The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - January 17, 2017


Slaying the Dragon Within Us


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour

Words per Minute

180.89507

Word Count

10,861

Sentence Count

673

Misogynist Sentences

9

Hate Speech Sentences

12


Summary

In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson discusses a new way of looking at the world that is substantially different from the standard materialist view of the world, and how it can help you find meaning in the world. This episode is taken from a 2002 lecture delivered by Dr. Peterson titled, "There's No Such Thing as a Dragon: How to Slay the Dragon Within Us." The lecture was recorded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and the link to the lecture is in the description of the book discussed in this lecture is listed here. You can support this podcast by donating to Dr. B.P. Peterson's PODCAST by searching "Jordan Peterson" on PODCASTS, and by searching Jordan Peterson PODcASTS.org. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. With decades of experience helping patients with depression and anxiety, Dr., Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and a roadmap towards healing. In his new series, he provides a roadmap toward 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. P. Peterson on the Daily Wire Plus now, and start helping those listening who may be struggling. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening to someone who might be struggling with these conditions, and offer a lifeline to help them find a way to feel better and find a place in the brighter, brighter future they deserve a brighter future that they deserve it. This is not only of course, but we know how important it is to be a beacon of hope and a place where they can find a brighter, better understanding of their own brighter future. Thank you for listening to this podcast, and let me know what they can do to help you feel better, and I'm looking forward to helping you find a bright future you can feel good about their day to day life and a brighter tomorrow you deserve, too. - The Dark Side of the Dark Side Of The Day, by Jordan Peterson Dr. . - , and his new book, Slaying the Dragon within Us is available here.


