In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson delivers a lecture called Playing the Hierarchical Game, Part 1, recorded in Melbourne, Australia on February 13, 2019. Dr. Peterson talks about his new series, 12 Rules for Life: A Guide to a Better Life, which focuses on mental health and wellness. In this lecture, he discusses the benefits of social media, the role of the Internet in society, and the importance of having a healthy relationship with your mental health, as well as the role that the Internet has played in shaping the way that we think about mental health in the 21st century, and why we should all be grateful that we have access to the information we need to make informed decisions about our mental health. He also discusses the value of the social media revolution, and how it can be used to improve the lives of millions of people around the world, including those struggling with anxiety, depression, and post-depression. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Enjoy the podcast, and don't forget to subscribe to Daily Wire Plus to get immediate access to new episodes of the podcast. Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, and subscribe on your favorite streaming platform so you don't miss the next episode! Subscribe on iTunes, and share the podcast on your social media platforms so you can be notified when new episodes are available! Subscribe to Dailywire Plus to stay up to date with the latest episodes! Learn more about your ad choices and become a supporter of The Jordan Peterson Podcast! Connect with Jordan Peterson on social media! Subscribe to The Jordan B Peterson Podcasts! Subscribe on Anchor.fm/The Jordan Peterson is a podcast that helps you get exclusive ad-free versions of his newest episodes and more! Click here to receive exclusive shoutouts and shoutouts from Dr. BONUS episodes, plus other perks! Subscribe and shout outs throughout the week, including tips on how to be featured on his new podcast, social media tips, tips, interviews, and more on his upcoming books, and so much more. , and more. Subscribe to his new episodes, subscribe to his newest podcast, The Jordan's new book, Playing The Hierarchy Game Podcasts The Secret Life Lesson, The Dark Side of the Mind, The Other Side of My Life, The Real Life Story, wherever he writes about it's Best of It All? .
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We 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.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:51.040Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
00:00:59.240I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's daughter and collaborator.
00:01:02.260Today's episode is a 12 Rules for Life lecture called Playing the Hierarchical Game, Part 1, recorded in Melbourne, Australia on February 13th, 2019.
00:02:26.280But this is, this is really something.
00:02:30.880There must be quite a dearth of things to do in Melbourne tonight.
00:02:34.640No, seriously, though, it's remarkable to see all of you come out to engage in what I believe to be fundamentally a serious conversation about psychological and philosophical and perhaps certainly ethical, perhaps even religious issues.
00:02:56.240And, you know, who would have ever guessed that there was a mass market for that, you know?
00:03:04.060And maybe we're smarter than we think we are.
00:03:06.660And I have a suspicion that that might be the case.
00:03:10.140One of the things that I've noticed about the intellectual dark web types, you know, that's a name that Eric Weinstein, you might be familiar with him, came up with.
00:03:19.260And it wasn't like we all got together and built a little fort out in our backyard and, you know, called it the intellectual dark web.
00:03:29.520And a number of people were included for one reason or another.
00:03:33.840And I've spent a fair bit of time trying to understand why that coinage stuck and what it might be that united this very strangely diverse range of people.
00:03:48.140One is that each of them, from Joe Rogan to Shapiro, the same with Sam Harris, are all people, and Dave, are all people who have their independent media platforms, right?
00:04:04.480They're not part of a corporate structure.
00:04:16.960And so that's kind of cool to see that happening, to see the technology that enables online video, which is really a complex form of broadcasting,
00:04:29.180and also online podcasts, which is a complex form of radio, enable that sort of independent journalism.
00:04:38.100And to see people able to, not precisely exploit that, but make use of it, that's a very good thing.
00:04:46.440And I'm thinking that that might be a real positive outcome of the social media revolution.
00:05:17.160But YouTube and podcasts have opened up a huge market for intellectual material in a manner that's never really happened before.
00:05:26.440And you're also seeing this happen with audiobooks.
00:05:29.780You know, the audiobook market has absolutely exploded in the last five years.
00:05:33.840About a third of books sold now are audiobooks.
