Jordan Peterson's Rules for Life with Richard Fidler
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Summary
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto in Canada. 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. 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. Dr. Peterson taught at Harvard and other universities, and then in 2016, something happened. 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. 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. But interestingly, neither his attackers on the left and his loudest supporters from the alt-right seem to be listening to what he actually has to say. You can support these podcasts by donating to his PODCAST by clicking the link below. You can also become a patron patron of the podcast by making a small monthly donation. to help support the podcast and the future you deserve. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future that you deserve, and let's all work together toward it. Thank you for listening to the Daily Wire Plus Podcast. Sincerely, Dr. Jordan Peterson - Erika and Erika Peterson - The Daily Wire + Erika & Elyssa Peterson . Erika ( ) ( ) ( ). ( ), Elyss ( . (). ( ) ( . ) ( . . ( . ( ) & Elisha ( , & Elesa ( . . ) )( ) ( ), (.) ( )( ( , , ( . , . )( . & , & Erika ( .) ( ) ) ( ). ( ) . ( . ). ( (..) ( . ), ( .). ( ) Thank you, Erika s ( ) and Elysss ( ), ( ) ? ( ) , ) & , and Elyn s ( .), and , etc., ) . .( ) & ( )
Transcript
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Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
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Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
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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.
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With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
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He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
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If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
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Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
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Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
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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.
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Professor Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto in Canada.
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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.
00:02:10.500
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.
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Jordan Peterson's now written a book called Twelve Rules for Life, which offers advice like stand up straight with your shoulders back,
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set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world,
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pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient, and do not bother children when they are skateboarding.
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Happiness is something that happens to you if you're fortunate, and it's a byproduct of pursuing, perhaps a byproduct,
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a fortunate byproduct of pursuing what you should pursue, and that's not happiness.
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First of all, happiness doesn't tide you through periods of tragedy and betrayal and loss.
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So if that's the purpose of life, well, what happens when things aren't going well?
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It's better to pursue things that are meaningful, and meaningful is the right way of thinking about it, engaging and meaningful.
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You say that the point is to embrace being, that you spell with a capital B.
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Well, it's an idea that I got in part from the philosopher Heidegger, who was very interested in, I would say,
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construing reality in a manner that was somewhat alternative to the reigning materialist viewpoint.
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Your experience isn't really made out of matter.
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I mean, in your field of experience, you have emotions and motivations and dreams and desires and stories and goals and aims.
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It's a narrative structure in some sense that you inhabit, and that's a reality.
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That's really reality in some sense, and, well, it's harsh, that reality.
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It has a tragic element, because people are vulnerable and mortal, and it has an element of malevolence as well,
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because we're all touched by betrayal and the, what would you call it, the sins of our fellow men,
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but we're also capable of those things ourselves.
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And so the question is, how do you cope with that, and what do you make of it?
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And one answer is, you can judge it harshly and denounce it and become bitter and resentful,
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and maybe you have your reasons for that, but it's a counterproductive approach,
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and so the approach that I lay out is the alternative to that, I would say.
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If life is based in suffering, that's what you argue, to begin with.
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So then the point is, what are you going to do about that?
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It's suffering tainted with malevolence, because there's the tragic element of suffering,
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which is just that, well, you know, you're a fragile creature, like everyone,
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and because of that, you're subject to mental and physical deterioration and to death,
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and so that's rough in and of itself, hard enough,
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and maybe hard enough to turn you against being itself,
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but that's made even more complicated by the fact that much of the suffering that people endure
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is a consequence of they impose it upon themselves or it's imposed by them on others,
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Yeah, well, what about the suffering that you create yourself
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People know perfectly well that, number one, they don't take advantage of their full potential.
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They don't make full use of the opportunities that are granted to them.
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They're characterized by laziness and procrastination and irritation
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and all sorts of habits of mind and of character that make their lives more better than they need to be,
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and that's also something that people have a very difficult time coming to terms with.
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They feel guilty about that, and so that's the complicated landscape of being, let's say.
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Yeah, I've known people who've banged their head against the wall
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because the world isn't as good as they want it to be, or they feel it ought to be,
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or as pure, in fact, as they think it ought to be.
