Our Emotions and the Social Hierarchy – Part Two
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 13 minutes
Words per Minute
163.53908
Summary
Our Emotions and the Social Hierarchy Part 2: A Jordan B. Peterson 12 Rules for Life Lecture. Episode recorded in Brisbane, Australia on February 17th, 2019. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. In his new series, he provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Subscribe to Daily Wire Plus to get 10% off of a monthly subscription to Basis by visiting trybasis.co/JBPodcast and use promo code JBP at checkout. That s a great deal on a groundbreaking supplement you can buy right from Trybasis! That s Jordan10, and the promo code is JBP. That s 10% Off of a Monthly Subscription to JBP by visiting JBP and using promo code Jordan10. That's Jordan10! That's JBP or promo code: Jordan10 at checkout, and using the promo Code JBP! . Let s talk Meat: ButcherBox is an affordable and convenient way to get healthy, humanely raised meat around $6 a meal. With ButcherBox by ButcherBox, you get the highest quality meat around about $6 per meal, and a great way to live a full and engaged life you deserve by visiting ButcherBox.co and get a discount of $20 off of their first box of meat ordered for the life of your first box. JBP is a $6-a-piece of meat you can get the best quality meat, plus $20 of ground beef for the Life of the future you get a chance to live the best of your best day. by JBP and a discount on ButcherBox for the day of the day you deserve to be the best chance to be part of the better future you dream of? Subscribe and learn more about ButcherBox! Subscribe today! by clicking JBP Podcasts and the social Hierarchy by clicking here. and Subscribe to the JBP podcast by Jordan Peterson , Subscribe to our new podcast, Subscribe to my podcast by clicking HERE.
Transcript
00:00:00.940
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.
00:00:41.780
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.
00:00:50.980
Welcome to episode 49 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
00:01:15.520
It's called Our Emotions and the Social Hierarchy, Part 2, recorded in Brisbane, Australia on February 17th, 2019.
00:01:27.620
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If things aren't laying themselves out in front of you the way that is necessary for you to live a full and engaged life
00:04:16.000
and not be cynical and bitter and twisted and cruel and vengeful and disappointed and all of that,
00:04:22.640
it's just possible that you're not aiming at the right thing.
00:04:39.020
And, you know, if what you're aiming at is producing nothing but unrequited misery for you and everyone else
00:04:46.200
and it's a downhill bloody spiral into something approximating hell,
00:04:50.540
then there is some possibility that you should think that perhaps your aim is off.
00:04:56.320
So, and I don't want to overplay my hand on that either, too,
00:05:01.820
if you're suffering, if you're depressed, if you're miserable,
00:05:05.400
there might, you might be, you might just, it might be a consequence of really bad luck.
00:05:15.960
You know, good people, they get sick and they die.
00:05:17.960
And so you can't say, well, if you're miserable and sick,
00:05:20.640
it's because there's something, you know, bad about you.
00:05:24.060
Because then that would be the case for everyone.
00:05:27.580
Always, whenever they get ill, and you could just blame ill people.
00:05:30.700
It's like, well, it serves you right that you're sick because you're a bad person.
00:05:33.580
It happens a lot, actually, with ill people, you know, and it's an unfortunate thing.
00:05:37.680
So I know there's an element of chance to all this.
00:05:43.920
You know, we are dust in the wind, to use a terrible cliche from a 70s rock song.
00:05:51.840
We're blown hither and thither by events that are somewhat beyond our control.
00:05:57.920
The point is that, to a large degree, you can determine the manner in which the world manifests itself to you
00:06:05.700
And so then that opens up, that opens up the entire domain of philosophy.
00:06:21.360
Well, your aim determines the manner in which the world lays itself out to you emotionally.
00:06:32.700
Because no one, especially no one who's been seriously hurt or seriously depressed, like in pain,
00:06:38.180
no one ever says, oh, well, who cares about that?
00:06:40.860
Because if you can say that about your pain, all that means is you actually haven't been in pain.
00:06:46.260
Because if you're in enough pain, you will not say that.
00:06:52.860
So, now you aim at something, you've got a goal,
00:06:57.060
and then you see that you're making progress towards the goal.
