The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Jordan Peterson's Rules for Life with Richard Fidler

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.

00:00:51.040 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

00:00:59.760 You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description.

00:01:06.820 Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com.

00:01:12.820 Professor Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto in Canada.

00:01:18.080 He wrote a book a while back on the common truths that he found embedded in myths and legends and in some of the earliest Bible stories.

00:01:26.540 He says that when you pull apart the story of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, you can find all kinds of truths about human beings and belief and morality.

00:01:34.700 Dr. Peterson taught at Harvard and other universities, and then in 2016, something happened.

00:01:40.000 He was catapulted into international prominence, and he spoke out against new legislation in Canada that would have compelled him and others to use gender-neutral pronouns.

00:01:51.280 And for this, he was hailed as a defender of free speech and denounced as a transphobic, a word he doesn't much care for.

00:01:59.580 Jordan Peterson's university lectures on YouTube have become spectacularly popular, and he's Australian-speaking to us sold out almost instantly.

00:02:07.440 He's something of a phenomenon right now.

00:02:10.500 But interestingly, neither his attackers on the left and his loudest supporters from the alt-right really seem to be listening to what he actually has to say.

00:02:20.780 Jordan Peterson's now written a book called Twelve Rules for Life, which offers advice like stand up straight with your shoulders back,

00:02:27.540 set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world,

00:02:31.080 pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient, and do not bother children when they are skateboarding.

00:02:37.440 Hello, Jordan.

00:02:38.640 Hello.

00:02:39.520 Twelve rules.

00:02:40.820 Twelve rules to guide you towards what?

00:02:43.500 Happiness or something else?

00:02:44.800 No, not happiness.

00:02:46.040 Happiness is something that happens to you if you're fortunate, and it's a byproduct of pursuing, perhaps a byproduct,

00:02:52.160 a fortunate byproduct of pursuing what you should pursue, and that's not happiness.

00:02:56.560 It's not that.

00:02:57.920 First of all, happiness doesn't tide you through periods of tragedy and betrayal and loss.

00:03:04.140 So if that's the purpose of life, well, what happens when things aren't going well?

00:03:07.980 What do you have then?

00:03:09.880 It's better to pursue things that are meaningful, and meaningful is the right way of thinking about it, engaging and meaningful.

00:03:16.820 You say that the point is to embrace being, that you spell with a capital B.

00:03:21.140 What do you mean by being with a capital B?

00:03:23.300 Well, it's an idea that I got in part from the philosopher Heidegger, who was very interested in, I would say,

00:03:32.060 construing reality in a manner that was somewhat alternative to the reigning materialist viewpoint.

00:03:36.300 I mean, you live in your experience.

00:03:41.420 Your experience isn't really made out of matter.

00:03:44.160 It's more made out of things that matter.

00:03:46.300 It's a very different way of looking at it.

00:03:48.280 I mean, in your field of experience, you have emotions and motivations and dreams and desires and stories and goals and aims.

00:03:55.640 It's a narrative structure in some sense that you inhabit, and that's a reality.

00:04:00.280 That's really reality in some sense, and, well, it's harsh, that reality.

00:04:07.060 It has a tragic element, because people are vulnerable and mortal, and it has an element of malevolence as well,

00:04:15.420 because we're all touched by betrayal and the, what would you call it, the sins of our fellow men,

00:04:21.160 but we're also capable of those things ourselves.

00:04:23.580 And so the question is, how do you cope with that, and what do you make of it?

00:04:27.660 And one answer is, you can judge it harshly and denounce it and become bitter and resentful,

00:04:33.880 and maybe you have your reasons for that, but it's a counterproductive approach,

00:04:37.660 and so the approach that I lay out is the alternative to that, I would say.

00:04:43.160 If life is based in suffering, that's what you argue, to begin with.

00:04:46.420 Suffering is inevitable.

00:04:47.080 Yeah, well, it's an incontrovertible fact.

00:04:48.820 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

00:04:50.100 So then the point is, what are you going to do about that?

00:04:52.080 That is, well, it's worse than just suffering.

00:04:54.760 It's suffering tainted with malevolence, because there's the tragic element of suffering,

00:04:59.300 which is just that, well, you know, you're a fragile creature, like everyone,

00:05:04.740 and because of that, you're subject to mental and physical deterioration and to death,

00:05:09.300 and so that's rough in and of itself, hard enough,

00:05:12.720 and maybe hard enough to turn you against being itself,

00:05:15.520 but that's made even more complicated by the fact that much of the suffering that people endure

00:05:20.540 is a consequence of they impose it upon themselves or it's imposed by them on others,

00:05:25.680 by others on them.

00:05:26.920 Yeah, well, what about the suffering that you create yourself

00:05:29.340 and coming to a proper accounting with that?

00:05:31.800 Well, that's a very difficult thing to do.

00:05:33.460 People know perfectly well that, number one, they don't take advantage of their full potential.

00:05:39.660 They don't make use of their full potential.

00:05:41.160 They don't make full use of the opportunities that are granted to them.

00:05:44.560 They're characterized by laziness and procrastination and irritation

00:05:49.060 and all sorts of habits of mind and of character that make their lives more better than they need to be,

00:05:56.580 and that's also something that people have a very difficult time coming to terms with.

00:06:00.540 They feel guilty about that, and so that's the complicated landscape of being, let's say.

00:06:06.620 The question is, how do you respond to that?

00:06:08.940 Yeah, I've known people who've banged their head against the wall

00:06:10.840 because the world isn't as good as they want it to be, or they feel it ought to be,

00:06:14.300 or as pure, in fact, as they think it ought to be.

00:06:16.760 Well, hey, there's no shortage of evidence for that.

00:06:19.240 I mean, so the thing is, these problems are real,

00:06:22.860 and I think part of the reason that people have been gravitating towards my lectures, let's say,

00:06:26.680 is because I make a very straightforward case for this.

00:06:30.600 I'm not a feel-good, self-esteem optimist.

00:06:33.940 That doesn't mean I'm pessimistic,

00:06:35.540 but I'm trying to help people grapple with the fact that life itself poses a very serious problem.

00:06:42.240 That's an existential idea, right?

00:06:44.200 Is that the problem of life is embedded in the structure of life.

00:06:47.400 You have to contend with your own inadequacies as an individual.

00:06:51.320 You have to contend with the tyranny and arbitrariness of the social world,

00:06:54.960 and you have to contend with the brutality of nature.

00:06:57.760 Now, that's only on the negative side, right?

00:06:59.840 But those are real things.

00:07:01.580 They're real.

00:07:02.720 That's the part of the mythological landscape, the reality of those things.

00:07:05.840 And then you have to plot your course through that.

00:07:09.300 And hopefully, you do it in a manner that doesn't make everything worse.

00:07:14.020 That's a good start.

00:07:15.460 One of your rules, indeed, the first one you have is stand up straight with your shoulders back.

00:07:20.440 My producer, Nick, was discussing this with you,

00:07:22.380 and as you were talking with her over the phone,

00:07:24.280 she said she unconsciously sat up straighter.

00:07:26.420 Right, right.

00:07:26.960 And so you must have this odd hypnotic power over the phone, Jordan Peterson.

00:07:30.460 This is really a disquisition about status and status consciousness.

00:07:35.140 What's your understanding as a clinical psychologist of how deeply embedded status consciousness,

00:07:40.500 awareness of one's own status is in animals like humans?

00:07:43.100 Oh, it's absolutely unbelievably deep.

00:07:44.820 There is an idea that's very attractive that's been put forward by thinkers on the left,

00:07:51.400 that hierarchy and exploitation, which clearly exist,

00:07:55.720 are secondary consequences of political and economic schemes.

