women over the last century. 1.00

00:54:05.000 But we say very little about the evil queen.

00:54:08.000 And that's a big mistake.

00:54:10.000 Because that has to be taken into account as well.

00:54:13.000 And so, we don't know what female totalitarianism might look like. 1.00

00:54:18.000 But my suspicions are we're going to get a pretty decent taste of it over the next 30 years.

00:54:23.000 Unless we're careful. 0.78

00:54:24.000 And if you think, if you're foolish enough to think that if you take a patriarchal structure, I use those words like with resistance, 0.98

00:54:35.000 and you fill it with women and that's somehow going to make it better, then you have another thing coming. 0.97

00:54:41.000 It's going to make it different.

00:54:43.000 But unless you think that women are somehow pure in their essence, in a manner that men aren't,

00:54:50.000 then the mere reconstruction of society, with women filling the roles, is not going to bring in the desired utopia. 0.99

00:54:57.000 It's going to produce positive consequences.

00:54:59.000 And it's going to produce negative consequences.

00:55:02.000 And some of the negative consequences that it's already producing is the insistence by a very strident minority of radical leftist types,

00:55:11.000 many of whom are feminists, that our culture is best characterized as a tyrannical patriarchy, 1.00

00:55:16.000 and that the activity of men is essentially adversarial.

00:55:20.000 And there's no excuse for that.

00:55:23.000 It's not, it's not true.

00:55:25.000 It's malicious.

00:55:27.000 It's not helpful.

00:55:29.000 And it's outright destructive.

00:55:31.000 All characteristics of the evil queen who wants to keep the hero locked in the dungeon until he's too damn old to do anything of any utility. 1.00

00:55:38.000 It's very important to get these mythological categories right.

00:55:43.000 And so that's the categories.

00:55:44.000 And my sense is, and you can think about this, something you can think about for a very long time,

00:55:50.000 a story that contains all those characters is not an ideology.

00:55:55.000 This is partly why it's been so difficult to get rid of Freud.

00:55:59.000 You know, why?

00:56:01.000 Ego, that's the individual.

00:56:03.000 Positive aspect of the ego, negative aspect of the ego.

00:56:06.000 Very, very explicit in Freud.

00:56:09.000 Super ego, that's the societal structure. 0.93

00:56:12.000 Well, Freud knew that you needed a strong superego to keep your impulses in check.

00:56:16.000 That was the civilizing force.

00:56:18.000 But that the superego could easily become hyper-dominant and totalitarian.

00:56:22.000 So he had the balance right there.

00:56:24.000 And then with regards to the id, well, that's nature.

00:56:26.000 And the id, well, that's the force that vitalizes you. 0.67

00:56:30.000 That's your primordial instincts.

00:56:32.000 But it's also, it's also, it's also the home of the horrors of nature itself.

00:56:37.000 And so Freud sketched out an almost completely, an almost complete metaphysical world.

00:56:42.000 Actually, a reconstruction of the landscape of ancient mythology.

00:56:46.000 And in doing so, did a good job of mapping the human psyche.

00:56:49.000 And that's partly why Freud is so difficult to get rid of.

00:56:52.000 That and the fact that he did understand very deeply that you're composed of sub-personalities,

00:56:58.000 and that those things are alive.

00:57:01.000 And so, and the Jungians, well, they did a better job of mapping out the landscape,

00:57:05.000 as far as I'm concerned, because they made it more explicit.

00:57:08.000 And I tried to continue that in Maps of Meaning.

00:57:10.000 Okay, so, so that's, so you can think about all that.

00:57:14.000 When everyone, when anyone is ever telling you a story about the way the world works,

00:57:18.000 you think, well, what's missing here?

00:57:20.000 People are, people are evil and they're destroying the planet.

00:57:23.000 And culture is nothing but the rape of nature. 0.97

00:57:26.000 It's like, fair enough, man.

00:57:28.000 People are kind of evil and culture does have a destructive element.

00:57:32.000 But there's, there's something missing there.

00:57:34.000 And, and poor nature, poor nature, all victim.

00:57:37.000 It's like, no, nature is trying to kill us just as hard as we're trying to take her out.

00:57:42.000 That's for sure.

00:57:43.000 And we have our reasons, right?

00:57:45.000 And those reasons mostly are rooted in the necessity for survival.

00:57:49.000 Now, even a smart bird doesn't follow its own nest, you know?

00:57:53.000 And I'm not saying that we should be careless,

00:57:55.000 but we have a real struggle for existence on our hands.

00:57:58.000 And nature might be beautiful and beneficial in its fundamental essence,

00:58:03.000 but it's also the primary murderous force.

00:58:06.000 And, of course, you Norwegians know that because you have winter, 0.84

00:58:09.000 just like we do in Canada. 0.77

00:58:11.000 And it's trying even harder in Canada most of the time to kill you all the time.

00:58:16.000 And so, and so to the degree that our environmental depredations

00:58:21.000 are merely a consequence of our attempts to protect ourselves against the evil queen,

00:58:25.000 they're justified, at least in some part,

00:58:27.000 and should be viewed with a certain amount of sympathy

00:58:30.000 instead of this anti-human dogma that seems to permeate, for example,

00:58:34.000 so much environmental discussion where human beings are often characterized as a,

00:58:39.000 as a cancer on the planet or some species that the planet would be better off without.

00:58:46.000 It's like, if you can't hear the evil king or the evil queen lurking behind utterances like that,

00:58:53.000 your ears aren't open because it's certainly there.

00:58:56.000 So, so that's the, that's the ideal, that's the antidote to ideology.

00:59:02.000 And so, and I want to continue that a little bit with a discussion about victimization.

00:59:08.000 Because, and this is a bit of a sideways move,

00:59:11.000 and all of this in some sense was a prodroma for it.

00:59:14.000 One of the things that I'm most appalled by with regards to modern intellectual discourse,

00:59:20.000 and I fundamentally blame the sociologists,

00:59:23.000 although there's a variety of other people you could blame,

00:59:25.000 but we could start with them,

00:59:27.000 is that the, that human beings are best characterized by their group identities.

00:59:32.000 Okay, so first of all, I don't find that an acceptable scheme,

00:59:36.000 because I think one of the things we learned in the West a long time ago,

00:59:40.000 was that human beings are best categorized as individuals.

00:59:43.000 And the reason for that is that we're the nexus of multiple group identities,

00:59:47.000 and to take all those identities into account simultaneously,

00:59:50.000 is in fact to treat people as if they're individuals.

00:59:53.000 And our entire societies are predicated on the idea

00:59:56.000 that the sovereign individual is the cornerstone of the state.

00:59:59.000 The family and the state.

01:00:01.000 And I believe that to be practically true,

01:00:03.000 insofar as societies that adopt that principle work delightfully well,

01:00:09.000 compared to societies that don't.

01:00:11.000 And metaphysically true, because I think that the cosmos is constructed

01:00:16.000 so that each of us in some sense is a center point of reality.

01:00:21.000 That consciousness itself is the center point of reality.

01:00:24.000 And that we have a certain divinity that goes along with that conscious status,

01:00:28.000 and a terrible responsibility that accompanies that.

01:00:31.000 So I think it's practically true, and true in a literary sense,

01:00:35.000 but also metaphysically true.

01:00:36.000 And then I think that any attempt to insist that each of us is no more than an avatar

01:00:41.000 of whatever group identity is to be regarded as paramount at the moment,

01:00:45.000 is a reversion to an extraordinarily dangerous form of tribalism.

01:00:50.000 So, now, along with that idea, the group idea,

01:00:55.000 is the idea that not only should we be characterized as group members,

01:01:00.000 sex, ethnicity, race, gender, sexual proclivity.

01:01:04.000 You can list a very long list of potential group identities,

01:01:08.000 which is one of the problems with the group identity theory.

01:01:11.000 The idea that those are paramount, first of all,

01:01:15.000 runs contrary to the notion of the sovereign individual,

01:01:19.000 and also, well, reduces us to our, each of us to our group.

01:01:24.000 So, but that's not, that's not the, that's not the bottom of what's wrong with that.

01:01:31.000 It's not only that it exists in contradistinction to our most fundamental axiomatic assumption,

01:01:37.000 which is that the individual is the fundamental locus of value,

01:01:41.000 it's that it produces a kind of narrative about the structure of the world,

01:01:46.000 which is an ideology and a dangerous one.

01:01:49.000 And the ideology is, well, we're all members of groups.

01:01:54.000 Some groups oppress other groups.

01:01:58.000 Some groups are victims and some groups are victimizers.

01:02:01.000 Now, you know, we want to go into that idea a bit,

01:02:06.000 and that's why I want to talk about being a victim.

01:02:08.000 The first thing I would like to say is,

01:02:11.000 the reason that the victim narrative is so attractive is that it's true.

01:02:17.000 It's not true in the ideological sense that it's been put forth, but it's true. 0.72

01:02:22.000 I mean, think about your situation.

01:02:24.000 You know, you're full of inadequacies that are characterized by your peculiarities,

01:02:30.000 whatever they happen to be, your multiple group identities.

01:02:33.000 You're not everything you should be.

01:02:35.000 You're going to be judged harshly and put outside the social ideal as a child and as an adult.

01:02:43.000 It happens to everyone, right?

01:02:45.000 You know, most kids are bullied when they grow up,

01:02:48.000 and some kids, I know perfectly well, are far more bullied than others.

01:02:52.000 But childhood is often no picnic for children.

01:02:54.000 I mean, even if you're a really together six-year-old,

01:02:56.000 there's some malevolent eight-year-old that'll be perfectly willing to push you around. 0.95

01:03:00.000 And then, and so there's that.

01:03:02.000 You're subject to that arbitrary element of socialization.

01:03:05.000 And then there's also the fact that, you know, you were kind of a delightful and idiosyncratic child,

01:03:09.000 full of potential and uniqueness, and you were sort of crushed and molded into what you are now.

01:03:17.000 And some of that's great because, you know, here you can sit peacefully and civilly among all these other people,

01:03:22.000 but there's a tremendous amount of destruction in the wake of that as well as some benefit.

01:03:27.000 Victim of the evil king, beneficiary of the wise king.

01:03:31.000 That characterizes all of us.

01:03:33.000 And so there's a victim element to that.

01:03:35.000 I mean, society is a harsh judge, and you're wrong in its eyes.