Transcript

00:00:00.960 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740 We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780 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.
00:00:57.420 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
00:01:04.420 This is episode 6, Slaying the Dragon Within Us.
00:01:10.920 This episode was taken from a 2002 lecture recorded by TV Ontario.
00:01:17.700 The book that's discussed is called There's No Such Thing as a Dragon, and the link to which is in the description.
00:01:27.420 You can support this podcast by donating to Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's Patreon account by searching Jordan Peterson Patreon.
00:01:38.780 Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, Self-Authoring, are available at self-authoring.com.
00:01:45.560 So I'm going to tell you today about a way of looking at the world that I think is substantially different from the way that most people look at the world.
00:01:56.920 And the way I want to tell you about looking at the world today is, I think, more inclusive than a standard sort of materialist view.
00:02:05.240 Like the standard scientific view of the world, of course, is that it's made up of familiar objects, and that the world is, in essence, a material place.
00:02:13.860 But there's some very potent limitations of that viewpoint, despite the fact that it's given us tremendous power.
00:02:22.680 And the limitations are essentially as follows.
00:02:25.200 The essential materialist view can't tell us anything about consciousness, which is probably the primary fact of experience.
00:02:37.180 Neuroscientists in recent years, mostly in the last decade, have been trying to crack the problem of consciousness, and they have absolutely made no progress.
00:02:46.040 They've tried to associate consciousness with neuronal activity, but that seems to be an incomplete answer, because there's many forms of neuronal activity in the brain that aren't accompanied by consciousness at all.
00:02:57.840 Not only do neuroscientists understand virtually nothing about consciousness, they can't even really figure out what its function is.
00:03:04.600 They can't understand why our brains would go to so much effort to make us aware of things when it isn't clear at all that awareness is necessary for life,
00:03:13.840 especially given that there are many life forms on the planet that don't seem to be aware at all.
00:03:19.360 The standard materialist view is also insufficient in many other ways.
00:03:22.880 It's insufficient philosophically, I think, as you probably all know, because a conception that portrays the world as made up of objects is in some really fundamental way dead.
00:03:33.660 It doesn't seem to have a place in it for human beings, or a place in it for meaning, or a mode whereby you might be able to conceptualize the real existence of something like an emotion,
00:03:42.900 or a dream, or a motivation, or a motivation, all phenomena which are just as mysterious to neuroscientists and to scientists in general as consciousness.
00:03:52.420 Now, the problem with this seems to be mostly experiential.
00:03:57.020 If you have to ask people what they know more than anything else, they know, number one, that they're conscious.
00:04:03.460 They know, number two, that their internal experiential life is composed of emotions and motivational states,
00:04:11.160 which, although not rational in essential structure, are so real and relevant that virtually everything that people do is predicated on them.
00:04:19.700 So our current viewpoint, despite its ability to give us tremendous technological power,
00:04:26.240 seems to eradicate from formal consideration many, many essential experiences that are vital to life, in fact, even perhaps primary.
00:04:35.080 Now, I'm going to suggest to you today that there's an alternative viewpoint,
00:04:39.980 and I think also it's one that, although you may be hearing about it formally for the first time,
00:04:45.900 is also something that you know unbelievably deeply.
00:04:49.000 How thousands of years ago, Plato proposed that all knowledge was remembering.
00:04:56.360 And, of course, we don't believe that today, because we believe we gather knowledge as a consequence of contact with the world.
00:05:01.120 But you'll see today that the knowledge that I'm going to share with you will strike a deep chord of remembering,
00:05:06.420 and it's because everything that you've done throughout your life is, in one way or another,
00:05:10.460 predicated on what I'm going to tell you today.
00:05:13.240 I'm going to demonstrate this in a peculiar way, I think, because I'm going to start by telling you a story.
00:05:18.400 And the reason I'm going to do that is because models of the world that include phenomena like consciousness and emotions and motivations and actions and interactions
00:05:27.900 are generally portrayed formally in stories and not in scientific theories.
00:05:34.120 And it does turn out to be that stories themselves have an identifiable structure, even a grammar, that makes them comprehensible.
00:05:41.900 Furthermore, it turns out that even the simplest stories, especially if they're elegantly constructed,
00:05:46.760 have an unbelievably profound underlying meaning.
00:05:51.280 And you can frequently see this, most particularly, in children's stories.
00:05:54.820 So, I remember I showed my son, when he was four years old, the Disney movie Pinocchio,
00:06:00.060 which, on the surface of it, is a very strange tale, right?
00:06:03.280 It's a wooden puppet who wants to become real,
00:06:07.060 so he has to rescue his father from the belly of a whale,
00:06:10.680 a structure that could by no means be considered rational,
00:06:15.020 that is, in fact, so surprising and unexpected that it's remarkable to imagine that grown men and women,
00:06:20.620 including children, can sit in a movie theater and watch a story like that unfold
00:06:25.720 without ever thinking for a second that it's absolutely peculiar that they can be taken in by such a tale
00:06:31.840 and regard it, experientially, as real.
00:06:36.500 Pinocchio is a deep, deep story.
00:06:38.600 It has echoes that go back three or four thousand years to the earliest stories that we know,
00:06:42.860 and it's so rich with information that a child can watch it over and over and over and over.
00:06:48.280 I think my son watched Pinocchio thirty times.
00:06:51.220 Why?
00:06:52.060 Well, it's either because a child can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality,
00:06:57.240 or it's because there's something to those stories that's much more potent than we actually consciously understand.
00:07:03.400 It's kind of interesting, too, you know, if you go to a video rental establishment,
00:07:09.320 you'll find that in the top ten highest grossing movies of all time
00:07:12.740 are four Disney movies that are animated fairy tales,
00:07:16.040 essentially retelling of mythological stories.
00:07:18.460 They strike a deep chord.
00:07:20.980 Why?
00:07:22.460 Well, Shakespeare was, of course, a great literary figure,
00:07:25.300 said it perhaps better than anyone else has,
00:07:29.020 which is not surprising because he said many things better than anyone else has.
00:07:32.500 He said all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
00:07:36.200 They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.
00:07:41.100 And so following from that, you can imagine that a story is no more about the props
00:07:46.260 in the world than a play that you go see is about the props on the stage.
00:07:51.820 A drama is about the manner in which people actually exist,
00:07:55.180 the emotions that they feel, the motivational states they encounter,
00:07:57.720 the problems they have to solve when they interact with each other.
00:08:00.560 And the play is the thing from that particular perspective
00:08:03.580 in which we can capture those aspects of our experience
00:08:07.340 that are not only real but essentially human.
00:08:11.020 And I'm going to tell you a little story to begin this off with.
00:08:13.620 It's a kid's story written for children of about four years of age,
00:08:16.880 but it's very, very elegant.
00:08:18.760 I tried to cut it down for this talk, but I found I couldn't
00:08:21.620 because it was so well edited that every single piece of it
00:08:24.240 had to fit in to make the story complete.
00:08:26.460 And I'm going to show you first the structure of the story.
00:08:29.540 Now, this is a very useful diagram in many ways.
00:08:34.580 It's very simple.
00:08:35.720 Basically, it says this.
00:08:37.860 Whenever you're doing anything, you inhabit a bounded world.
00:08:42.100 Now, you know, like, for example, you're sitting here in this lecture,
00:08:44.460 there's things you are paying attention to and things you're not.
00:08:46.520 If I took most of you out of this room right now
00:08:48.640 and asked you definitively what color the rug was,
00:08:52.500 you wouldn't know, or what color your chair was, for example,
00:08:54.740 or what the person next to you was wearing,
