The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Ben Shapiro

00:00:00.960 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:00:06.480 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.

00:00:12.740 We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.

00:00:20.100 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.

00:00:27.420 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.

00:00:35.360 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.

00:00:41.800 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.

00:00:47.460 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:00:57.420 Thank you.

00:01:27.400 I'm in Denver, Colorado today. It's May 7th, 2018.

00:01:32.040 I'm going to give the fourth talk of my American 12 Rules for Life tour tonight, or maybe it's the fifth.

00:01:38.560 First one was Toronto, then Washington, then Chicago, then Detroit, now Denver.

00:01:44.080 So yes, I guess that's the fifth.

00:01:45.540 I'm announcing the remaining venues today in the U.S. where tickets are still available, and the dates and places for my Canadian tour.

00:01:55.980 Ten Canadian cities in July.

00:01:58.200 So there's tickets remaining to 10 venues in the United States.

00:02:02.040 On May 23rd, Philadelphia.

00:02:05.680 On May 29th, Houston.

00:02:08.800 On June 8th, Richmond.

00:02:11.960 On June 10th, Charlotte.

00:02:14.320 June 12th, Nashville.

00:02:17.020 June 14th, Louisville.

00:02:19.680 June 15th, Indianapolis.

00:02:21.980 June 16th, June 16th, Milwaukee.

00:02:25.440 June 25th, Portland.

00:02:28.240 June 25th, Sacramento.

00:02:31.780 And in between all that, on Wednesday, June 5th, I'll also be in Rikjevic in Iceland.

00:02:37.680 So tickets are available for those.

00:02:39.860 And then I'm going to be touring Canada in July and August.

00:02:43.680 On the 19th, in Toronto.

00:02:45.660 On the 20th, in Hamilton.

00:02:47.680 That's July again.

00:02:49.220 21st, in London, Ontario.

00:02:52.220 22nd, in Kitchener.

00:02:54.140 On the 23rd, in Ottawa.

00:02:56.640 On the 26th, in Vancouver.

00:02:58.940 On the 27th, in Calgary.

00:03:01.480 On the 28th, in Edmonton.

00:03:03.100 In August, on the 14th, at Regina.

00:03:08.560 And on August 15th, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

00:03:12.760 You can find out more about that if you go to JordanBPeterson.com and look up events.

00:03:19.740 That's JordanBPeterson.com under events.

00:03:23.540 Also in this video is a discussion that I recently did.

00:03:27.440 Last week, in fact, it was just released with Ben Shapiro

00:03:30.280 as part of his new Sunday podcast initiative.

00:03:34.260 And I think we had a very good conversation.

00:03:36.840 And so the rest of this video was taken up with the conversation that I had with Ben.

00:03:42.440 I think we got farther on the issue of how human perception and cognitive function

00:03:49.600 is nested inside a fundamental narrative substrate.

00:03:52.980 And we related that to modern findings, neuropsychology related to hemispheric function.

00:03:59.060 I think it was an excellent discussion.

00:04:00.660 And so I'm very happy to bring it to you.

00:04:02.560 There's some ads in it because I took it directly from Ben's video.

00:04:06.280 So anyway, so that's the tour.

00:04:08.440 Philadelphia, Houston, Richmond, Charlotte, Nashville, Louisville, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Portland, and Sacramento.

00:04:15.360 And that's all in June and May.

00:04:18.980 And then Rick Javik in June as well.

00:04:21.700 And then the Canada tour in July and August.

00:04:24.160 Toronto, Hamilton, London, Kitchener, Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, and Saskatoon.

00:04:31.500 And as I said, you can find out about that at JordanBPeterson.com events.

00:04:37.340 Thank you very much.

00:04:38.620 And I hope that you can come to one of the talks.

00:04:41.860 They seem to be going really well so far.

00:04:44.220 We've sold out a very large number of them.

00:04:47.420 And the people seem quite enthusiastic.

00:04:49.760 And I've been able to get farther in my thinking than I was in my book.

00:04:54.700 And each of the talks is designed to illuminate a different element of, let's say, the 12 rules and the topics that are associated with that.

00:05:04.940 So thanks very much.

00:05:06.500 And I hope you enjoy the discussion with Ben Shapiro.

00:05:09.580 Okay, so I could not be more excited to speak with Jordan Peterson.

00:05:15.220 Well, as Jordan knows, before the show, we talk for an hour before the show just about interesting things we should have caught on tape.

00:05:20.180 But now we're actually going to get a chance to do it live.

00:05:22.500 So here is Jordan's new book.

00:05:24.320 If you haven't bought it yet, everybody on planet has bought this book.

00:05:26.700 I was walking through the office today.

00:05:27.880 We didn't have a copy in the office.

00:05:29.360 The person at the front desk had a copy of your book just sitting on her desk.

00:05:31.540 So that's the way this works.

00:05:33.220 12 Rules for Life, an antidote to Cass.

00:05:35.300 Fantastic book, obviously topping all the bestseller lists all over the world.

00:05:38.460 Jordan, thanks so much for joining the show.

00:05:39.680 I really appreciate it.

00:05:40.500 Thanks for the invitation.

00:05:41.840 Well, you know, obviously your prominence has just blown up in the last year and a half.

00:05:46.740 We were talking before the show about why that is and why there are so many people who suddenly are very angry about you.

00:05:51.480 I noticed there's an article in Politico suggesting that young, angry white males, you are now their leader.

00:05:56.600 So congratulations.

00:05:57.420 Oh, yes.

00:05:58.740 I wanted to ask you about that.

00:05:59.820 Why do you think that, number one, your profile has become so big of late?

00:06:04.080 And number two, why do you think it is that so many members of the left are so angry about that?

00:06:08.880 Why are they characterizing people who listen to you as angry, enraged, young white men?

00:06:12.620 Well, we could look at the characterization to begin with, you know, because I think it speaks to the pathology of the radical left instantly.

00:06:20.020 They're absolutely incapable of viewing the world except through group identity terms. 0.99

00:06:24.380 You know, and so if someone comes out and disagrees with them, then they have to characterize them by their fundamental group attribute, whatever that happens to be.

00:06:32.600 Maybe it's gender because that's a favorite or maybe it's race. 0.97

00:06:35.940 And so angry white men, young, there we go, sexist, ageist and racist all at once, right? 0.98

00:06:41.320 They're angry, young, white men. 0.95

00:06:43.560 Well, it has to be that way if you're going to play the leftist game because that's the only way that you can look at the world.

00:06:51.400 And then if you can't make your opponent reprehensible in some manner, and it's strange that they would attempt to make them reprehensible on the grounds of race, age and sex,

00:07:01.400 since that's precisely what they stand against, hypothetically.

00:07:04.260 But if you can't make your enemy reprehensible along some dimension, then you have to contend with them seriously.

00:07:11.440 And so, you know, if I'm not an alt-right fascist like Hitler, you know, or Milo Yiannopoulos, which was how I was characterized in Canada,

00:07:18.600 because the radical leftists can't even get their bloody insults straight.

00:07:22.080 He's like Hitler or Milo Yiannopoulos.

00:07:24.660 It's like, because there's no difference between them, right?

00:07:26.760 No obvious difference.

00:07:28.140 It's just another attempt to pillory as far as I can tell. 0.99

00:07:31.440 And I think that it's dreadful.

00:07:34.460 I really think it is.

00:07:35.700 There was an article written by, I believe, the editor of the New York Review of Books that was just republished in the Globe and Mail,

00:07:42.100 talking about the emergence of hyper-masculinity and how I was somehow responsible for that or contributing to it, like Mussolini.

00:07:49.800 And I read that and I thought, yeah, like Mussolini.

00:07:52.580 And I thought, okay, so what are you doing?

00:07:55.920 I see.

00:07:57.180 You're defining masculinity.

00:07:59.360 You're conflating masculinity and hyper-masculinity at the same time.

00:08:03.560 Then you're virtue signaling by being against hyper-masculinity.

00:08:07.160 But really what you're trying to do is bring down whatever it is that's masculinity.

00:08:12.000 And what masculinity is in this frame is something like competence.

00:08:16.080 And so it's part of the radical leftist's general war on competence as well, which I think is one of the most pernicious elements of the culture wars, the dissolution of hierarchies, the assumption that every hierarchy has to be based on power and serve the needs of your group, whatever that happens to be, that there's no such thing as competence.

00:08:36.440 And so, and then the other thing that's reprehensible about it, because that's not enough, is that it's just wrong.

00:08:43.640 Like, there's, I've got tens of thousands of letters from people, and people come up to me all the time on the street.

00:08:50.740 I'll give you an example.

00:08:51.860 This is a great story.

00:08:52.820 This is really touching.

00:08:54.200 So I was in L.A. about a month and a half ago, and I was downtown L.A., and downtown L.A. is kind of rough.

00:09:00.400 And I was wandering around, and with my wife, and this young guy pulled a car up beside me and hopped out.

00:09:07.360 And he was kind of a stylish looking 21-year-old Latino guy, something like that.