01:03:40.000 Now, it's not only a harsh judge, but that's there.

01:03:43.000 And so, you know, that's part of the essential tragedy of life.

01:03:46.000 So characterizing people as victims at the sociological level rings true to some degree, 0.97

01:03:51.000 because, well, because it's true to some degree.

01:03:54.000 And then, with regards to nature, let's say, well, God, you know,

01:03:58.000 you're not as good-looking as you might be,

01:04:00.000 and there's lots of people that are smarter than you,

01:04:02.000 and, you know, there's people who are going to live longer than you,

01:04:05.000 and you're going to have a lot of pain and suffering in your life in a very unfair way,

01:04:08.000 and you're going to have a fair bit of bad luck.

01:04:10.000 And, you know, there's this arbitrary subjugation to the random catastrophes of nature

01:04:16.000 that characterizes everyone.

01:04:18.000 I mean, everyone gets sick.

01:04:20.000 Everyone dies.

01:04:21.000 Everyone loses everything.

01:04:23.000 And so to think of us as victims is like, well, for sure.

01:04:26.000 And then, of course, it's also the case that at any given time,

01:04:31.000 some people seem to be much more victims than others.

01:04:35.000 And for arbitrary reasons as well.

01:04:38.000 The problem is that it's not that helpful as a characterization.

01:04:45.000 You know, and it's dangerous, especially dangerous,

01:04:48.000 when you start to play it out at the level of group.

01:04:52.000 So I've been trying to puzzle this out.

01:04:54.000 I wrote the foreword to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's

01:04:57.000 the 50th anniversary version of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.

01:05:02.000 And for its historical inaccuracies and its faults,

01:05:06.000 which are obvious, let's say, 50 years later, but certainly weren't then,

01:05:10.000 it was the first book to completely tear the mask off Soviet,

01:05:15.000 the absolute catastrophic depths of decades of absolute Soviet barbarism. 0.71

01:05:22.000 And it dealt the death blow to the, what appeared to be the death blow,

01:05:29.000 to the reprehensible ideology that had given rise to all that.

01:05:32.000 And when I, I've read that book in its entirety,

01:05:36.000 the three volumes set a couple of times,

01:05:38.000 and then the abridged version again more recently while I was writing the foreword.

01:05:42.000 And I was trying to figure out exactly what had happened,

01:05:44.000 because, you know, the apologists for the Stalinists, for the Soviets,

01:05:49.000 basically said, look, the whole Soviet Marxist enterprise

01:05:55.000 was fundamentally good in its initial presuppositions,

01:05:59.000 proletariat against bourgeoisie, victimizer against victim,

01:06:03.000 that was the underlying narrative.

01:06:05.000 That was really true, it was an accurate way of viewing history.

01:06:08.000 The utopia that was promised was a universalist utopia,

01:06:12.000 and worth making a certain amount of sacrifices for,

01:06:15.000 and it all went wrong because no one implemented it properly.

01:06:19.000 It's like, well, no.

01:06:24.000 It went wrong fast.

01:06:26.000 Like, you know, it wasn't that it started out all, what, snowflakes and roses,

01:06:33.000 and then got murderous over a couple of decades.

01:06:36.000 That isn't what happened.

01:06:37.000 It got murderous right away.

01:06:39.000 And so I've been trying to puzzle out why that was,

01:06:41.000 because, you know, if you're going to give the devil his due,

01:06:44.000 you might say, well, back in 1914,

01:06:47.000 with the tremendous amount of inequality that existed,

01:06:50.000 might be perfectly reasonable, if you were a compassionate person,

01:06:53.000 to feel that a bit of inversion of authority and power might be in order,

01:06:57.000 to bring the peasantry up and to bring the aristocracy down,

01:07:01.000 and to give everyone a fighting chance,

01:07:03.000 and to deal with inequality once and for all.

01:07:06.000 You might have been forgiven for being naive enough

01:07:09.000 to assume that you could manage that with rational social planning

01:07:13.000 and radical revolutionary change.

01:07:16.000 Although people had warned against that, like Dostoevsky and like Nietzsche,

01:07:20.000 and said it would be a complete bloody catastrophe, which it was.

01:07:23.000 But still, but now, it's like, no, sorry, we ran the experiment,

01:07:28.000 we ran it in the Soviet Union, we ran it in China,

01:07:31.000 we ran it everywhere, and it didn't work.

01:07:34.000 And it's because, well, it's for a variety of reasons,

01:07:37.000 but it's bloody solid evidence that it didn't work,

01:07:40.000 because it was replicated in many different circumstances,

01:07:43.000 with people from very different cultures,

01:07:46.000 and always the same terrible consequence emerged.

01:07:49.000 And if you don't think that's evidence,

01:07:51.000 then you don't think what evidence is,

01:07:54.000 is the same thing than what I think evidence is.

01:07:57.000 So, and I would say...

01:08:04.000 You also suffer from the unforgivable delusion

01:08:07.000 that you, in your purity and perfection,

01:08:10.000 actually understand Marxism the proper way,

01:08:12.000 and if the tools of power were just given to you,

01:08:15.000 you would have brought about the utopia

01:08:17.000 that Mao and Stalin failed to produce.

01:08:20.000 And if you don't see that arrogance lurking

01:08:22.000 in that kind of interpretation,

01:08:23.000 then you really haven't come to terms

01:08:25.000 with the adversarial part of the individual personality.

01:08:28.000 So, that wasn't real Marxism.

01:08:31.000 It's like, yeah, like your version would be any better.

01:08:34.000 And I'll tell you, it's worse than that,

01:08:37.000 because if it does happen to be that you're St. Francis of Assisi,

01:08:40.000 and your utopian implementation of the communist ideal

01:08:44.000 would have in fact brought the utopia forward, 0.97

01:08:46.000 you would have been among the first to be annihilated

01:08:49.000 by the executioners who took over the Russian Revolution,

01:08:52.000 pretty much the second it manifested itself.

01:08:54.000 So, it wouldn't have made a bloody bit of difference to begin with.

01:08:57.000 So, what happened? What happened?

01:09:00.000 Here's what happened, as far as I can tell.

01:09:02.000 And this is the problem, part of the problem with the group identity idea,

01:09:06.000 and part of the problem with the victim-victimizer narrative.

01:09:09.000 We've already decided, yeah, yeah, you're a victim.

01:09:12.000 And we should also decide at the same time,

01:09:14.000 and this is a critical thing, that you're also a victimizer.

01:09:17.000 That's your unearned privilege, right?

01:09:19.000 And that's the fact that you happen to be born in Norway, 0.98

01:09:22.000 you know, instead of some bloody hellhole somewhere else in the world, 0.90

01:09:26.000 like Venezuela, for example.

01:09:29.000 So, you have that privilege, and it's arbitrary, you know?

01:09:32.000 And so, and you have to contend with your arbitrary privileges,

01:09:35.000 just like your arbitrary disadvantages.

01:09:37.000 And you have to atone for them, I would say, with some responsibility.

01:09:41.000 There is that arbitrariness.

01:09:43.000 So, here's the problem.

01:09:46.000 So, we already decided that, well, you could be a member of a group,

01:09:49.000 and we could characterize you that way.

01:09:51.000 Well, then the question is, well, are you a victim or a victimizer?

01:09:55.000 And then we might say, well, it depends on the group,

01:09:57.000 and it would also depend on how that group was being construed at this moment, right?

01:10:02.000 So, but that's only part of the problem,

01:10:05.000 because you're not just the member of one group.

01:10:07.000 You're the member of a bunch of groups,

01:10:09.000 as the intersectional theorists have insisted, right?

01:10:12.000 Even within their own domain of knowledge.

01:10:15.000 We can't only characterize you with one group.

01:10:17.000 Maybe we have to, to come to terms with your unique status as victimizer or victim,

01:10:23.000 we have to do a multi-dimensional analysis of your group identities.

01:10:27.000 Well, here's the problem with that.

01:10:29.000 Well, let's say it's more unforgivable to be a victimizer than it is...

01:10:38.000 If you're a victimizer, let's get this right.

01:10:42.000 If you're a victim, you're worthy of compassion.

01:10:45.000 But if you're a victimizer, you're worthy of punishment.

01:10:48.000 And you're more worthy of punishment as a victimizer than you are worthy of compassion as a victim.

01:10:55.000 Let's start with that.

01:10:57.000 That goes along nicely if you have a particularly malevolent attitude towards your fellow human being.

01:11:03.000 Let's say, Nietzsche said to beware of those in whom the desire to punish is strong.

01:11:09.000 So, and we should also point out that you don't want to underestimate the power of hate and resentment and revenge.

01:11:15.000 Like maybe you can put that up against love and love will win,

01:11:18.000 but that means that what you were manifesting would have to be love.

01:11:21.000 And that's not so easy to manage.

01:11:23.000 And it's fairly easy to manage resentment and hatred and the desire for a certain amount of mayhem.

01:11:29.000 You can do that, you can do that with virtually no effort whatsoever on your part.

01:11:34.000 And so, whereas love and kindness and compassion in their true sense, those are effortful achievements.

01:11:40.000 They're not something that come to people without discipline and care and vision and all of those things.

01:11:46.000 Self-sacrifice, it's rare.

01:11:48.000 And maybe you've developed some of that in you and good for you,

01:11:51.000 but don't be thinking that that's something that you're just gifted with easily.

01:11:55.000 So, what happened in the Russian Revolution?

01:11:58.000 Well, it turned out that you could take everyone and you could fractionate them into five different group memberships.

01:12:05.000 And then it turned out that as long as you were a victimizer along one of those axes,

01:12:09.000 it was perfectly reasonable to do away with you.

01:12:11.000 And that seems to me to be exactly why it went wrong.

01:12:15.000 It's like, and the reason that that's a problem is because, well, it's true.

01:12:20.000 You know, every single one of us is the undeserving beneficiary of a certain amount of privilege in respect to history.

01:12:32.000 The existentialists in the 1950s, the existentialist psychoanalysts called that thrownness.

01:12:38.000 It was after Heidegger, right?

01:12:40.000 And thrownness was this arbitrary element to the world.

01:12:43.000 It's like, you're born with a certain amount of intelligence, right?

01:12:47.000 Well, you didn't deserve that.