00:08:56.460 unless that person happens to be your husband or your wife.
00:08:59.040 You wouldn't remember any of those things.
00:09:00.960 And the reason for that is when you're in a situation like this
00:09:03.280 and you're attending to a speaker,
00:09:04.940 most of the occurrences that are unfolding around you are irrelevant.
00:09:08.620 You don't store them.
00:09:09.440 You only focus on certain things.
00:09:11.440 Well, how do you decide what to focus on,
00:09:14.080 given that there's a virtually unlimited number of things to pay attention to?
00:09:18.300 Well, you have to conceive of yourself as being somewhere, always.
00:09:23.420 And you have to conceive of yourself as going somewhere.
00:09:26.080 So you could say, in a real sense, the world you inhabit is a journey.
00:09:29.600 It's a journey from point A to point B,
00:09:31.900 a journey from what is to what should be,
00:09:34.360 a journey from the place you are,
00:09:36.020 which is insufficient in some important manner,
00:09:39.740 to a place that in some important manner is going to be better.
00:09:43.300 A standard story has exactly that structure.
00:09:45.480 A child comes home and you say,
00:09:46.560 well, what happened to you today on the way to school?
00:09:49.640 Setting up the little narrative structure,
00:09:51.440 and the child unfolds the sequence of events that he encountered.
00:09:54.040 If the story's more interesting than just a recount
00:09:57.840 of exactly what happened to him,
00:09:59.840 it usually involves the encounter with something unexpected
00:10:02.920 on the way to point B,
00:10:04.800 and a description of the manner in which that encounter
00:10:07.500 with the unexpected was resolved.
00:10:09.820 Typical story.
00:10:11.100 Now, why would you want to know that?
00:10:12.560 Why would you want to listen to it?
00:10:14.100 Well, it's because on your journey from point A to point B,
00:10:18.540 all sorts of unexpected things always happen.
00:10:21.320 And if someone else has encountered something unexpected
00:10:24.080 and conjured up a decent solution to it,
00:10:26.240 it could well be worth your time to listen.
00:10:28.700 Well, maybe there's a pattern to encountering unexpected things.
00:10:36.400 Maybe there's a proper way to encounter the unexpected.
00:10:39.820 Maybe it's the case that in our collective wisdom as human beings,
00:10:43.900 we've gathered up representations of ways to encounter the unexpected
00:10:48.940 that we put forth in our stories.
00:10:51.500 How should you face what you don't understand?
00:10:55.340 Well, now I'm going to tell you this story.
00:10:56.700 It's written for four-year-old kids.
00:10:59.060 But I want you to take a look at it for a moment from a different perspective
00:11:03.180 and see if you can imagine exactly what it is that it's saying.
00:11:08.800 There's no such thing as a dragon.
00:11:11.940 Well, we all know that, right?
00:11:13.460 A dragon is a fictitious creature.
00:11:15.860 Reptilian.
00:11:17.020 Terrible.
00:11:18.200 Lives forever.
00:11:19.640 Breathes fire.
00:11:21.380 Hoards gold.
00:11:23.560 Strange combination of attributes.
00:11:25.460 Why would something terrible and ancient hold a treasure?
00:11:32.900 Billy Bixby was rather surprised when he woke up one morning and found a dragon in his room.
00:11:38.620 It was a small dragon about the size of a kitten.
00:11:41.820 The dragon wagged its tail happily when Billy patted its head.
00:11:46.680 It's interesting, you know, in Chinese mythology, the dragon is a positive figure.
00:11:55.960 In European mythology, the dragon is something to face in combat and destroy.
00:12:02.600 Or something to face in combat and build something out of the pieces left over from the dragon.
00:12:09.640 Billy went downstairs to tell his mother.
00:12:11.560 There's no such thing as a dragon, said Billy's mother.
00:12:16.560 And she said it like she meant it.
00:12:19.600 Remember once my daughter had a nightmare.
00:12:22.140 She was about four.
00:12:23.180 This was at the time when she first started to notice graffiti and litter.
00:12:27.620 And both graffiti and litter bothered her.
00:12:29.820 She couldn't understand the motivations behind the graffiti artist.
00:12:32.720 And she didn't like the fact that there was litter cluttering up the world's order.
00:12:37.480 And the reason she got sensitive to that as a child was because children are really, really dependent on order.
00:12:43.120 Right?
00:12:43.240 I mean, and the reason for that is that their realm of competence is rather restricted.
00:12:47.220 So they don't like to see things messed up.
00:12:49.700 So little kids, for example, they're not happy with you if you play a game with them and then mess around with the rules of the game.
00:12:55.240 They don't like that at all.
00:12:56.240 They think that that's immoral activity to shake up the structure of the game.
00:13:01.220 Well, anyways, while she was pondering all this, she came into our bedroom one night and said,
00:13:06.680 Dad, I had a nightmare.
00:13:08.060 Now, we all know, right, nightmares aren't real, just like dragons.
00:13:10.800 Dreams aren't real, of course, which raises the question of why in the world you'd bother having them six or seven hours a night every single day of your life
00:13:18.820 and why they're a recognized feature of animal behavior all the way down to the amphibian level.
00:13:25.340 She said, I dreamt that there was a clear flowing stream, but in the stream there was all sorts of garbage.
00:13:30.680 And it scared me and bothered me so much I woke up.
00:13:33.220 So I told her, look, close your eyes and imagine the stream.
00:13:37.440 It's full of garbage.
00:13:38.860 What should you do about it?
00:13:40.100 She said, well, I should take the garbage out of the stream.
00:13:42.820 I said, all right, so picture the stream, picture yourself cleaning the garbage out of it.
00:13:48.400 She calmed down and went back to sleep.
00:13:50.120 Why?
00:13:50.860 Well, because dreams concentrate on threat.
00:13:53.140 We know that.
00:13:53.760 They present threats to you, threats you haven't been able to deal with well.
00:13:57.760 There's a part of your brain that tracks threats.
00:14:00.200 And it's not really all that smart in some ways.
00:14:02.960 All it does is say, look, here's the problem.
00:14:05.640 And it's waiting for the rest of your brain to conjure up some solution to that problem.
00:14:09.140 And if it doesn't conjure up a solution, then it just presents the problem over and over and over and over and over.
00:14:15.800 So people who have post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, who've been really upset by their contact with something unexpected, dream about the same tragedy forever until they solve it.
00:14:26.220 And they solve it by facing it and living it over and over voluntarily.
00:14:33.620 So you might think right off the bat from listening to that little story that suggesting to your four-year-old daughter who's just had a nightmare that her fears aren't real and that the dream representation of them isn't real because it's not tangible like a table might not really be the best approach to the problem.
00:14:49.220 So you see, Billy, he's pretty much got it right right off the bat, right?
00:14:55.460 The dragon wagged its tail happily when Billy patted its head.
00:14:59.460 Billy went downstairs to tell his mother, there's no such thing as a dragon, said Billy's mother.
00:15:04.600 And she said it like she meant it.
00:15:06.340 So there's a dragon in this house.
00:15:08.240 Now the next thing you might wonder is, how often have you actually gone into a house where there's a dragon?
00:15:13.480 My guess is if you don't take this particularly specifically and allow yourself to use your imagination and to think metaphorically for a moment,
00:15:21.800 you've all encountered dozens of houses that were filled right to the rafters with various dragons,
00:15:27.260 all of which were being studiously ignored by the people who inhabited the house.
00:15:32.920 Billy went back to his room and began to dress.
00:15:35.560 The dragon came close to Billy in a friendly manner and wagged its tail, but Billy didn't pat it.
00:15:40.320 If there's no such thing as something, it's silly to pat it on the head.
00:15:46.560 Billy washed his face and hands and went down to breakfast.
00:15:49.640 The dragon went along.
00:15:51.000 It was bigger now, almost the size of a dog.
00:15:55.260 Billy sat down at the table.
00:15:57.760 The dragon sat down on the table.
00:16:00.240 This sort of thing was not usually permitted, but there wasn't much Billy's mother could do about it.
00:16:04.380 She'd already said there was no such thing as a dragon.
00:16:06.640 And if there's no such thing, you can't tell it to get down off the table.
00:16:12.980 Sometimes I sit with friends of mine who have very young children to eat, say.
00:16:17.940 And the children, two or three years old, don't sit at the table.
00:16:22.200 They sit on the table.
00:16:23.280 Or they run around the table.
00:16:24.880 Or they run around the table and pull things off the table.