00:08:00.060 So you might say, if you're a Marxist, for example,

00:08:02.360 that inequality and hierarchy can be laid at the feet of capitalism and the free market.

00:08:08.000 It's like, there's no doubt that there's hierarchy.

00:08:11.700 There's no doubt that there's inequality.

00:08:13.120 And there are prices to be paid for both of those. 0.97

00:08:16.580 But you are an unbelievably naive optimist

00:08:20.180 if you think that that can be laid at the feet of the free market and capitalism.

00:08:23.340 Because the problem of hierarchy and inequality is a third of a billion years old.

00:08:29.700 It's so old that your nervous system is adapted to it as a permanent feature of existence.

00:08:35.420 So the systems that regulate your emotions, these are serotonergic systems,

00:08:39.440 essentially serotonin is a brain chemical.

00:08:41.800 The systems that regulate your negative and positive emotion do it in part unconsciously,

00:08:47.420 pre-consciously, by evaluating your relative status in whatever hierarchy happens to be relevant to you,

00:08:54.280 and determining whether the negative emotion should be turned up

00:08:57.640 and the positive emotion turned down, or vice versa.

00:09:01.720 So if you encounter a status failure, let's say,

00:09:05.140 and you move down the hierarchy,

00:09:07.020 then your nervous system transforms so that you become more sensitive to negative emotion

00:09:11.680 and less sensitive to positive emotion.

00:09:14.320 And is the inverse true?

00:09:15.240 If you have the more powerful status, of higher status you attain,

00:09:20.380 you get the happy drugs in your head and the unhappy drugs in your head.

00:09:24.360 My experience of a lot of senior political leaders is that they're kind of highly strung and quite shouty.

00:09:28.800 Jordan, I don't know if that really accords with what you're saying there.

00:09:30.840 Well, status is not the only determinant of your emotional well-being.

00:09:35.340 There's an observation of your own competence, so that's one.

00:09:40.160 The other is your temperament.

00:09:42.040 So some people are temperamentally more or less anxious,

00:09:44.600 and that's established very early on, very heavily under biological control.

00:09:49.160 And then the third is your relative status within your communities.

00:09:52.180 Those are the three determinants of your anxiety levels, let's say.

00:09:56.120 So if you're giving that advice to someone, stand up straight with your shoulders back,

00:09:59.000 for someone who is feeling like they have low status in society.

00:10:01.900 Are you – I don't want to say so you're saying, but –

00:10:05.600 No, you don't want to say that.

00:10:06.460 No, I don't want to say that.

00:10:07.680 No one wants to say that.

00:10:08.880 Let me try and paraphrase you then.

00:10:10.160 Are you saying fake it till you make it then?

00:10:12.140 Carry yourself like you are a formidable person until you actually become more formidable?

00:10:16.560 Well, it's part of that.

00:10:17.960 It's part of that.

00:10:19.020 So there's practical advice in that postural readjustment,

00:10:22.640 because if you set yourself up properly physically, then you can breathe better,

00:10:26.660 and you manifest yourself as more competent and confident.

00:10:31.900 And that does produce an internal feedback process that tends to facilitate that.

00:10:36.560 So you can make yourself feel better generally if you're slouching habitually.

00:10:40.900 If you learn to stand up straight, that actually does make you feel better physiologically.

00:10:44.980 But there's a metaphorical element to it too,

00:10:47.500 which is that even if you've had to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fate

00:10:52.300 in some particularly unfair manner,

00:10:54.400 you still have the option of accepting that in some sense voluntarily.

00:10:58.640 And that means to stand up straight and to expose yourself to the world.

00:11:02.360 Because partly what you're doing when you're standing up is you're exposing your most vulnerable surfaces

00:11:06.720 to the social and natural world.

00:11:09.740 And so that's an indication of confidence.

00:11:11.740 But you're not hunching over like an armadillo.

00:11:13.500 That's right.

00:11:13.820 In other words, you're exposing your soft underbelly.

00:11:15.800 Well, you are precisely doing that.

00:11:17.340 And it's particularly true with human beings,

00:11:19.260 because of course we stand up on our hind legs.

00:11:21.140 And so most animals are armoured against the world by their back.

00:11:25.500 But not us.

00:11:26.240 We put our soft parts front and forward,

00:11:28.720 which is that's partly the realisation of nakedness in the Garden of Eden, right?

00:11:32.560 That's partly what that story details in some sense,

00:11:35.520 is the discovery of that,

00:11:37.620 the self-conscious human discovery of that vulnerability.

00:11:41.400 So, but your best path forward is to accept that vulnerability voluntarily.

00:11:46.340 And the strange thing is, is that in that acceptance there's a simultaneous transcendence.

00:11:51.260 So, if you're a clinician, for example,

00:11:53.160 and if you're dealing with people who are anxious,

00:11:55.060 you don't make them safe.

00:11:58.080 You don't build higher walls around them.

00:12:01.200 You help them develop strategies to voluntarily expose themselves

00:12:05.260 to the things that they are frightened of or detest.

00:12:08.960 And that makes them stronger.

00:12:10.080 So, rule one is an injunction to adopt that as a metaphysical stance in life,

00:12:18.260 is to take the tragedy on voluntarily.

00:12:21.420 As a clinical, of course, I mean, you lecture in psychology at the University of Toronto,

00:12:25.260 but you've worked clinically as well as a psychologist.

00:12:27.960 You would have been in a room, I'm just guessing here,

00:12:29.820 you would have been in a room with a person who would be suffering terrible bullying,

00:12:35.420 terrible, the tyranny of other people to the point where they're almost,

00:12:38.580 they're tearful and they're full of rage and woundedness and vulnerability.

00:12:44.120 Oh, yes.

00:12:44.880 Bearing what you just said in mind, what advice do you give to someone

00:12:47.440 who's actually carrying that kind of woundedness, that pain and that rage

00:12:52.280 against the tyrant, whether it's a boss or a violent husband or someone like that?

00:12:58.480 Well, the first thing you do with someone like that is listen to them.

00:13:01.160 It's like, imagine, so when someone comes to see you clinically,

00:13:04.540 they have a problem or they wouldn't be there.

00:13:07.140 And it may be a psychological problem, but it might just be a problem, right?

00:13:11.120 Because there's a distinction between a psychological problem and a problem.

00:13:14.820 Like if your father is dying of Alzheimer's disease, that's a problem.

00:13:18.560 It might also be a psychological problem.

00:13:20.840 So people come because they have problems or psychological problems or both.

00:13:25.600 And they also come because they're not doing as well as they need to

00:13:29.320 and they would like things to be better.

00:13:30.740 So what you do to begin with, if you're a careful clinician,

00:13:33.980 is you listen to the person tell you what their problem is.

00:13:38.140 And they may have never had anyone listen to that.

00:13:40.220 They might not even know.

00:13:41.480 They come in because they're suffering in some manner.

00:13:44.440 And when you told that story, a particular client,

00:13:46.980 or when you asked that question, a particular client came to mind

00:13:49.300 who'd been terribly bullied.

00:13:50.860 He had a lot of physiological and cognitive problems.

00:13:54.620 And he'd been terribly bullied.

00:13:55.680 And used to people sneering at that, I expect as well.

00:13:57.780 Oh God, in ways you just can't imagine.

00:13:59.840 I mean, you just can't believe how much some people can be alienated and bullied.

00:14:03.640 And, you know, you spend hours to begin with as a clinician just letting the person.

00:14:09.080 I had a client a while back who had been bullied into a psychotic break.

00:14:13.460 When I first saw her, she could hardly speak.

00:14:16.320 She was a young woman.