01:12:49.000 That's a big deal, to be born with a certain amount of intelligence.

01:12:52.000 It's actually better, by the time you're 40, it's better to be born at the 95th percentile for intelligence than the 95th percentile for wealth.

01:13:00.000 And it's a genetic lottery.

01:13:02.000 You know, like, your parents can suppress your intelligence, but it's very difficult to augment it.

01:13:08.000 That's something that seems to be more or less gifted to you.

01:13:11.000 You know, and it makes a huge difference in terms of the probabilities of your life outcome.

01:13:15.000 Intelligence, IQ, is the best predictor of long-term socioeconomic success.

01:13:19.000 The best.

01:13:20.000 And there's a huge genetic component to that.

01:13:23.000 So, some are born smart, and some aren't born so smart.

01:13:27.000 You know, it's so arbitrary.

01:13:30.000 Here's a terrible statistic.

01:13:32.000 The United States government, the military, decided a decade or so ago, maybe a little longer than that,

01:13:39.000 that it was illegal to induct anybody with an IQ of less than 83 into the armed forces.

01:13:44.000 Okay, why?

01:13:46.000 Because despite the American military being absolutely desperate for warm bodies in wartime and in peacetime,

01:13:55.000 well, you need soldiers.

01:13:57.000 Peace time, well, you can use the military as a means of moving people from the underclass up into the more educated strata of society.

01:14:05.000 You can use it as a tool of social policy.

01:14:07.000 And they're chronically short of manpower.

01:14:09.000 Well, they decided that if you have an IQ of less than 83, there wasn't a thing they could possibly train you to do,

01:14:15.000 no matter how much effort it took to do anything at all that wasn't positively counterproductive.

01:14:21.000 Right?

01:14:22.000 It's terrible.

01:14:23.000 It's terrible.

01:14:24.000 The thing is, the military were early adopters of IQ tests and did a lot of the research that was designed to validate them,

01:14:31.000 because they wanted to screen people quickly for aptitude to develop an officer corps during wartime.

01:14:35.000 So they had their reasons.

01:14:37.000 And they developed very powerful IQ tests.

01:14:39.000 And the terrible thing about that is that's 10% of the population.

01:14:43.000 Right?

01:14:44.000 So you just think about that.

01:14:46.000 So pure genetic lottery, fundamentally.

01:14:48.000 There's some environmental effects, but they're not very strong.

01:14:51.000 Genetic lottery dooms 10% of the population to counterproductive existence in any society that's approximately as complex as the U.S. military,

01:15:00.000 which is certainly the society that you've produced.

01:15:03.000 And so the fact that you happen to be sitting there and you're fairly intelligent, it's like,

01:15:08.000 well, there's some privilege for you.

01:15:10.000 It's hard to tell how much you should be punished for that.

01:15:13.000 And you can be sure.

01:15:14.000 You know, here's another thing.

01:15:15.000 You hear people making a case all the time about the 1%.

01:15:19.000 Something became very popular in the United States.

01:15:22.000 You know, to be in...

01:15:23.000 So the question is, well, where do you draw the boundaries exactly?

01:15:26.000 You part of the 1%?

01:15:28.000 Well, no, there's many people that are richer than me.

01:15:31.000 It's like, yeah, but there's probably about 6,999,000,000,000, etc., etc., that are poorer than you.

01:15:40.000 So you need an income of $32,000 a year to be in the top 1% worldwide.

01:15:45.000 So I don't know what the average GDP is in Norway, but it's a hell of a lot higher than that.

01:15:51.000 It's probably triple that.

01:15:53.000 So you're not just in the 1%, you're in the upper third of the 1%.

01:15:56.000 You might say, well, that's not fair because we want to draw the boundaries, you know, around Norway, but that's convenient for you.

01:16:03.000 That's all.

01:16:04.000 There's no reason you should do that canonically.

01:16:06.000 And so, well, so what's the point of all this?

01:16:10.000 Well, the whole victim-victimizer thing, the whole group identity narrative is predicated on a very narrow and I would say malicious view of the world.

01:16:26.000 You're victimized by your own malevolence.

01:16:29.000 You're victimized by the tyranny of your culture.

01:16:32.000 And you're victimized by the catastrophe of nature.

01:16:35.000 And that's built into the structure of the world.

01:16:37.000 And you can draw distinctions between different levels of victimization, I suppose.

01:16:41.000 And you can do that on the basis of group identity.

01:16:44.000 But it doesn't solve the fundamental problem and it creates other problems that are far worse.

01:16:49.000 What's the alternative?

01:16:52.000 Well, this is an alternative that I think we did a very good job of articulating in the West.

01:16:59.000 And it's the first element of that is to insist upon the fundamental sovereignty of the individual.

01:17:06.000 And not with regards to rights.

01:17:08.000 That's something we've got wrong over the last 50 years.

01:17:11.000 Right?

01:17:12.000 Sovereign individual.

01:17:14.000 The most important element of that sovereignty is not what you have coming to you from others in the form of your rights.

01:17:21.000 The most important part of the sovereign individuality is what you can deliver in terms of your responsibility.

01:17:27.000 Because it's that upon which your own stability relies.

01:17:30.000 The stability of your family and the integrity of the state.

01:17:34.000 And so, and what you do instead of claiming your status as victim, which is self-evident.

01:17:41.000 Yes, victim.

01:17:42.000 Obviously, life is fundamentally suffering.

01:17:45.000 And it's contaminated by malevolence.

01:17:47.000 And that's a permanent reality.

01:17:49.000 Instead of characterizing yourself as a hapless victim, differentially affected by that.

01:17:55.000 And then looking for whose fault it is, you do something radical.

01:18:00.000 And you think, maybe it's not my fault.

01:18:04.000 Maybe it's my responsibility to do something about that.

01:18:08.000 There's plenty of suffering in the world that you could do something about.

01:18:12.000 You could start with your own, for that matter.

01:18:14.000 You could treat yourself half decently.

01:18:16.000 That's rule two, right?

01:18:17.000 Treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping.

01:18:20.000 You could try that.

01:18:21.000 Actually works quite nicely.

01:18:23.000 And if you can manage that, well, maybe you could do the same thing for your family.

01:18:26.000 That would be a nice extension of grace, let's say.

01:18:30.000 And maybe if you get good at that, well, you could try doing it for the whole community.

01:18:34.000 You could take on the load of that suffering, that load of that victimization, let's say.

01:18:38.000 You could take that on not only as an unavoidable existential reality, but as a challenge to the deepest part of yourself.

01:18:50.000 And I'll tell you one of the things that we've also learned from deep narrative and from clinical lore is,

01:18:56.000 well, what's the fundamental narrative?

01:18:58.000 You've got your characters, your evil queen and your good queen and your evil king and your good king and the hero and the adversary.

01:19:05.000 What's the fundamental narrative?

01:19:07.000 Stand up against tyranny.

01:19:09.000 Confront the catastrophe of nature.

01:19:11.000 Act out the mythology of the hero.

01:19:14.000 Gain the treasure the dragon stores.

01:19:17.000 It's the fundamental narrative of mankind.

01:19:20.000 And that's the willingness to take on the responsibility that goes along with the entire catastrophe of being.

01:19:27.000 And that's much preferable alternative to deciding who's to blame and going after them.

01:19:34.000 Thank you very much.

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01:22:26.000 What you didn't say? No one for their extroverted enthusiasm.

01:22:31.000 All right, so here's what we're going to do. I want to go through some of the big questions that I've come up with during the last five or six months on the road with you, which have just been an incredible, truly life-changing time for me.

01:22:45.000 And then we're going to end with Oslo's best question. You got 45 minutes in you?

01:22:51.000 We'll see.

01:22:52.000 All right. So first off, every single night you are different, and I think tonight perhaps more different than any night so far.

01:23:03.000 How the hell do you do it? I honestly don't know.

01:23:07.000 You know, I usually go back in the green room with you for a little bit before, and about 10 minutes before showtime, I walk out of there, and you say you need to think for a little bit.

01:23:16.000 And then you somehow do an hour and a half summing up everything you think in a different way on any given night.

01:23:23.000 Well, there's some, I'll answer that technically. You know, the first thing is, is that something I tell my students, you know, if you want to write an essay, you need a problem.

01:23:36.000 Because the essay is an attempt to solve a problem. So first of all, you need a problem.

01:23:42.000 And then second, if you're going to devote time to the problem, then it should be, like it should be a problem that is your problem.

01:23:50.000 At least a piece of it should be. You know, I have students all the time, and they come up to me and they say, tell me what I should write my essay about.

01:23:57.000 And they're often very annoyed that I haven't, you know. You didn't give us a topic.

01:24:01.000 It's like, yes, that's because the topic is the difficult part of the assignment, right?

01:24:08.000 To specify the problem, that's the difficult part of the assignment.

01:24:12.000 In fact, when you're trying to address a complex, let's say, domain of suffering, the diagnosis, which is the problem formulation, is the crucial cognitive step.

01:24:25.000 So, if you want to write, you need a problem. And if you want to write truthfully, then you need a problem that's yours.

01:24:32.000 And if you want to write in a focused and aimed manner, then you unite your thinking around the problem.

01:24:41.000 And so, one thing I always do before, when I sit backstage, is I think, okay, what's the problem for tonight?

01:24:50.000 You know, and the problem for tonight was victim.

01:24:53.000 So, it's one statement, it's like, okay, let's explore the concept of victim.

01:24:59.000 And go down as far as we possibly can.

01:25:02.000 Okay, so then, well, then, I would say, I have my knowledge organized in an idiosyncratic manner.

01:25:12.000 And that's a consequence of having spent, when I wrote my first book, which was Maps of Meaning,

01:25:20.000 I wrote every day, for three hours, for 15 years.

01:25:26.000 And I vowed, when I started, that I was going to make that, what would you say, the highest duty that I had.

01:25:37.000 Nothing was going to come before that.

01:25:39.000 And there's a certain amount of cruelty in that, because it meant that, you know, if my wife came into my office,

01:25:46.000 then I would bark at her, and if my kids came into my office, like a junkyard dog, surrounded by barbed wire.

01:25:52.000 It's like, because you can always not write.

01:25:55.000 It's not that important that day.

01:25:57.000 And there might be more pressing concerns, and they're probably, including people who would just like to have something to do with you for a while,

01:26:04.000 or do something nice, or have a problem fixed.