00:09:10.800 He was all excited.

00:09:12.240 He said, he asked me who I was, and I told him, and he, you know, that's what he had presumed.

00:09:16.280 And so he was kind of excited about that.

00:09:17.640 And he said, look, I've watched all your lectures, and it's really helped me, and I've been straightening out my life and trying to get my room clean.

00:09:23.220 And he laughed about that.

00:09:24.260 But, you know, developing some aims and trying to tell the truth.

00:09:26.780 And look, I've really fixed up my relationship with my father.

00:09:30.440 And so then he said, wait, wait, just wait a minute.

00:09:32.240 And I thought, sure, sure.

00:09:33.840 And so he went back in the car, and he got his father out of his car, and he came over with his dad.

00:09:38.520 And, like, they had their arms around each other, and he said, look, we've really improved our relationship.

00:09:42.060 And they were both smiling away.

00:09:43.520 And, you know, that's, man, if you're going to target me for that, just go right ahead, man.

00:09:48.760 Yeah, it sounds real white supremacist.

00:09:50.040 Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:09:50.720 And it's, wherever I go now, and this is one of the things, this is the thing that's so wonderful about that, all of this, as far as I'm concerned, is that people come up to me all the time.

00:10:00.520 And that's exactly what they say. 0.97

00:10:01.940 They say, look, I was lost, aimless, depressed, nihilistic, anxious, drug addicted, alcoholic, wasting my time, masturbating too much. 0.90

00:10:13.100 Although they don't generally use that particular example, you know, lost, essentially, and hopeless in some sense.

00:10:22.160 And I've been watching your lectures, and they've really helped, and I've really been putting my life together, and I've been trying to say what I believe to be true, and develop a vision.

00:10:29.640 And it's really helped.

00:10:31.000 And, like, and it's so overwhelming, you know, like, if I'm doing book signings after a talk, then there'll be a dozen people or more who, and these aren't, and, like, I'm only talking to people for about 15 seconds, but you can have a very intense conversation in 15 seconds.

00:10:48.660 And they'll say, look, you know, like, I was suicidal, man.

00:10:51.440 Like, I was really hanging on to the edge of the earth by my fingernails, and I'm better.

00:10:57.340 And they have tears in their eyes.

00:10:58.600 It's like, little of that goes a long way, man.

00:11:01.940 Well, I think that when I look at your rise, and look, I talk to people who love what you do.

00:11:07.740 I mean, every time I go on the road, and I'm speaking at a campus, you're the number one name that gets mentioned by people who come to my lectures.

00:11:14.940 And I think that the reason for that that I've seen is really twofold.

00:11:18.300 One is that one of the things that you really talk a lot about is the notion of self-discipline and purpose in your life and control,

00:11:25.020 and the idea that you are in control of your decision-making, and your decision-making matters.

00:11:28.680 That's one.

00:11:29.460 And the other is that you have a unique capacity to say no to things.

00:11:34.260 And when somebody says something to you that is illogical but popular, that you have the capacity to say no.

00:11:38.980 That's what happened in that Kathy Newman interview, that somebody was saying something to you that made no sense,

00:11:42.720 and you just said, well, no, and then you just stood on that no.

00:11:46.080 And when you stand on that no, I think it gives people a lot of courage.

00:11:48.820 Yeah, well, I mean, the gender issue is really an interesting one because one of my professional domains of expertise is individual differences.

00:11:57.340 I'm a personality psychologist, and so I know the gender difference literature.

00:12:02.400 And it's a very solid literature.

00:12:05.260 Well, first of all, it's very solid.

00:12:07.440 It has a 30-year history.

00:12:09.500 Once a psychologist got the personality models down, so that would be the big five model, all empirically derived, straight statistics, right?

00:12:16.600 Brute force empiricism.

00:12:18.200 Nobody had a theoretical axe to grind with the big five except to say maybe there are human traits.

00:12:24.780 Maybe they're encapsulated in language.

00:12:27.160 We can use statistical techniques to find out what they are.

00:12:29.680 That was it.

00:12:30.240 That's the whole ideology.

00:12:32.100 So very, very neutral as far as ideologies go.

00:12:34.740 Five traits emerge.

00:12:36.280 Okay.

00:12:36.500 Are there differences between the sexes?

00:12:40.020 Turns out there are.

00:12:41.520 All right?

00:12:41.840 They're not massive, although if you sum them across all the traits, you can separate men and women with about 75% accuracy.

00:12:48.780 So it's not trivial, but you have to sum across all the traits.

00:12:51.560 Then another question comes up.

00:12:53.200 Well, are those differences sociocultural or biological?

00:12:57.500 Okay, we can test that.

00:12:58.660 We'll go around the world, we'll look at cultures, we'll rank order them in terms of the gender equality of their sociological policies.

00:13:07.100 We can do that with broad agreement from the right and the left.

00:13:10.560 Then the hypothesis would be if gender differences decrease among more egalitarian societies, then the gender differences are sociocultural or at least more sociocultural.

00:13:21.340 That's exactly the opposite of what was found repeatedly.

00:13:26.220 That's pseudoscience.

00:13:27.420 It's like, no, that's mainstream psychology.

00:13:30.200 Those papers have thousands of citations.

00:13:32.780 And right, the average humanities paper has zero citations, right?

00:13:37.040 And then the next most common one has one.

00:13:39.480 Three thousand?

00:13:40.220 That's an unbelievable classic.

00:13:43.180 And here's the other bit of proof.

00:13:44.860 Like you say, well, how do you know that you can trust someone's judgment about a fact?

00:13:49.600 The fact emerges despite their ideological presuppositions.

00:13:53.780 Okay, so it's well known that the social sciences and the humanities have a left tilt.

00:14:00.700 And a lot of that's temperamental.

00:14:02.300 And the tilt has become more pronounced.

00:14:04.000 But as Jonathan Haidtis pointed out, there are no conservatives among social personality psychologists or none to speak of.

00:14:11.580 Very few, yeah.

00:14:12.220 Very few.

00:14:13.440 Vanishingly few.

00:14:14.520 And if the field has a bias, it is definitely and indisputably a left-wing bias.

00:14:20.460 Okay, so you have to fight that if you're a scientist, right?

00:14:23.200 Even if you're a left-wing scientist, you have to fight that because you want to get to the facts.

00:14:26.420 It was these social scientists who generated the data that suggested that the gender differences not only were real, but that were bigger in egalitarian societies.

00:14:35.160 They didn't do that to grind their ideological acts because their ideological presupposition was, no, no, you make the society egalitarian.

00:14:44.060 Men and women get more of the same. 0.87

00:14:45.720 It's like, nope, they get more different.

00:14:47.920 Oh, hmm, isn't that something?

00:14:50.720 And so then there's a corollary there, which is, all right, you could still say, and they're kind of pushing in this direction in Scandinavia, boys and girls are different.

00:15:00.940 Men and women are different.

00:15:02.620 It looks biological.

00:15:04.360 But because people are malleable, you could push the sociocultural structure harder and harder to minimize the biological differences.

00:15:13.400 Okay, well, first of all, maybe and maybe not.

00:15:15.540 Maybe you'd get a rebound and they'd get even, like, the kids would rebel.

00:15:19.020 That could easily happen.

00:15:20.260 But let's say, okay, you could.

00:15:22.080 The problem with that is that if you cede that much power to the state, like, you're basically giving the state the right to socialize your kids.

00:15:32.520 Right.

00:15:32.700 It's like, really?

00:15:35.620 Really?

00:15:36.120 You really want to do that?

00:15:37.240 I mean, people in Israel couldn't do that with the kibbutzans, right? 1.00

00:15:40.200 It didn't work.

00:15:41.320 So people aren't going to give up their children to the state, and thank God for that.

00:15:44.520 Well, I mean, this is one of the big questions that we were discussing earlier, is that we were talking about the polarization in politics between right and left.

00:15:50.260 And obviously, you're a psychologist, you're a philosopher, but you've been dragged almost kicking and screaming into this political sphere because everything has been so politicized.

00:16:00.360 And so when you say, when you cite social science statistics, and they're scientifically based, you're called a racist, you're called a sexist, you're called a homophobe.

00:16:08.580 Called Milo Yonopoulos.

00:16:09.420 Exactly.

00:16:09.980 So why is it that so, why do you think it is that so many folks on the left who purport to be all about reason and science and objective fact are so willing to throw those out the window the minute that it becomes politically inconvenient for them?

00:16:23.580 Well, because you imagine that cognitive systems, an interpretation of the world, has levels.

00:16:30.640 They're axiomatic levels.

00:16:31.680 Some fundamental presuppositions are more fundamental than others.

00:16:36.840 And you could say, well, the leftists, historically, maybe because of their atheistic rationality, are more on the side of science than, say, the fundamentalists of any sort.

00:16:47.340 But when push comes to shove, you find out how the axioms are nested.