00:14:17.040 She could hardly speak.

00:14:18.180 And she would put her hands in front of her and move them up kind of robotically.

00:14:22.340 And when I asked her what she was doing, she said, well, I can see lines.

00:14:26.160 And I'm trying to balance the lines, like in a psychotic manner.

00:14:30.000 She was completely fragmented.

00:14:31.940 It took six months of listening to her say what had happened to her at school

00:14:37.280 before I could figure out what broke her and help her put herself back together.

00:14:43.760 She was targeted by two kids who were particularly malevolent.

00:14:47.400 Like they were in to take her out.

00:14:49.600 That was their goal.

00:14:50.460 And they broke her, you know.

00:14:52.520 And so, yeah, that can be absolutely brutal.

00:14:55.000 So anyways, you let the person delineate out their experiences.

00:14:58.100 And you do a causal analysis.

00:14:59.760 It's like, well, let's figure out exactly what the chain of events were

00:15:06.020 that led you to be vulnerable to that catastrophe.

00:15:10.200 Because the cure, and this is actually why you remember the past, right?

00:15:13.740 What you want to do if something terrible has happened to you is analyze the terrible experience

00:15:18.860 so that you can now reconfigure your perceptions and your behaviors

00:15:22.840 so that the probability that that will happen again in the future is reduced.

00:15:27.200 That's the purpose of memory.

00:15:28.580 So you recognize it.

00:15:29.500 So you identify and go, aha, right.

00:15:31.460 And then you're standing outside the problem.

00:15:33.380 Well, and then you can also develop a strategy because that's the next thing you do as a clinician.

00:15:37.300 It's like, okay, well, okay, now we see the situation.

00:15:39.920 You were bullied and these were the people who were after you and they had malevolent intent.

00:15:43.920 And in some way you were vulnerable to that, even though that doesn't mean it was just

00:15:48.320 or that it was your fault or any of those things.

00:15:50.080 Although we want to see what you might have contributed to it so that you can stop doing that.

00:15:54.460 And then you need a strategy of defense.

00:15:56.520 It's like, okay, if you meet someone like that again,

00:15:58.900 how are you going to reconfigure your behavior so that they cannot take advantage of you again?

00:16:03.040 And when you find these people are harboring things, feelings like homicidal thoughts towards their tormentor

00:16:10.120 and they're shocked by that, what do you tell them about those thoughts?

00:16:15.320 Oh, well, we explore why they have them.

00:16:18.900 I mean, I've seen people get pushed into positions sometimes where they have homicidal thoughts

00:16:23.320 that you can understand.

00:16:24.600 They've been betrayed by someone.

00:16:26.460 The betrayal is ongoing.

00:16:27.620 They've been pushed into a corner where terribly, terribly unjust things are happening to them

00:16:31.940 that have serious consequences for their lives.

00:16:34.240 It's not surprising that they have vengeful and hostile fantasies and obsessions sometimes.

00:16:41.720 So you have to have them lay out the problem, which is often extraordinarily complicated,

00:16:48.020 and then strategize towards something that would be a better solution.

00:16:52.920 Sometimes you see people who are so trapped and hurt that they feel that their violent impulse

00:16:59.220 is actually the only way of obtaining justice.

00:17:02.700 And discriminating between justice and revenge is not easy.

00:17:06.660 Like, that's a very, very, it requires a very, very sophisticated analysis of the situation

00:17:12.960 to distinguish between vengeance and justice.

00:17:15.040 And so you might say to people, well, you should give up your anger because it's so hard on you,

00:17:18.960 it's ruining your life.

00:17:19.740 And they say, well, I can't.

00:17:20.740 This is so unjust.

00:17:21.620 My, every ethical bone in my body cries out to me to rectify this.

00:17:27.480 You have to help people find a pathway that's more productive.

00:17:30.140 It's very difficult.

00:17:31.760 So much of these conversations come out of something you touched on a bit earlier,

00:17:35.600 which is a fundamental view of human nature, if indeed such a thing is appropriate.

00:17:41.840 I don't know.

00:17:42.720 I mean, there is a view, I had a guest on the show last year who was, whose view is an economist.

00:17:46.840 And his view is really that human nature is fundamentally good, that most of our interactions

00:17:52.380 are either benign or kind, but it's the horror show that gets the publicity.

00:17:57.460 And it's like that when you write history, the most colorful bits are the bloodiest bits.

00:18:00.600 The most interesting bits is when there's all this great wickedness being perpetrated.

00:18:05.120 But the boring truth is, according to him, the boring truth is that people are fundamentally good.

00:18:10.260 What do you say to that?

00:18:11.500 I think the second part of that is true, but the first part is not true.

00:18:14.460 I think that people are good and evil, and that that's the case for everyone.

00:18:20.880 And that, you know, Hannah Arendt wrote a book called The Banality of Evil, which could

00:18:25.040 have been reversed.

00:18:25.880 It could have been The Evil of Banality, which I think would have been a better title, actually.

00:18:29.620 But she pointed out very clearly, and many commentators have done this, that terrible acts

00:18:34.900 are often the culminating consequence of an accumulation of what you might regard as minor

00:18:40.580 sins.

00:18:41.000 So the mythological landscape is that the individual is the hero and the adversary at

00:18:46.920 the same time.

00:18:47.740 That would be mythologically represented in Christianity, for example, or represented theologically

00:18:51.860 as the eternal conflict between Christ and Satan.

00:18:54.540 But you see this sort of thing mirrored in popular culture all the time.

00:18:57.600 It's Harry Potter versus Voldemort, for example, or it's Batman versus the Joker, Superman versus

00:19:02.640 Lex Luthor.

00:19:03.340 You know, that idea of that duality of spirit that inhabits a single individual, that's

00:19:08.720 an ancient mythological truth.

00:19:10.480 That's exactly right.

00:19:11.400 That's mythology.

00:19:12.340 That's not what real life feels like on a day-to-day basis, does it?

00:19:16.900 Oh, it depends on what your life is.

00:19:18.600 Well, that's true.

00:19:19.760 That's true.

00:19:20.180 I mean, I'm not living in the killing fields of Cambodia.

00:19:21.760 But this is true.

00:19:22.580 And this is true.

00:19:23.120 And it's always a good thing to remember that.

00:19:24.860 I give thanks and praise to it every day, just quietly.

00:19:28.020 But nonetheless, I think, by and large, I mean, most people listening right now would

00:19:32.260 feel that their lives are – there's not many Jokers or Lex Luthers or Voldemorts in

00:19:37.860 their lives.

00:19:38.360 They might be here and there.

00:19:39.640 They're rare.

00:19:40.520 And when they pop up, they're a big shock to everyone.

00:19:42.640 Yeah, well –

00:19:43.100 So they're outliers rather than an integral part of –

00:19:45.460 Well, they are as super villain figures, you know, because those are obviously – those

00:19:50.340 are caricatures in some sense, you know.

00:19:52.120 But it doesn't – you don't have to scrape very far down, underneath the surface of

00:19:58.220 most people's lives, to find fairly appalling stories of betrayal and self-betrayal.

00:20:05.260 And those are reflections of that proclivity for evil, let's say, that desire to do harm

00:20:10.760 for harm's sake, that's characteristic of, well, you see that in schoolyard bullying.

00:20:15.540 You see it in children.

00:20:16.540 It's everywhere.

00:20:17.800 And people don't like to see it.

00:20:19.320 And I would also say, you know, with respect to your point, is that we have managed to

00:20:25.340 formulate societies, primarily in the West, where the default interaction between people

00:20:30.020 is decent.

00:20:30.820 But that's a kind of miracle.