00:05:36.160And so, and that seems to be because people, having become accustomed to podcasts, are downloading audiobooks and listening to them in their cars or when they're exercising or when they're doing housework or, you know.
00:05:50.000And it's one of the advantages of this new media type is that you have it on demand and you can play it at your leisure or when you're working, for that matter.
00:05:59.020And so, you know, I have all sorts of working class guys come up and talk to me after the show.
00:06:04.300Long haul truck drivers and those sorts of people who have a lot of time, you know.
00:06:09.060Obviously, they're concentrating on what they're doing, but they have spare time to listen.
00:06:13.180And they're listening to, you know, three-hour Joe Rogan podcasts on all sorts of abstract subjects and my lectures as well.
00:06:21.300And it's really something to see that happening.
00:06:23.360And so, that's one element of the intellectual dark web that's interesting and tied in with the new media revolution.
00:06:32.000Because it really is a revolution to have video on demand like that and to have it so easy to produce and to have it permanent and to have it distributed everywhere in the world
00:06:41.520and to have it subtitled in all sorts of different languages and to have it essentially free of charge and able to be produced in a day or two.
00:06:50.680I mean, it's, and then it's permanent like a book.
00:06:55.740And then the same with the audio version.
00:06:58.840And I do believe it may be the case that more people can, like a lot of people are intimidated by books for all sorts of reasons.
00:07:07.720I mean, highly literate reading is a relatively rare skill.
00:07:13.260Like, it's not overwhelmingly rare, but it's relatively rare.
00:07:17.220But listening, man, people can listen, you know.
00:07:21.120And so, all of a sudden, this complicated information is available to people who can listen.
00:07:26.820And maybe that's ten times as many people who are likely to read.
00:07:29.820Or maybe it's fifty times as many people who are likely to read.
00:07:32.960So, God only knows what the consequence of that is going to be.
00:07:36.100That could be a real education revolution.
00:07:38.260And hopefully we'll be smart enough to take advantage of that carefully over the next ten years and find out if that is the case.
00:07:45.660I'm optimistic about it because one of the things that really is cool about the internet is that, you know, if you want to learn something,
00:07:53.060you can pretty much type in your question, whatever it is, and somebody will have put up a YouTube video that tells you how to do it.
00:08:01.340And, you know, you might have to sort through two or three of them before you find someone who's done a very high-level job of the explanation.
00:08:11.880But they've done it, and often, you know, they run an ad maybe and monetize it a little bit.
00:08:17.160But mostly, I would say it's an altruistic gesture.
00:09:43.760Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport,
00:09:48.040you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:09:53.100And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:09:55.980With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:10:03.740Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:11:04.380Starting a business can be tough, but thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is easier than ever.
00:11:10.420Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business.
00:11:14.540From the launch your online shop stage, all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage, Shopify is here to help you grow.
00:11:21.280Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise, and we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products, and track conversions.
00:11:29.620With Shopify, customize your online store to your style with flexible templates and powerful tools, alongside an endless list of integrations and third-party apps like on-demand printing, accounting, and chatbots.
00:11:40.820Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout, up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms.
00:11:49.640No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level.
00:11:56.060Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase.
00:12:01.580Go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in.
00:12:09.760Yeah, strangely enough, I'm actually looking forward to that, because I've been feeling a lot better recently, and so it'd be actually nice to have a conversation with a journalist when I wasn't feeling half dead, and to see how that goes.
00:12:26.300So, it'd be nice to have a conversation at one point when I was at the top of my game, and so I don't know if I'm at the top of my game right now, but I am definitely feeling a lot better than I have for a long time.
00:12:38.080So, yeah, yeah, I'm really, thank God for that, man.
00:12:43.000It's, hopefully that will be reflected in some reasonable quality of discourse tonight, and perhaps a tiny bit of wit, but we'll see how that goes.
00:12:51.940So, when I step into an old school television studio, it feels like 1975 in some sense, you know, the person I'm talking to isn't really there.