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Well, hey, there's no shortage of evidence for that.
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I mean, so the thing is, these problems are real,
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and I think part of the reason that people have been gravitating towards my lectures, let's say,
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is because I make a very straightforward case for this.
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but I'm trying to help people grapple with the fact that life itself poses a very serious problem.
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Is that the problem of life is embedded in the structure of life.
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You have to contend with your own inadequacies as an individual.
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You have to contend with the tyranny and arbitrariness of the social world,
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and you have to contend with the brutality of nature.
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That's the part of the mythological landscape, the reality of those things.
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And then you have to plot your course through that.
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And hopefully, you do it in a manner that doesn't make everything worse.
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One of your rules, indeed, the first one you have is stand up straight with your shoulders back.
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My producer, Nick, was discussing this with you,
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and as you were talking with her over the phone,
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And so you must have this odd hypnotic power over the phone, Jordan Peterson.
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This is really a disquisition about status and status consciousness.
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What's your understanding as a clinical psychologist of how deeply embedded status consciousness,
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awareness of one's own status is in animals like humans?
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There is an idea that's very attractive that's been put forward by thinkers on the left,
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that hierarchy and exploitation, which clearly exist,
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are secondary consequences of political and economic schemes.
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So you might say, if you're a Marxist, for example,
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that inequality and hierarchy can be laid at the feet of capitalism and the free market.
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It's like, there's no doubt that there's hierarchy.
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And there are prices to be paid for both of those.
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if you think that that can be laid at the feet of the free market and capitalism.
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Because the problem of hierarchy and inequality is a third of a billion years old.
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It's so old that your nervous system is adapted to it as a permanent feature of existence.
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So the systems that regulate your emotions, these are serotonergic systems,
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The systems that regulate your negative and positive emotion do it in part unconsciously,
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pre-consciously, by evaluating your relative status in whatever hierarchy happens to be relevant to you,
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and determining whether the negative emotion should be turned up
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and the positive emotion turned down, or vice versa.
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So if you encounter a status failure, let's say,
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then your nervous system transforms so that you become more sensitive to negative emotion
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If you have the more powerful status, of higher status you attain,
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you get the happy drugs in your head and the unhappy drugs in your head.
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My experience of a lot of senior political leaders is that they're kind of highly strung and quite shouty.
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Jordan, I don't know if that really accords with what you're saying there.
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Well, status is not the only determinant of your emotional well-being.
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There's an observation of your own competence, so that's one.
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So some people are temperamentally more or less anxious,
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and that's established very early on, very heavily under biological control.
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And then the third is your relative status within your communities.
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Those are the three determinants of your anxiety levels, let's say.
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So if you're giving that advice to someone, stand up straight with your shoulders back,
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for someone who is feeling like they have low status in society.
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Are you – I don't want to say so you're saying, but –
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Carry yourself like you are a formidable person until you actually become more formidable?
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So there's practical advice in that postural readjustment,
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because if you set yourself up properly physically, then you can breathe better,
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and you manifest yourself as more competent and confident.
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And that does produce an internal feedback process that tends to facilitate that.
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So you can make yourself feel better generally if you're slouching habitually.
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If you learn to stand up straight, that actually does make you feel better physiologically.
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which is that even if you've had to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fate
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you still have the option of accepting that in some sense voluntarily.
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And that means to stand up straight and to expose yourself to the world.
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Because partly what you're doing when you're standing up is you're exposing your most vulnerable surfaces
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But you're not hunching over like an armadillo.
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In other words, you're exposing your soft underbelly.
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because of course we stand up on our hind legs.
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And so most animals are armoured against the world by their back.
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which is that's partly the realisation of nakedness in the Garden of Eden, right?
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That's partly what that story details in some sense,
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the self-conscious human discovery of that vulnerability.
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So, but your best path forward is to accept that vulnerability voluntarily.
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And the strange thing is, is that in that acceptance there's a simultaneous transcendence.
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and if you're dealing with people who are anxious,
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You help them develop strategies to voluntarily expose themselves
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to the things that they are frightened of or detest.