00:16:27.260 Or they run around the house and pull things off, all the shelves in the house, and keep their parents so busy chasing them around that they have no time whatsoever to interact as adults.
00:16:37.380 Well, you have to wonder under those circumstances whether you're dealing with a child or a dragon, so to speak.
00:16:44.180 And you also might wonder whether or not the dragon is large and unruly, precisely because the parents are completely unwilling to admit that it actually exists.
00:16:58.760 Mother made some pancakes for Billy.
00:17:02.580 But the dragon ate them all.
00:17:04.460 Mother made some more.
00:17:05.500 But the dragon ate those too.
00:17:07.200 Mother kept making pancakes until she ran out of batter.
00:17:10.320 Billy only got one of them, but he said that's all he really wanted anyway.
00:17:13.140 One time, an acquaintance of ours in Boston brought their son over to be babysat at our house.
00:17:24.400 And his nanny had just been in a car accident, so he was being shunted from house to house while his parents went off to work.
00:17:30.960 And he didn't have a very good reputation, this kid.
00:17:33.520 He was about four.
00:17:35.320 And he came over to our house with his mother in the morning, and she dropped him off, and she said,
00:17:43.140 Well, he probably won't eat all day, but that's all right.
00:17:47.480 And I thought, no.
00:17:50.480 He's four.
00:17:51.500 If he doesn't eat all day, that's not all right.
00:17:55.740 Right?
00:17:55.940 Because kids, if they don't eat, they're basically horrible.
00:17:58.820 Right?
00:17:59.060 If they don't sleep and they don't eat, they're horrible.
00:18:00.660 So it isn't all right that he doesn't eat.
00:18:02.600 So then you think, well, maybe there's some sort of dragon associated with this child that happens to be interfering,
00:18:08.320 perhaps with his ability to eat.
00:18:10.220 So I came back at noon.
00:18:11.380 My wife had taken care of the children that day.
00:18:14.000 And I walked in the house, and the other four or five kids that we had in the house were off playing.
00:18:19.180 And this little kid was standing in the corner, really isolated and looking, you know, upset fundamentally.
00:18:26.140 So I went over and I poked him a bunch.
00:18:27.620 Because generally, if you poke a kid a little bit, you know, well, they'll go like this, you know, they'll sort of back off.
00:18:33.320 But sooner or later, you can crack them, and they'll smile, and then they'll play.
00:18:36.560 Not this kid, boy.
00:18:37.460 There's no bloody way he's going to play with me.
00:18:38.960 And that was that.
00:18:39.900 Like, he'd already learned that adults should either be ignored or that they were trouble.
00:18:46.160 And he wasn't going to let any adult into his little world.
00:18:48.780 So there was absolutely a dragon associated with that little boy, and it was eating all his pancakes.
00:18:53.900 Billy went upstairs to brush his teeth.
00:18:59.220 Mother started clearing the table.
00:19:00.960 The dragon, who was quite as big as Mother by this time, made himself comfortable on the hall rug and went to sleep.
00:19:07.680 I really like this one.
00:19:09.900 By the time Billy came back downstairs, the dragon had grown so much he filled the hall.
00:19:14.480 Billy had to go around by way of the living room to get to where his mother was.
00:19:18.560 I didn't know dragons grew so fast, said Billy.
00:19:21.060 There's no such thing as a dragon, said Mother firmly.
00:19:23.900 Cleaning the downstairs took Mother all morning.
00:19:31.880 What with the dragon in the way and having to climb in and out of windows to get from room to room.
00:19:36.420 So, you know, you think back in your own experience when you've gone to a house where there's a dragon hiding underneath the living room rug and nobody's saying anything about it.
00:19:45.440 And then you think, how long does it take to get something absolutely simple done in a house that's absolutely jammed to the rafters with unfinished business?
00:19:55.960 Forever, right?
00:19:56.840 Organizing people in a household like that, to even do something as simple as go out for breakfast in the morning, or even perhaps to make a meal, is virtually impossible.
00:20:05.940 Why?
00:20:06.220 Well, because there's something going on in the household that has been studiously ignored for a very long time, and has grown so large as a consequence that it occupies the whole domain.
00:20:18.660 By noon, the dragon filled the house.
00:20:22.360 Its head hung out the front door, its tail hung out the back door, and there wasn't a room in the house that didn't have some part of the dragon in it.
00:20:28.760 When the dragon awoke from his nap, he was hungry.
00:20:36.200 The bakery truck went by.
00:20:37.560 The smell of fresh bread was more than the dragon could resist.
00:20:40.560 He ran down the street after the bakery truck.
00:20:42.860 The house went along, of course, like the shell on a snail.
00:20:48.440 The mailman was just coming up the path with some mail for the Bixbys when their house rushed past him and headed down the street.
00:20:55.660 He chased the Bixbys' house for a few blocks, but he couldn't catch it.
00:21:02.000 When Mr. Bixby came home for lunch, the first thing he noticed was that his house was gone.
00:21:08.940 Luckily, one of the neighbors was able to tell him which way it went.
00:21:12.100 You know, that sort of thing happens to people not infrequently too, right?
00:21:17.180 They're not really looking around much at what's going on, and they come home from work one day, and their house is gone.
00:21:23.720 And what does that mean?
00:21:24.520 Well, maybe their children have become completely alienated from them, or maybe their wife has decided suddenly, but of course not so suddenly, to leave.
00:21:35.580 Why?
00:21:37.180 Well, according to this story, it's because something ignored was growing in the house.
00:21:41.520 Mr. Bixby got in his car and went looking for the house.
00:21:46.940 He studied all the houses as he drove along.
00:21:49.200 Finally, he saw one that looked familiar.
00:21:51.260 Billy and Mrs. Bixby were waving from an upstairs window.
00:21:53.760 You know, in the 1890s in India, when a house was being built, the local priest, equivalent to the priest, would come by to set the foundation stone.
00:22:05.460 And when he set the foundation stone, he'd take a big spike and drove it into the ground.
00:22:10.780 And the reason he drove it into the ground at the place where the foundation was going to be laid was to keep the great dragon that is underneath the earth firmly pinned down by its head so it couldn't move and shake the house to bits.
00:22:23.460 And what does that mean?
00:22:24.360 Well, it means the same thing that's meant in the New Testament when you're told not to build your house on a foundation of sand, right?
00:22:31.140 It doesn't matter how good the house is or how well constructed it is or how rich it is if the foundation is made out of sand or if it rests on top of a dragon.
00:22:40.520 There's nothing in that household that's ever going to be accomplished that's positive.
00:22:44.380 And the wealthy display that the house might consist of is nothing but a sham.
00:22:49.220 Mr. Bixby climbed over the dragon's head onto the porch roof and through the upstairs window.
00:22:56.240 How did this happen?
00:22:58.380 Mr. Bixby asked.
00:23:00.260 It was the dragon, said Billy.
00:23:03.320 There's no such thing, Mother started to say.
00:23:06.220 There is a dragon, Billy insisted, a very big dragon.
00:23:09.920 And Billy patted the dragon on the head.
00:23:12.280 The dragon wagged its tail happily.
00:23:14.800 Then, even faster than it had grown, the dragon started getting smaller.
00:23:20.080 Soon it was kitten size again.
00:23:22.240 I don't mind dragons this size, said Mother.
00:23:29.000 Why did it have to grow so big?
00:23:31.740 I'm not sure, said Billy, but I think it just wanted to be noticed.
00:23:36.780 So the first thing you might think about is just what happens if you don't pay a bill?
00:23:41.000 Like really don't pay it, right?
00:23:42.900 I mean, when it first comes in, it's only the size of a kitten.
00:23:45.940 But if you leave it alone for two or three years, it pretty much grows into a full-fledged dragon.
00:23:50.560 Why?
00:23:51.700 Well, because things that you ignore have a life of their own, complex life, like a bill.
00:23:57.000 A bill is attached to a whole industrial complex, right?
00:24:01.300 One of whose major functions is to make sure that you pay the bill.
00:24:04.560 And if you don't pay the bill, then you immediately find out what it's connected to.
00:24:09.580 It's connected to something immense and very troublesome.
00:24:12.180 And if you allow the full force of that thing to manifest itself, it's not pretty.
00:24:16.060 So one lesson from this story is that if something's nagging at you just a bit, it's probably better to deal with it before it turns into a full-fledged dragon.
00:24:29.840 And then you might think, well, what if it's already a full-fledged dragon, right?