00:16:53.120 There's deeper axioms underneath that, which is that all hierarchies are based on power, and all power plays are based on group identity, tribal identity, essentially.

00:17:04.460 And that the entire history of the world is nothing but a power play between these different identity groups. 0.73

00:17:10.460 It's like, okay, well, if the science indicates that some of that's wrong, then do you alter those beliefs or do you alter the science?

00:17:18.060 And the answer to that question is, well, it depends on how you've hierarchically arranged those.

00:17:22.200 If the science is at the bottom, then you alter your beliefs, right?

00:17:26.560 If the scientific facts are the axiomatic substructure, then you alter your beliefs.

00:17:32.860 If your beliefs are the axiomatic substructure, then you alter the science.

00:17:36.820 Well, we've seen how that plays out.

00:17:38.660 And one of the things I've tried to do, so to speak, is to diagnose the axiomatic structure.

00:17:43.600 It's like, okay, what's the metaphysical presumption structure of the radical left?

00:17:49.260 Well, what it is, is you're basically your group.

00:17:53.360 Your groups are basically engaged in warfare, right?

00:17:56.980 And the warfare is arbitrary, except insofar as it serves your group.

00:18:01.380 Okay.

00:18:01.920 I don't buy any of that.

00:18:03.300 I think that's a route to certain disaster.

00:18:06.460 I think it's a degeneration into tribalism, and that we will seriously pay for it.

00:18:11.500 Not only because it returns us to tribalism, and tribes fight, as the anthropological evidence for that is overwhelming, right?

00:18:19.260 Tribes fight.

00:18:20.080 It doesn't even matter if they're chimpanzee tribes.

00:18:22.660 Even chimpanzee tribes fight.

00:18:24.480 So, not only do you regress to a tribalism, but you also invalidate the one proposition that's been able to help us arise above the tribal, which is the idea that the individual should be sovereign.

00:18:38.500 And so, I think the culture war is about what's the proper framework within which to view human identity, and what's the relationship between the individual and the group in relationship to that identity?

00:18:54.060 And the leftist answer is, it's all group, and it's all power.

00:18:57.560 It's like, okay.

00:18:58.360 So, in just a second, I want to ask you a little bit about some of the more enlightenment-minded thinkers who are out there right now, because it seems like we've been discussing the big gap in Western civilization right now, which is between the collectivists and the individualists, if you were to put it broadly.

00:19:12.760 But I want to talk about some of the divisions among the individualists in just a second.

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00:20:35.920 Okay, so Jordan, one of the things that we've been talking about, obviously, is the big gap that I think we certainly agree on between the collectivist identity politics and the sublimation of science in favor of subjective politics that favors a power group.

00:20:51.220 But I want to talk a little bit about a division that is also now breaking out among those of us who I think would consider ourselves friends of the Enlightenment.

00:21:00.880 So you consider yourself a friend of the Enlightenment-style thinking, at least in the essence that individuality matters and that the individual is sovereign.

00:21:07.940 And that the scientific method is useful.

00:21:09.940 And the scientific method, yeah, that it matters.

00:21:11.540 And that facts are useful and real.

00:21:13.980 And in this group, I consider myself as part of this group.

00:21:16.580 People have started to call it the intellectual dark web.

00:21:18.540 Sam Harris is part of this group.

00:21:20.580 There are a wide variety of folks with a lot of broad political differences that are part of this group.

00:21:26.080 But there are some real differences that are broken out even among people who consider themselves part of this group.

00:21:30.820 Steven Pinker has a different perspective on the world than you do.

00:21:35.220 I have a different perspective than Sam Harris does.

00:21:36.960 You and I have our differences, probably, on some matters of philosophy.

00:21:40.600 So where do you think the vulnerability lies in the possibility of revivifying an Enlightenment mentality?

00:21:47.420 Because it seems to me that one of the big problems that's popping its head up above the water now is the rejection of the Enlightenment in favor of this old-style tribalism that you've been talking about.

00:21:56.620 That we're now going to repeat history because we've benefited so much from the Enlightenment that we forget that things don't have to be this way.

00:22:02.500 We've got so much nice stuff.

00:22:03.680 We live in so much freedom that we forget that if we just toss those Enlightenment ideals out the window, things get really ugly again.

00:22:09.600 I think that's what unites...

00:22:10.700 Well, that's the question, is that what do you toss out the window before things get ugly?

00:22:17.120 Right.

00:22:17.340 And the Enlightenment proponents, you could say Harris, you could say Pinker, Charles Taylor in Canada, they trace back the development of the modern self, let's say.

00:22:29.980 Taylor wrote a book called Sources of the Modern Self to the Enlightenment.

00:22:33.500 And it's quite interesting because, like, if you look at the typical academic psychologists, say, their historical knowledge generally runs back about 15 years.

00:22:42.520 And so, because they're all concerned with the modern literature.

00:22:45.660 And there's some utility in that.

00:22:46.780 But the downside is they don't have any historical context.

00:22:50.000 So you read someone like Taylor and you think, wow, he's stretching it back 500 years, you know.

00:22:54.560 But there's reading that goes way beyond that to look at the sources of the self and the source of the modern ethos.

00:23:01.720 And this is a huge bone of contention between people like me, say, and people like Harris.

00:23:07.040 And I think between people like you and people like Harris is that my sense is that the Enlightenment values themselves are grounded in an ethos that's much deeper and much less articulated.

00:23:18.000 And that would be an ethos of metaphor, image, drama, ritual, religion, art, music, all of that.

00:23:27.060 Dance, even, for that matter.

00:23:28.840 The nonverbal, the pattern recognition.

00:23:32.160 Ian McGilchrist has written a book called The Master and His Emissary, which lays that out quite nicely with regards to hemispheric specialization.

00:23:38.000 It's kind of predicated on L. Conan Goldberg's observation that the left hemisphere is specialized for what we know and the right hemisphere is specialized for what we don't know.

00:23:48.340 So that's an order chaos dynamic.

00:23:50.500 And the rough idea would be that the left hemisphere generates paradigmatic systems.

00:23:55.800 So that would be like the Enlightenment system, axiom predicated, right?

00:23:59.380 Even statable axiom predicated.

00:24:01.440 But that entire axiomatic system is based in a nonverbal, in the nonverbal domain that's associated with, well, it would be associated with the right hemisphere, but would also be associated with deep motivations, biological motivations, and emotions.

00:24:19.020 And so, because here's one way of looking at it.

00:24:22.000 You think, well, how do you validate an axiomatic system of ethics?

00:24:26.020 And the answer is quite straightforward.

00:24:27.340 Jean Piaget figured this out, is you play it out in the world, literally, you act it out in the world, and then you watch each other's emotional responses.

00:24:35.960 And if the thing that you're playing out, if the axiomatic system that you're playing out satisfies the motivations and the emotions of the people who are engaged in that system, then the system is justified.

00:24:47.940 And then you say, well, it's not just that their motivations and emotions are satisfied.

00:24:51.800 It's more complex.

00:24:52.580 It's that the motivations and emotions of each individual are satisfied, but not only now, but now, next week, next month, and next year.

00:25:02.320 So you have to extend it across time.

00:25:04.580 And not only my emotions and motivations, but yours as well.

00:25:09.580 Now, next week, next month, and across time.

00:25:12.240 So there's terribly tight constraints placed upon an axiomatic system's validity.

00:25:19.680 Now, the way Jean Piaget thought of that, he said, well, think about it like a child's game.

00:25:23.760 A bunch of kids get together, and they decide to play pretend.

00:25:27.560 Okay, and pretend is let's model the world, right?

00:25:31.260 And as a place to act, because to pretend, you act out, right?

00:25:34.740 So the kids get together, and they assign roles, and they say, well, you're going to be mom, you're going to be dad, you're going to be the dog, and we're going to play house.

00:25:43.180 And then they act it out.

00:25:45.620 And what they're doing is seeing if they can regulate the manner in which they're constructing the game so that everyone's emotions and motivations are so well satisfied that they want to continue the game.

00:25:57.860 Okay.

00:25:58.560 And so that's so cool.

00:25:59.660 So what it shows you is that's how an ethical system is tested and justified.

00:26:05.000 It's like you play it out, and you see if everyone wants to keep playing.

00:26:08.480 And so that's a whole different methodology than the scientific domain, right?

00:26:12.140 So the axiomatic system isn't, the ethical axiomatic system isn't justified by reference to the scientific method.

00:26:19.500 It's justified by reference to the emotional and motivational well-being of all the players of the game.

00:26:24.960 Now, that game emerges, this is the second part of this, and this is so cool.

00:26:30.960 Then the question is, well, how does that game emerge?

00:26:34.900 And the answer is the same way that children's games emerges.

00:26:38.980 So what Piaget noted is that kids would get together, and they'd play marbles.

00:26:43.200 And if they were young kids, they could all play marbles, say six years old.

00:26:46.720 They could all play marbles.

00:26:47.820 And if they were in a group, they were playing marbles, and it all worked out fine.