00:13:09.640They're really a speaking device for the corporation, and they have to be, because the corporation, which is running high bandwidth, you know, high experience,
00:13:21.940low bandwidth television, where every minute or every second is extraordinarily expensive, they can't really take risks, they can't have free-flowing conversations on the off chance that something goes dreadfully wrong, and it might, right?
00:13:37.140And, and so everything is scripted, and then, you know, you have 30 seconds to make your point, and, like, there's just some things you can't say in 30 seconds, you know?
00:13:46.360You have to, you have to compress them down to the point where they actually, they're actually foolish.
00:13:52.640It's actually foolish to try to do it, but, you know, what else do you have?
00:13:56.780Whereas with these long-form conversations, man, you can actually have a discussion about something, and you can, you can try to get to the bottom of it.
00:14:03.840And so that's, that's pretty cool, and then, and then it turns out that people will actually follow along.
00:14:09.520Like, I was actually absolutely stunned by, I had four debates with Sam Harris earlier this year, two in Vancouver, and one in Dublin, and one in London.
00:14:19.240And, and, and each of them lasted about three hours, and we were going to do a Q&A for each of them, but as it turned out, while we were talking, we got into the conversation, and then we asked the audience to vote by clapping whether we should continue the conversation or move to the Q&A.
00:14:35.560And it was overwhelming majority of people wanted the conversation to continue, and so basically, what happened was something approximating a 12 to 15 hour continuous conversation about the relationship between facts and values or science and religion, you know?
00:14:53.980And that's a fairly solid philosophical discussion, and that isn't necessarily the case that Sam and I are the two people in the world who would be most qualified to undertake such a discussion.
00:15:04.440But, you know, we did our best, and it was a pretty high-level conversation.
00:15:09.240I mean, for me, it was approximately the level, I think, that would characterize a pretty decent PhD dissertation defense, and that's fairly high-level intellectual conversation, and the audience was just with us the entire time.
00:15:26.100It could easily be that our relatively primitive initial mass communication technologies, like television, made us look a lot stupider, even to ourselves, than we actually were, because everything had to be compressed to a very short period of time.
00:15:45.780Everything had to be scripted, so it couldn't be spontaneous discussion.
00:15:49.160You couldn't assume that your audience knew anything, because maybe it was the first time they watched the show.
00:15:55.600You couldn't assume that they remembered anything, because you didn't know, like, if it was a series, whether they had participated in the entire series.
00:16:02.860You had to aim at the lowest common denominator, and you couldn't assume much of an attention span.
00:16:08.760But it turns out that people have an incredible attention span.
00:16:12.420You know, like, I was just re-watching Breaking Bad, and I don't know how many hours Breaking Bad is.
00:16:39.000So it turns out that, well, it turns out maybe we're not so stupid.
00:16:42.820And so that'd be nice if we weren't so stupid.
00:16:46.700And I'm kind of tired of everyone assuming that we are, just like I'm tired of everyone assuming that we're some sort of cancer on the planet, you know?
00:16:55.540I don't like that attitude about human beings.
00:16:59.600I think it's, I think there's something deeply, deeply wrong about it.
00:17:03.520So, you know, this is something, something that's just kind of an interesting historical tidbit.
00:17:10.800Back in the late 1800s, there was a biologist named Thomas Huxley, and he was the famous novelist.
00:17:17.600Eldest Huxley's, I think, great-grandfather, perhaps grandfather, and very intelligent man,
00:19:20.440We were starting to become a force that was, to some degree, a match for nature.
00:19:25.880You know, and, and bloody well, thank God for that, you know, because nature was more than a match for us for a very long period of time, right?
00:19:33.940Our, our, our species has come up through, through, through, through epochs, eons of absolute brutal, um, privation and difficulty and, and starvation and, and freezing temperatures
00:19:50.040and, and burning in the desert sun and lack of water and lack of, of hygienic facilities and, like, just hand to mouth suffering.