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So, rule one is an injunction to adopt that as a metaphysical stance in life,
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As a clinical, of course, I mean, you lecture in psychology at the University of Toronto,
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but you've worked clinically as well as a psychologist.
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You would have been in a room, I'm just guessing here,
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you would have been in a room with a person who would be suffering terrible bullying,
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terrible, the tyranny of other people to the point where they're almost,
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they're tearful and they're full of rage and woundedness and vulnerability.
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Bearing what you just said in mind, what advice do you give to someone
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who's actually carrying that kind of woundedness, that pain and that rage
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against the tyrant, whether it's a boss or a violent husband or someone like that?
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Well, the first thing you do with someone like that is listen to them.
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It's like, imagine, so when someone comes to see you clinically,
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And it may be a psychological problem, but it might just be a problem, right?
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Because there's a distinction between a psychological problem and a problem.
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Like if your father is dying of Alzheimer's disease, that's a problem.
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So people come because they have problems or psychological problems or both.
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And they also come because they're not doing as well as they need to
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So what you do to begin with, if you're a careful clinician,
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is you listen to the person tell you what their problem is.
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And they may have never had anyone listen to that.
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They come in because they're suffering in some manner.
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And when you told that story, a particular client,
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or when you asked that question, a particular client came to mind
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He had a lot of physiological and cognitive problems.
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And used to people sneering at that, I expect as well.
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I mean, you just can't believe how much some people can be alienated and bullied.
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And, you know, you spend hours to begin with as a clinician just letting the person.
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I had a client a while back who had been bullied into a psychotic break.
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And she would put her hands in front of her and move them up kind of robotically.
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And when I asked her what she was doing, she said, well, I can see lines.
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And I'm trying to balance the lines, like in a psychotic manner.
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It took six months of listening to her say what had happened to her at school
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before I could figure out what broke her and help her put herself back together.
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She was targeted by two kids who were particularly malevolent.
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So anyways, you let the person delineate out their experiences.
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It's like, well, let's figure out exactly what the chain of events were
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that led you to be vulnerable to that catastrophe.
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Because the cure, and this is actually why you remember the past, right?
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What you want to do if something terrible has happened to you is analyze the terrible experience
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so that you can now reconfigure your perceptions and your behaviors
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so that the probability that that will happen again in the future is reduced.
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Well, and then you can also develop a strategy because that's the next thing you do as a clinician.
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It's like, okay, well, okay, now we see the situation.
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You were bullied and these were the people who were after you and they had malevolent intent.
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And in some way you were vulnerable to that, even though that doesn't mean it was just
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or that it was your fault or any of those things.
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Although we want to see what you might have contributed to it so that you can stop doing that.
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It's like, okay, if you meet someone like that again,
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how are you going to reconfigure your behavior so that they cannot take advantage of you again?
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And when you find these people are harboring things, feelings like homicidal thoughts towards their tormentor
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and they're shocked by that, what do you tell them about those thoughts?
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I mean, I've seen people get pushed into positions sometimes where they have homicidal thoughts
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They've been pushed into a corner where terribly, terribly unjust things are happening to them
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that have serious consequences for their lives.
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It's not surprising that they have vengeful and hostile fantasies and obsessions sometimes.
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So you have to have them lay out the problem, which is often extraordinarily complicated,
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and then strategize towards something that would be a better solution.
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Sometimes you see people who are so trapped and hurt that they feel that their violent impulse
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And discriminating between justice and revenge is not easy.
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Like, that's a very, very, it requires a very, very sophisticated analysis of the situation
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And so you might say to people, well, you should give up your anger because it's so hard on you,
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My, every ethical bone in my body cries out to me to rectify this.
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You have to help people find a pathway that's more productive.
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So much of these conversations come out of something you touched on a bit earlier,
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which is a fundamental view of human nature, if indeed such a thing is appropriate.
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I mean, there is a view, I had a guest on the show last year who was, whose view is an economist.
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And his view is really that human nature is fundamentally good, that most of our interactions
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are either benign or kind, but it's the horror show that gets the publicity.
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And it's like that when you write history, the most colorful bits are the bloodiest bits.