00:26:51.380 Squabbles and all that.

00:26:52.200 But, you know, the kids would keep playing.

00:26:55.100 Validating the game.

00:26:56.040 But if you took the kids out of the game, and you said, what are the rules of the game?

00:26:59.300 They would give completely disparate accounts.

00:27:01.460 So they knew how to do it.

00:27:03.000 It was like the wisdom was in the group.

00:27:06.100 The wisdom was fragmented enough among the individuals.

00:27:08.680 So if you pulled the individuals out, they'd give disparate accounts.

00:27:10.900 But if you put them all together, they could play the game.

00:27:13.260 But then if you waited until they were 11 or 12, and you pulled them out of the game,

00:27:17.080 then they could tell you the rules.

00:27:18.620 Then at 14 or 15, they would be willing to, this is with more sophisticated games,

00:27:25.460 they would be more willing to regard themselves as makers of the rules.

00:27:29.620 Okay.

00:27:29.940 So here's how it happens in an evolutionary sense.

00:27:32.560 People, going all the way back to our primate forebears, organize themselves into functional

00:27:38.820 hierarchies.

00:27:39.640 Okay.

00:27:40.200 And the hierarchies are complex. 1.00

00:27:41.960 And they're not just based on power, despite what the idiot Marxists say. 0.99

00:27:45.240 Even DeWall has noted that chimpanzee hierarchies are unstable if they're only based on power. 0.99

00:27:51.680 They don't last.

00:27:52.440 They degenerate into violence.

00:27:54.100 So you have a hierarchy that works, but it's acted out.

00:28:00.340 No one knows why it works.

00:28:01.580 It works because everyone seems to be happy with it.

00:28:04.860 Okay.

00:28:05.160 And so those hierarchies get more complex and more sophisticated.

00:28:08.140 And then people start to observe them and talk about them.

00:28:10.860 It's like, oh, well, we've got this hierarchy here.

00:28:12.680 What's it like?

00:28:13.600 And then they spin off dramas about the hierarchy.

00:28:16.440 Here's a hero who climbed up the hierarchy, and here's what a hero looks like.

00:28:19.780 Okay.

00:28:20.240 So then you get the idea of hierarchy, and then you get the idea of the hero as the person

00:28:24.720 who moves up the hierarchy and generates it.

00:28:27.220 Okay.

00:28:27.660 Then out of that, you get the extraction of the idea of the hero, and then you get development

00:28:33.260 of that idea.

00:28:34.200 And it's out of that that you get the monotheistic religions.

00:28:37.140 And so it's like the procedure and the hierarchy come first.

00:28:41.080 No one knows what the rules are.

00:28:42.780 It's all played out the same way that wolves play it out in a pack, or chimpanzees play

00:28:47.120 it out in a troop.

00:28:48.160 Then we wake up and think, oh, we live in a structure.

00:28:51.280 Here's the structure.

00:28:52.340 That would be Osiris in the Egyptian mythologies.

00:28:54.800 Here's the structure.

00:28:55.740 Here's how the structure goes wrong.

00:28:57.960 Here's what the structure does.

00:28:59.180 Here's its tyrannical aspect.

00:29:01.500 Here's what you have to do to generate the structure and to thrive in it.

00:29:04.780 Okay, that's even more important.

00:29:06.700 The hierarchy is important enough.

00:29:08.140 But what we want to know is how to master the hierarchy.

00:29:10.780 Okay, that's where you get the mythologies of the hero.

00:29:12.940 Okay.

00:29:13.300 And then so then this generates all sorts of different heroes, because there's different

00:29:17.120 ways of being successful.

00:29:18.320 Then you have a panoply of heroes.

00:29:20.840 Then you think, okay, well, now we've got all those heroes.

00:29:23.840 That's a set.

00:29:25.840 We can pull back and say, okay, something about all these heroes is what makes them heroes.

00:29:33.000 That's when you extract out the monotheistic savior. 0.60

00:29:36.460 Because that's why in Christianity, Christ is the king of kings.

00:29:39.880 It's actually, you can think about it as a literal statement.

00:29:43.620 Forget about the religious overlay.

00:29:45.020 It's like, okay, you've got a bunch of people.

00:29:47.540 Some of them are kind of king-like.

00:29:49.380 Okay, so you admire them.

00:29:50.860 It's like, for whatever reason that is, it's not easy to figure out why you admire someone.

00:29:55.120 That's complicated.

00:29:56.200 But let's say you've got admirable people.

00:29:58.800 You start telling stories about them.

00:30:00.460 That's why you go to a movie.

00:30:02.100 You want to go watch someone you don't care about, you're bored by?

00:30:05.140 No, you want to go watch someone admirable and interesting, or maybe the opposite of that.

00:30:09.260 But it doesn't matter.

00:30:09.840 It's the same thing.

00:30:11.140 Then you think, okay, well, we've got all these admirable people.

00:30:13.480 They're generating the world properly.

00:30:16.060 That's what makes them admirable.

00:30:17.420 There's a principle they embody.

00:30:19.660 And that principle is the process by which the admirable world is generated.

00:30:24.080 That's the logos.

00:30:25.720 That's the thing that's operative at the beginning.

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00:32:03.420 So here's my question about all this, because now we're really not talking about 12 Rules for Life as much as Maps and Meaning, which is your first book, which you're doing the audio read of it now.

00:32:14.760 Yeah, I'm recording the audio.

00:32:15.100 And it's definitely a harder book than 12 Rules for Life and a much more complex book in a lot of ways than 12 Rules for Life.

00:32:21.400 So how universal are these systems?

00:32:23.320 Meaning, why is it that the Enlightenment only arrives at one time in human history and one place in human history, as opposed to if human biology is essentially consistent across humanity?

00:32:32.720 Then why is it that, you know, if at the apex of the levels, you end up with the Enlightenment idea, which is where we started this particular question, then why is it that it only arrives in one place at one time, as opposed to arriving in a variety of places, in a variety of different times, in a variety of different cultures?

00:32:47.140 That's a great question, man.

00:32:48.120 Okay, the first thing we would say is, the process by which this, the hierarchy itself, and success within the hierarchy is generated, that's to be accounted over millions of years, at least hundreds of thousands of years.

00:33:02.880 But I would push it back, because you can see analogs in the chimps.

00:33:05.620 So 20 million years, let's say, that's a long time.

00:33:09.420 On that time scale, the fact that the Enlightenment values arose in Europe 500 years ago before anywhere else, it's like, well, who cares?

00:33:17.800 It's five old men long, right? 0.91

00:33:20.980 If you put five 100-year-old men in line, it's like, it's yesterday.

00:33:25.520 It's this morning.

00:33:26.880 So we've evolved these hierarchical structures.

00:33:31.580 That's our culture.

00:33:32.880 We've evolved ways of maneuvering within the hierarchical structures that are successful.

00:33:37.440 And now we've started to evolve ways of mapping our adaptation.

00:33:42.560 Not just adapting, but mapping it.

00:33:45.160 Okay, so how does the mapping occur?

00:33:48.340 First, admiration.

00:33:51.840 Second, imitation of admiration.

00:33:54.940 And that would be drama.

00:33:56.520 It's like you dramatize.

00:33:58.100 Shakespeare extracts out what's admirable and interesting and plays it out.

00:34:02.280 So that's the use of the body as a representational structure of the body.

00:34:06.040 So we act out what's admirable.

00:34:08.040 You think, okay, now we've kind of got the drama down.

00:34:09.940 We're all captured by this drama.

00:34:11.200 It's like, well, then the literary critics come along, the philosophers, and they say, oh, what are the principles by which the admirable people operate?

00:34:19.240 It's like chimps woke up and said, oh, well, some chimps are more successful than others.

00:34:22.460 What are the rules of success?

00:34:25.000 It's like, well, there were no rules because they weren't running by rules.

00:34:28.140 Right.

00:34:28.580 There aren't rules until you describe the patterns.

00:34:31.760 Then you have a rule.

00:34:32.940 Okay.

00:34:33.060 That's what happens with Moses, by the way.

00:34:34.620 Moses has a revelation.

00:34:36.700 Here's the rules.

00:34:37.840 It's like, yeah, we've been living out those rules forever.

00:34:40.240 But we didn't know what they were because they weren't rules.

00:34:42.660 They were customs.

00:34:43.940 Right.

00:34:44.220 Okay.

00:34:44.500 So you start by mapping your customs in drama and story.

00:34:49.160 And that way you can represent them and you can transmit them.

00:34:52.160 Then once you have them in your grip, say, they're represented now, not just acted out.

00:34:57.640 Well, then you can move one step backwards from them.

00:35:00.640 And you can say, well, what's the commonalities among these?

00:35:03.900 What are the general principles?

00:35:05.180 That would be the development of something like the Code of Hammurabi.

00:35:08.500 Right.

00:35:08.960 It's like, well, we've got all these customs.

00:35:11.480 What are they?

00:35:12.520 Right.

00:35:13.020 Revelation.