00:20:02.720And, you know, we've managed to organize ourselves to the point where that's still the lot of a substantial number of people on the planet,
00:20:15.020You know, the UN now projects that by the year 2030, abject poverty, which is defined as living on less than a dollar a 90, dollar 90 a day in, in today's US money, will be eradicated.
00:20:28.620There won't be anybody in the world that poor, and the cynics say, well, that's a pretty damn low, uh, um, barrier, let's say, but if you double it,
00:20:38.940you also see that's decreasing very rapidly, and if you triple it, you see that's decreasing very rapidly, and you've got to draw the bloody line somewhere,
00:20:46.480you know, and abject poverty is abject poverty, and the fact that it's decreased by 50% in the last 12 years, from 2000 to the year 2012,
00:20:56.880we decreased the absolute level of abject poverty in the world by 50%, right?
00:21:02.160It was the fastest economic, it was the most spectacular economic miracle in the history of humankind.
00:21:08.960And, you know, you hardly ever hear about it, hardly anyone knows about it, it's like, it's, it's a bloody miracle,
00:21:15.160there's more middle class people in the world now than non-middle class people,
00:21:19.320and there are way more obese people than there are starving people.
00:21:23.640And so, that's something to celebrate, you know, I mean, it's a funny thing to celebrate, but, but it's a, it's a, it's quite the thing to celebrate,
00:21:31.860and the fastest growing economies in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa, and, and they're growing at 5 to 7% a year,
00:21:39.220so it looks like the economic miracle that's, you know, that took place in India, and in China, most of Southeast Asia,
00:21:45.380is really starting to kick in in Africa, and it's, seems at least in part, it's because of the collapse of the Soviet Union back in the 1989,
00:21:52.660and the, the lack of overt pressure to have African countries pursue the most pathological possible economic doctrines
00:22:04.340that anybody could ever imagine, they just stopped doing that, has freed people up to start to become,
00:22:10.780well, if not rich, at least richer, and at least with the possibility of a continual rise upward, you know,
00:22:16.780the child mortality rate in Africa now is the same as it was in Europe in 1952, I mean, that's, that's really something, you know,
00:22:25.900and, and, um, um, longevity rates have increased tremendously in Africa, and, well, you know, we're kicking the slats out of some major diseases,
00:22:37.580polio's pretty much gone, it looks like we're putting a pretty good dent in malaria, that'll do great things for Africa,
00:22:43.580I think there's a real possibility with some concerted effort that we could get rid of tuberculosis in the next 15 years or so,
00:22:50.320if we made that a target, that would be something, you know, that's an ancient scourge of mankind, we could certainly do without that,
00:22:57.960so, there, and, and, and there are intelligent people who are working hard on trying to eradicate these problems,
00:23:04.640and they're doing it successfully, and so, you know, I'm, I'm not, I'm not in favor of the whole,
00:23:12.560there's something wrong with humanity, and we're a scourge on the bloody planet,
00:23:16.780and it would be better off if there were fewer of us, and the whole planet would be thriving if there were none of us at all,
00:23:23.180I think that there's something unbelievably dangerous about that attitude,
00:23:27.340and I think it's, it's ungrateful, and unfair, and unsympathetic, and ungrateful, and non-empathetic,
00:23:34.940because I really do see that, like, I know, I don't know a lot about human history,
00:23:40.480because God, there's a lot of history to know about, you know, and the more you know about human history,
00:23:46.080the more you know that there's just endless details that you have no idea about,
00:23:52.500but if you, if you do a reasonable overview, you, you do see that it's, it's a bloody mess, you know,
00:23:59.280that it's, it's, it's privation, and war, and catastrophe, and brutality, and struggle, and, and strife, and difficulty,
00:24:08.320all, the entire way through, you know, people striving against odds that are just absolutely astronomical,
00:24:15.580astronomical, and yet succeeding, you know, that overall, the, the story overall is one of,
00:24:22.700I wouldn't say unbroken progress, but it's decent progress, and it's better now than it's ever been,
00:24:28.120by a huge margin, and there's every bit of evidence to suggest that it could continue to get better,
00:24:34.920and better, and better, you know, here's another thing that's really cool,
00:24:38.560do you know that we're adding four years of life expectancy every year now,
00:24:44.120so, once we hit a year every year, then that's it, we don't die anymore, but those last eight months a year,
00:24:51.040they're going to be, they're going to be tough to manage, you know, but four months a year is really something,
00:24:56.520and so, you know, we're basically living longer, and we're living healthier, and we're smarter than we were,
00:25:02.840because we're much more, our nutritional levels are higher than they were, because, because we're not starving,