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The most interesting bits is when there's all this great wickedness being perpetrated.
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But the boring truth is, according to him, the boring truth is that people are fundamentally good.
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I think the second part of that is true, but the first part is not true.
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I think that people are good and evil, and that that's the case for everyone.
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And that, you know, Hannah Arendt wrote a book called The Banality of Evil, which could
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It could have been The Evil of Banality, which I think would have been a better title, actually.
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But she pointed out very clearly, and many commentators have done this, that terrible acts
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are often the culminating consequence of an accumulation of what you might regard as minor
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So the mythological landscape is that the individual is the hero and the adversary at
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That would be mythologically represented in Christianity, for example, or represented theologically
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as the eternal conflict between Christ and Satan.
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But you see this sort of thing mirrored in popular culture all the time.
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It's Harry Potter versus Voldemort, for example, or it's Batman versus the Joker, Superman versus
00:19:03.340
You know, that idea of that duality of spirit that inhabits a single individual, that's
00:19:12.340
That's not what real life feels like on a day-to-day basis, does it?
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I mean, I'm not living in the killing fields of Cambodia.
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I give thanks and praise to it every day, just quietly.
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But nonetheless, I think, by and large, I mean, most people listening right now would
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feel that their lives are – there's not many Jokers or Lex Luthers or Voldemorts in
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And when they pop up, they're a big shock to everyone.
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So they're outliers rather than an integral part of –
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Well, they are as super villain figures, you know, because those are obviously – those
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.
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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.
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And I would also say, you know, with respect to your point, is that we have managed to
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formulate societies, primarily in the West, where the default interaction between people
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It's not the case for most of the thugocracies in the world, you know, that are rife with,
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I would say, individual, familial, social and economic pathology, where the default transaction
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It's very – it's not obvious at all how we manage to create societies where the default
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One of the things you've talked quite a bit about is apprehending the true nature of certain
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.
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Well, in Rule 6, the rule is set yourself – set your house in perfect order before you
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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
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occur, why it is that a young person might spend months or even years fantasizing about
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taking dark revenge, you know, of the sort that might involve killing elementary school
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children, for example, which is what happened at Sandy Hook.
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You have to go to a very dark place for a very long period of time before you dream up
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And the question is, well, why might you go there?
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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.
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And they have a certain – they have been subject to a certain amount of malevolent treatment
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and have nursed a certain amount of malevolence in their own heart.
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They get very, very judgmental about the structure of existence and regard themselves as eternal
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That was certainly the case for the Columbine High School killers.
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And conclude that being itself, because it's full of tragedy and malevolence, is an evil
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And you don't want to encounter someone like that.
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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.
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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.
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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
00:23:18.440
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
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They're not bullied people who are just, you know, responding and seeking justice.
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There are people who just want to see the world burn.
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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
00:24:01.560
You know, Winston Churchill famously in the 1930s was the one conservative politician in
00:24:10.840
Chamberlain and his colleagues believed Hitler ultimately would be a rational actor and would
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.
00:24:25.280
Do you think he was able to do that because he had part of that in himself?
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.
00:24:46.640
Look, in chapter two, I suggest, rule two, that people should treat themselves like they're
00:24:57.260
People are rational, rationally self-interested.
00:25:05.360
Not if you're contemptuous of yourself and other people.
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.
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.
00:25:35.040
And so the idea of rational self-interest is, that's a naive fool.
00:25:40.420
There were no shortage of economists at the outset, before the First World War,
00:25:46.820
There's too much economically at stake for war to start.
00:25:50.280
Well, you'd think that people constantly presume that the current situation is somehow different
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
00:26:11.820
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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.
00:29:46.980
Can you give us a sense of its landscape and how far it is from everywhere else?
00:29:53.340
It's about 600 miles from the Pacific Ocean, east of the Pacific Ocean.
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.
00:30:35.100
Right, so it's nearly like 1,000 kilometers, in other words.
00:30:41.160
Given that you're that far north, how dark and cold were winters?
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.
00:31:12.560
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?
00:31:32.720
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
00:31:42.460
And how much daylight do you get in the middle of winter?