00:24:33.020 I mean, then what's your option?
00:24:34.260 Is there nothing left but to run away?
00:24:36.300 And so then I can tell you what we know from 50 years of studying the outcome of clinical psychological interventions.
00:24:43.380 So let's take an extreme case, right?
00:24:45.760 Let's say something truly terrible has happened to you.
00:24:48.580 And as a consequence of that, you're in shock, post-traumatic shock, which is a condition that's sufficiently serious to damage your brain over time.
00:24:58.300 It's not only a psychological disorder, it's a physical disorder.
00:25:01.200 If you're really stressed, your cortisol levels shoot up.
00:25:03.800 And if your cortisol levels shoot up, that cortisol in high doses is a neurotoxin, starts to damage your brain.
00:25:10.160 So let's take a very extreme case and imagine that you've been violently sexually assaulted.
00:25:15.720 And as a consequence of that, you're in post-traumatic shock.
00:25:18.480 How do you get cured?
00:25:20.280 So that means you can't really go outside.
00:25:21.920 You certainly can't encounter anything that's associated with the event.
00:25:24.800 Your sense of integrity and personal safety has been completely destroyed.
00:25:29.000 Is there any way you can get back on your feet?
00:25:31.340 Now, there's a woman named Edna Foa in New York, I think one of the world's top clinical psychologists.
00:25:37.360 And she's been dealing with women who have post-traumatic stress disorder for decades.
00:25:40.980 And she's found a treatment that works.
00:25:46.300 And the treatment is this.
00:25:47.900 She has the women relive the event in as much detail as possible, over and over in their imagination, with the accompanying emotion.
00:25:56.500 And she's found, because she's done physiological measurements on her clients, that those women that allow themselves to get the most fully upset as a consequence of the reliving, get better faster and stay better longer.
00:26:08.400 The clinical evidence is absolutely clear.
00:26:11.220 When you take someone to therapy, you're basically doing two things to them.
00:26:14.960 Well, three.
00:26:15.720 You allow them to confess what's wrong with them.
00:26:17.640 Because it's really useful to actually say what it is that's bothering you.
00:26:21.060 It makes it clear and distinct.
00:26:25.040 You help the person get their story straight.
00:26:27.180 Because you have to have your story straight, right?
00:26:28.600 You have to know where you're coming from.
00:26:30.180 And you have to know where you're going.
00:26:31.460 Because otherwise, there's no structure for your life.
00:26:33.520 And the third thing is, if your path from point A to B is being blocked by something that you're afraid of, you better learn to confront it.
00:26:43.920 Because if you don't, it will grow and expand until it turns into the kind of dragon that occupies your whole house.
00:26:52.580 Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
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00:27:05.800 In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
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00:29:36.200 At this point in the lecture, Dr. Peterson refers to a figure, an image that is, which can be found in the description under map of motivation.
00:29:54.800 There'll be a link in the description, map of motivation, and it'll give context to this segment of the lecture.
00:30:00.980 This is another representation of a story.
00:30:05.380 It's a map of motivation.
00:30:06.960 It basically says this, and it's easy to understand if you think, go to a movie, it doesn't matter what country it's made.
00:30:12.860 There's certain things that always happen, right?
00:30:15.300 Like two broad classes of fiction, adventure and romance.
00:30:18.640 What's an adventure?
00:30:19.920 To go to new lands and discover something new and become transformed as a consequence.
00:30:23.980 What's a romance?
00:30:24.640 A romance to meet another person who's certainly as complicated as anything you could meet on an adventure.
00:30:30.720 And again, to be transformed as a consequence of the contact.
00:30:34.300 Two fundamental plots.
00:30:35.880 Why?
00:30:37.060 Why are there fundamental plots?
00:30:39.160 And why can we understand them without them being explained to us?
00:30:42.260 Well, it's because fundamentally we're all very, very similar.
00:30:45.500 We have a finite set of basic needs.
00:30:48.740 So, for example, hot people would rather be cool, thirsty people would rather have water, hungry people would rather eat.
00:30:57.340 And these motivations color what we conceive of as our ultimate destiny.
00:31:00.960 So, in the Old Testament, for example, an agrarian community, often hungry, paradise was construed as the land of milk and honey.
00:31:08.620 Well, why?
00:31:09.660 Well, milk is high in fat, and honey is high in glucose.
00:31:13.040 And if you're hungry, really hungry, there's nothing you want more than fat and sugar.
00:31:21.720 Affiliative desire.
00:31:22.780 We like to be around other people.
00:31:24.120 Sexual desire.
00:31:25.360 A fundamental sub-element of a romantic plot.
00:31:28.360 These underlying motivational systems of ours set us up.
00:31:32.760 Bounded worlds within which we live.
00:31:35.360 So, for example, if you fall in love with someone and you construe your destiny as being with them,
00:31:40.180 any indication that they're pleased with you is going to produce a rush of positive emotion.
00:31:46.100 Why?
00:31:46.680 Because our emotional systems are set up so that any sign that we're moving towards our goal is responded to with a rush of positive emotion.
00:31:55.520 And conversely, a frown from the person that you love, especially in the initial stages of a romance,
00:32:03.060 is met with a flood of negative affect.
00:32:06.380 Why?
00:32:06.760 Because anything that stops us on the path that we've chosen produces negative emotion.
00:32:14.680 That's how we're set up.
00:32:16.060 And our emotional systems are actually quite straightforward.
00:32:18.760 We posit a goal.
00:32:19.920 The thing about people is that we can posit virtually anything as a goal.
00:32:23.600 That's one of the things that distinguishes us from animals.
00:32:25.800 So we can all be thrilled to death when our favorite soccer team scores a goal.
00:32:29.340 Because we participate in what they're doing.
00:32:31.620 The same way we participate in watching a protagonist on a movie or in a book.
00:32:36.140 We can feel it.
00:32:37.640 We embody it.
00:32:38.340 We even know now that the neural systems that I utilize to watch a movie involve the same neural systems that the actor is utilizing acting out the part.
00:32:48.100 So when you say you understand someone else, what you mean is your body is set to do exactly the same thing their body is.
00:32:55.540 And your emotional systems are locked on exactly the same way theirs are.
00:32:59.060 So when they experience something and you're watching it, you experience an echo of it.
00:33:02.960 And that's what understanding means.
00:33:05.140 And it turns out as well that those neural systems that allow us to embody someone else and to imitate them are right underneath the structures that we've evolved to use for language.
00:33:15.020 And what that indicates is that mostly what we use language for is to tell stories.
00:33:20.480 To tell stories about the way that people act so that we can derive information, not about what the world's made of.
00:33:27.160 Because we don't really care about that in some fundamental way.
00:33:30.260 But instead, how should we act?
00:33:33.000 That's the fundamental question.
00:33:34.640 How should we act?
00:33:35.820 Now, if you go see a movie about a thug, the message there is, given that the thug generally comes to not so good end, don't act like a thug, right?
00:33:47.060 Interesting though it might be, compelling as a lifestyle, at least sufficiently compelling so you'll watch it, it's not a good long-term strategy.
00:33:55.740 What is a good long-term strategy?
00:34:00.120 You know, we've been collecting stories as people for, we don't know how long, really.
00:34:04.220 We don't know, 100,000 years maybe.
00:34:06.520 There's been creatures like us, indistinguishable from us, for 100,000 years.
00:34:11.120 And we know that societies that appear to be more or less as archaic as those old societies tell stories, have rituals, have mythology.
00:34:20.000 We have ancient written stories, like the Enuma Elish, which is a Sumerian story, the oldest written story we have, 4,000 years old.
00:34:27.340 Based on an oral tradition that's probably 20,000 years older than that.
00:34:32.060 We've been collecting stories for a long, long time.
00:34:35.940 What do they mean?
00:34:37.540 What are they good for?
00:34:39.520 Well, imagine this, you know, you tell a story to your husband or your wife, about something interesting that you saw, right?
00:34:45.860 Well, then imagine that you could collect 1,000 of the most interesting stories.
00:34:50.660 And then imagine that you were some kind of literary genius like Shakespeare.