00:20:32.800 It's not the case for most of the thugocracies in the world, you know, that are rife with, 0.98

00:20:37.540 I would say, individual, familial, social and economic pathology, where the default transaction

00:20:43.380 is hostility and suspicion.

00:20:45.900 It's very – it's not obvious at all how we manage to create societies where the default

00:20:51.100 interaction between strangers is trust.

00:20:53.500 That's an amazing accomplishment.

00:20:55.380 One of the things you've talked quite a bit about is apprehending the true nature of certain

00:20:59.040 evil figures like Hitler. 0.74

00:21:00.840 I mean, yeah. 0.94

00:21:01.800 Particularly Hitler. 0.79

00:21:02.600 We have to sort of focus on him.

00:21:04.240 There's also Stalin.

00:21:05.180 There's also Pol Pot. 0.88

00:21:05.960 There are other figures.

00:21:07.280 Genghis Khan as well.

00:21:08.080 People like that, is the thing that's most misunderstood about them, you say, is that

00:21:13.820 they're not necessarily playing to win so much as to purify the world with fire.

00:21:19.640 Can you just talk a bit about that?

00:21:21.040 Well, in Rule 6, the rule is set yourself – set your house in perfect order before you

00:21:26.560 criticize the world.

00:21:27.420 And it's a very dark chapter, and I would recommend it to people who would actually like

00:21:32.420 to understand why the school shootings in the United States in particular continue to

00:21:37.520 occur, why it is that a young person might spend months or even years fantasizing about

00:21:43.420 taking dark revenge, you know, of the sort that might involve killing elementary school

00:21:47.200 children, for example, which is what happened at Sandy Hook.

00:21:49.640 You have to go to a very dark place for a very long period of time before you dream up

00:21:54.540 something like that.

00:21:55.860 And the question is, well, why might you go there?

00:21:58.400 Well, part of it is that life, as we already discussed, is very hard.

00:22:03.480 And for some people, they're outcast and almost nothing works out for them.

00:22:06.640 And they have a certain – they have been subject to a certain amount of malevolent treatment

00:22:12.240 and have nursed a certain amount of malevolence in their own heart.

00:22:15.760 They get very, very judgmental about the structure of existence and regard themselves as eternal

00:22:24.740 judges, I would say, in some sense.

00:22:26.220 That was certainly the case for the Columbine High School killers.

00:22:28.400 And conclude that being itself, because it's full of tragedy and malevolence, is an evil 0.86

00:22:34.240 that should be punished and annihilated.

00:22:37.060 And then they work to do exactly that. 0.95

00:22:39.460 And you don't want to encounter someone like that.

00:22:42.060 I mean, if you're a naive person, and I've had many people like this in my clinical practice,

00:22:46.880 and this happens to people in the military too.

00:22:49.000 If you're a naive person and you encounter that in someone else or in yourself,

00:22:53.140 it will produce post-traumatic stress disorder.

00:22:55.720 Because post-traumatic stress disorder occurs when people are touched by evil.

00:22:59.940 That's not how it's normally described clinically, because academics, and I would say people in

00:23:05.080 general, don't really like to grapple with that sort of reality.

00:23:08.300 But if you talk to military personnel who have post-traumatic stress disorder, and you start

00:23:12.580 talking to them about a dialectic between good and evil, they're instantly on board for

00:23:18.240 that.

00:23:18.440 They need a dialectic of good and evil to recover from post-traumatic stress disorder.

00:23:23.440 Well, the murderous types, the types that are out for destruction, they make an artistic

00:23:30.480 process of bringing as much misery to the world to the least deserving as rapidly as possible

00:23:36.100 with the most amount of trouble.

00:23:37.840 And that's what they're aiming at.

00:23:39.160 They're not misunderstood.

00:23:41.080 They're not bullied people who are just, you know, responding and seeking justice.

00:23:45.320 It's gone way, way, way past that.

00:23:49.100 There are people who just want to see the world burn.

00:23:51.000 That's right.

00:23:51.320 There are people who, and not only burn, but, you know, because maybe you could have a quick

00:23:55.740 death if it was burning, but burning in a way that would give you the most drawn out

00:23:59.840 possible pain.

00:24:01.560 You know, Winston Churchill famously in the 1930s was the one conservative politician in

00:24:07.460 Britain who recognized Hitler for what he was. 0.62

00:24:10.840 Chamberlain and his colleagues believed Hitler ultimately would be a rational actor and would 0.97

00:24:16.580 act in rational self-interest and was constantly confused and confounded by it.

00:24:20.660 But Churchill kind of recognized that malevolence in Hitler. 0.88

00:24:25.280 Do you think he was able to do that because he had part of that in himself?

00:24:28.240 Oh, definitely.

00:24:28.760 And recognized it in himself and was fascinated by it.

00:24:30.980 The first thing that we might point out is that it's by no means self-evident, except

00:24:37.200 as an axiomatic statement, which is what the economists do, that self-interest is rational. 0.98

00:24:43.980 That's foolish. 1.00

00:24:45.480 It's foolish. 0.99

00:24:46.640 Look, in chapter two, I suggest, rule two, that people should treat themselves like they're 0.99

00:24:52.000 someone that they're responsible for helping.

00:24:54.400 You might think, well, that's self-evident.

00:24:55.840 That's the economist's claim.

00:24:57.260 People are rational, rationally self-interested.

00:25:00.420 It's like, no, you're not.

00:25:01.900 Not if you hate yourself.

00:25:03.740 Not if you're terrified of your life.

00:25:05.360 Not if you're contemptuous of yourself and other people.

00:25:07.860 You have no rational self-interest.

00:25:10.040 You might be perfectly willing to punish yourself on an endless basis.

00:25:13.440 There's no shortage of teenage girls who are cutting themselves constantly. 1.00

00:25:18.060 They don't have a rational self-interest.

00:25:19.660 They think that they deserve to be punished and continually.

00:25:22.700 And it's not actually that surprising because people,

00:25:25.840 tend to carry a load of guilt, some of which is unwarranted, but much of which is justified

00:25:31.360 because everyone knows that they're not everyone they could be. 0.99

00:25:35.040 And so the idea of rational self-interest is, that's a naive fool. 0.94

00:25:40.420 There were no shortage of economists at the outset, before the First World War, 0.95

00:25:43.620 who said, war is impossible.

00:25:45.160 It would defeat everyone's self-interest.

00:25:46.820 There's too much economically at stake for war to start.

00:25:49.820 Right.

00:25:50.280 Well, you'd think that people constantly presume that the current situation is somehow different

00:25:56.660 than the historical reality.

00:25:58.600 And it would be lovely, in some sense, if people were enlightened, rational, self-interested actors.

00:26:03.320 Even if that was primarily based in selfishness, at least it would be devoted towards the preservation

00:26:10.300 of at least one thing.

00:26:11.820 But when you're dealing with someone who's gone beyond the pale,

00:26:16.200 and you think that their actions could be conceptualized within the framework of rational self-interest,

00:26:24.000 you're a lamb to their wolf. 0.61

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00:29:25.200 This is Conversations with Richard Feidler on ABC Radio.

00:29:39.100 To get a sense of your worldview, I'd like to talk about your origins.

00:29:42.380 You grew up in a town called Fairview in northern Canada.

00:29:46.020 Where is Fairview?

00:29:46.980 Can you give us a sense of its landscape and how far it is from everywhere else?

00:29:51.340 It's on the western side of the country.

00:29:53.340 It's about 600 miles from the Pacific Ocean, east of the Pacific Ocean.

00:30:00.680 It's north of the Rocky Mountains.

00:30:02.780 It's about 600 miles north of the American border.

00:30:06.320 It's at the northernmost reach of the North American prairie.