00:35:13.540 It's like, oh, here's how you map the customs.

00:35:15.640 That's the Decalogue.

00:35:16.720 It's the same idea.

00:35:17.540 So it took human beings a very long time to evolve their hierarchies, to evolve their structures

00:35:25.900 of success, and then to have enough people around with enough spare time to engage in the

00:35:32.280 cultural process of the artistic cultural process of mapping the adaptive structure.

00:35:38.200 That all emerges in mythology and drama.

00:35:40.540 Then that lays the groundwork for philosophy.

00:35:43.320 Then the philosophers can come in, especially once it's written, like in the Judeo-Christian 0.63

00:35:47.140 pantheon.

00:35:47.840 It's like, oh, now we've got it written down.

00:35:49.540 Oh, well, we don't have to remember it.

00:35:52.720 Right.

00:35:52.800 We can read it, and while we're reading, we can think about it.

00:35:56.700 And so then out of that starts to come the semantic codes.

00:35:59.980 Well, then you get the enlightenment.

00:36:01.800 It's like, oh, well, here's a bunch of semantic codes.

00:36:04.120 It's like, yeah, yeah, those are great.

00:36:05.420 So this is really interesting because if you read Pinker or if you read Jonah Goldberg's

00:36:08.920 new book, essentially they attribute the enlightenment to, Jonah Goldberg calls it the

00:36:12.960 miracle.

00:36:13.780 It's almost as though it accidentally occurred in a certain place in a certain time.

00:36:17.340 Jonah doesn't quite go quite that far, I think, to be fair to him.

00:36:19.420 But I think that that philosophy, that this sort of sprang up randomly here, is very much

00:36:26.600 embedded in a lot of Sam Harris's thinking, a lot of Pinker's thinking, and you're taking

00:36:31.220 it further back.

00:36:32.160 But I do wonder if this may be an area of actual disagreements between the two of us.

00:36:35.460 It should be fun.

00:36:36.200 Are you attributing the growth of the Judeo-Christian ethic that emerges into the enlightenment as

00:36:43.420 also accidentally just pushing the timeline further back?

00:36:46.180 No, I don't think it's accidental.

00:36:47.740 Okay.

00:36:47.960 And I'm not making a reductionist argument.

00:36:50.580 So the first thing is I'm going to say, this is how religion evolved.

00:36:54.500 But I'm not saying that this explanation exhausts the phenomenon because it's a very strange

00:37:01.600 phenomenon.

00:37:02.260 It's very, very strange.

00:37:03.780 But that doesn't mean we can't generate a plausible evolutionary account.

00:37:07.620 It's like if you have a bunch of motivated, emotional, limited beings occupying the same

00:37:13.720 territory and competing and cooperating for the same resources, including the resource

00:37:19.440 of cooperation, which can generate more resources.

00:37:22.320 It's not a zero-sum game.

00:37:23.980 There are going to be patterns of adaptation that emerge from that that are similar.

00:37:30.260 So here's a way of thinking about it.

00:37:32.160 If you put a bunch of kids together, they're going to evolve games.

00:37:36.100 Right.

00:37:36.280 Well, which games?

00:37:37.260 Well, a bunch of different games.

00:37:38.460 Yeah, but they're all games.

00:37:40.260 Right?

00:37:40.680 So even though, so that's the moral relativist element, a bunch of different games.

00:37:45.700 Okay.

00:37:46.100 But the moral absolutist element is, yeah, yeah, but they're all games.

00:37:48.940 And the games have to be playable, which means they have to continue in an iterated way.

00:37:55.260 Right?

00:37:55.380 So that's a big constraint.

00:37:57.160 People have to want to play them.

00:37:59.180 So not only do they have to be games and comprehensible to everybody and enjoyable, but people,

00:38:05.020 but they have to be self-maintaining and everyone has to want to play them.

00:38:08.640 Okay.

00:38:09.920 That's the answer to the postmodern conundrum.

00:38:12.980 A plethora of potential ethical implications of the world.

00:38:16.380 An infinite variety.

00:38:18.760 Yeah?

00:38:19.060 Okay.

00:38:19.660 Fine.

00:38:20.980 Not an infinite variety of pragmatically applicable interpretations.

00:38:25.380 You instantly constrain the universe to, well, to what?

00:38:29.600 Well, this is why there's commonalities in mythologies.

00:38:32.480 It's like, if you put enough people together in enough different places, the commonality

00:38:37.840 of the groups of people, because of the grounding in common motivation and emotion and embodiment,

00:38:43.400 because we're embodied, means that they're going to generate hierarchies that are broadly

00:38:48.260 similar with strategies of success within those hierarchies that are broadly similar, with

00:38:53.740 descriptions of the strategies that are broadly similar.

00:38:57.120 And so you could say, in some sense, the ethic that gave rise to the enlightenment is in place

00:39:02.080 more or less everywhere.

00:39:04.200 Now, it's tricky because not every hierarchical system is as functional as every other hierarchical

00:39:10.060 system.

00:39:10.540 Some of them can degenerate into tyranny.

00:39:12.280 Hey, we're talking about the set of all voluntarily playable games or something like that.

00:39:17.140 And that can degenerate.

00:39:18.340 Out of that, you're going to get common hero myths.

00:39:20.680 You have to.

00:39:21.940 And then that lays the groundwork.

00:39:24.260 That lays the groundwork for even our ability to communicate.

00:39:26.820 Right.

00:39:27.180 Right.

00:39:27.720 And this is the enlightenment, guys.

00:39:29.560 They just, they're not getting that.

00:39:31.300 So, and this gets to, I think, the broader question that I know you and Sam went on for

00:39:34.900 three hours about, about the nature of truth, because particularly truth in the moral sphere.

00:39:38.780 I think that, would it be fair to say that you guys agree on the idea of truth in the

00:39:43.000 scientific sphere?

00:39:43.800 That, you know, if something, that there is such a thing as objective truth?

00:39:47.520 Or are you more-

00:39:48.220 I would say we agree on a lot of that.

00:39:50.740 The question is, to some degree, why do scientists accept the idea that objective truth is true?

00:39:57.520 And then I would say, we probably don't agree about that.

00:40:00.560 Because I would ground that in pragmatism.

00:40:02.820 Right.

00:40:03.060 And Sam would ground that in the idea of an independently existing objective world.

00:40:07.700 Right, which is a leap of faith more like my own, actually, than the pragmatist view,

00:40:11.240 right?

00:40:11.500 And if you believe that there's a God who's out there in the universe who created the

00:40:14.420 structures in a particular certain way, then what he created is the truth, and it is apart

00:40:18.580 from you.

00:40:19.280 And if human beings didn't exist, and they weren't able to utilize the truth, that truth

00:40:21.960 would still exist out there.

00:40:22.980 Whereas the pragmatist might say, truth is in the use that it has for human beings.

00:40:27.240 Well, that's the thing, is that, you know, I don't know if we would consider scientific

00:40:31.460 truth true, unless we are also simultaneously accepting the idea that scientific truth is

00:40:37.680 good for people.

00:40:39.280 So, there's one other thing I wanted to bring up that's relevant, because you brought up

00:40:43.380 the idea of God.

00:40:44.640 So, here's a way of thinking about it.

00:40:47.120 And I don't know what to make of this, because this is stretching me, this is stretching my

00:40:50.900 thoughts out beyond where I've been able to develop them.

00:40:53.720 So, this is the intuition that I have, based on a variety of things, experiences I've had.

00:40:58.320 So, imagine that there's a very wide range of human behaviors, okay?

00:41:04.140 And some subset of those are both admirable and not admirable.

00:41:08.400 So, let's call them good and evil at the extremes, okay?

00:41:12.460 Then we might say, well, there's a pattern that characterizes all the actions that are

00:41:17.640 good, and a pattern that characterizes all the actions that are evil.

00:41:21.320 And that's a transpersonal pattern, because it's not just about you or me, it's about everyone.

00:41:25.780 Okay, and so, then that gets personified.

00:41:28.180 That's Christ and Satan, let's say, or Cain and Abel, right?

00:41:30.680 That gets personified.

00:41:31.920 And that's a bad guy and a good guy in a movie.

00:41:34.120 Like, it's personified all the time.

00:41:36.300 It's Thor and Loki, you know, in the Marvel movies, you know?

00:41:39.320 So, now you have the, let's say, you take the idea of Christ, and you think, okay, so

00:41:44.120 that's the abstraction of everything that's admirably good about the set of all human behaviors.

00:41:52.020 Okay, and then you think, well, what sort of reality does that have?

00:41:55.620 And this pulls back into the reality of the idea of the Logos, and the idea that it was

00:42:00.480 the Logos that God used at the beginning of time to extract order out of chaos.

00:42:06.100 So, you think, well, it's transpersonal, the goodness, because it's not just characterized

00:42:11.800 stick of any one person.

00:42:14.060 It's more like something that inhabits a person, rather than that a person is.