01:26:07.000 It's like, no, go away.

01:26:10.000 I've got three hours.

01:26:12.000 And so I was a thief, and I took that from my life.

01:26:18.000 And so I spent a very long time writing and thinking about the hardest problem that I could conceptualize.

01:26:26.000 And that was the relationship between the individual and the atrocity committed in the service of totalitarian possession.

01:26:36.000 It was the worst problem I could think of.

01:26:39.000 How?

01:26:40.000 So I looked to see what the worst thing people could do under the worst circumstances was,

01:26:47.000 and tried to figure out why that happened.

01:26:50.000 That was step one.

01:26:51.000 And step two was having come to some determination about how it might happen,

01:26:57.000 then, and having learned something that I had suspected all along,

01:27:03.000 which was that that capacity was part of the individual, right?

01:27:09.000 Me, as well as everyone else,

01:27:11.000 to determine if there was a mode of acting in the world that would restrict that possibility

01:27:18.000 so that it would no longer manifest itself.

01:27:21.000 And so I spent however many hours, 45,000 hours thinking about that.

01:27:29.000 And that's not right, because that's how much time I spent writing about it.

01:27:33.000 Most of that time, because I have a very obsessive mind in some sense.

01:27:38.000 If I lock on a problem, I can't let it go, or it can't let me go.

01:27:42.000 I don't know which way to think about it.

01:27:43.000 And so it wasn't only that I was writing for three hours a day.

01:27:48.000 I was thinking about it all the time,

01:27:51.000 right from the time I woke up till the time I went to sleep.

01:27:53.000 And I was reading about it obsessively.

01:27:56.000 You know, I read a tremendous amount when I was in graduate school.

01:27:59.000 And so the reason I'm telling you all of that is to answer this question.

01:28:03.000 It's like, then I spent 30 years lecturing about it.

01:28:06.000 And, you know, I started out with my lectures fairly structured,

01:28:09.000 because I was still wrestling with the ideas.

01:28:11.000 But I tried over the years to reduce the amount of scaffolding,

01:28:17.000 safety wire, netting that was underneath me while I was lecturing,

01:28:21.000 until I got to the point where I didn't need to do anything other than sit for ten minutes

01:28:26.000 and think, okay, what's the problem?

01:28:28.000 Where am I going?

01:28:30.000 I'm exploring a solution.

01:28:32.000 I'm not necessarily putting forward a pre-constructed solution.

01:28:36.000 Like, it'll be in the universe of solutions I've considered,

01:28:40.000 but I'd like to get it sharper and clearer.

01:28:42.000 So I got to the point where I could go from the problem through the story,

01:28:46.000 using all these things that I had already talked about and knew,

01:28:50.000 and so then I can sequence them.

01:28:52.000 And I think the closest analogy I can think of is jazz improvisation.

01:28:57.000 It's something like that.

01:28:58.000 You know, an expert musician has a tremendous number of habits,

01:29:03.000 deeply ingrained, like an athlete, same thing,

01:29:07.000 that are part and parcel, built into him or her.

01:29:12.000 And so I have that, and so then I can come out and think,

01:29:15.000 okay, well, a little of this and a little of that, and that's new.

01:29:20.000 It's like each of these ideas is a personality of sorts,

01:29:23.000 and you can let them have a dialogue in real time and see where it goes.

01:29:27.000 And that's a story, right?

01:29:29.000 That's what a great author does when he writes a book,

01:29:31.000 is he puts out some characters,

01:29:32.000 and then he lets the characters do whatever they would do,

01:29:35.000 and that reveals the story.

01:29:37.000 And so I kind of do that.

01:29:38.000 I let the ideas do what they're going to do

01:29:40.000 and see how they fight and compete with one another.

01:29:43.000 And then that's, see, what people want in a lecture is,

01:29:48.000 assuming that this is a lecture, and it probably isn't,

01:29:52.000 it's probably more like a strange sort of dialogue with the audience.

01:29:57.000 What people want in a forum like this is they want to see thought in action, right?

01:30:04.000 They don't want to see something that's already crystallized and dead,

01:30:09.000 which is why I did read the last time I was here,

01:30:12.000 although I do that rarely.

01:30:14.000 They want to see something, they want to see,

01:30:17.000 well, what they want to see, technically speaking,

01:30:20.000 is something, if you thought about it metaphysically,

01:30:23.000 is they want to see the logos in action.

01:30:25.000 That's really what people always want to see.

01:30:28.000 And I mean that philosophically.

01:30:31.000 And so the real-time part of it, the fact that it's not a contrived performance,

01:30:38.000 is actually crucial to its success.

01:30:41.000 And also what keeps me engaged. 0.98

01:30:43.000 Like it's, I don't know how these damn lectures are going to go when I come out here. 0.98

01:30:46.000 I think, okay, victim. 0.99

01:30:48.000 Man, that's a big problem.

01:30:50.000 Okay, well, we could address it with this, and then we could use this,

01:30:54.000 and I can play those together, and we can see how that goes,

01:30:58.000 and then perhaps I'll be able to draw a rousing conclusion,

01:31:02.000 because it's hard to bring that to the point at the end, you know, successfully,

01:31:06.000 which is something I've got better at over the tour, which is quite fun.

01:31:09.000 But I never don't know if it's going to work.

01:31:12.000 And so I'm on edge when I come out on stage.

01:31:16.000 I think, oh my God, I've got a big problem here,

01:31:18.000 and I've got to sort it out in 70 minutes, and there's all these people here.

01:31:22.000 So, and that makes it really tense for me in an exciting way.

01:31:28.000 It's an exhilarating, you know, it's an exhilarating challenge,

01:31:31.000 but that also makes it alive, because I could easily fail.

01:31:36.000 So, well, so that's how. It's lots of practice.

01:31:41.000 And then the final thing is, I don't talk about problems that don't matter to me.

01:31:46.000 They matter.

01:31:48.000 This victim thing, that matters.

01:31:50.000 It's important. It's fundamental.

01:31:52.000 And so every night I come out, and I think, okay, well,

01:31:54.000 what's the fundamental problem for tonight?

01:31:56.000 And it's a problem that affects me as far, as deep down as I can go, you know?

01:32:02.000 And so, yeah.

01:32:07.000 Do you know the point in life when you became a serious person?

01:32:11.000 Yes.

01:32:12.000 And I mean that in the best sense of it, because when people ask me what it's like to be on tour with you,

01:32:16.000 I always say, well, he takes life seriously.

01:32:20.000 And it's making me take life more seriously.

01:32:22.000 And I think it's making these people take life more seriously.

01:32:25.000 Do you remember the moment that that happened?

01:32:26.000 Yes.

01:32:27.000 Can you tell me that moment?

01:32:29.000 Yes, I can.

01:32:32.000 Yeah.

01:32:33.000 So, it was in, I think, 1983.

01:32:38.000 And this is a strange story.

01:32:42.000 I came home from a party, a university party.

01:32:47.000 And I wasn't in the best mood.

01:32:52.000 I've always had a certain proclivity towards depression,

01:32:55.000 which I've recently discovered is probably an autoimmune problem.

01:33:00.000 In any case, I'd gone to this party, and I'd had a lot to drink, because I like to drink.

01:33:06.000 And, I don't know, I wasn't happy with something that happened at the party.

01:33:13.000 I wasn't happy with the way I behaved.

01:33:14.000 I mean, that's not uncommon, right?

01:33:16.000 If you like to drink, then you're not happy with the way you behave.

01:33:19.000 Those things just go together.

01:33:21.000 And so, but it was deeper than that.

01:33:23.000 It wasn't just that I was unhappy with the way the party had gone,

01:33:26.000 but I was deeply dissatisfied with how I was oriented in life.

01:33:30.000 Like, I felt that there was a, it was a nihilism, I suppose.

01:33:35.000 That was, that was gnawing at me.

01:33:38.000 This was not long after I'd stopped.

01:33:44.000 I'd worked for a socialist party in Canada for a while when I was a kid.

01:33:47.000 And this wasn't long after I stopped doing that.

01:33:49.000 And so, I'd kind of lost my moorings.

01:33:51.000 And, you know, the Christianity that my mother practiced in particular,

01:33:56.000 I'd abandoned that when I was like 13.

01:33:59.000 And so, I didn't have any structure to orient me at all.

01:34:03.000 And so, I was experimenting a little bit with artistic production at this point.

01:34:09.000 Not a lot, but a bit.

01:34:10.000 And so, I took out this canvas from my closet.

01:34:15.000 And I sat down and I sketched out this picture.

01:34:18.000 And I just let my imagination roam.

01:34:21.000 And what came out was it was a crucifixion.

01:34:24.000 And there was a, I drew a picture of Christ on the crucifixion.

01:34:28.000 But it was a very judgmental face, very angry face.

01:34:33.000 And with a snake wrapped around his waist.

01:34:35.000 And it was a really harsh picture.

01:34:37.000 It was like an expressionist picture.

01:34:39.000 Not that I have the talent of an expressionist.

01:34:41.000 But that's what it was.

01:34:43.000 And I thought, I mean, I wasn't thinking.

01:34:47.000 I didn't think that I was thinking in religious terms at that point at all.

01:34:51.000 And, you know, I was an absolutely sporadic churchgoer.

01:34:54.000 And I was absolutely shocked by this picture.

01:34:58.000 I thought, what, where the hell did this come from?

01:35:02.000 What did that possibly mean?

01:35:04.000 You know, it took me years to figure out what it meant.

01:35:08.000 I mean, really, one thing.

01:35:11.000 So, I'll tell you part of what it meant.

01:35:13.000 So, Carl Jung said something very interesting about the structure of the New Testament.

01:35:18.000 He said that the gospel Christ is fundamentally, although not entirely,

01:35:23.000 fundamentally a figure of compassion.

01:35:26.000 But, the ideal is not only compassion.

01:35:31.000 The ideal is also a judge.

01:35:33.000 Because an ideal is a judge.

01:35:35.000 You know, let's say you have an ideal.

01:35:37.000 Well, it's a judge, because you don't live up to it.

01:35:40.000 And so, your ideal is always looking at you like you're not what you should be.

01:35:44.000 And the higher the ideal, the more judgmental the judge.

01:35:47.000 Well, that's why he thought the book of Revelation, first of all, emerged as an unconscious revelation.