00:30:10.720 And so it was among the last land settled in the settler rush into North America.

00:30:17.420 It was settled about, well, it would be about how long ago now, 60, 19, 10, about 70 years ago.

00:30:24.000 All right, that's pretty recent then.

00:30:25.280 Oh, yes, definitely.

00:30:26.340 It was just scraped out of the prairie.

00:30:28.520 And the railway ended 13 miles north of us.

00:30:31.760 How close is the nearest big city to Fairview?

00:30:33.540 400 miles.

00:30:35.100 Right, so it's nearly like 1,000 kilometers, in other words.

00:30:37.200 Yeah, yeah.

00:30:37.680 There it is.

00:30:38.080 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:30:39.060 About 700 kilometers, yeah.

00:30:41.160 Given that you're that far north, how dark and cold were winters?

00:30:44.360 Oh, it was cold.

00:30:45.040 I was just up there three weeks ago.

00:30:47.260 I gave a talk to my alma mater, which was in a little college about 60 miles away,

00:30:52.760 in a reasonably larger urban center, about 50,000 people.

00:30:56.420 And it was 30 below when we were up there for the whole week.

00:30:59.280 I mean, and when I was a kid, when I went to college at Grand Prairie Regional College,

00:31:04.220 there was a segment of time there, 38 days, where it never got above minus 40.

00:31:11.020 And minus 40 is really cold.

00:31:12.560 Like, you go outside at minus 40, well, if you throw a kettle full of boiling water in

00:31:16.120 the air at minus 40, it will vaporize completely before it hits the ground.

00:31:19.600 And tires used to freeze flat on the bottom, and things act very strangely at 40 below.

00:31:25.940 Yeah, what does smoke do when it's coming out of a chimney there?

00:31:28.180 It tends to drift downward, yeah.

00:31:30.660 It's that heavy.

00:31:31.660 Yeah, yeah.

00:31:32.280 Right.

00:31:32.720 It just gets cold so fast that the particulates drift downward.

00:31:36.140 You can tell it's really cold outside when you can see the chimneys, the smoke kind

00:31:40.040 of drift downward and collect on the ground.

00:31:42.460 And how much daylight do you get in the middle of winter?

00:31:44.980 About six hours.

00:31:45.720 So it's like Iceland, in other words, essentially.

00:31:47.880 It's the kind of weather of Iceland.

00:31:50.020 As you were growing up there, did your parents-

00:31:51.280 It's much colder than Iceland, though, because it has the Gulf Stream.

00:31:53.860 Of course it does, yes.

00:31:55.580 Was the expectation always that you would leave?

00:31:58.220 The expectation for most people in the town, most young people who had options, let's

00:32:06.040 say, and who weren't, options that transcended a working class horizon, was that they would

00:32:12.740 leave, because what else were they going to do, even to further their education?

00:32:17.300 There was, you know, there was a college there, but it was an agricultural college, mostly.

00:32:21.500 If you were going to attend college or university, you were definitely leaving.

00:32:24.780 You could go to college 60 miles away for the first two years of your university, which

00:32:28.880 is what I did in a larger urban center.

00:32:30.940 It only had about 45,000 people at that time.

00:32:33.460 But by Northern Alberta standards, it was the urban hub.

00:32:37.300 And then I went to Edmonton after that, which was 600 kilometers away.

00:32:42.560 The big city.

00:32:43.260 Yeah.

00:32:43.400 How old were you when you met your wife there?

00:32:45.620 About, I was eight.

00:32:46.960 Yeah.

00:32:47.560 Yeah.

00:32:48.060 She was a childhood friend of mine.

00:32:49.780 A childhood friend.

00:32:50.800 Yeah.

00:32:51.080 We used to play together all the time when we were kids.

00:32:52.980 And then you kept in touch or something?

00:32:55.640 She used to hit my croquet ball down the street and then laugh.

00:32:59.120 That'll do it for a young man in love.

00:33:02.140 Who was it that made you a reader when you were in this town?

00:33:04.860 Oh, my father taught me to read when I was very young.

00:33:08.660 He was a school teacher.

00:33:10.620 He's still alive.

00:33:11.700 And he spent a lot of time with me when I was a little kid.

00:33:14.480 And he taught me to read when I was very young.

00:33:16.040 He had a workbook that he'd designed that stepped me through the process of learning with

00:33:20.660 phonics.

00:33:21.200 And he'd spend an hour or so a night with me when he came home for work, which was something

00:33:25.080 I really, really liked, really looked forward to.

00:33:27.140 And so he taught me to read.

00:33:28.580 And I had a particular facility for it as well.

00:33:30.680 So it was a happy marriage of innate ability, I would say, and care and attention.

00:33:36.720 Who was the librarian that opened you up to the world of books?

00:33:39.580 Yeah.

00:33:39.860 Well, she was an interesting person.

00:33:41.200 Her name was Rachel Notley.

00:33:42.340 And she's actually the mother of the current premier of Alberta, Rachel Notley, who was

00:33:47.400 a childhood friend of mine, adolescent friend of mine, really.

00:33:52.100 Sandy Notley was a New Englander, an educated person, a very anomalous person for our small

00:33:58.860 community, partly because she was genuinely a literary person, let's say, an educated person.

00:34:04.500 She was the librarian in our local junior high and also the wife of our local member of the

00:34:11.760 legislative assembly, who was the only socialist in Alberta.

00:34:15.500 Alberta, my home province, was the entire legislative assembly was conservative, every

00:34:20.940 single member.

00:34:21.960 And for decades, like for 40 years, he was the only member of the opposition.

00:34:26.960 And people in Fairview, Alberta is a conservative province.

00:34:30.020 People in Fairview, my town, didn't vote for him because he was a socialist.

00:34:33.140 They voted for him because they thought he was a good person, and he was.

00:34:36.680 Anyways, his wife was also a committed socialist, and she worked as our town librarian, our junior

00:34:42.300 high librarian, and she introduced all the delinquent and semi-delinquent types used to

00:34:46.220 hang out in her library because, well, she was an interesting person.

00:34:50.120 And that was you?

00:34:50.620 You were delinquent or semi-delinquent or not really?

00:34:52.860 Well, yeah, kind of.

00:34:54.920 You know, Fairview was kind of a rough town, and the people to hang out with, there wasn't

00:35:01.360 a lot of variety.

00:35:02.940 I kind of liked the kids who weren't particularly obedient and were kind of tough, you know?

00:35:08.820 Now, I wouldn't say I was a particularly tough kid.

00:35:11.420 I'd skipped a grade.

00:35:12.480 So I was smaller than my peers, and I was rather small for my age.

00:35:17.520 But I was pretty mouthy, so I could hold my own in a verbal dispute.

00:35:20.860 And it was, I just, I kind of admired the kids who had some fight in them, you know?

00:35:29.080 And anyways, we used to go hang out in the library, and she got a fair number of my friends

00:35:32.960 to read things that were quite sophisticated, but she piled books on me.

00:35:36.240 What sort of stuff was she introducing you to?

00:35:38.380 Oh, well, she introduced me to 1984 and Brave New World and One Day in the Life of Ivan

00:35:44.180 Denisovich, and also Ayn Rand's books, which was quite interesting because, of course-

00:35:48.320 Oh, for a socialist to bring you Ayn Rand.

00:35:50.660 Hey, look, she was a genuine intellectual, right?

00:35:53.140 It was, she thought that I would read those books and come to the appropriate conclusion,

00:35:58.120 you know?

00:35:58.420 And I suppose, in some sense, that was the case.

00:36:00.620 But she really put me on a path to reading.

00:36:03.640 I was reading a lot of science fiction at that point.