00:25:08.000especially the people at the bottom end, and, you know, we're educating people all over the world,
00:25:13.920the Chinese graduate more engineers every year than the U.S. have engineers,
00:25:20.600now, that's terrifying, because, God, all we, we've got all these engineers already,
00:25:25.480and they're making gadgets at such a rate, that you can't even keep track of the gadgets, right,
00:25:31.600you go online, and, like, there's all these technologies, and all these subcultures using them,
00:25:37.420and you don't even know what the technologies are, if you're fully informed,
00:25:42.700you can't keep up with the new stuff that you might buy, and it's not like it's trivial technology,
00:25:49.840it's unbelievably powerful technology, like, I'm in awe of many of the young people that I work with,
00:25:55.760because they're more, they're, they're savvier about the technological infrastructure
00:26:01.620that constitutes the web than I am, because I'm old, and it, and it's hard to keep up as you get old,
00:26:08.060and, you know, they come up with tools to make difficult things very simple, very rapidly,
00:26:13.960and there's just subcultures everywhere that are doing this at an unbelievably rapid rate,
00:26:19.860you know, and you go to somewhere like Silicon Valley, and I've spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley,
00:26:23.580and it's, it has its problems, but, Jesus, there's a unbelievable collection of smart people there,
00:26:30.240and, and they're working on things like, they're working on things like mad, and, and, and it's working,
00:26:36.940you know, you see someone like Elon Musk, I mean, what the hell do you make of someone like that,
00:26:42.080you know, I mean, what did he do, he made an electric car, which is basically impossible,
00:26:46.540and it works, which is basically impossible, and then he built an infrastructure,
00:26:50.660so that you could charge the damn thing, wherever you drove, and that was basically impossible,
00:26:56.480and then he made it cheap, because if you buy an electric car, and you factor in the price of gas,
00:27:02.780the electric car is actually about as expensive as the gasoline car, and so that was unbelievable,
00:27:08.940and then he built a bloody rocket, which was one-tenth the price, or less, that, of a NASA rocket,
00:27:15.800that you could reuse, which was impossible, and then he put one of his cars on top of the rocket,
00:27:22.660and he shot it up into space, and then this happened, right, this all happened, and he's still alive,
00:27:29.440and, you know, and then he went and blew it all by smoking pot on Joe Rogan, you know, because,
00:27:35.820because, well, it's so funny, you know, we, you know, we like our insane geniuses, like predictable,
00:27:45.760and, and, and, and, and safe, and so we don't want them doing strange things like having a tiny puff
00:27:51.560of marijuana on a show famous for marijuana, so, so anyways, you know, that's all, that's all good news,
00:27:59.840it's, it's all good news, man, and I learned a lot about this, I worked for the UN for a while,
00:28:05.340like indirectly, um, and, and I, and I wasn't paid for it, by the way, it was volunteer work,
00:28:10.780I worked on this, uh, um, uh, document, which was the report to the Secretary General on sustainable
00:28:18.820economic development, it's quite funny, because a lot of the right-wing conspiracy theorists are
00:28:23.440having a field day with that, man, that I'm some sort of, like, closet globalist shill, because I,
00:28:31.020because I work momentarily for the UN, it's like, well, what, what the hell are you supposed to do
00:28:36.400when you're asked to do something like that, you know, there was a document that was being prepared
00:28:40.480that was supposed to lay out some halfway's intelligent vision of what things might be like
00:28:46.680if the international community cooperated for the next 30 years, it wasn't, it wasn't like,
00:28:52.060there weren't brutal guidelines that were going to be enforced by jack-booted Nazis, it was,
00:28:57.240it was just a proposal paper, and so we had a chance to, to, to work on it, there was only one Canadian
00:29:03.920team, and I got, I got placed on that, and that was kind of cool, and so it gave me an opportunity
00:29:09.440to spend two years reading about economics and about ecology at the same time, and so, and what
00:29:17.120was so weird about that was the more I read, the more optimistic I got, and I thought, well, that isn't
00:29:22.620what I expected, like, I thought we were going to hell in a handbasket at quite the, quite the rapid rate,
00:29:27.400and, you know, I mean, there's no doubt that we're doing some stupid things, and I would say the stupidest
00:29:33.540thing we're probably doing is overfishing the oceans, because there's just no use, it's just,
00:29:39.480there's just no use in that, it's, it's completely destructive, it doesn't do anybody any good,
00:29:44.040and it could be stopped, but I know that your country, for example, is starting to put aside
00:29:48.140marine park reserves that are fishery-free, essentially, and you don't need a lot of that
00:29:54.800before the ocean can regenerate itself, because it's actually pretty good at that.