01:35:53.000 Which, because Christ comes back at the end of time, so the story goes, as the ultimate judge.

01:36:01.000 And, virtually no one is judged acceptable.

01:36:06.000 Well, why?

01:36:07.000 Well, because by the highest possible.

01:36:09.000 See, speaking psychologically, even biologically for that matter.

01:36:14.000 The idea of Christ is the instantiation of the ideal as such.

01:36:19.000 That's what it is.

01:36:21.000 Now, it might be more than that, but that's what it is.

01:36:23.000 It's whatever a human being would be if a human being was perfect.

01:36:28.000 And it's an effort of our collective imagination to represent that symbolically.

01:36:33.000 Which we do with cathedrals, for example.

01:36:35.000 When we paint the image of Christ against the dome that represents eternity itself.

01:36:39.000 That's the ideal.

01:36:41.000 Now, you might say, well, I don't believe in the ideal.

01:36:43.000 It's like, you're missing the point.

01:36:47.000 You're missing the point.

01:36:48.000 And so, that ideal is a judge.

01:36:51.000 And the farther you are away from that ideal, the harsher the judge.

01:36:55.000 And so, the snake was part of that.

01:36:58.000 Because the thing is, is that if you're low enough and the ideal is high enough,

01:37:02.000 the ideal itself is so judgmental and so detached for you

01:37:05.000 that it starts to look to you like your enemy.

01:37:08.000 And so, that was the painting.

01:37:10.000 And it was like...

01:37:11.000 And I was asking a question.

01:37:12.000 That was the thing, eh?

01:37:13.000 I was asking a question.

01:37:14.000 I was asking, like, what would I have to do to set this...

01:37:18.000 What would I have to do to set the situation that I'm in right?

01:37:22.000 And so, then I drew this picture and the picture had the answer.

01:37:28.000 I mean, artistic production always has the answer.

01:37:31.000 That's where the answers come from, you know?

01:37:33.000 And so, that was a manifestation of imagination.

01:37:35.000 It was part of me attempting in its symbolic mode of personified thinking

01:37:42.000 to deliver a message.

01:37:44.000 And so, I swore that night that I was going to do whatever it took to set myself right.

01:37:51.000 Period.

01:37:52.000 Whatever.

01:37:53.000 And I was dead serious about that.

01:37:55.000 And so, that was the... that was the moment.

01:37:58.000 And then, I don't know what I did with that picture.

01:38:00.000 I hid it in my closet because I was so freaked out by it.

01:38:03.000 I thought, what the hell is this?

01:38:04.000 It's like some schizophrenic nightmare.

01:38:06.000 It's like underneath the covers with that thing.

01:38:09.000 But that was the... and that was... it wasn't long after that that I wrote the first essay

01:38:14.000 that eventually turned into this Maps of Meaning book.

01:38:18.000 It was a poem to begin with, actually.

01:38:20.000 That was how it came about first.

01:38:22.000 So, that's when I decided to be... to straighten myself out.

01:38:28.000 Regardless of... to straighten myself out, that's what I was going to do.

01:38:32.000 So...

01:38:33.000 So, I think this is our 13th show in Europe.

01:38:38.000 We've got a couple more over the next couple of days.

01:38:40.000 And now, it sounds like we're extending for another 30 or 40 probably in the spring.

01:38:43.000 I mean, this thing has just grown and grown and grown.

01:38:47.000 Are you shocked at the amount of people that live in Western societies here in Norway,

01:38:54.000 especially when we were in Sweden a couple of days ago, but all the countries that we've been in,

01:38:58.000 that live in free societies, yet are completely afraid to say what they think?

01:39:04.000 Is it absolutely shocking to you?

01:39:07.000 I think the most... I think what I've been most shocked about in all of that is what's happened in the UK,

01:39:15.000 with the police starting to prosecute people for crimes of offensiveness.

01:39:20.000 That's just... and I think that's probably partly because I'm...

01:39:24.000 And I mean, I see that as broadly reflective of something that's happening in the West in general,

01:39:29.000 but it's particularly shocking and appalling to me as a Western Canadian, you know,

01:39:34.000 because obviously Canada was part of the British Empire,

01:39:37.000 and when I grew up, like, there was a pretty tight affinity still in Western Canada with the British Empire.

01:39:43.000 I mean, our maps were the dominion of Canada, it was still pink, you know,

01:39:48.000 it was still part of the British Empire.

01:39:50.000 We sang God Save the Queen constantly at public gatherings, that's gone by the wayside.

01:39:55.000 And so, and, you know, I've always regarded British common law and the British parliamentary tradition as,

01:40:05.000 well, one of... perhaps the highest achievement of Western civilization.

01:40:10.000 I mean, you could argue about that, but it's in the top ten, let's say.

01:40:14.000 And then to see the Brits, who also have this phenomenal sense of humour,

01:40:19.000 this ability to say anything, no matter how outrageous about anyone,

01:40:23.000 and to include themselves in the joke, right?

01:40:26.000 Which is such an elegant way of expressing comedic freedom.

01:40:32.000 To see them going down this road is just... it's just... it's... it's... it's... what is it exactly?

01:40:40.000 Well, it's deeply saddening, that's for sure.

01:40:43.000 And... and... what's horrifying?

01:40:47.000 And that's not exactly the right word.

01:40:49.000 I don't know what the word for it is.

01:40:50.000 There's certainly sorrow that's associated with it, disbelief.

01:40:53.000 It's also that... at... at... at... at... watching that happen in...

01:40:58.000 in what I still think is, like, the central core of the idea of...

01:41:02.000 individual sovereignty and freedom as expressed across the Western world.

01:41:07.000 And so... and then there's similar manifestations of that everywhere else,

01:41:12.000 but... the police for... prosecuting people for, you know...

01:41:16.000 asking people to turn in their neighbours if they say something offensive.

01:41:20.000 And that's happening in... in the UK.

01:41:22.000 Yeah, literally... well, we saw that, that...

01:41:24.000 you know, somebody sent me posters...

01:41:27.000 pictures of posters in the... in the Scottish subway, in the... in the metro, in the tube,

01:41:32.000 you know, saying...

01:41:34.000 inviting people to inform on their neighbours for being offensive. 0.78

01:41:38.000 It's like, what... what the hell?

01:41:40.000 What... what's... I knew this was coming because... 0.86

01:41:42.000 because... because... I knew...

01:41:46.000 we brought our first... hate speech laws in Canada back in the 1980s.

01:41:50.000 We were... after this character named Ernst Zundel,

01:41:53.000 who is a... particularly despicable piece of work. 0.59

01:41:56.000 Hard hat-wearing, right-wing, anti-Semit, Holocaust denier. 0.98

01:42:00.000 You know, he had it all, that guy. 0.73

01:42:03.000 Um... and... you know... it was his... shenanigans... careless, malevolent shenanigans

01:42:14.000 that enticed Canadians into producing hate speech legislation.

01:42:18.000 I thought, no, that's... that's not good.

01:42:22.000 It's not good.

01:42:23.000 You're making a big mistake.

01:42:24.000 We're gonna pay for this.

01:42:25.000 It's gonna unfold over a long time.

01:42:28.000 Who defines hate?

01:42:31.000 The crucial issue.

01:42:33.000 It's not like it's a scientific category.

01:42:35.000 It's a judgement.

01:42:37.000 And the answer is, those whom you least want to have the power to define it.

01:42:42.000 Because they're the ones that will take that power to themselves.

01:42:45.000 And if you think that isn't gonna affect what you get to say,

01:42:48.000 well, you've got another thing coming.

01:42:50.000 So... I think it's... I think it's...

01:42:56.000 We're gonna pay for it.

01:42:58.000 Hopefully... hopefully we'll wake up and push back before we have to pay too high a price.

01:43:03.000 We're gonna pay for it.

01:43:05.000 So... yeah.

01:43:07.000 And we're gonna deserve to pay for it, too.

01:43:10.000 He's talking to you.

01:43:13.000 Mm-hmm.

01:43:14.000 What...

01:43:16.000 Well...

01:43:17.000 You know...

01:43:19.000 Last night...

01:43:22.000 Last night I was on this British show called Question Time, which is a very famous British show.

01:43:27.000 And there was a... a woman parliamentarian there from Ireland who was pretty bright. 1.00

01:43:32.000 I liked listening to her.

01:43:34.000 But...

01:43:35.000 Um...

01:43:36.000 The... the host asked me about this character named Count Dankula.

01:43:40.000 I don't know if you know about him.

01:43:42.000 Um...

01:43:43.000 His...

01:43:44.000 Girlfriend...

01:43:45.000 He's a comedian.

01:43:46.000 Well, he thinks he's a comedian.

01:43:47.000 And...

01:43:48.000 Well...

01:43:49.000 But...

01:43:50.000 You know...

01:43:51.000 There are lots of comedians who think they're comedians that aren't funny.

01:43:53.000 And...

01:43:54.000 And I'm not saying he's not funny.

01:43:55.000 Because other people think that he's a comedian, too.

01:43:57.000 But...

01:43:58.000 He presents himself as a comedian.

01:43:59.000 Count Dankula. 0.84

01:44:00.000 I mean...

01:44:01.000 That's actually a joke, that name.

01:44:03.000 Um...

01:44:04.000 And his girlfriend had a pug.

01:44:06.000 And...

01:44:07.000 I liked Count Dankula because he hated that pug.

01:44:10.000 And...

01:44:11.000 I'm not...

01:44:12.000 Very fond of pugs.

01:44:13.000 I think they're hideous little creatures.

01:44:15.000 And... 0.71

01:44:16.000 And...

01:44:17.000 And...

01:44:18.000 And...

01:44:19.000 You know, I don't really hate them.

01:44:20.000 If a pug comes along, then I'll pet it and everything.

01:44:22.000 But...

01:44:23.000 It's just sort of like the...

01:44:24.000 The...

01:44:25.000 This little rat-like dog with these bug...

01:44:26.000 You know, if you hit a pug on the back of the head, the eyes will pop out.

01:44:31.000 And so...

01:44:32.000 Because they've been so genetically mishandled.

01:44:35.000 And so...

01:44:36.000 I don't know, man.

01:44:37.000 It's just...

01:44:38.000 You do realize we're putting this on YouTube and you're just on...