00:42:18.560 You can really see this, for example, on the other end, too, with the satanic end, because

00:42:22.240 if you read the writings of people who do absolutely horrific things, like the shooters,

00:42:27.780 you can see that possession extraordinarily clearly.

00:42:30.900 If your eyes are open, it's like, and it's shocking, so people don't usually look at it.

00:42:35.140 And they even say that themselves.

00:42:36.840 Like the Columbine kids, their writings are hair-raising, you know, and they were clearly possessed by 0.99

00:42:42.420 an evil that you only encounter if you sit in a dark place and brood on your hatred for

00:42:50.000 months and years, right?

00:42:51.760 You go places that...

00:42:53.440 You go places where all the dark people go. 1.00

00:42:56.620 Right.

00:42:56.940 Right.

00:42:57.180 And then that takes you over.

00:43:00.360 Okay.

00:43:00.840 So, the good can take you over as well.

00:43:03.000 Okay.

00:43:03.280 So, there's this spirit of good, let's say.

00:43:07.120 And what the spirit of good does is act in the world on the potential of the world to generate

00:43:12.640 the actuality of the world.

00:43:14.660 And the Judeo-Christian proposition is that if you confront the potential of the world with 0.61

00:43:19.880 good in mind, using truth, truthful communication, then the order that you extract is good.

00:43:27.520 And then that's echoed in Genesis when God is using the word and he creates cosmos out

00:43:32.760 of potential.

00:43:33.380 And every time he does that, he says, and it was good.

00:43:36.460 Which is, I think, it's so interesting because there's a proposition there.

00:43:40.040 And the proposition there is that if you encounter potential with truth, the cosmos you create

00:43:44.560 is actually good.

00:43:46.240 Well, that's just an absolutely overwhelming idea.

00:43:49.680 Yeah.

00:43:49.800 It's like, if it's true, if it's true, it's the greatest idea there ever was.

00:43:53.660 Yeah.

00:43:53.940 Now, your thoughts on this actually from Maps of Meaning helped generate what we in Judaism

00:43:59.120 called Zvartor in Hebrew, meaning a thought about the Bible.

00:44:04.280 But this merged with a little bit of Aristotelian thought led me to the idea that when it comes

00:44:09.140 to the mystical notion of the tree of good and evil in Eden, what is that supposed to

00:44:14.540 be?

00:44:14.700 What did people do wrong by eating from the tree of good and evil?

00:44:17.500 And my feeling is that what they did wrong is that God created a universe in which the

00:44:21.880 value was embedded in the object, right?

00:44:24.080 In the same way that you, in your book, talk about if you're teaching a child about an object,

00:44:29.220 the rules of the object are embedded in the teaching about the object.

00:44:32.200 So you use the example of a vase.

00:44:33.480 We were discussing this earlier.

00:44:34.280 But you use the example of a vase where you teach a child, don't touch the vase because

00:44:38.360 the vase will break.

00:44:39.180 So that the rule is embedded in the object.

00:44:41.000 In the same way, in Aristotelian thought, the rules for behavior are embedded in the

00:44:44.880 nature of the universe.

00:44:46.000 Meaning what makes a man good is what makes a man unique, which is reason.

00:44:50.020 The idea is that reason is what makes a man unique.

00:44:51.900 So acting in accordance with right reason is what makes something, is what makes an action

00:44:55.380 good.

00:44:55.640 So if you believe that God created the universe along these lines and that what natural law

00:44:59.720 is, is just the human attempts to understand the lines along which God created the universe,

00:45:05.140 then where human beings went wrong is when they decided to separate values from the universe.

00:45:10.620 When we decided to take values and say, this is a completely separate thing.

00:45:13.680 So this vase has no rules attached to it anymore.

00:45:16.200 It's just a vase.

00:45:17.100 And we can instruct the rules arbitrarily as to what to do with this vase.

00:45:20.840 And so eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil changes the nature of good

00:45:25.500 and evil from the universe comes along with a set of rules to human beings think that

00:45:30.520 they can use their own intuition to supplant God's rules and to supplant universal rules

00:45:35.060 with their own particular vision of what the universe ought to be.

00:45:37.500 And at that point, they have to be expelled from eating.

00:45:38.900 Yeah, well, okay, okay.

00:45:39.700 So that's also associated to some degree, I would say, with Milton's warning in Paradise

00:45:44.360 Lost.

00:45:45.040 Because Milton basically portrays Lucifer, who's the bringer of light, weirdly enough, as the

00:45:50.500 spirit of unbridled rationality, which accounts for, say, the Catholic Church antagonism, the

00:45:56.440 Catholic Church's antagonism towards rationality.

00:45:58.840 The idea was, same idea in the Tower of Babel, that human beings have a proclivity to erect 0.92

00:46:04.440 their own dogmatic ethical systems, and then to expand them into a grandiosity that challenges

00:46:11.960 the transcendent, and that that's a totalitarian catastrophe.

00:46:16.080 And for Milton, Satan was the spirit that eternally does that, right?

00:46:20.700 Who says, everything I know is enough, and that supplants what I don't know.

00:46:25.680 That supplants the transcendent.

00:46:27.240 And that that's a catastrophe.

00:46:28.600 How that's tangled up with the knowledge of good and evil, while you're making some

00:46:32.660 headway towards sorting that out.

00:46:35.280 I mean, there is a cataclysm that's explained in the story of Adam and Eve, right?

00:46:41.260 The cataclysm is the coming to wakefulness, and it's associated partly with recognition

00:46:47.360 of nakedness, which is recognition of vulnerability and mortality, and the discovery of death, and

00:46:52.300 then also the discovery of good and evil that goes along with that.

00:46:55.200 So you said, well, that's partly the cognitive division of ethics from the facts of the object.

00:47:01.900 So I have to think that through.

00:47:03.300 I would also recommend to people, I think I mentioned this before, is Ian McGilkis' book,

00:47:07.140 and the master and his emissary, because he looks at this neuropsychologically, right?

00:47:10.980 And looks at the left hemisphere as the hemisphere that's dealing with the explicitly axiomatic

00:47:16.740 systems, and the right hemisphere that's dealing with what those systems are embodied in.

00:47:23.280 Okay, so part of what happens with the emergence of good and evil, as far as I could tell, it

00:47:28.140 took me a long time to think about this, is that, and this is different than the hypothesis

00:47:33.280 that you laid forward, which is why I can't reconcile them exactly as, you recognize you're

00:47:37.820 naked, you know you can be hurt, you know you're vulnerable and insufficient, you hide

00:47:44.400 from God, because that's what happens next, and the reason you hide from God, say God

00:47:49.320 is your destiny, or God is the, you're walking with God as a manifestation of your ultimate

00:47:53.980 proper destiny.

00:47:55.260 You doubt whether you're capable of that, because now you realize your embodied finitude,

00:48:00.140 your nakedness and insufficiency, so you hide and you're ashamed, so there's that.

00:48:05.300 You also realize that you can be hurt and suffer, and that kind of goes along with God's command

00:48:09.920 that you're going to work in the sweat of your brow, and that you're going to die, and 0.87

00:48:13.300 that women are going to be subjugated to men, which is put on as a curse, not as a moral

00:48:17.620 imperative, right?

00:48:18.760 Right.

00:48:19.360 But then, what emerges out of that is that, as soon as you know that you can be hurt,

00:48:25.300 this is what differentiates us from animals, and you really think that through, here's all

00:48:29.740 the myriad ways I can be hurt.

00:48:31.380 Then you're angry about that, because you can be hurt, but even worse, you can figure

00:48:35.060 out how to hurt other people.

00:48:36.540 And so, that's part of that knowledge of good and evil.

00:48:39.440 You associated it with this dissociation of the object from its ethical container.

00:48:44.680 Of the universe as created by God, from our interpretation of the universe, that there

00:48:48.940 is a gap between the two, and that once human beings begin to supplant their own rationality

00:48:53.200 for atelos, right?

00:48:55.340 In the Aristotelian, the ateliology.

00:48:57.400 Yeah.

00:48:57.560 What we end up doing is creating all sorts of awful systems that end up destroying us

00:49:02.180 in the end.

00:49:03.080 There's something about that that's right.

00:49:04.920 I mean, part of what happens in the New Testament, as far as I can tell, is that what Christ says,

00:49:10.460 so he's trying to transcend the rule structure, right?

00:49:13.520 Not because there's anything wrong with the rules.

00:49:15.480 They're a necessary precondition for discipline, which is actually why it wrote 12 rules, right?

00:49:19.280 It's like, you need rules, but rules conflict, and they don't always apply, and so there has

00:49:24.480 to be an ethic underlying the rules, and you should have more respect for the ethic than

00:49:28.260 for the rules.

00:49:28.960 Right.

00:49:29.540 Okay, Christ's idea, and this is part of the idea of the reestablishment of paradise,

00:49:33.500 is that you should orient yourself towards the good, and that's something like an alliance

00:49:39.200 with God, and then that you should tell the truth, and that that's the ethic that generated

00:49:43.580 the rules to begin with.