00:36:05.860 I read a book a day when I was a kid, and she tilted me more towards what you might think

00:36:11.440 of as higher quality literature.

00:36:13.180 And so that was a big deal.

00:36:14.160 So when you went reading Solzhenitsyn in the library, what were teenagers doing for fun

00:36:18.500 in Fairview?

00:36:19.520 What kind of stuff?

00:36:20.660 Oh, God.

00:36:22.200 Drinking ice-cold vodka behind their neighbor's fence.

00:36:25.620 And like, it was, I wouldn't call it a particularly salutary adolescent culture.

00:36:31.620 Yeah, what were parties like?

00:36:32.580 There were a lot of drugs in town.

00:36:33.100 Yeah.

00:36:33.560 What were parties, what do you remember of teenage parties at that time?

00:36:36.400 I never really liked teenage parties because they were very dark places.

00:36:39.920 You know, there wasn't, there was a lot of disengaged, premature cynicism that kind of

00:36:48.000 characterized the teenage population.

00:36:49.560 It was in the 1970s.

00:36:50.760 And at, you know, the 60s had a certain amount of optimism.

00:36:53.400 And then they kind of, the detritus of the 60s washed up on the shore of the 1970s.

00:36:59.280 And like, illicit drug use peaked in North America in 1979, which was the same year that

00:37:04.060 I graduated.

00:37:04.700 And the teenage parties were full of people who had consumed far too much alcohol, who

00:37:11.000 were listening to music, and I liked music, and I liked loud music, but who was listening

00:37:14.880 to music at volumes that precluded any possibility of any sort of conversation whatsoever.

00:37:20.920 And were also places where there was no shortage of drugs.

00:37:26.140 And there was a real nihilistic hopelessness about them that I didn't like.

00:37:30.800 I don't think anyone liked it particularly, but what were we going to do?

00:37:33.540 You sit at home and wait for Godot, you know?

00:37:37.540 You and I are roughly the same age.

00:37:38.880 I think you're a tiny bit older than me.

00:37:40.440 Like you, well, like me, you had recurrent worries, if you like, a certainty in the early

00:37:48.160 80s, particularly as the Cold War reached a new kind of dangerous intensity, that we weren't

00:37:53.500 going to live to see our 30s.

00:37:54.780 I mean, I was quite convinced of that.

00:37:56.540 Oh, many people were convinced of that.

00:37:58.120 I was quite convinced of that.

00:37:58.980 Yeah, yeah.

00:37:59.320 And you kind of had to live knowing that.

00:38:03.120 You said you used to have a kind of recurrent nightmares.

00:38:05.440 I had nightmares all the time about that.

00:38:06.980 Oh, yeah.

00:38:07.460 I can.

00:38:08.000 I was just watching Terminator, the Terminator movie.

00:38:10.660 And there's a scene in there where there's a scene of hydrogen bombs being blown off in

00:38:15.780 the horizon, you know, where you could see the mushroom clouds rise.

00:38:17.940 I had dreams that contained that sort of imagery all the time.

00:38:20.920 All the time.

00:38:21.600 Do you understand what, you said you began to read obsessively after that, about the

00:38:25.860 Holocaust, about terrible things, the worst things that have happened. 0.69

00:38:29.680 Do you understand your fascination for that?

00:38:32.600 Not really.

00:38:34.020 I think it might have something to do with temperamentally.

00:38:37.700 I have a fairly strong proclivity towards depression, which I think is an autoimmune illness

00:38:42.240 in my case.

00:38:43.240 And I think that that might have highlighted the negative for me more than it might for

00:38:48.680 someone else.

00:38:49.440 But I am voraciously curious.

00:38:52.320 So I don't know if you combine a bit of a dark side with voracious curiosity, you get

00:38:56.660 obsession with tyranny and malevolence, something like that.

00:39:01.000 But the curiosity, I think, apart from the darkness, I mean, I was oriented towards finding

00:39:07.200 the biggest problem I could conceptualize to try to solve it, you know, because I like an

00:39:12.060 intellectual challenge.

00:39:13.040 It's built into me, that liking.

00:39:15.200 And so I thought, well, especially once I went to graduate school and decided to, my

00:39:20.600 first degree was in political science and literature.

00:39:24.300 And I thought that political science held the key to understanding complex problems.

00:39:29.460 It was to be, they were to be analyzed at the political level.

00:39:32.460 But I learned fairly rapidly, partly because I didn't buy the human being as rational actor

00:39:37.020 theory or the people are motivated primarily by economics theory, which was the competing

00:39:43.020 theory, say, on the left.

00:39:44.120 I thought, no, neither of those are true.

00:39:46.400 Psychology became much more attractive.

00:39:48.040 And then when I decided to become a psychologist, I thought, well, if I'm going to try to solve

00:39:51.980 a psychological problem in my research, then I might as well pick the biggest problem I

00:39:55.620 can, that I can, that I can conceptualize and have at it.

00:40:00.220 I mean, at the same time I did my PhD on, on the heritable, on the, on heritable forms

00:40:05.640 of alcoholism, it was much more bounded and much more, I would say, classically scientific,

00:40:11.400 biological.

00:40:12.180 So I was doing that at the same time.

00:40:13.360 Are you trying to make yourself invulnerable with this?

00:40:15.280 Like, like, if I can, if I can really expose myself to the full knowledge of this, this,

00:40:19.040 this terrible thing, uh, this, these, these awful things, the worst things that can possibly

00:40:23.200 happen.

00:40:23.620 And I fully, I'm, I'm kind of fascinated by this stuff myself, you know, forms my reading.

00:40:28.180 It makes you then, well, I, well, now I know that I wouldn't be surprised or something.

00:40:31.660 Well, I think there's some of that.

00:40:33.080 It's some of its preparation, but no, I think I was more, I was more, um, interested in making

00:40:39.200 myself not bad.

00:40:41.740 You know, one of the things I learned quite rapidly from reading the literature pertaining

00:40:45.460 to, to situations like those that obtained in Auschwitz was that, um, people could be

00:40:51.620 Auschwitz camp guards.

00:40:53.000 And not only that, they could really enjoy it.

00:40:55.140 And I thought, see, I learned early that history isn't about other people.

00:41:01.620 History is about you.

00:41:03.100 And then you might think, well, you might still try to worm out of that, let's say, and you

00:41:08.680 think, well, the history that's about me is the history of the victim.

00:41:12.140 It's like, fair enough, you know, but it's also the history of the perpetrator.

00:41:16.840 And if you don't read history as the perpetrator, then you haven't, you haven't figured out how

00:41:22.780 the world works.

00:41:23.920 So you think history is a warning then?

00:41:25.360 A warning, not just to other people, but to yourself?

00:41:28.060 Yeah.

00:41:28.320 Well, history is an autobiography.

00:41:30.240 History is a biography.

00:41:31.320 It's about you.

00:41:32.220 It's like, you're the Auschwitz camp guard.

00:41:34.220 You might think, well, no, I'm not.

00:41:35.440 It's like, maybe not.

00:41:37.460 Maybe you're the person who would have opened her house up to Anne Frank and her family. 0.74

00:41:44.440 But probably you're not.

00:41:46.520 Because that's statistically very, very, very unlikely.

00:41:49.420 And it requires a level of courage and a level of willingness to accept risk, even on behalf

00:41:54.980 of your family, that virtually no one has.

00:41:58.340 And that almost no one should ever lay careless claim to.

00:42:01.540 Now, I see, I've really experienced that in the last year, watching people respond as

00:42:07.080 I've been immersed in one political controversy over another.

00:42:10.560 I am, I knew people were timid before I stepped into this political arena, let's say, or before

00:42:16.800 it engulfed me.