01:44:41.000 You're unleashing a whole new world of hate from the pug people. 1.00

01:44:45.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:44:46.000 I know.

01:44:47.000 I know.

01:44:48.000 I know.

01:44:49.000 But whatever.

01:44:50.000 Whatever.

01:44:51.000 So you can have your pug and you can love it. 0.96

01:44:52.000 It's useless.

01:44:53.000 That it was just a miracle.

01:44:54.000 And he loved it to death.

01:44:55.000 And so...

01:44:56.000 And you know, that's fine.

01:44:57.000 That's fine.

01:44:58.000 But...

01:44:59.000 And there's kind of an ironic attitude in the dismissal of pugs.

01:45:02.000 And Dankula didn't like his girlfriend's pug.

01:45:05.000 And so he thought he'd play a mean trick and...

01:45:07.000 Or a mean slash funny trick and teach it to do a Hail Hitler salute. 0.74

01:45:12.000 Which I actually thought was quite funny.

01:45:14.000 It's like...

01:45:15.000 I don't...

01:45:16.000 Look, I don't see that as glorifying Hitler.

01:45:18.000 It's a pug, for God's sake.

01:45:21.000 It wasn't a...

01:45:22.000 It wasn't a...

01:45:23.000 What do you call those?

01:45:24.000 Doberman.

01:45:25.000 You know?

01:45:26.000 It was a pug. 0.63

01:45:27.000 It's like teaching a rat to do a Hail Hitler salute. 0.66

01:45:31.000 I love how this has come down to the breed of dog with you.

01:45:34.000 Well, these things matter in terms of their...

01:45:37.000 Of the way they're represented.

01:45:38.000 You know?

01:45:39.000 And then, you know, he taught it to...

01:45:42.000 It's so horrible.

01:45:43.000 He... 0.99

01:45:44.000 And I'm gonna be so killed for this. 0.87

01:45:47.000 Um...

01:45:48.000 He taught it to do its little salute when he said, 0.94

01:45:51.000 Gas the Jews. 1.00

01:45:52.000 Which is not funny. 0.99

01:45:53.000 You know?

01:45:54.000 Except it's horribly funny.

01:45:56.000 You know?

01:45:57.000 That's the thing.

01:45:58.000 Well, look.

01:45:59.000 And so, yeah, you laugh.

01:46:00.000 That's right. 0.99

01:46:01.000 Because you're all horrible. 1.00

01:46:02.000 And you know... 0.99

01:46:03.000 And you know perfectly well that it's horribly funny.

01:46:06.000 And...

01:46:07.000 And you know we need...

01:46:14.000 We need to be able to be horribly funny.

01:46:17.000 Because life is horrible.

01:46:18.000 And we...

01:46:19.000 And we need to be able to find...

01:46:22.000 We need to be able to allow people the freedom to find the ability to transcend that horror with comedy.

01:46:29.000 And a mark of a free society is that comedians can be just exactly what they are.

01:46:35.000 Which...

01:46:36.000 They're people who push the edge of what's acceptable.

01:46:38.000 And if you're a brilliant comedian, you get right to the edge.

01:46:41.000 Right?

01:46:42.000 And you dance there.

01:46:43.000 And the audience is thinking...

01:46:44.000 Oh...

01:46:45.000 Sarah Silverman's a good example of that.

01:46:46.000 You know?

01:46:47.000 Because you can just see her.

01:46:48.000 She's got all politically correct recently.

01:46:49.000 But...

01:46:50.000 When she was in her heyday, you could just see Sarah.

01:46:52.000 She's so smart.

01:46:53.000 You'd see her sitting there. 0.88

01:46:54.000 And she'd think of something just spectacularly evil and horrible.

01:46:59.000 And she'd think...

01:47:00.000 Oh...

01:47:01.000 And then she'd say it.

01:47:02.000 You know?

01:47:03.000 And everyone would just crack up.

01:47:04.000 Because, like, the darkest part of their soul had once thought something like that.

01:47:08.000 And she dared to utter it.

01:47:10.000 And by uttering it, she also simultaneously transcended it.

01:47:13.000 You know?

01:47:14.000 And that's the beauty of comedy.

01:47:15.000 And...

01:47:16.000 And...

01:47:17.000 Well, so anyways, they went after Dankula and nailed him legally.

01:47:21.000 And I thought...

01:47:22.000 And that's in Great Britain as well.

01:47:23.000 And...

01:47:24.000 Last night...

01:47:25.000 So...

01:47:26.000 They brought this up on Question Time.

01:47:27.000 And...

01:47:28.000 You know?

01:47:29.000 The...

01:47:30.000 The Irish woman... 0.98

01:47:31.000 Who said...

01:47:32.000 She went off on a... 0.94

01:47:33.000 Talk about how terrible Kristallnacht was.

01:47:36.000 And what an awful thing Auschwitz and the Holocaust was. 0.95

01:47:39.000 It's like...

01:47:40.000 Well...

01:47:46.000 It's...

01:47:47.000 It's...

01:47:48.000 You're not that morally virtuous to notice that.

01:47:51.000 You know?

01:47:52.000 You know what I mean?

01:47:53.000 It's like...

01:47:54.000 And it didn't have anything to do with the topic at hand.

01:47:56.000 It's like...

01:47:57.000 Yeah...

01:47:58.000 You wouldn't say that you noticed that unless you were implying that there are people around

01:48:02.000 you...

01:48:03.000 Including this Count Dankula...

01:48:04.000 Who didn't notice that.

01:48:06.000 Okay... 1.00

01:48:07.000 It had nothing to do with whether he should have been prosecuted for his stupid joke. 1.00

01:48:11.000 And... 1.00

01:48:12.000 You can say...

01:48:13.000 Well... 1.00

01:48:14.000 You can say it was a stupid joke. 1.00

01:48:15.000 Which it certainly was. 1.00

01:48:16.000 You can say that it was a hateful joke.

01:48:18.000 Which I don't agree with, by the way.

01:48:20.000 But you could say that.

01:48:21.000 And I think you could...

01:48:22.000 You can make a credible case for that.

01:48:24.000 But then to say that because you think that the Holocaust was bad...

01:48:28.000 He should be criminally prosecuted.

01:48:30.000 And it's like...

01:48:31.000 No.

01:48:32.000 Sorry, man.

01:48:33.000 You've crossed the line.

01:48:34.000 And there's no excuse for it.

01:48:36.000 And so...

01:48:37.000 That's part of what's...

01:48:39.000 Worrisome about the state of discourse in the free West.

01:48:43.000 That...

01:48:44.000 Same thing.

01:48:45.000 Comedians won't go to university campuses. 0.96

01:48:47.000 It's the same thing.

01:48:48.000 You don't get to be funny.

01:48:50.000 So...

01:48:51.000 And if you can't be funny, then you're not free.

01:48:53.000 You know?

01:48:54.000 The jester in the king's court is the only person who gets to tell the truth.

01:48:58.000 And if the king is such a tyrant that he kills his jester, then you know that the evil king is in charge.

01:49:03.000 And so when we can't tolerate our comedians, it's like, well, there you go.

01:49:07.000 There are the canaries in the coal mine, as far as I'm concerned.

01:49:09.000 So...

01:49:10.000 So...

01:49:11.000 You know, I promised my wife that I wouldn't hit any hornets with...

01:49:28.000 Any hornets' nests with sticks for like a day.

01:49:31.000 And now I just hit a big hornet's nest with a stick.

01:49:34.000 So...

01:49:35.000 Sorry, Tammy.

01:49:36.000 She's here somewhere.

01:49:37.000 Yeah.

01:49:38.000 Give it up for Jordan's wife, by the way. 1.00

01:49:39.000 She's been on this entire tour.

01:49:50.000 All right, so let's...

01:49:51.000 David's fault.

01:49:52.000 Yeah.

01:49:53.000 Let's shift gears a little bit.

01:49:54.000 What has been the best part of this adventure, of this tour, for you, personally?

01:50:02.000 Oh, well, the best part happens all the time.

01:50:07.000 The best part...

01:50:09.000 I think I told this story tonight, though I'm not sure, because I talked to a bunch of journalists today,

01:50:15.000 so I can't remember when I told this story, but this guy came up to me last night.

01:50:19.000 He was a kind of a pierced guy, rough-looking guy.

01:50:22.000 And about...

01:50:23.000 He's probably in his late 20s, maybe early 30s.

01:50:26.000 He said,

01:50:28.000 I've been smoking drug-free for nine months.

01:50:33.000 And I said, hey, good work, man.

01:50:35.000 Because he looked pretty pleased about that.

01:50:37.000 I said, well, you know, hopefully that's a lot better.

01:50:41.000 And he said, it's a lot better.

01:50:42.000 And I said, well, good for you, for sticking it out.

01:50:44.000 And I hope you can continue it.

01:50:46.000 And I meant that, because I did mean good for you, and I hope you can stick it out.

01:50:49.000 And he knew I meant that, because he wouldn't have bloody well told me that to begin with,

01:50:53.000 if he didn't think that that was going to be the response.

01:50:55.000 And then he said, I got nine of my mates to do the same thing.

01:50:59.000 Wow.

01:51:00.000 Yeah, I thought, right on, man, that's great.

01:51:03.000 And then, you know, this...

01:51:04.000 I was in Birmingham two nights ago, and I walked out of the hotel,

01:51:07.000 and this kid, working-class kid, came up to me, you know, just out of the blue,

01:51:11.000 and he said, thank you very much for elevating my vision.

01:51:14.000 I thought, hey, look, it's really a good thing to be able to go around the world

01:51:18.000 and to have people stop you on the street and say things like that to you.

01:51:21.000 It's like, that's as good as it gets, you know.

01:51:23.000 And people are telling me stories like that all the time.

01:51:26.000 They come up and they say, well, you've watched this.

01:51:28.000 It happens all the time.

01:51:30.000 People come up and they tell me some way that their house was out of order, you know.

01:51:35.000 They're hopeless and nihilistic and drinking too much 0.64

01:51:40.000 and watching too much pornography and procrastinating too much

01:51:44.000 and being not serious with their relationship

01:51:46.000 and not getting along with their parents

01:51:48.000 and, you know, not formulating a vision and not growing up.