00:49:45.300 Okay, and then we could be serious about this, you know, and we could say, well,

00:49:48.440 how do you adjudicate the reality of that claim?

00:49:51.740 All right, so then we might think, well, we already walked through the fact that the

00:49:56.000 heroes of the past acted on potential to extract out the world of actuality, and if they did

00:50:01.680 that properly, then the world they extracted was good, and that that is a divine principle.

00:50:06.500 And then we might say, well, is it a divine principle?

00:50:10.860 And you might say, well, what is it that's acting through people in the good?

00:50:14.520 Like, the Christian theological answer to that would be the logos, right?

00:50:18.700 That's the idea.

00:50:19.720 That's the idea of the Holy Spirit, roughly speaking.

00:50:21.940 Right.

00:50:22.140 You might think, well, is that a real thing?

00:50:24.280 It's like, well, to me, it's real the same way that consciousness is real.

00:50:28.900 And we don't know the role of consciousness in determining reality.

00:50:32.900 But even if you're an evolutionary biologist, and this is so interesting, because the evolutionary

00:50:38.220 biologists actually discriminate, differentiated themselves from Darwin on this point.

00:50:43.360 Darwin was very, very forthright in his claim that sexual selection was as powerful as natural

00:50:49.440 selection, or even more so.

00:50:51.020 And so that, so here's where that goes.

00:50:53.320 And because that was, because that brought consciousness into the world as an active player, the materialistic

00:50:59.100 evolutionary biologist ignored that for like 150 years, and only concentrated on natural

00:51:03.500 selection, where they could play, well, this is all chance.

00:51:06.660 Right.

00:51:06.860 It's like, sexual selection is not chance.

00:51:10.000 Okay, so here's a hypothesis.

00:51:12.320 Human beings separated themselves from chimpanzees.

00:51:15.220 One of the reasons they did that was because human females are sexually selective. 1.00

00:51:19.840 Chimps aren't. 0.94

00:51:20.980 Chimps will, female chimps in estrus will mate with any chimp. 0.99

00:51:23.940 The main chimps, the dominant ones, chase the subordinate males away, so they're more

00:51:29.760 likely to have offspring, but it's not because of female choice. 0.90

00:51:32.580 Right.

00:51:33.000 Now, human females have done this whole different thing, is that they have hidden fertility, 1.00

00:51:40.480 and they're much more likely to go after guys who have climbed up the hierarchy.

00:51:46.580 So let's say heroes will give the women some credit for intelligence, right, and say that 0.99

00:51:50.820 that's what they're after, even if they're using wealth and so forth, and status as a

00:51:54.840 marker.

00:51:55.560 They're actually using those as a marker for competence.

00:51:58.000 Yeah, it's a standard.

00:51:58.300 Yeah, and I think that's, I think the evidence, I think the evidence for that is clear.

00:52:02.000 Okay, so you might say, oh, well, it was human female conscious choice that selected us. 1.00

00:52:08.320 Okay, and you think, well, that's not random.

00:52:10.460 That's not random at all.

00:52:12.020 It's the farthest thing from random that there is, and that means consciousness is making its

00:52:15.520 choices with regards to what propagates.

00:52:17.560 But then it's even more complex than that.

00:52:19.460 So here's what happens among men.

00:52:22.440 The men all get together in their hierarchy.

00:52:24.880 They posit a valued goal.

00:52:27.440 They all accept that as the goal, because otherwise they wouldn't be cooperating.

00:52:31.200 Then they arrange themselves into a hierarchy, and they let the most competent guys lead,

00:52:35.460 because they want to get to the promised land.

00:52:37.840 They want to get the most competent leaders leading.

00:52:42.140 Competent, defined by that value.

00:52:44.760 Okay, so here's what happens, essentially.

00:52:46.520 The men all get together and vote on the good men, and the good men are then chosen by the

00:52:53.780 women, and those are the people who propagate. 1.00

00:52:56.480 And so it's like men are voting on which men get to reproduce, and women are going along 0.92

00:53:02.500 with the vote, and being even more stringent in their choices, let's say.

00:53:06.420 And so then what you get is that the consciousness, that through its active expression, transforms the potential of the world into actuality, also selects the direction of evolution.

00:53:18.760 Right, and that's where the meme, Dawkins' term, turns into the biological reality.

00:53:25.800 It's not just, so yeah, this is something that's so cool about Dawkins.

00:53:29.220 It's like, I've often thought this about Dawkins, is if he would push his thinking to the limits,

00:53:33.960 he would fall right into Jung.

00:53:36.200 Well, and then he'd be lost, of course, because that's a whole other universe.

00:53:39.080 But if you take that meme seriously, like, and I mean really seriously, you think, yeah, there's some ways of conceptualizing that becomes so all-encompassing that they, yeah, that's right.

00:53:51.920 They start to become an actual force of evolution itself.

00:53:54.820 And so then here's the case you could make.

00:53:57.580 Consciousness extracts the proper world of being from potential through truth, and then it's good.

00:54:03.380 It's like, okay, that's a hard one, man.

00:54:08.360 That manifests itself in human beings at the individual, level of individual consciousness.

00:54:13.080 That's the logos within.

00:54:14.780 That's the metaphysical foundation of the idea of natural right and responsibility. 0.82

00:54:19.980 That's a bloody killer idea.

00:54:21.920 That's expressed in the hero of heroes, that idea.

00:54:25.480 That hero of heroes is the driving force behind human evolution.

00:54:29.880 So not only do you get the action of the logos metaphysically as the process that extracts order out of chaos at the beginning of time, you also get it as the major driver of evolution.

00:54:40.340 And so then you ask, okay, then what kind of reality does that have?

00:54:45.020 Because you chase consciousness back, like it disappears into the mystery of the past, and we have no idea what its relationship is with matter.

00:54:52.840 But it's the force that gives rise to the cosmos and drives evolution.

00:54:56.840 It's like you're getting pretty close to God there.

00:54:58.740 Even just pragmatically speaking.

00:55:00.580 And you're certainly, you know, not close to, but in the midst of an argument about free will.

00:55:04.900 Because obviously if you make the hard determinist argument that free will doesn't exist and that consciousness is merely a sort of trick that your brain is playing on itself,

00:55:12.680 then how exactly does, how does culture propagate?

00:55:16.560 How do these memes propagate?

00:55:18.000 How are people choosing sexual selection and natural selection become one and the same as soon as you boil sexual selection down to natural selection?

00:55:23.860 Well, and also I think that the free will argument, I mean, I see why Harris gets tangled up in that, you know, because, well, first of all, deterministic arguments are unbelievably powerful.

00:55:33.440 And when we use deterministic models for many things, they really work.

00:55:37.540 So you could say, well, we're going to use that by default.

00:55:40.160 It's like, fair enough.

00:55:40.920 We're going to deviate from that with care.

00:55:43.800 But I don't see people as driven like clocks winding down.

00:55:48.840 First of all, we don't wind down in any simple way.

00:55:51.380 We're dissipative structures to use, he wrote, Schrodinger, what is life?

00:55:57.960 A human being is a dissipative structure.

00:55:59.800 We're not an entropic structure like a clock running down.

00:56:03.560 We are in some sense.

00:56:04.860 But as living beings, we pull energy in.

00:56:07.400 And so we're not winding down like a deterministic structure.

00:56:10.380 We're something other than that.

00:56:11.940 And the way we treat each other is as logos, as far as I can tell.

00:56:17.000 The way I treat myself, if I'm going to be good to myself, in the proper sense, is that I'm an active agent of choice confronting an infinite landscape of potential and casting that potential into a reality for good or for evil.

00:56:32.100 Okay.

00:56:32.780 And if I treat myself that way, then I have proper respect for myself and proper fear of myself because I can make bad decisions and warp the structure of reality.

00:56:42.420 And I think if you read Frankl, for example, or Solzhenitsyn, and you see how your bad decisions can warp the structure of reality, then that wakes you up, right?

00:56:51.540 Okay.

00:56:52.060 So there's that.

00:56:53.860 If you don't treat yourself like an active agent, imbued with logos, then your life doesn't go well.

00:57:00.340 But more, if you don't treat other people that way, they do not want to play with you.

00:57:04.740 If we set up societies that aren't predicated on the idea that people are like that, then the societies become, they dissolve or they become totalitarian almost instantly.

00:57:15.100 So then I would say, well, you've got the problem of determinism.

00:57:18.860 It's like, fair enough, man.

00:57:20.420 How do you reconcile the fact that if you lay out a society at every level of analysis on strict deterministic grounds, it fails?

00:57:29.580 So doesn't that mean your hypothesis has a flaw?

00:57:34.280 I mean, maybe not.

00:57:35.340 Maybe you can say, no, the facts are independent of the ethical consequences.

00:57:38.060 Right, exactly.

00:57:38.740 This is where the truth pragmatism question comes back into being, right?

00:57:42.920 Because Sam would say, well, it's true regardless of what the effect is.