00:42:17.660 But people are way more timid than I thought.

00:42:21.420 Not everyone.

00:42:22.520 There are people you meet that have backbones of steel.

00:42:25.920 But they're not very common.

00:42:27.880 I'd say it's one in a thousand, maybe.

00:42:29.840 You wrote a book early on in your academic career called Maps of Meaning.

00:42:35.380 And what were you looking for when you were writing that book?

00:42:38.280 I was doing two things.

00:42:39.500 I was trying to understand what the fundamental issue was at the heart of the Cold War.

00:42:46.360 And then I was trying to determine whether what the Cold War was, was merely a, an argument

00:42:54.480 between two hypothetically equally valid narratives, which would be kind of a postmodern view of

00:43:01.380 it, right?

00:43:01.820 So, well, there's a left-wing, radical left-wing narrative, and it's arbitrary, but perhaps

00:43:06.860 we can organize society along its guidelines.

00:43:09.460 And there's a free-market capitalist, democratic narrative, and it's just as arbitrary, and

00:43:14.760 perhaps we can organize society along those lines.

00:43:17.060 But one's arbitrary, and so is the other.

00:43:19.640 And so is any other narrative that you might impose.

00:43:22.420 And so I was curious about that, because I thought, well, look, it looks like there's

00:43:25.240 something really at stake here.

00:43:26.640 We've generated tens of thousands of unbelievably powerful weapons.

00:43:30.300 We've aimed them at each other.

00:43:31.540 We're willing to put the world to the torch because of this argument.

00:43:36.560 Maybe there's something to it.

00:43:38.340 So I went into it with what I would say is an open mind, trying to understand if it was

00:43:43.760 merely an argument between two arbitrary systems of moral relativism, or if there was something

00:43:49.400 else at stake.

00:43:50.860 And what I discovered, I would say, partly by reading the works of other people who had

00:43:57.400 discovered this before me, let's say, was that, no, they weren't equivalent systems

00:44:02.300 in any way at all.

00:44:03.660 The West is founded on something that's far deeper than mere arbitrary narrative.

00:44:09.640 Part of that is the idea of the sovereignty and divinity of the individual, which is the

00:44:15.760 most powerful idea there is, the most powerful human idea there is.

00:44:19.160 And it's also the idea that, without which, in the absence of that idea, you cannot produce

00:44:24.440 a functioning society at any level of analysis.

00:44:28.540 You can't function in relationship to yourself because you won't take yourself with any degree

00:44:32.780 of seriousness.

00:44:33.900 You won't function well within your family because you won't treat your family members

00:44:37.660 like they matter.

00:44:38.880 And you won't function well as a citizen because you'll be nihilistic and cynical.

00:44:44.140 How did you then, with that, map that onto stories, old, old stories, which is what you

00:44:48.160 wanted to do with this book, older stories from the Bible, stories like Pinocchio and even

00:44:52.260 Harry Potter.

00:44:52.820 Yeah, well, even the political debates, in some sense, are competitions between stories

00:44:59.180 about how to live.

00:45:00.680 Okay, so then the next observation is, well, stories map out how to live.

00:45:04.820 When the question then becomes, well, what's the story that maps out the proper way to live?

00:45:09.840 And that story would have to contain a description of the environment, right?

00:45:13.320 Because just like a map has to map out the territory, the story would have to contain a description

00:45:17.940 of the environment, and that would have to contain a description of your role in the environment.

00:45:22.000 And so the mythological landscape is something like this.

00:45:25.660 It's good and evil at the level of the individual.

00:45:27.980 That's the hero and the adversary, right?

00:45:30.040 Everyone has to contend with that.

00:45:31.620 The darkness and goodness in yourself and in other individuals.

00:45:35.820 Everyone contends with that.

00:45:37.680 So it's universal truth.

00:45:38.780 And then that individual is encompassed within society.

00:45:44.520 And society is the wise king and the tyrant.

00:45:47.060 And it's always the wise king and the tyrant.

00:45:49.300 It's both.

00:45:49.900 Now, some societies are almost all tyrant.

00:45:52.640 And some societies tilt quite nicely towards wise king.

00:45:55.960 But even if you grow up in a relatively benevolent society like ours, you're still crushed by

00:46:02.140 the mob into a certain conformity.

00:46:04.920 And there's a lot of pain and wastage that goes along with that.

00:46:08.360 Now, there's benefits.

00:46:09.580 And then the last element of the mythological landscape is the terror and creative potential

00:46:16.860 of nature.

00:46:18.140 Well, that's the mythological landscape.

00:46:20.240 And a meaningful story guides you through that.

00:46:23.100 Well, they're the same stories we need to hear.

00:46:24.840 Joseph Campbell wrote about this.

00:46:26.400 George Lucas read it.

00:46:27.620 It's there in Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey.

00:46:31.640 It's there in Star Wars.

00:46:32.760 It's there in The Wizard of Oz.

00:46:33.760 There's the hero.

00:46:34.800 The world is out of joints.

00:46:36.180 The hero is living in this kind of strange environment.

00:46:38.280 There's the call to adventure, which is refused, then exceeded to.

00:46:41.100 You go into the world.

00:46:42.080 You encounter shapeshifters and allies and secret adversaries.

00:46:46.120 And then you go into the evil kingdom, take the elixir, bring it back to the village,

00:46:50.180 and the good world is restored.

00:46:51.580 Right.

00:46:51.620 That's exactly right.

00:46:52.400 That's that pattern.

00:46:53.020 Or you revive your dead father and restore him to life.

00:46:55.900 Oh, yeah.

00:46:56.120 That's another variant of it.

00:46:57.040 And then it might be Darth Vader, but that's the whole other thing.

00:46:59.640 But no, this is exactly right.

00:47:01.420 These stories, like when they're recast, Star Wars is a great example.

00:47:04.300 Although I don't think that the Star Wars stories are of particularly high quality.

00:47:08.940 No, but we seem to need these stories, though, don't we?

00:47:11.260 I mean, humans seem to need to hear these stories again and again.

00:47:14.300 It's almost killing Hollywood, but it's something we need to hear again and again.

00:47:17.080 Well, if you get in a car without a map, you don't know where you are or where you're going.

00:47:20.920 It's like, what good is that?

00:47:22.400 Like, all there is then is confusion and pain.

00:47:25.820 So, yeah, the story is life.

00:47:28.760 The story is, well, it's the story of rule one.

00:47:31.500 Stand up straight with your shoulders back.

00:47:33.200 Stand up and confront the catastrophe of existence.

00:47:35.740 So, voluntarily move forward under your load.

00:47:39.280 Discover new things.

00:47:40.380 Share them with the people around you.

00:47:42.100 Life is a call to adventure.

00:47:44.180 And everything's at stake.

00:47:46.140 That's the thing.

00:47:46.740 It's an all-in game.

00:47:48.340 So, you might as well play it that way.

00:47:51.380 Dutch economist I had on recently, Ricker Bregman, was talking about the state of play with jobs at the moment, in the Western world particularly.

00:47:58.600 And he quoted a poll that was done in Britain that showed as many as 37%, 37% of British workers say they have a job they think doesn't need to exist.

00:48:08.900 And the proliferation of jobs, worthless jobs, that create little or no value and induce a kind of despair in people have created a big problem in modern life.

00:48:18.440 This is something you've seen.

00:48:19.360 And this is something you feel these ideas can address.

00:48:22.420 Well, one of the prices you pay for a hierarchy, like a society that's organized in complex, multi-level hierarchies, is that you can get ensconced in the middle of one of those hierarchies.