00:29:58.440One of the things that's kind of funny, you know, remember when that, when there was that big oil
00:30:03.820spill in the Gulf of Mexico? You know there were more fish there two years later than there were
00:30:09.020before the spill? You know why? Because people stopped fishing, so it turned out that the pollution
00:30:16.680was really good for the fish. It's like, yeah, well, that's why you have to do your research carefully,
00:30:24.800because you never know, you know, you never know what's true and what isn't, and so that was,
00:30:28.840that was pretty interesting. The same thing happened in World War II, by the way,
00:30:32.380in, in the North Sea, because the North Sea had been fished out pretty badly, and then
00:30:35.940during World War II, it wasn't all that safe to go out and fish in the North Sea, because,
00:30:41.120you know, you would get sunk by a submarine, and that was not very bright, so, um, people stopped
00:30:46.740fishing, and the fish came back very rapidly, and fish do that, because they breed quite quickly,
00:30:51.500and so if you just leave the damn things alone for a while, most of them come back, but, um, but,
00:30:58.060you know, apart from the fisheries, which, which is, is really quite an appalling and, and, and,
00:31:03.360and pessimistic story, although not hopeless, um, and people are waking up to it, and, and building
00:31:09.840these marine reserve parks, for example, a lot of the ecological news was surprisingly good,
00:31:15.700way better than I thought it would be, uh, you know, so, for example, there are more forests in the
00:31:21.160northern hemisphere than there were a hundred years ago, so, who would have guessed that? I wouldn't
00:31:26.620have guessed that, partly it's because marginal farmland has returned to forest, so, and because
00:31:31.980we've got more effective at, at, um, at agriculture by a huge margin, and, uh, there are more forests in
00:31:39.740China than there were 30 years ago, and so that's something, and it turns out when people burn coal,
00:31:45.180which is, you know, kind of polluting, they don't burn wood, so, you know, they're going to burn
00:31:51.240something, because they don't like eating raw, inedible things, and freezing to death, so they're
00:31:57.700going to burn something, and it turns out that coal is actually, uh, preferable to wood, um, and so,
00:32:04.300well, and so these things are complicated, and the, the ecological story looked better than,
00:32:11.360than I would have ever guessed, even the overpopulation issue, you know, ever since the
00:32:16.2601960s, with Paul Ehrlich, and the population bomb, there was this terrible pessimism, that we were
00:32:23.640going to breed, you know, like, like uncontrolled rats, until every square inch of the world was, like,
00:32:30.300covered with, with some starving skeleton, and that that was all going to happen by the year 2000,
00:32:35.840when there would be mass starvation, and the, the price of commodities would have blown through the roof,
00:32:41.120and we would run out of oil, and, and all the, uh, all the, uh, um, commodities that we need to
00:32:47.920maintain a reasonably standard, reasonably high standard of living, and, you know, that didn't
00:32:52.760happen, and not only did it happen, is that rates of poverty went down, and rates of hunger went down,
00:33:00.220even though the population went way up, and so there are more people who are hungry now, than there were
00:33:05.76050 years ago, but there are far fewer proportion of people who are hungry, and that's really something,
00:33:11.860and so, the overpopulation, doom and gloomers, were absolutely wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and we're going to
00:33:20.260peak at 9 billion, that's what it looks like, all the projections indicate something around 9 billion, and that's