00:57:45.240 And you would say, well, it's obviously not true if morals are constructed for a pragmatic reason.

00:57:50.120 And if this pragmatism doesn't work, if it falls into nothingness.

00:57:52.660 Well, it also depends to some degree on what you're willing to, how you're willing to test your hypothesis.

00:57:57.820 Because I might say, well, if your hypothesis is factually correct, wouldn't you assume that if people base their behaviors individually and familial and socially on that set of facts, which is basically what Sam claims about facts to begin with, if you base your ethos on those facts, wouldn't it work?

00:58:18.160 Right.

00:58:18.260 Well, he claims that that's a test.

00:58:20.380 And I would say, well, then it fails that test.

00:58:22.380 It doesn't work.

00:58:23.420 We have to treat each other like divine centers of consciousness in order for society to work.

00:58:29.620 Yes.

00:58:29.800 And I think, well, that's, I can't see any way out of those arguments.

00:58:34.100 Yeah, I can't either, obviously, which is why you and I agree on so much about this kind of stuff.

00:58:38.300 And I think that it's also the reason why people find your work really inspiring.

00:58:42.160 And while the left wants to claim that you are an angry person, they'll claim similarly that I'm a deeply angry person.

00:58:47.280 I don't think there's been quite an angry conversation.

00:58:49.160 I'm pretty sure it has not been.

00:58:51.400 I'm horrified by what the radical left is capable of, but that doesn't make me angry.

00:58:56.040 Exactly.

00:58:56.600 And I think that it's demonstrative of why so many people find what you're doing inspiring.

00:59:00.660 Because unlike the radical left, which is consumed with the idea of victimhood and victimology, and we're victims of the system, like Marxism makes the claim that the only way that people suck is the claim that Marxism makes.

00:59:12.000 But the only way to cure people of sucking is by changing the entire system, which will, in some magical fashion, transform the nature of humanity.

00:59:18.400 Yeah, in the proper direction.

00:59:19.820 Right.

00:59:20.520 Exactly. 1.00

00:59:21.060 The claim that you're making, and I hope that I'm making as well, is that human beings do suck unless they decide to stop sucking. 0.99

00:59:27.660 Right? 0.97

00:59:28.020 And your whole goal is to tell people exactly how it is that they can clean up their rooms, is your famous phrase, Gus.

00:59:34.100 Yeah.

00:59:34.540 Well, they might as well start with what's right in front of them.

00:59:36.660 It's a lot harder than it looks.

00:59:38.260 Because to clean up your room means to accept that it's actually necessary for you to take that little bit of chaos that's in front of you, that chaotic potential, and cast it into habitable order.

00:59:48.820 And then you have to develop the right attitude towards that.

00:59:51.200 It's like, okay, well, I'm going to put my room in order.

00:59:53.840 Well, what do you mean?

00:59:55.120 Order is in relationship to something.

00:59:57.880 You know, like if your desk is ordered, it means you've ordered it because you're going to work there, and you're working there on something valuable.

01:00:04.140 And so the order is conceived of in relationship to a telos.

01:00:07.840 It's like, okay, you're going to order your room.

01:00:09.600 Well, what are you going to do in it?

01:00:11.340 Like, what's your room for?

01:00:13.200 What's the purpose?

01:00:13.900 What's the purpose?

01:00:14.880 You can't order your room without falling into purpose.

01:00:18.920 And I would say, well, if you're going to fall into purpose, it's like, try it out on a local scale first.

01:00:23.660 Right?

01:00:23.900 You don't want to go out there and change the system.

01:00:26.540 It's like, what the hell do you know?

01:00:28.220 Leave the system alone.

01:00:30.200 See what you can do locally.

01:00:32.000 See if you can put yourself together.

01:00:33.580 See if you can put your immediate environment together.

01:00:35.460 And you'll find, if you're in a chaotic household, and a chaotic household would be one where no one has any discipline, no one has any aims, and there's a terrible battle between Cain and Abel going on all the time.

01:00:47.880 Right?

01:00:48.480 So, life sucks, and everything's miserable, and we're cynical, and that's what wisdom is. 0.99

01:00:54.200 It's like, and there's no point in trying anything because everything's meaningless, and who the hell's going to care in a million years, and you're a fool to move forward in any case. 0.99

01:01:02.620 It's like, there's your household. 0.91

01:01:04.440 Okay, and so now you decide, no, despite all that, I'm going to put my room in order.

01:01:10.220 It's like, you will have a war on your hands.

01:01:12.120 Because the first thing the people around you who are aiming down will do is think, oh, you really, eh?

01:01:17.080 You think you're so much better than we are, do you? 0.99

01:01:20.080 You really think that, you and your fancy goddamn plans. 0.99

01:01:23.380 It's like, we're going to put every psychological obstacle we can possibly think of in your way. 0.99

01:01:28.400 Because if you succeed, even in something that trivial, you shed a very dim light on our existence.

01:01:35.000 And so we're going to put, we're going to do everything we can to take you out.

01:01:38.520 And so this, people think, oh, well, cleaning your room, that's just a cliche.

01:01:41.900 It's like, yeah, really, eh?

01:01:43.240 Just go ahead and try it.

01:01:44.580 You see how much of a cliche that is.

01:01:46.520 And if you've got your room in order, then put your office in order.

01:01:49.860 See, and then you're going to encounter the, as soon as you do that, you step out into the social world, you're going to encounter the antipathy between men and women.

01:01:57.060 You're going to encounter the identity politics in the workplace.

01:02:00.340 You're going to encounter how you regulate your sexual morality while you're working with people of the opposite sex. 1.00

01:02:06.280 You're going to encounter the ethics that are necessary to move your business forward.

01:02:10.620 It's like the whole, it's a microcosm.

01:02:13.000 It really is.

01:02:13.960 And so to take those microcosms seriously, well, that's what I'm asking people to do.

01:02:19.840 And I'm saying, look, it isn't only about you being happy.

01:02:24.580 It's like, yeah, whatever, happy.

01:02:27.080 There's lots of times in your life you're not going to be happy.

01:02:29.220 And so that's not going to work.

01:02:30.580 You want to have something meaningful.

01:02:32.180 That's the boat that will take you through the storm, right, when you batten down the hatches.

01:02:37.380 But there's more.

01:02:38.000 It isn't even that.

01:02:38.780 It isn't even a meaningful, engaged life will see you through the catastrophes, even though that's a big deal, right?

01:02:46.000 That's a great proposition.

01:02:47.260 And I really believe it's true because you can say to yourself, yeah, it's worth it.

01:02:50.980 Right.

01:02:51.340 Right.

01:02:51.680 And great, man.

01:02:52.580 But there's the other part of it, too, which is don't be thinking that your errors aren't linked to hell because they are.

01:03:00.720 If you look at what happened in the 20th century, the brilliant commentators on the 20th century totalitarian states and all of their atrocities said the same thing over and over.

01:03:11.780 It isn't top-down evil leader manipulating innocent masses.

01:03:16.100 That's not it.

01:03:16.940 It's the moral failings of every single individual unwilling to say their truth, unwilling to act out what they know to be right, that accumulate and produce the catastrophic state.

01:03:29.660 And so when you're fussing about with your life, when you're not manifesting your potential, when you're falsifying your speech and your actions in the service of short-term expedience, you are working to bring about hell on earth.

01:03:42.380 And that's true.

01:03:44.320 It's true literally.

01:03:45.720 And then it's true, I suspect it's also true metaphorically.

01:03:49.540 And that's a real truth, man.

01:03:51.000 When you get the literal and the metaphorical working at the same time, it's like that's real.

01:03:56.660 So it isn't just that you have to fix up yourself so that you can have a better life.

01:04:00.820 It's like who cares about you for a moment?

01:04:03.360 It's you have to fix up your life because if you don't, every time you make a mistake that you know to be a mistake, you're leading the world toward hell.

01:04:11.140 And I believe that.

01:04:12.480 I think it's true.

01:04:13.800 Well, Jordan Peterson's book is 12 Rules for Life.

01:04:16.600 Honestly, we could do this all day long and we'll certainly have you back.

01:04:20.120 I really appreciate the time.

01:04:21.760 There's a reason so many people follow Jordan.

01:04:23.200 There's some reason so many people are buying this book.

01:04:25.260 The book is fantastic.

01:04:26.120 And his other book, Maps and Meaning, is also fantastic.

01:04:27.960 So I'll get a copy of that as well.

01:04:29.340 Jordan, thanks so much for stopping by.

01:04:30.480 I really appreciate it.

01:04:31.260 Thanks, Ben.

01:04:32.020 It was great.

01:04:32.520 Yeah.

01:04:32.920 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay, executive producer Jeremy Boring,

01:04:44.220 associate producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens, edited by Alex Zingaro.

01:04:48.300 Audio is mixed by Mike Karomina.

01:04:49.980 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.

01:04:51.520 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

01:04:55.480 Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - May 14, 2018

Ben Shapiro

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