00:34:54.060 Like Shakespeare, and you could take those 1,000 interesting stories and boil them down to 100 really interesting stories.
00:35:01.280 And then imagine that you had 10,000 years to gather up those 100 most interesting stories and average them.
00:35:07.480 And you could come out with one perfect story.
00:35:10.080 The best story.
00:35:10.920 The most interesting story that you could possibly tell.
00:35:14.320 Well, that's what a myth is.
00:35:16.160 It's the most interesting story you can possibly tell.
00:35:19.040 And just as this little story that I just told you had an underlying mythological structure, virtually every story you ever see has such a structure.
00:35:27.520 That's why it's compelling to you.
00:35:29.160 And when you meet someone who's charismatic or who holds your attention or who you're interested in, the probability that they're acting out a mythological fragment is very, very high.
00:35:39.460 And that's why it is that your attention is captivated by them.
00:35:44.780 What's the world like from this perspective?
00:35:47.640 Well, look, you know, you're all sitting in this room.
00:35:49.480 You think, if I took you out of here, how would you describe it?
00:35:52.060 Well, you'd say it was full of chairs.
00:35:53.480 There was a table.
00:35:54.920 Lights.
00:35:55.760 Well, why would you pick that level of resolution?
00:35:57.780 Like, why wouldn't you say, well, you know, the average ceiling tile had about 15,000 dots on it.
00:36:04.300 It doesn't seem like a relevant data point, right?
00:36:07.100 You'd say the same thing about the rug.
00:36:08.440 There's nothing stopping you from counting the number of stains or the number of red spots or the way the light plays off your partner's shirt or the shine on your shoes.
00:36:17.620 And if you were an artist, say, and trying to make a representation of this room, you'd concentrate on aspects that were completely different from those that you're concentrating on now.
00:36:25.820 You talk about chairs.
00:36:27.780 TV cameras, cabinets, tables.
00:36:30.400 Why?
00:36:31.340 They're functional.
00:36:32.380 They're objects, right?
00:36:33.400 They're tools.
00:36:34.200 They're tools.
00:36:35.060 They're things you can use.
00:36:36.680 Normally, when you're going from point A to point B, you divide up the world into things you can use.
00:36:42.580 Those are things you see.
00:36:44.180 Your perceptual systems do this.
00:36:46.060 Things you can use.
00:36:47.760 And things that might get in the way.
00:36:49.700 And as you move from motivated world to motivated world, the little stories that you inhabit, you chop the world up in different pieces.
00:36:57.420 So a piano for a concert pianist is a different phenomena than a piano for someone who has no musical education.
00:37:03.880 But you're always parsing up the world in terms of what it's good for, how it can serve your purposes.
00:37:09.140 And you even see it that way.
00:37:12.020 Now, the question is, the complicated question isn't so much, how do you parse up the world into things that are useful to you, like chairs?
00:37:19.320 The complicated question is, what do you do when something that you don't expect happens?
00:37:27.160 So imagine you've had a 15-year-long marriage.
00:37:32.120 And you find lipstick on your husband's collar.
00:37:37.640 Not once, but three times.
00:37:39.700 And then you think, well, I thought I had a map, right?
00:37:44.860 I thought we were both in the same game.
00:37:46.700 I thought we were both going from point A to the same point B.
00:37:50.560 I thought we had established a shared structure of interpretation.
00:37:54.480 But I find that there's some aspect of his apparent behavior that's completely outside my scope of interpretation.
00:38:01.520 What do you do?
00:38:02.060 Well, you can choose to ignore that, right?
00:38:03.640 It's easy to do that.
00:38:04.660 Why would you ignore it?
00:38:06.640 Because if you don't ignore it, you have to think, he's not who I thought he was.
00:38:11.080 And that's really not a good thing to think, because people are really, really, really complicated.
00:38:15.600 And if they're not who you think they are, you have no idea who they might be.
00:38:19.980 And you also might think, well, maybe I'm not who I think I am.
00:38:23.560 Because, after all, I got sucked into this situation.
00:38:26.540 I thought I'd pretty much understood the world.
00:38:28.820 And it turns out that I certainly don't understand the opposite gender.
00:38:32.980 And there's some indication that I really don't even understand myself.
00:38:35.720 Because, fundamentally, I'm so clueless.
00:38:38.180 And then you might think, well, when did this start, this cluelessness?
00:38:41.660 How long have I been blind?
00:38:43.140 Well, do you really want to ask that question?
00:38:45.500 Well, not generally, right?
00:38:46.740 It's easy to keep the dragon in the closet, which is where it tends to live.
00:38:51.740 What happens when you encounter something you don't expect?
00:38:56.020 For a long time, psychologists thought that people learned fear.
00:38:59.720 Right?
00:38:59.980 So your typical person, your typical lab rat, was a calm creature.
00:39:04.680 Now, it's a funny thing, eh?
00:39:06.660 Because if you take a lab rat out of his home cage, and you put him in a new cage, where
00:39:11.440 you want to teach him, say, to be afraid of something, to be afraid of a light paired
00:39:14.600 with a shock, which is a typical psychological experiment.
00:39:17.500 The funny thing about the rat is you've got to let him calm down before he's normal.
00:39:22.780 Well, except that you might think that the not-calm rat is also the normal rat, right?
00:39:26.800 You take the rat out of his cage, and you put him in the new cage, and what does he do?
00:39:30.280 He goes like this.
00:39:31.560 Why?
00:39:32.540 Well, he's a rat, right?
00:39:33.760 Someone might eat him.
00:39:35.040 So he's a bit nervous about being in this new situation.
00:39:37.880 Rats do not like being in new situations.
00:39:40.140 They don't like bright light.
00:39:41.580 If you put them in a new situation that's brightly lit, they go right over to the corner, because
00:39:45.080 they think maybe cats won't find them.
00:39:47.500 Rats are so afraid of cats that they never even have to meet a cat to be afraid of them.
00:39:51.520 So you can take a rat that's never seen a cat in his life, and if you let him smell
00:39:55.720 some cat odor, or show him a cat, he'll, well, I'll tell you.
00:39:59.960 If you show a rat, a cat, somewhere he doesn't expect it, he will run back to his burrow and
00:40:06.580 scream for 24 hours.
00:40:10.620 Now, you imagine how scared you'd have to be to scream for 24 hours, especially given
00:40:14.380 a rat only lives about a year.
00:40:16.360 So that would be, for you, like screaming.
00:40:19.080 That'd be like screaming for three months, right?
00:40:21.680 So the rat runs back to his burrow, and he screams, and every other rat who hears him
00:40:28.300 scream freezes.
00:40:29.300 And they all stay like that for 24 hours until they sort of calm down, and then the first
00:40:35.420 thing they do is they go back to the place where they saw the cat, and they start to map
00:40:38.300 it out.
00:40:39.300 So they do these things called corner runs, which is, so the rat wants to go back to this
00:40:43.300 territory, knows the territory might be a place where he gets food.
00:40:46.380 Is the cat still there?
00:40:47.860 Well, you might think, stay in the burrow, right?
00:40:50.000 But then maybe you don't get something to eat.
00:40:52.060 So the rat goes back to the place where the cat was, carefully, and then he hunches down,
00:40:58.000 and he runs over part of it.
00:40:59.760 And if nothing kills him, then he goes back and does the same thing with a little more
00:41:03.240 of the territory until finally the rats have run all over the territory again.
00:41:06.360 Then they go back to eating, making love, paying attention to their families, because
00:41:12.260 rats are quite social, despite the fact that they're rats.
00:41:17.140 The rat's smart enough to go back to the scene of the crime, so to speak, right?
00:41:20.460 It's not going to let the dragon that might be there grow.
00:41:23.420 The rat knows that if something is terrifying, it should be investigated, not run away from.
00:41:30.720 The question is, what do you encounter when you encounter something you don't expect?
00:41:34.760 And so you say, well, you've got your spouse mapped out, right?
00:41:37.320 But then they do something you don't expect, which hopefully happens fairly regularly, right?
00:41:40.920 Because otherwise you get bored with them.
00:41:42.640 They do something you don't expect, and you think, aha, who is that person precisely?
00:41:47.760 And what that means is that when you encounter something unexpected, you actually can't see
00:41:54.700 what's there.
00:41:55.880 Why?
00:41:56.880 Because it's too complicated.
00:41:58.680 You might have to spend a month talking to your spouse to figure out just exactly why