00:33:26.340only 2 billion more than we have, like, it's not nothing, it's still 2 billion people, but we're, but at the rate at which we're improving agricultural output, and with regards to efficiency of agricultural output, there's no evidence whatsoever that we're going to run out of food, and, you know, a country like Uganda, this is quite interesting, if Uganda, which is a very big country, by the way,
00:33:47.400if it was utilized properly, it has a water table underneath it, and plenty of water, if Uganda was utilized properly, it could feed all of Africa, and so, it's not like we're making full use, even, of the agricultural capacity, that we have available to us, and so, there's no, we're not going to overpopulate the world, and leave everybody, like, starving, in, on, on, like, Easter Island, with nothing but giant heads, and no trees, that's not going to happen,
00:34:16.140and, and, and in fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that within 100 years, one of the biggest problems that we'll be facing is a declining population, and that that'll be worrisome, I mean, we won't be concerned about that at the moment, but, um, that whole doom and gloom scenario just seems to be, to be wrong, and, you know, there are, there are fewer wars than there were by a large margin, the overall rates of homicidal behavior in the world have plummeted,
00:34:44.020the rates of death by terrorism over the last 50 years have plummeted, um, there's, there's a lot of good news, there's way more good news than there is bad news, and that's, there's no wars in the western hemisphere, there's a piece of good news, you know, that's a remarkable thing, so, and, you know, and, and it's been, it's been 70 years since World War II, and we've had thermonuclear weapons since then,
00:35:11.040and, and, of course, everyone's terrified of those bloody things, and, and no wonder, and maybe that's for the best, because we, maybe we needed something to really terrify us, you know, it's certainly possible, but, even though there's always the possibility of a mistake, and there's still the possibility of a nuclear outbreak, we haven't used them, and we haven't had a third world war, and almost all of us here have lived in, what do you gotta think, man, comparative peace and prosperity,
00:35:36.700if you compare it to any other time and place, anywhere else in the world, at any point in history, which is not perfect, because, you know, you're still getting old, and you're still gonna die, and, and we haven't, we haven't, we haven't, what, we haven't defeated all the diseases that, that beset us, but, God, it could be a lot worse, and we seem to be making it a lot better, and so, and so, look, this is what happened to me, you know,
00:36:04.020when I wrote my first book, which was Maps of Meaning, I was looking at something that was really dark, it was really dark, I, I was interested in totalitarianism, and I'm still interested in totalitarianism, I don't care if it's, whether it's on the left or the right, it doesn't matter to me, it's this, it's this totalizing view, that's predicated on the assumption, that you can take a set of, a few simple axioms, about the way the world is, and always was,
00:36:32.840and then you can decide how society would be structured, and then you can force people into acting that way, and the utopia will come. I'm, I'm not fond of that sort of thinking, I don't think there's any evidence that it's, um, viable, partly because the world's too complicated to manage that, and you just can't get your axioms right.
00:36:53.700And besides, things shift around on you, and even if you're right today, something's going to turn on you tomorrow, and you're going to have to update your model a bit, and if you don't, well, then all hell's going to break loose, so,
00:37:05.860but then, you know, I was interested in totalitarianism, partly because, because, for psychological reasons, I was interested in why people were so committed to belief systems, that they were willing to put everything to the torch, essentially, so, mostly I was concerned about the ideological struggle between the western world, and the communist world, particularly the Soviets, but not only the Soviets.