01:51:51.000 And, well, you know, there's just endless ways that you can descend

01:51:55.000 into a kind of, what would you call it, a kind of grungy,

01:52:00.000 filthy carpet-infested hell.

01:52:04.000 And so, and then they say, look, I've been watching your lectures

01:52:09.000 and I've developed a plan for my life

01:52:12.000 and I've been trying to be more responsible

01:52:14.000 and I've been really trying to tell the truth

01:52:16.000 and I mended my relationship with my father

01:52:19.000 and I got married to my girlfriend

01:52:21.000 and now I have a flat and I quit doing drugs

01:52:23.000 and I've just tripled my salary in the last year

01:52:26.000 and I didn't commit suicide like I was going to six months ago.

01:52:31.000 I think I have, I don't know, out of the 150 people that I talk to each night,

01:52:36.000 I would say probably over the course of the lecture series

01:52:40.000 there's probably 10 people like that a night who tell me that.

01:52:43.000 And so, see, because I believe what I said tonight,

01:52:47.000 I believe that the individual is sovereign

01:52:50.000 and that individual sovereignty is the cornerstone of reality itself

01:52:56.000 and it's the cornerstone of the state

01:52:59.000 and it's the cornerstone of reality itself.

01:53:01.000 I truly believe that to be the case.

01:53:03.000 That every time I hear someone say, look, I've got my act together,

01:53:07.000 I think that's one more weight on, you know,

01:53:12.000 if the scales are always tilting towards good or towards evil,

01:53:16.000 then every time someone decides to straighten themselves up,

01:53:19.000 they take a major weight off the evil side

01:53:22.000 and they put it on the good side and it's not trivial.

01:53:25.000 And I believe that that's what the redemption of the world depends on.

01:53:28.000 It's not political. It happens at the level of the individual.

01:53:32.000 Just like the descent into totalitarian catastrophe

01:53:35.000 occurs when people abandon their sovereign responsibility,

01:53:38.000 which I think is the most accurate way of diagnosing

01:53:41.000 what happened in the 20th century.

01:53:43.000 So whenever someone comes up to me and says, I was not doing so well

01:53:47.000 and here's, you know, three ways where I've really put my life together,

01:53:50.000 we have a little 15-second party and we both know why.

01:53:54.000 And so that's as good as it gets.

01:53:57.000 And so that's happening constantly.

01:53:59.000 And I feel, generally speaking, that these events are like,

01:54:02.000 they're celebrations of that.

01:54:04.000 And so interesting to watch the media miss this completely.

01:54:07.000 It's like they don't have the conceptual, what would you say?

01:54:14.000 They don't have the conceptual tools to understand that something might be happening

01:54:21.000 that's worthy of note outside the purely conventional confines of, you know,

01:54:28.000 the stultifying and dull political discourse.

01:54:32.000 But it doesn't matter.

01:54:34.000 It might be nice if it didn't happen.

01:54:36.000 It doesn't fundamentally matter because I'm a psychologist.

01:54:40.000 I decided a long time ago that the individual was the right level of analysis.

01:54:44.000 And so it's an absolute, it's not a pleasure.

01:54:51.000 It's not the right way of thinking about it.

01:54:53.000 What's rule seven?

01:54:57.000 Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient.

01:55:00.000 This is the most deeply meaningful thing that I can envision doing.

01:55:04.000 So that's great.

01:55:06.000 It's great.

01:55:07.000 It's hard.

01:55:08.000 Great is hard.

01:55:10.000 When something great happens, that's hard, right?

01:55:13.000 It's not something trivial.

01:55:15.000 But it doesn't matter because it's great.

01:55:19.000 And so every time someone says to me, I'm better.

01:55:24.000 I'm getting along with my father.

01:55:26.000 I've married my girlfriend.

01:55:28.000 We're going to have a child.

01:55:29.000 We weren't going to have children.

01:55:30.000 Now we're going to have children.

01:55:32.000 I think, that's one more.

01:55:34.000 So that's great, man.

01:55:37.000 Tell the audience a little bit about Jordan Peterson having fun.

01:55:54.000 We did serious Jordan Peterson.

01:55:56.000 What's Peterson doing for fun?

01:56:02.000 I stumped him, actually.

01:56:05.000 Well, it's not like I don't...

01:56:08.000 It's like most of what I've always done for fun in my life has been to play, you know.

01:56:15.000 And so when I had little kids, I played with them all the time.

01:56:18.000 And my kids are grown up and I play with them all the time.

01:56:21.000 And my daughter is so playful, despite her rather catastrophic life up to this point.

01:56:28.000 And she's much better, but...

01:56:30.000 Is that every single thing she says, you know, when she's not delivering...

01:56:38.000 Like, when she's not focused on talking to people about a serious topic.

01:56:44.000 Everything she says is a joke.

01:56:46.000 You know, and my son is ridiculously teasy and playful.

01:56:49.000 And so that's fun.

01:56:51.000 And when they were little kids, we just played all the time.

01:56:54.000 And so I really like that.

01:56:56.000 And most of the people who've been my close friends have been people like that.

01:57:01.000 They play with their speech all the time.

01:57:04.000 Which is why I think I get along with comedians.

01:57:06.000 You know, it's like, it's partly why we travel well together.

01:57:08.000 And John, my tour manager, who's a great guy and very, very useful.

01:57:12.000 He's also a comedian.

01:57:13.000 And Rogan's a comedian.

01:57:14.000 And so many of the people that I've got along with are comedians.

01:57:17.000 And the best interviews I've had have been with comedians.

01:57:20.000 Because there's that element of play.

01:57:23.000 So I really like that.

01:57:24.000 On this tour, there's not a lot of fun, I wouldn't say.

01:57:29.000 We had a good time when we went to the comedy club in...

01:57:32.000 Salt Lake City.

01:57:33.000 Salt Lake City.

01:57:34.000 That was fun.

01:57:35.000 That was 45 minutes of fun.

01:57:36.000 And I had some fun at Cambridge.

01:57:38.000 I had some fun at...

01:57:40.000 Just to be clear, I brought Jordan up as the surprise guest.

01:57:43.000 I did about an hour of stand-up.

01:57:44.000 And then I brought Jordan up.

01:57:46.000 And we did...

01:57:47.000 We sort of did stand-up together.

01:57:48.000 We just kind of riffed for about 45 minutes.

01:57:50.000 And people were...

01:57:51.000 Yeah, it was fun.

01:57:52.000 They were thrilled.

01:57:53.000 And they loved seeing you laugh.

01:57:54.000 Yeah, well, I did.

01:57:55.000 I was at the Cambridge Union just a couple of days ago.

01:57:57.000 And I was in a fairly high-spirited mood.

01:57:59.000 And I had a fair bit of fun with the students there.

01:58:02.000 It was still serious.

01:58:03.000 But, you know, what I really like...

01:58:06.000 The times in my life that I've had the best time is when I'm sitting around with a variety of people who are very amusing.

01:58:12.000 And all they're trying to do is to outwit each other with something absurd and funny.

01:58:17.000 And it was really a part of...

01:58:19.000 I don't know if it's a part of Scandinavian culture or not.

01:58:22.000 But in the West, where I grew up, which is a working-class culture.

01:58:28.000 I mean, most of what my friends and I did with regards to conversation was like half-witted upmanship.

01:58:39.000 I guess that's what it is.

01:58:41.000 Your goal was to say something funnier than the person just before you said.

01:58:44.000 And so it was competitive humor.

01:58:46.000 And I really, really like that a lot.

01:58:48.000 And so when I'm able, that's great relief.

01:58:53.000 But this tour, like it's very tightly scheduled.

01:58:57.000 Crazily tightly scheduled.

01:58:59.000 And Tammy and I decided at the beginning that, because it was such an absurd opportunity, that it was a working tour.

01:59:06.000 You know, and that we were going to subordinate everything to making sure that these shows went as well as they possibly could.

01:59:14.000 And that we would take whatever refuge and amusement we could, you know, where we could steal it.

01:59:20.000 And we've had some of that.

01:59:22.000 I mean, the last time we were in Oslo, we walked up to the sculpture gardens.

01:59:26.000 And so that was really cool.

01:59:27.000 And we walked down the boulevard.

01:59:29.000 And we only had about an hour and a half to take a look around the city.

01:59:32.000 But it was a nice hour and a half.

01:59:34.000 You know, the sun was out and we enjoyed ourselves.

01:59:37.000 And so that's rule 12, right?

01:59:40.000 Pet a cat on the street when you see one, when you encounter one.

01:59:44.000 And you take your joy where you can get it.

01:59:47.000 And you don't complain if it's not happening perhaps as often as it should.

01:59:52.000 Especially when you're given, like we have been, this absolutely improbable adventure.

02:00:00.000 And we'll have time, hopefully, God willing, knock on wood with some luck for some more fun in the future.

02:00:11.000 Well, that's actually quite a segue to my next question, which is, because you talk about stories so much and the importance of stories,

02:00:23.000 does the Jordan Peterson story have a happy ending?

02:00:27.000 And does that even matter?

02:00:28.000 Or what do you think the ending of the Jordan Peterson story is?

02:00:32.000 I don't have any idea.

02:00:39.000 You know, when I was, from the time I was about 20, I kind of had a sense of what would happen to me.

02:00:49.000 I had some sense of it.

02:00:51.000 But only, it really only extended until I was about my age, 50, something like that.

02:00:59.000 And I didn't know what would, I didn't have a vision for after that.

02:01:04.000 See, I thought, when I wrote Maps of Meaning, I remember telling one of my peers, I said,

02:01:16.000 I think everyone will think the way that I think in this book in 50 years.

02:01:21.000 And he said, well, that's a pretty grandiose claim, I guess, that was it.

02:01:28.000 Something like, well, fair enough, you know.

02:01:31.000 But by the same token, I wasn't taking credit for the ideas.

02:01:36.000 Like, I was taking some credit for clarifying them.

02:01:41.000 The ideas were already there.

02:01:44.000 They're everywhere, those ideas.

02:01:46.000 But clarifying them is something.

02:01:48.000 And so I knew that what I was working on in Maps of Meaning was at the center of things in some sense.

02:01:55.000 And that manifested itself in my teaching career.

02:02:00.000 Because, well, I taught at Harvard for six years.

02:02:02.000 And the course there, which was based on my book, was very, very popular.

02:02:07.000 And students regarded it as life-changing.