00:07:06.720
It actually, technically, there's a system, dopamine system, neurochemical system,
00:07:12.000
same system, by the way, that cocaine and methamphetamine and opiates activate,
00:07:19.420
And it tells you that you're moving forward in the manner that you should be according to the dictates of your plan.
00:07:28.460
It doesn't necessarily tell you whether you have a good plan.
00:07:34.460
But one thing that you could know is that a plan is better than no plan.
00:07:40.220
That's a really useful thing to know, especially if you're kind of drifting.
00:07:45.580
It's like, no, just pick something and move towards it.
00:07:50.680
And as you move towards it, you're going to succeed and fail, specifically.
00:07:56.240
And then you're going to learn something about success, specifically.
00:07:59.000
And you're going to learn something about failure, specifically.
00:08:01.700
And then you can learn what you use to fix your plan.
00:08:09.440
And you're likely to have a stupid plan, or at least to be able to make one.
00:08:21.740
You know, you could think about it a little bit.
00:08:24.840
And have your successes and failures along the way.
00:08:37.920
And maybe what you're trying to do is to move the target to an ever better place.
00:08:44.500
And at the same time, you're moving the target.
00:08:47.680
And you're trying to move the target towards something like an ultimate ideal.
00:08:51.000
You're trying to find out what that ultimate ideal is.
00:08:53.440
And part of the way you figure that out is by moving towards a target.
00:08:56.520
And by learning about success and failure along the way.
00:08:59.140
Because then you can inform yourself with regards to what might constitute a reasonable aim.
00:09:04.360
And so that's the reason to go out in the world and make some mistakes.
00:09:18.080
And so you're moving towards wherever you're going.
00:09:25.500
You get some motivation from this dopaminergic system that adds zest to life.
00:09:31.400
It adds interest and engagement and meaning to life.
00:09:41.540
You know you have might wonder about whether or not you should be engaged in life.
00:09:45.660
And then if all of a sudden you're doing something.
00:09:48.020
And because you're doing it you get engaged in life.
00:09:50.800
Then it seems like that might be the very definition of a good thing.
00:09:56.660
The engagement is evidence that you're actually doing a good thing.
00:10:00.380
A worthwhile thing in life with all its suffering and misery and brutality.
00:10:14.080
It's associated with a part of the brain called the hypothalamus.
00:10:19.740
It's not some new thing that popped up like 15,000 years ago.
00:10:27.180
It's part of the instinct for meaning that I talked about in chapter.
00:10:32.020
Do what is meaningful and not what is expedient.
00:10:37.040
And way down in way down in your psychophysiological structure.
00:10:45.920
And so if it's saying hey man you're on the right track.
00:11:04.000
But you know if you're a smart person who doubts.
00:11:07.100
You also might be smart enough now and then to doubt your doubt.
00:11:14.600
And something I explain to my clinical clients and my students often.
00:11:17.940
And it's like if you're trying to put your life together.
00:11:23.860
Because if your life isn't together you don't know who you are.
00:11:26.520
So just watch yourself like you don't know who you are.
00:11:28.700
And notice now and then if you're engaged in something.
00:11:35.220
Because if you're engaged in it you don't quite notice.
00:11:56.860
And that happened to you like 15 minutes once in two weeks.
00:12:04.480
Well maybe in the next two weeks you can see if you can do it for half an hour.
00:12:16.380
It's like oh look I'm interested in what I'm doing.
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Those are all questions you have to ask yourself.
00:12:28.560
Well that's the beginning of philosophy as well.
00:12:32.620
And the answer is well do you want to be engaged in your life?
00:12:48.560
Generally speaking if you have an aim and you're moving forward.
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You're moving forward to something that's psychologically valuable.
00:12:55.940
If it's really a good aim also it's good for you now, tomorrow, the next day, the next
00:13:01.700
month because you're smart enough to generally smart enough to calibrate yourself so that
00:13:07.980
things that are really bad for you don't have that engaging quality.
00:13:12.680
Now it's not perfect especially if you've messed yourself up psychologically by lying to
00:13:22.520
And then the other thing you can also notice is well when are you doing things that make
00:13:32.220
I had some interaction with someone and now I feel awful.