00:42:04.200 they have that particular peculiar opinion.
00:42:06.820 You have to explore and dig to find out how they map the world.
00:42:10.200 If you encounter something unexpected, the first thing you see is not the world.
00:42:14.220 The first thing you see is just a sense of discomfort and fear, combined with some latent
00:42:21.180 curiosity, that the world is not the way you thought it was.
00:42:24.660 Now, how do you find out what the world is actually like?
00:42:29.660 Well, you have to investigate it.
00:42:30.920 You have to investigate it.
00:42:32.000 It means you have to take a risk.
00:42:33.580 You have to move forward the same way that people do in psychotherapy.
00:42:36.260 You have to find the thing that you're bordering on avoiding and go in and map it.
00:42:41.560 Now, it's a curious thing, you know.
00:42:44.320 Common anxiety disorder is agoraphobia.
00:42:46.980 Agoraphobia is a generalized anxiety disorder.
00:42:50.460 And people who suffer severely from agoraphobia often get to the point where, because of their
00:42:55.360 panics, they're housebound.
00:42:57.660 They can't go outside their room or their house.
00:43:00.500 Now, they'd run away from their room or their house, too, if they could.
00:43:02.980 But there's nowhere to run.
00:43:04.500 So they're pretty much stuck being somewhere.
00:43:07.320 So an agoraphobic comes in for therapy.
00:43:11.600 You think, well, what do you do with them?
00:43:12.960 And you say, well, the agoraphobic says, I can't go on elevators.
00:43:16.100 And you say, OK, well, let's go try.
00:43:19.220 And you say, all right, well, relax.
00:43:23.020 Just teach the person to breathe, which really doesn't help that much, but it makes them feel
00:43:26.780 better.
00:43:27.360 You can do this without teaching them to relax.
00:43:29.520 It doesn't matter a bit.
00:43:30.520 But it does help them feel better.
00:43:32.580 You say, OK, well, there's the elevator.
00:43:33.760 You say, how close can you get to the elevator?
00:43:36.160 You say, well, you know, I can't really get more than, like, 20 feet.
00:43:39.720 That's maximum.
00:43:40.320 I say, well, OK, let's just go up to 20 feet there.
00:43:43.680 And they do that.
00:43:44.540 And then you let them stand there and stand there and stand there and stand there and
00:43:48.640 stand there.
00:43:49.040 Sooner or later, they get bored of being 20 feet from the elevator.
00:43:52.680 And then you say, well, look, you know, let's, could you go 10 feet?
00:43:56.340 No, I couldn't go 10 feet.
00:43:57.800 That's too close.
00:43:58.820 How about, could you go three more feet?
00:44:00.960 Yeah, I think I could do that.
00:44:02.000 So they go three more feet and then you let them stand there.
00:44:05.020 And they find out nothing terrible is happening sooner or later.
00:44:08.280 And then they go another three feet.
00:44:09.920 And then they go another three feet.
00:44:10.980 And then they're, they're like confronting the elevator.
00:44:13.980 And then they're inside the elevator.
00:44:15.820 But they're going like this.
00:44:17.020 Because they don't want to look at the elevator, right?
00:44:18.840 So you say, well, you've got to look at the elevator.
00:44:20.460 You've got to look at the numbers.
00:44:21.400 You've got to look at the buttons.
00:44:22.260 So they do that.
00:44:24.960 And then you think, well, could we go up a floor?
00:44:26.860 No, we couldn't go up a floor.
00:44:28.420 Okay, well, I'll tell you what.
00:44:29.920 We'll just close the door.
00:44:31.040 I'll put my hand in.
00:44:31.720 It'll open again.
00:44:32.440 Could you do that?
00:44:33.180 Yeah, I could do that.
00:44:34.280 Step by step.
00:44:36.600 Sooner or later.
00:44:37.240 And usually sooner, bang, they've gone up a floor, right?
00:44:39.600 So then what happens?
00:44:41.900 They go home and have a fight with their husband that's been brewing for like 15 years.
00:44:46.340 Why?
00:44:47.240 Well, it's not because the elevator is symbolically related to the fight.
00:44:50.920 It has nothing to do with it.
00:44:52.680 It's because what the person learns in the combat with the unknown,
00:44:57.920 which just happens to be taking the guise of an elevator,
00:45:00.480 is that they can confront things that frighten them
00:45:02.780 without being destroyed by the confrontation.
00:45:05.740 And so what you see immediately,
00:45:07.260 and this was contrary to an original psychoanalytic prediction,
00:45:10.240 is that, man, you know, you take that person out
00:45:12.500 and you teach them they can go on the elevator,
00:45:13.800 and right off the bat, they're going to shopping malls,
00:45:16.400 they're in taxis, they're back in the subway,
00:45:18.360 and they're standing up for themselves at home.
00:45:21.280 Generalization.
00:45:22.000 Why?
00:45:22.560 Because they didn't learn that the elevator wasn't frightening.
00:45:25.860 That isn't what they learned.
00:45:27.540 They learned that despite the fact that the elevator
00:45:29.640 was as terrifying as anything they've ever encountered,
00:45:32.280 they were actually up to the challenge.
00:45:34.820 And now that's a really useful thing to teach someone, right?
00:45:36.960 Because if you have an obsessive-compulsive patient,
00:45:40.460 and I had one who actually used to work with radiation,
00:45:42.620 now he was terrible.
00:45:44.000 He worked in some kind of biolab in Montreal.
00:45:47.080 People with obsessive-compulsive disorder
00:45:48.860 often are very frightened that they'll contaminate someone else.
00:45:52.340 So like typical obsessive-compulsive obsession would be,
00:45:56.060 I'll go to a shopping market,
00:45:57.580 I'll touch some fruit from, you know, some third world country,
00:46:00.620 I'll get some nasty bacterial disease,
00:46:02.620 I'll bring it home and I'll give it to my kids.
00:46:05.260 Well, you tell them, look, you know,
00:46:06.560 the chances of that are like 1 in 150,000.
00:46:08.860 And they look at you and they think,
00:46:11.480 I don't care if the chances are only 150,000.
00:46:15.680 What if my kids die?
00:46:17.820 And you think, well, yeah, that does pose a problem, doesn't it?
00:46:20.420 Because it isn't exactly clear from a logical perspective
00:46:23.240 where you should draw the risk line.
00:46:29.060 Well, with the obsessive-compulsive,
00:46:30.380 you do exactly the same thing.
00:46:31.520 You say, look, yeah, your fear is real, no kidding,
00:46:33.320 because lurking at the bottom of their fear
00:46:35.700 is the same fear that everybody else has, right?
00:46:38.120 Same fear.
00:46:39.700 I might die, I might get sick,
00:46:42.000 I might lose the people that I love.
00:46:43.560 Not only might that happen, it's going to happen.
00:46:47.040 Why aren't people afraid of that all the time?
00:46:49.940 We don't really know.
00:46:52.440 Obsessive person becomes aware of it.
00:46:54.520 What do you tell them?
00:46:55.320 You say, do it anyway.
00:46:57.020 Do it anyways.
00:46:58.080 And they learn quickly that
00:46:59.200 if they don't run away from the thing they're afraid of,
00:47:02.480 there's something in them that responds to it.
00:47:04.440 They learn that the fear is not larger than they are.
00:47:09.720 Now, I like Ednafoa's case in particular,
00:47:12.200 because you always might wonder with this,
00:47:13.920 like, what's the limit, right?
00:47:15.020 Okay, yeah, that sounds good in theory,
00:47:16.520 but what if something really terrible's happened to you?
00:47:18.800 Well, what's happened to Ednafoa's patients?
00:47:20.620 That's up there with terrible, right?
00:47:22.500 I mean, that's up there with terrible, right?
00:47:25.220 Stripped of social dignity, violated physically.
00:47:28.860 That combines two of people's most specific fears.
00:47:32.060 Well, then there's other kinds of confrontation, too.
00:47:36.000 I like the story of Solzhenitsyn.
00:47:37.600 I think it's really a good one,
00:47:38.700 because there's different kinds of dragons, right?
00:47:40.320 There's natural dragons like death and disease,
00:47:43.620 and then there's social dragons like bureaucracies and tyrannies.
00:47:48.620 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, you may or may not know,
00:47:50.800 was a prisoner in the Soviet gulag concentration camp system
00:47:55.280 that, by his report at least, killed 60 million people
00:47:58.360 between 1919 and 1959, right?
00:48:00.680 60 million.
00:48:01.500 That's 10 times as many as Hitler killed,
00:48:03.740 at least with regards to the genocide.
00:48:06.100 60 million people.
00:48:07.880 Solzhenitsyn, he had a pretty nasty life.
00:48:09.580 I mean, first of all, he's on the Russian front,
00:48:11.680 which was a nasty place to be.
00:48:13.620 Then he was captured by the Germans,
00:48:15.160 and they didn't like Russians.
00:48:17.320 So they put them in separate prisoners of war camp,
00:48:19.720 partly because Stalin, who was a consummate paranoid,
00:48:22.020 wouldn't sign the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War.
00:48:26.240 So the Germans set up extra POW camps for the Russians,