02:02:10.000 And the same thing happened at the University of Toronto.

02:02:12.000 And so I knew that that power was in those ideas.

02:02:17.000 But I don't see my future very clearly from here on in.

02:02:25.000 You know, over the next year, I'm going to do more of what I'm doing.

02:02:29.000 I want to return to Exodus. 0.99

02:02:32.000 I like doing those biblical lectures.

02:02:34.000 I thought that was useful and important.

02:02:36.000 So I want to do that.

02:02:38.000 But my vision kind of runs out in December of 2019.

02:02:43.000 And I don't know what, because all of this is so unlikely.

02:02:49.000 You know, I thought, for the last two years, every single day, I thought,

02:02:53.000 well, this has got to come to an end. 0.96

02:02:55.000 Like, this is ridiculous. 0.98

02:02:57.000 And this is ridiculous. 0.99

02:02:58.000 It can't continue. 0.97

02:03:00.000 But it is continuing.

02:03:02.000 And so I have no idea.

02:03:04.000 How do you predict something like that?

02:03:06.000 I mean, for the longest time, I thought that as this wave grew,

02:03:11.000 the probability that I would end up like a surfer smashed on the beach

02:03:15.000 was the highest probability outcome.

02:03:18.000 And I still probably think that that's the highest probability outcome.

02:03:23.000 But I'm not as apprehensive about that now as I was. 0.95

02:03:29.000 Because, in some sense, assuming I don't do anything spectacularly stupid like defend Count Dankula on Dave Rubin.

02:03:40.000 The people who would have liked to have taken me out have thrown the worst that they could throw at me, as far as I can tell. 0.50

02:04:00.000 I mean, my cardinal day in terms of vilification, and it's quite a contest, by the way, because there were many days like that,

02:04:09.000 was the day where I was simultaneously accused by an alt-right magazine of being a Jewish shill,

02:04:16.000 and accused by a Jewish magazine of being tantamount to Hitler himself.

02:04:23.000 And I thought, well, that pretty much does it. 0.63

02:04:26.000 It's like, the Nazis hate me because I'm a Jewish shill.

02:04:29.000 And, well, this particular Jewish publication, you know, compared me to Hitler.

02:04:34.000 And I thought, well, that's it.

02:04:35.000 Where else do you go after that?

02:04:37.000 Are you going to call me Mao?

02:04:38.000 It's like, it's the rarity.

02:04:40.000 That's just not that much past Hitler. 0.98

02:04:42.000 And so, you know, and so I'm not that concerned that in the absence of some fatal stupidity on my part, 1.00

02:04:51.000 which certainly could still happen because we have that proclivity for fatal stupidity within all of us, 0.99

02:04:58.000 I'm not too concerned that I'm going to be taken out by my ideological opponents. 0.98

02:05:03.000 But, by the same token, this is a pretty unwieldy and unprecedented situation to be in.

02:05:10.000 And so, I'm not under any illusions about its stability or safety.

02:05:16.000 So, who knows, man?

02:05:20.000 Well, I'll stick with you as long as you'll keep me.

02:05:22.000 So, there you go.

02:05:23.000 So far, so good.

02:05:24.000 All right.

02:05:25.000 So, I promised you guys that I was going to take what I thought was the best question from you guys.

02:05:28.000 And there were hundreds of them.

02:05:30.000 I was reading through them during the lecture.

02:05:32.000 But I thought this was the best we got out of Oslo.

02:05:38.000 Will you move to Oslo and run for Prime Minister of Norway?

02:05:41.000 Well, first, you probably want someone who can speak Norwegian.

02:06:06.000 And second, more seriously, throughout my life, I've considered a political career.

02:06:15.000 And certainly, when I was young, very seriously, that was my ambition.

02:06:19.000 Until I was about 18.

02:06:22.000 But, yeah.

02:06:25.000 It started when I ran for an executive position in the Socialist Party in my home province when I was 14.

02:06:35.000 And so, that was the first large-scale public speech I gave to about 700 people.

02:06:41.000 Wait, can everyone pause for one second?

02:06:42.000 Try to picture 14-year-old socialist Jordan Peterson.

02:06:46.000 That's an incredible image to me.

02:06:48.000 What was that kid like?

02:06:50.000 Like me.

02:06:52.000 It's kind of, you know, I could speak to a crowd then.

02:06:58.000 The speech was very successful.

02:07:00.000 I lost the position by 13 votes out of 700, something like that.

02:07:06.000 And, you know, I had the audience under...

02:07:11.000 I had the audience, you know.

02:07:13.000 So, you know, there's certain things about you that remain constant.

02:07:22.000 Hopefully, I know more than I did then.

02:07:25.000 You know, that's to be devoutly hoped for.

02:07:28.000 I stopped actively pursuing a political career when I was 18.

02:07:36.000 And the reason for that was because I became more interested in something else.

02:07:41.000 Which is what I was talking about tonight.

02:07:43.000 Because it turned out that the political problems that I was interested in were deep enough, arguably, not to be political.

02:07:57.000 Because they were really...

02:07:59.000 For some reason, I was very interested in totalitarianism right from the time I was like an adolescent.

02:08:05.000 I don't know why exactly.

02:08:08.000 Who the hell knows why you get interested in what you're interested in?

02:08:12.000 Some problem.

02:08:13.000 You know, this is a thing that's useful to know about life.

02:08:16.000 You know, all of you have problems that bother you.

02:08:21.000 And you think, well, I don't want to have a problem.

02:08:24.000 And, fair enough.

02:08:25.000 But, like, there's a whole lot of problems you could have that could bother you.

02:08:28.000 Because there's lots of things wrong with the world.

02:08:30.000 And you could be obsessed by, like, a million problems, right?

02:08:33.000 Because there's just problems everywhere.

02:08:35.000 But you're not.

02:08:37.000 Some problems grab you.

02:08:40.000 Why?

02:08:43.000 It's a mystery.

02:08:45.000 It's the mystery of the autonomy of being, in some sense.

02:08:49.000 A problem grabs you and it won't let you go.

02:08:52.000 There's suffering in that.

02:08:54.000 That's your problem.

02:08:56.000 And, you know, in that problem might be your destiny.

02:08:58.000 I think that's right.

02:09:00.000 The problems that grip you are the portal to your destiny.

02:09:05.000 And so, well, then you can accept them.

02:09:09.000 It's like, what are you going to have?

02:09:10.000 No problems?

02:09:11.000 Good luck with that.

02:09:13.000 So, you've got your problems.

02:09:15.000 One of the things you learn as a therapist is you don't interfere with people's problems.

02:09:18.000 And what I mean by that is this.

02:09:22.000 Let's say you come to me and, you know, we have a discussion about what's going wrong in your life.

02:09:28.000 And I listen because I want you to explain what the problems are.

02:09:31.000 Because what do I know about your life?

02:09:33.000 It's like, I need to listen so that I can hear what your problem is.

02:09:39.000 And not rush to a conclusion.

02:09:41.000 And then I want to listen while you generate a solution.

02:09:45.000 Now, I'm going to help by asking questions and help you explore.

02:09:48.000 But if I, let's say you lay out your problem and I think, hey, I know what would fix that.

02:09:53.000 And then I just say to you, well, you know, here's a solution.

02:09:57.000 Well, first of all, you're going to be very annoyed about that.

02:09:59.000 Because I just took your problem.

02:10:03.000 And it was up to you to wrestle with that problem and come up with a solution.

02:10:07.000 And then to have a little self-congratulatory burst of pleasure at your own intuitive genius that you could solve your problem.

02:10:18.000 And then you're motivated because you've come up with a solution.

02:10:20.000 Maybe you go implement it.

02:10:22.000 Right?

02:10:23.000 And so, well, so my problem became something that wasn't political.

02:10:29.000 And so I pursued that.

02:10:30.000 And so I'm not going to pursue a political career.

02:10:32.000 And I've also decided to, I didn't know this, but I don't have the temperament for it.

02:10:37.000 I couldn't do it.

02:10:39.000 I find the adversarial interviews that I'm in, for example, they take me like, it takes me three days to recover from one of those.

02:10:48.000 Well, it does because I don't like that mode of discourse.

02:10:54.000 And if you're political, you're in that mode of discourse all the time.

02:10:58.000 And I'm not cut out for it.

02:11:01.000 Like, I'm not a particularly combative person by nature.

02:11:06.000 I'm a person who's terrified about leaving monsters under the rug ignored.

02:11:16.000 But that is not the same thing.

02:11:17.000 And it's not like I enjoy the process of calling them out and hashing them through.

02:11:23.000 But I think, well, better get at them while they're small.

02:11:26.000 So, no, I'm not coming to Norway.

02:11:31.000 That's the answer to that question.

02:11:34.000 All right.

02:11:35.000 Well, on that note, I've said this to you privately before, but I may as well say it publicly since we're putting this up on the YouTube.

02:11:41.000 This, what we're doing here, this started as a professional joy for me, but it has become a personal joy that I can't explain.

02:11:48.000 I am better than when we started.

02:11:50.000 Like, I know what it's like to be these people that are taking these ideas in and changing.

02:11:54.000 And I'm better.

02:11:55.000 And it's because of the work that you've put into your life that you've helped give to all of us.

02:12:01.000 So, I want to thank you for that.

02:12:04.000 And on that note, I've never ended a show like this before, but I'm going to get out of the way.

02:12:08.000 And I need you guys to go bananas for Dr. Jordan Peterson.

02:12:12.000 Thank you, guys.

02:12:15.000 If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up Dad's books, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos.

02:12:26.000 Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

02:12:31.000 See jordanbpeterson.com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

02:12:37.000 I really hope you enjoyed this podcast.

02:12:39.000 If you did, please leave a rating at Apple Podcasts, a comment, a review, or share this episode with a friend.

02:12:44.000 Thanks for tuning in and talk to you next week.

02:12:47.000 Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson,

02:12:53.000 on Facebook, at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram, at jordan.b.peterson.

02:13:00.000 Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books,

02:13:08.000 can be found on my website, jordanbpeterson.com.

02:13:12.000 My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their pasts, understand themselves in the present,

02:13:19.000 and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future, can be found at selfauthoring.com.

02:13:25.000 That's selfauthoring.com.

02:13:28.000 From the Westwood One Podcast Network.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - November 17, 2019

Being a victim

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