00:37:32.920Um, and, and, and I was curious in a sort of post-modern way, because, you know, you might say, well, you know, the Marxists, they have their viewpoint, and, you know, inequality of income distribution is a problem, and maybe things should be fairer, and maybe the fact that there are relatively poor people in the west, and relatively rich people in the west, is a consequence of oppression, and maybe something could be done about that, and the western way of looking at the world is just an arbitrary set of rules, and,
00:38:02.920the communist way of looking at the world is another arbitrary set of rules, maybe you could even say that about the fascist way of looking at the world, although, somehow people are much less likely to agree to that, which is quite interesting, because it, it means that, by and large, we have come to a collective decision,
00:38:21.320that there are some forms of arbitrary games, let's say, set up on axiomatic structure, that are wrong, you know, and, and it's a very rare person, who thinks that what the Nazis did was, was justifiable, was right, in any, in any fundamental sense.
00:38:39.140That's interesting, you know, because it means that, collectively, we have come to a decision, that there is a difference between good and evil, if you assume that what the Nazis did was evil, which I think is a fairly reasonable assumption,
00:38:54.300I don't, I don't, I don't know what you would do with the word evil, if what happened in places like Auschwitz didn't deserve that epithet, you need some other word that was just as dark to describe what happened,
00:39:07.000so, you might as well just use evil, because everybody knows what it means, so we have come to a conclusion that there are things that we shouldn't get up to, you know, and that also implies that we've come to some conclusion about what constitutes good,
00:39:22.260some general sense that whatever the opposite of what, let's say, the Nazis did, and I would say also the collectivist communists, whatever the opposite of that is, whatever that might be, that's good,
00:39:35.780and that we should be pursuing that, and so that's a good thing, because it kind of pulls us out of the moral relativistic problem, not exactly, because it's not defined perfectly or anything,
00:39:45.800you know, to say, well, you shouldn't be a Nazi, it's like, well, it's kind of vague, you know, okay, no arm bands, no goose stepping, but then what?
00:39:56.320Well, that's a complicated question, to figure out how to conduct yourself, so that you would be unlikely to participate in the horrors of a totalitarian ideological system,
00:40:09.720if the advantages of doing so were offered to you in a realistic way, that's really the moral issue, because, you know, if you read about Nazi Germany,
00:40:18.560and you read about communist Soviet Union and China, you understand that those systems were very attractive to people,
00:40:28.240and there were reasons for that attractiveness, and that had you been there, there's a high probability that you would have been attracted by those ideas,
00:40:38.040and you can see that now, because there's a big resurgence, for example, both on the left, on the right, but I would say primarily on the left, especially in the academic world,
00:40:49.220there's a big resurgence in the same kind of ideas that inspired generations of Soviet utopians, say, back in the early 1900s,
00:41:03.080when they had not so much evidence that what they were doing was absolutely bloody, pointless, and murderous, you know,
00:41:10.660and so that does separate the modern people who suggest that such things from those who believed it a hundred years ago,
00:41:17.220but nonetheless, you know, the point is, is that those ideas are so attractive that they still, they still resonate with people,
00:41:25.300and you have to take that seriously, because it means they probably resonate with you,
00:41:28.600and some of it is, I deal with this to some degree in chapter one, stand up straight with your shoulders back,
00:41:35.800because it really is a discussion of hierarchies, and I actually try to make a case, like I like to make a case for hierarchy,
00:41:44.800you know, the radical leftist types, the post-modernists in particular, and I put this mostly at the feet of people like Foucault,
00:41:53.100he'd be, he'd be villain number one, although he was influenced heavily by Marx, and his own special sense of resentment,
00:42:01.680intellectual resentment and arrogance, so, which, which, which made him into a sort of perverted and malevolent and underhanded Marx,
00:42:09.500which is really something to be, because just the ordinary Marx wasn't so great,
00:42:14.300you know, and, and, and Foucault makes this fundamental case that human, that there's no real truth,
00:42:22.180and that what passes this truth is the dominant opinion of the dominant group,
00:42:30.220and by dominant, he means those that hold the power, and, and so, that's a hell of a pessimistic view of the world,