00:31:45.720
So it's like Iceland, in other words, essentially.
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.
00:31:55.580
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
00:32:33.460
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.
00:32:51.080
We used to play together all the time when we were kids.
00:32:55.640
She used to hit my croquet ball down the street and then laugh.
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.
00:33:11.700
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
00:33:21.200
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.
00:33:28.580
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?
00:33:42.340
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
00:34:21.960
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.
00:34:50.620
You were delinquent or semi-delinquent or not really?
00:34:54.920
You know, Fairview was kind of a rough town, and the people to hang out with, there wasn't
00:35:02.940
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.
00:35:12.480
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.
00:35:38.380
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-
00:35:50.660
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,
00:35:58.420
And I suppose, in some sense, that was the case.
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
00:36:14.160
So when you went reading Solzhenitsyn in the library, what were teenagers doing for fun
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.
00:36:33.560
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
00:36:50.760
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
00:37:04.700
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?
00:37:40.440
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
00:38:03.120
You said you used to have a kind of recurrent nightmares.
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.
00:38:21.600
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.
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
00:38:43.240
And I think that that might have highlighted the negative for me more than it might for
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
00:39:15.200
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
00:39:48.040
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,
00:40:13.360
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
00:40:23.620
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.
00:40:33.080
It's some of its preparation, but no, I think I was more, I was more, um, interested in making
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
00:40:55.140
And I thought, see, I learned early that history isn't about other people.
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
00:41:25.360
A warning, not just to other people, but to yourself?
00:41:37.460
Maybe you're the person who would have opened her house up to Anne Frank and her family.
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
00:41:58.340
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
00:42:22.520
There are people you meet that have backbones of steel.
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?
00:42:39.500
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
00:43:01.820
So, well, there's a left-wing, radical left-wing narrative, and it's arbitrary, but perhaps
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.
00:43:19.640
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
00:43:26.640
We've generated tens of thousands of unbelievably powerful weapons.
00:43:31.540
We're willing to put the world to the torch because of this argument.
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
00:43:50.860
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
00:44:03.660
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
00:44:33.900
You won't function well within your family because you won't treat your family members
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
00:44:52.820
Yeah, well, even the political debates, in some sense, are competitions between stories
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.
00:45:31.620
The darkness and goodness in yourself and in other individuals.
00:45:38.780
And then that individual is encompassed within society.
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
00:46:04.920
And there's a lot of pain and wastage that goes along with that.
00:46:09.580
And then the last element of the mythological landscape is the terror and creative potential
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.
00:46:27.620
It's there in Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey.
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.
00:46:42.080
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,
00:46:53.020
Or you revive your dead father and restore him to life.
00:46:57.040
And then it might be Darth Vader, but that's the whole other thing.
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.
00:47:28.760
The story is, well, it's the story of rule one.
00:47:33.200
Stand up and confront the catastrophe of existence.
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.
00:48:19.360
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.
00:48:40.620
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.
00:48:52.420
We need washers and screws and all of those things.
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.
00:49:17.540
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.
00:49:32.160
That he's old and willfully blind and ready to fall apart.
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.
00:49:50.500
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.
00:50:02.180
I've thought about this a lot over the last couple of years because, well, especially, I did these biblical lectures in Toronto.
00:50:11.080
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.
00:50:22.640
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.
00:50:33.280
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.
00:50:49.440
It's like, well, actually, for most young people, they actually don't think they are okay the way they are.
00:50:56.860
It's they think, well, I don't have a really good relationship.
00:51:07.540
Not that there's anything wrong with video games, but they can become an obsession.
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.
00:51:26.560
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.
00:51:42.200
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.
00:52:02.380
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.
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.
00:52:19.740
It's like, yeah, look at those baby boomers, man.
00:52:22.320
I mean, they were called the me generation for good reason.
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.
00:52:43.040
Yet people are always asking you, how should I live my life?
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,
00:53:18.440
It's like, well, that's not, that's a paradoxical message for a guru.
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.
00:53:44.500
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.
00:53:56.400
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.
00:54:07.480
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.
00:54:37.480
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.