00:48:37.220 And you're kind of detached from reality.

00:48:40.620 And so, the adventure isn't so self-evidently there.

00:48:43.580 You know, maybe you're a mid-level functionary in a large, faceless corporation that makes some sort of widget.

00:48:49.100 And I'm not being cynical about this.

00:48:50.980 Like, we need widgets, you know.

00:48:52.420 We need washers and screws and all of those things. 0.91

00:48:54.460 I'm not talking about those guys.

00:48:55.340 I'm not talking about the people who collect their garbage and clean houses and actually do worthwhile, useful things.

00:48:59.620 I'm talking about people who are living in some kind of strange, vague bureaucracy and moving things around that are quite often very well-paid jobs.

00:49:06.500 They're often also difficult, even if they're not producing anything.

00:49:09.820 Well, it's easy for large-scale bureaucracies to end up doing pseudo-work.

00:49:15.440 It's still difficult, you know.

00:49:17.540 But the connection between the work and the actual world, let's say, gets attenuated to the point that the job appears either meaningless or even counterproductive.

00:49:28.380 I mean, that's a sign that you're in an organization.

00:49:30.580 That's the tyrannical king, right?

00:49:32.160 That he's old and willfully blind and ready to fall apart.

00:49:35.120 But you're still part and parcel of that.

00:49:38.240 Yeah.

00:49:38.580 One of the things I'm getting at, I suppose, with this is that your videos, particularly on YouTube, tend to resonate particularly with young men.

00:49:44.200 Young men are a very large part of your audience.

00:49:47.640 What do they want to know?

00:49:50.500 And what do they say they get from your videos to you?

00:49:53.600 Oh, they want to know first that they're not everything they should be, which is, I have very perverse messages.

00:49:58.360 They want to know that they're not everything they should be.

00:49:59.880 Oh, absolutely.

00:50:00.440 It's like, I mean, it's so funny.

00:50:02.180 I've thought about this a lot over the last couple of years because, well, especially, I did these biblical lectures in Toronto.

00:50:07.980 And they're pretty harsh.

00:50:09.520 And they sold out.

00:50:11.080 It's like, and I thought, well, just imagine this.

00:50:12.660 Imagine that I formulated a business plan and I went to a venture capitalist and I said, here's my plan.

00:50:18.360 I'm going to do it.

00:50:18.880 Talk about the Bible.

00:50:19.820 Yeah, I'm an academic.

00:50:21.440 I'm going to rent a theater.

00:50:22.640 I'm going to talk about the Bible, responsibility and truth to disaffected young men.

00:50:27.940 Yeah, we're going to get them out of the pub and into the lecture hall to hear about it.

00:50:30.740 Yeah, yeah, that's my plan to make a profit.

00:50:33.280 It's like, well, you know how that's just so absurd.

00:50:36.020 But it's not so absurd because, you know, psychologists, the more pathological brand of psychologists have been pushing this doctrine of, like, self-esteem on young people for 50 years.

00:50:47.920 It's like, you're okay the way you are.

00:50:49.440 It's like, well, actually, for most young people, they actually don't think they are okay the way they are.

00:50:55.080 And that's a really pessimistic message.

00:50:56.860 It's they think, well, I don't have a really good relationship.

00:51:00.280 I don't have any real goals in my life.

00:51:02.420 I know I'm really undisciplined.

00:51:03.940 I procrastinate all the time.

00:51:05.460 I play video games till three in the morning.

00:51:07.540 Not that there's anything wrong with video games, but they can become an obsession.

00:51:11.360 You know, I don't have any discipline.

00:51:14.200 I'm not happy with my career.

00:51:15.920 I'm not very well educated.

00:51:17.380 It's like the list goes on, you know.

00:51:19.200 And then you come along and you pat them on their back and say, oh, well, you know, you're just lovely the way you are.

00:51:24.740 It's like, it's so pessimistic.

00:51:26.560 And so I've been suggesting to, not just to young men, although there are people who tend to be more on YouTube,

00:51:32.460 that there's a hole in the structure of reality that's exactly their size and they should rise up and fill it.

00:51:39.800 They have a destiny to achieve.

00:51:42.200 And that becoming disciplined and forthright and having an aim and paying attention to your family and taking on responsibility

00:51:49.040 and learning to speak truthfully, all of those, means that things don't careen towards hell.

00:51:56.000 It's really important that each person sets themselves in order.

00:52:00.440 And I know that that's true.

00:52:02.380 And I'm on the side, like, I'm not finger wagging and saying, oh, these young people today.

00:52:07.000 It's like, it's not obvious to me that young people today are any worse than they were in Socrates' time. 0.99

00:52:12.440 There's certainly no worse than they were in the 1960s.

00:52:15.540 You know, baby boomers are so self-righteous about young people. 1.00

00:52:18.380 Oh, look at those young people today.

00:52:19.740 It's like, yeah, look at those baby boomers, man. 1.00

00:52:22.320 I mean, they were called the me generation for good reason. 1.00

00:52:25.980 And so I'm telling these young guys, I'm suggesting to these young guys,

00:52:29.380 and I put myself in the same category, you know.

00:52:33.460 It's like, look, you're a make-work project, man.

00:52:37.460 There's lots of things about you that could be fixed.

00:52:39.840 And so fix them.

00:52:40.980 I'm pretty sure you don't like gurus.

00:52:43.040 Yet people are always asking you, how should I live my life?

00:52:46.540 Your book is called 12 Rules for Life.

00:52:48.120 And they are your rules.

00:52:50.060 Are you troubled by that?

00:52:52.200 Well, I'm troubled by it to some degree.

00:52:54.680 I mean, there's always a danger in that.

00:52:57.860 I don't, I'm not troubled by it to any great degree because I don't think,

00:53:03.780 it's a fairly strange guru who says, chart your own destiny,

00:53:09.720 take your own risks, make your own choices, pick your own aims,

00:53:15.040 be responsible, right?

00:53:17.040 Take this on yourself.

00:53:18.440 It's like, well, that's not, that's a paradoxical message for a guru.

00:53:24.360 So what am I, the leader of individualists?

00:53:27.240 You know, you know what I mean?

00:53:29.260 I'm not too concerned about that.

00:53:30.960 Now, you know, people, I would say, have a proclivity to, at now at least,

00:53:36.480 to be occasionally somewhat starstruck, let's say, when they encounter me.

00:53:41.560 But I can get over that very, very rapidly.

00:53:44.500 You know, I have experience with that sort of thing anyways,

00:53:46.980 because that happens to you upon occasion when you're a clinician.

00:53:50.020 You have to learn to deal with that, and properly, you know.

00:53:53.020 So, no, I'm not too concerned about that.

00:53:56.400 It's been a great pleasure to speak with you, Jordan Peterson.

00:53:58.300 I've only got through half the questions I wanted to ask you,

00:54:00.280 so I'd like to come back on sometime in the future so we can go through those questions as well.

00:54:04.220 No, that would be good.

00:54:04.760 It's been such a pleasure.

00:54:05.300 It's been very nice talking with you.

00:54:06.780 Thank you so much.

00:54:07.480 On-air, online, and podcast, this is Conversations with Richard Feidler.

00:54:27.380 Jordan Peterson's new book is called 12 Rules for Life.

00:54:31.480 abc.net.au slash conversations is our website.

00:54:34.220 I'm Richard Feidler.

00:54:35.280 Thanks for listening.

00:54:37.480 You've been listening to a podcast of Conversations with Richard Feidler.

00:54:47.260 For more Conversations interviews, please go to the website.

00:54:50.440 abc.net.au slash conversations.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - April 02, 2018

Jordan Peterson's Rules for Life with Richard Fidler

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