00:13:42.400
What were the routines that constituted that ill-advised set of actions?
00:13:47.780
And maybe you're going to have to think really deeply about it you know because God only
00:13:51.120
knows how much of your personality structure is involved in that error.
00:13:55.440
But if it made you wretched, it made you feel like life wasn't worth living then that might
00:14:02.420
And so then maybe you could start doing more of the things that make you engaged and less
00:14:13.460
You might think about that as a fundamental ethical requirement or I would say it's a
00:14:31.240
It's bloody well worth walking down this pathway.
00:14:33.980
And you know on the left of me is terror and horror and hell and pain and I'm avoiding
00:14:40.180
And to the right of me perhaps is ego and arrogance and the things that can get out of control
00:14:49.040
Okay and now we think about what might constitute the right pathway.
00:14:52.080
Well I can tell you a pathway that works for me to some degree.
00:14:58.660
So this is a value structure that's characteristic of me of things I do.
00:15:05.440
I type because I write and so that's pure action right.
00:15:17.100
And then people and then I talk about the books and people read the books.
00:15:22.260
And the reason that they can understand the books is because we're a lot the same.
00:15:26.580
You know like there's a lot of things that have to be the same about you and me before
00:15:32.500
And I have to be able to take them for granted.
00:15:35.060
And so the reason I'm telling you that is because there's an important relationship between
00:15:41.800
my hierarchy of values and your hierarchy of values if we're going to be able to communicate
00:15:46.920
and if we're going to be able to occupy the same place at the same time.
00:15:50.980
You know so if I'm writing a book like Twelve Rules for Life and it has a discussion about
00:15:55.640
what constitutes the good in it then I have to start with the presupposition that we share
00:16:03.020
some fundamental intuition about what constitutes the good or my words will fall on deaf ears.
00:16:13.300
and this is maybe the relationship between the social world and the psychological world
00:16:23.360
As I build up my hierarchy of skill and ability, perception and emotional regulation
00:16:30.140
you know from slicing carrots upwards you know.
00:16:33.660
I'm a good cook, I'm a good parent, maybe I'm a good man, maybe I'm a good person you know.
00:16:40.320
And all of those cover a broader and broader range of abstractions and abilities.
00:16:45.200
There has to be a relationship between that and what other people think.
00:16:49.140
You know because look if you're, your kid, you teach your kid to set the table and then
00:16:55.080
he goes to someone else's house and sets the table and he gets a swat.
00:17:01.920
Well the consequence of that is that the kid is going to be unhappy.
00:17:07.380
Well it's because the kid did a lot of work building up all those separate skills to undertake
00:17:17.420
You don't have a robot at home that sets the table.
00:17:19.800
You know you have a cell phone and it's smart but it can't set the damn table.
00:17:25.540
And so your kid had built this complicated neurological structure as a consequence of reward
00:17:31.540
primarily because reward helps build neurological structures.
00:17:35.880
He built this whole structure and now what he's hoping is that all the work that went into
00:17:41.100
building that structure is something that other people will appreciate as well.
00:17:45.820
So that's where you need the isomorphism between the intra-psychic structure, the psychological
00:17:53.380
structure and the social structure which is why we have to have a shared social reality.
00:17:58.160
This is partly why I think the post-modernists went off the rails so badly with their insistence
00:18:04.580
It's like it is in some sense very important that you construe the world the same way I do
00:18:11.140
even though there's a very wide range of ways of construing the world.
00:18:14.800
We come to some negotiated agreement about what's good and what isn't so that when I do things
00:18:20.300
that I think are good you also think they're good so that I get rewarded for my good behavior
00:18:25.840
and I get let's say punished for my bad behavior because that's often a relief as well by the way.
00:18:30.380
And so we have to have our own internal structure of values that we're pursuing
00:18:35.980
because otherwise we don't have any meaning in our life and that's no damn good
00:18:40.240
and then it has to be nested inside a shared structure of values that's similar
00:18:45.780
so that when we act out what we have learned to be good we're treated by the world as if that's good
00:18:54.260
That's the definition of a functioning political system.
00:18:58.200
We've organized a moral game, a very complex one
00:19:02.700
and then we master it through reciprocal interaction with one another
00:19:07.240
we internalize it so that it regulates our emotions
00:19:10.060
then we act it out in the world and if there's a concordance
00:19:13.240
between the way we act it out and the way the world responds
00:19:18.780
Because there's nothing more disturbing to you than to act out a high order moral good
00:19:24.480
let's say you're working really hard at your job for example
00:19:28.580
and let's say you deserve a promotion by all reasonable standards
00:19:34.580
You know, it's taken, it's given to, I don't know, it's given to the boss's mistress
00:19:38.140
or some damn thing or, you know, it's given to someone
00:19:41.920
who doesn't deserve it by the canonical rules of the moral game
00:19:49.460
and the reason that it devastates you is because it disrupts the relationship
00:19:53.860
between the internal moral hierarchy that you've built
00:19:57.960
and everything you have is staked on maintaining that isomorphism.
00:20:02.460
You know, and it's the same even in intimate relationships.
00:20:06.140
You know, if you do something good for your wife or your husband
00:20:09.480
you know, you go out of the way maybe to make a nice meal
00:20:12.520
and they come home and they punish you arbitrarily for some tiny fault
00:20:23.980
first of all in your own intra-psychic hierarchy
00:20:27.460
second in the structure of the social hierarchy
00:20:33.500
and it's the match between them that's really important
00:20:47.600
it's partly a complicated explanation of how we regulate our emotions
00:20:55.280
we regulate them by walking the straight and narrow path
00:20:59.400
but then we also regulate them by being fortunate enough
00:21:03.900
to be in a situation where if we walk the straight and narrow path properly
00:21:18.320
there's you composed of this very unbelievably complex nested set of patterns
00:21:24.780
beautiful patterns that you spent forever working on
00:21:27.460
and then they're nested inside a social structure
00:21:32.080
and those are working harmoniously together like a dance
00:21:36.680
it's the meeting of the individual with society
00:21:40.360
and it's the secret to harmonious emotional regulation
00:21:48.440
and to movement forward practically in the world
00:21:54.260
okay, well, I'll close with just a description of what a hierarchy might look like
00:21:58.940
and a brief description of how it is that you calculate when you make a major mistake
00:22:17.820
it's all coherently laid out towards some higher order aim
00:22:40.400
and hopefully people respond to it as if it's a good thing
00:22:47.200
and so that seems to be like the very definition of a good thing
00:22:53.620
I'm trying to set myself straight by writing carefully
00:22:57.020
I'm trying to set the culture straight by saying what I believe to be the case
00:23:02.300
I'm trying to set other individuals straighter by communicating with them
00:23:06.060
I'm trying to ensure that we can live more harmoniously in our culture and in the world
00:23:12.420
well those are good things to have at the outermost reaches of your value hierarchy
00:23:17.600
you know my friend of mine was talking to me about bricklayers the other day
00:23:21.660
and he's trying to restructure a major company at the moment
00:23:24.300
and we were talking about how to motivate people
00:23:28.060
it's like you know one damn brick after another
00:23:41.340
you're working in one of the great early renaissance cities in Europe
00:23:56.480
and so you're not putting one brick down after another
00:23:59.980
it's like you're involved in this unbelievably complicated moral structure
00:24:04.600
that stretches really stretches all the way up to heaven itself so to speak
00:24:08.120
and each of your minor actions you know your local actions
00:24:11.900
is imbued with the spirit of that entire moral structure
00:24:21.740
well hopefully it isn't just unrequited suffering and malevolence
00:24:27.060
we could dispense with that as much as possible
00:24:35.700
and we've laid out things that could be aimed at
00:24:43.080
you stop doing the things that you shouldn't be doing
00:24:48.820
wake up enough so that you can set the structures around you right
00:24:55.300
your responsibility and your divine duty I would say
00:25:00.800
because in the west everyone is regarded as a sovereign individual
00:25:09.800
on whose shoulders rests the fate and the health of the state
00:25:25.000
so that the ship of state continues to move forward in the appropriate direction
00:26:10.460
or maybe to disintegrate them a bit when they need it