00:48:30.120 and they starved generally so badly
00:48:32.080 that if other POWs were in the vicinity,
00:48:34.220 they'd throw food packages over the wire,
00:48:36.540 even though they themselves weren't particularly well fed.
00:48:40.560 So then, so the war ends, and the Russians win,
00:48:42.680 and Solzhenitsyn goes back to Russia, right?
00:48:44.360 And what happens?
00:48:45.000 He's thinking, you know, wow, this is over.
00:48:47.260 We help defend the fatherland we're going to get.
00:48:50.140 If not a hero's welcome, at least some welcome.
00:48:52.220 But Stalin figured, no, no.
00:48:54.180 These Russians who'd been to the West,
00:48:56.160 they were contaminated by their exposure
00:48:58.180 to the Western economic system,
00:49:00.300 and as a consequence of that,
00:49:01.420 they posed a threat to the integrity of the Soviet state,
00:49:03.520 so he just threw them all in concentration camps.
00:49:06.340 So, fine.
00:49:07.700 So Solzhenitsyn's sitting there in this concentration camp
00:49:10.040 on a coal pile,
00:49:12.160 a coal pile which contained this kind of clay
00:49:14.320 that his compatriots would eat
00:49:15.900 because they were so damn hungry
00:49:17.140 that it was better to have the clay in their stomach
00:49:19.000 than nothing at all,
00:49:19.700 and he thought, all right,
00:49:21.920 what the hell did I do to get here?
00:49:25.540 Which is really a remarkable thing to think, right?
00:49:27.800 Because, like, there was the Second World War,
00:49:30.040 and that probably couldn't be pinned directly on him,
00:49:33.060 and then there's Stalin,
00:49:34.560 who was, you know,
00:49:35.180 really one of the world's worst monsters,
00:49:37.480 and then there's the concentration camp,
00:49:39.560 and the POW camp,
00:49:41.000 and, like, a lot of things happened to Solzhenitsyn,
00:49:43.600 but he said he had nothing but time to think
00:49:46.160 in this concentration camp,
00:49:47.300 and he wasn't really that happy with the way things turned out,
00:49:49.760 so he made a vow in the camp,
00:49:52.260 and the vow was this.
00:49:53.080 He said he's going to go back over his whole life,
00:49:56.020 whole life, right from day one,
00:49:57.800 and try to remember every time he ever did something
00:50:01.460 he thought was wrong.
00:50:02.760 He thought, right?
00:50:04.260 Not someone else,
00:50:04.940 but that gave his conscience a pang.
00:50:09.000 And he said,
00:50:09.480 well, since I don't have anything better to do,
00:50:11.140 I'm going to spend, like,
00:50:11.680 the next ten years seeing if I can undo
00:50:13.760 all those little knots in my soul that I tied.
00:50:17.140 And the consequence of that
00:50:18.220 was that he wrote a book called
00:50:19.240 The Gulag Archipelago, right?
00:50:20.560 Three-volume book,
00:50:21.660 1900 pages long.
00:50:23.280 He memorized it,
00:50:24.480 because there wasn't any paper and pencil
00:50:26.140 available for him in prison.
00:50:27.380 And then it circulated in the underground
00:50:30.420 in the Soviet Union
00:50:31.300 for years before it got published in the West,
00:50:33.580 published in 1975.
00:50:35.640 Definitely one of the literary events
00:50:38.380 that brought down the Soviet Union.
00:50:40.160 You think that's kind of interesting, isn't it?
00:50:41.640 You think this one guy, right,
00:50:43.440 he's got numbers tattooed on his arm,
00:50:45.140 he's as skinny as a rail,
00:50:46.220 he's three-quarters dead,
00:50:47.440 he's been beat to death in 15 different ways.
00:50:50.420 He decides,
00:50:51.660 under completely unreasonable circumstances,
00:50:53.860 that he's going to take personal responsibility
00:50:55.620 for the position that he happens to find himself in.
00:50:57.380 The consequence of that,
00:50:59.340 25 years later,
00:51:00.500 is that Solzhenitsyn's still around,
00:51:01.920 but the Soviet Union isn't.
00:51:03.580 And you think,
00:51:04.160 well, that can't be the way the world works,
00:51:06.300 now can it?
00:51:07.000 But then you think this, too,
00:51:08.120 like,
00:51:08.540 do we really know how the world works, right?
00:51:10.540 We've had a pretty nasty century
00:51:12.020 in the last hundred years, right?
00:51:13.600 We had the Nazis,
00:51:14.540 we had Mao Zedong,
00:51:15.960 we had the recent tragedies in Africa,
00:51:18.120 we don't seem to learn anything about genocide.
00:51:20.580 Someone like Solzhenitsyn says,
00:51:22.000 well, you know,
00:51:23.720 it might be your fault.
00:51:26.140 Why?
00:51:26.520 What are you ignoring?
00:51:29.140 Good question.
00:51:30.200 Can you make peace with your own family?
00:51:32.220 It's not so easy, right?
00:51:33.820 It's probably no easier than making peace
00:51:35.460 between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
00:51:39.040 What do we encounter
00:51:40.060 when we encounter something we don't understand?
00:51:43.620 We don't know.
00:51:45.440 It's not the simple world of objects.
00:51:47.860 The simple world of objects
00:51:49.100 is something we've learned to see.
00:51:50.860 The real world is way more complicated
00:51:53.620 than what we just see.
00:51:55.380 Let me give you an example.
00:51:56.400 When I was in Montreal in 1985,
00:52:02.780 my computer crashed.
00:52:05.340 So what do you do when your computer crashes?
00:52:06.960 Well, when a computer encounters something unexpected,
00:52:09.800 it crashes.
00:52:10.440 It can't do a damn thing about it.
00:52:11.620 You have to fix it.
00:52:12.300 So I checked the monitor.
00:52:14.320 It was okay.
00:52:15.140 It wouldn't go on.
00:52:16.480 It seemed all right.
00:52:18.300 And I noticed my lamps weren't working.
00:52:20.180 So I went to the fuse box.
00:52:21.280 So all the fuses seemed okay.
00:52:22.600 So then I went outside
00:52:23.760 to go down to the corner store
00:52:25.720 to get a cigarette.
00:52:26.360 And I saw that outside
00:52:28.100 all the lights were off.
00:52:29.060 The traffic lights were off.
00:52:30.800 Right?
00:52:31.040 The whole city was in darkness.
00:52:32.700 Then I found out the next day
00:52:34.040 that there was a solar wind.
00:52:37.440 Big solar flare.
00:52:39.100 Put out a big cloud of electrons.
00:52:41.360 Zipped along to Earth
00:52:42.280 at the speed of light.
00:52:44.000 Put an electrical pulse
00:52:45.200 through the hydroelectric grid in Quebec.
00:52:47.520 Crashed my computer.
00:52:49.440 Well, I hadn't thought
00:52:51.400 until that point
00:52:52.300 that the integrity of my computer
00:52:54.420 was dependent on the stability of the sun.
00:52:58.600 Everything is way more complicated
00:53:00.340 than it looks.
00:53:01.540 And when you just look at something
00:53:03.060 you see a very simple representation
00:53:04.800 of what's actually there.
00:53:06.580 What do you encounter
00:53:07.620 when you encounter something unexpected?
00:53:10.460 Well, when you first encounter it
00:53:12.120 you don't know.
00:53:14.180 All you know is that
00:53:15.540 it frightens you
00:53:16.920 but it makes you curious.
00:53:19.820 Think dragons, right?
00:53:21.720 Every primate's afraid of lizards
00:53:23.480 including us.
00:53:25.320 Chimpanzees don't like snakes.
00:53:26.600 If you take a chimp
00:53:27.240 it's never seen a snake.
00:53:28.100 You throw it a snake
00:53:28.600 show it a snake
00:53:29.440 it will hit the roof of its cage
00:53:31.300 then it'll look at the snake.
00:53:34.700 Why would a dragon hoard gold?
00:53:38.900 Because a dragon represents
00:53:40.040 everything that you're afraid of.
00:53:42.120 What's embedded in everything
00:53:43.540 that you're afraid of?
00:53:45.980 Absolutely everything
00:53:46.840 that you need to find.
00:53:48.560 Run from what you're afraid of?
00:53:50.920 Run from exactly
00:53:52.020 what you need to find.
00:53:54.980 One of the oldest
00:53:56.040 dramatic representations
00:53:57.560 we know of
00:53:58.180 not this specific painting
00:53:59.360 this is St. George and the Dragon.
00:54:00.960 Right?
00:54:01.380 Dragon lives in the ground
00:54:03.580 chased there by heroes
00:54:07.760 of a previous generation.
00:54:10.240 Now and then re-emerging.
00:54:12.860 Kills people, right?
00:54:14.260 These are skulls
00:54:15.060 around its lair.
00:54:18.520 Threatens the integrity
00:54:19.920 of the community
00:54:20.840 like everything unexpected does.
00:54:24.660 Hero comes out
00:54:26.140 slays the dragon
00:54:29.060 frees the treasure.
00:54:33.020 In this case
00:54:33.620 it's a virginal woman.
00:54:38.520 Dragons hoard gold
00:54:39.700 because the thing
00:54:42.120 you most need
00:54:42.860 is always to be found
00:54:44.200 where you least want to look.
00:54:48.120 I'm going to close this
00:54:49.240 with another dream.
00:54:51.520 This is a dream
00:54:52.380 my five-year-old nephew had.
00:54:56.140 Now, you've got to get
00:54:57.380 the context of this dream, right?
00:54:59.100 Year after this dream
00:55:00.200 parents were divorced.
00:55:01.520 So there were dragons
00:55:05.780 in the house.
00:55:08.480 He was about four
00:55:09.540 at this time.
00:55:10.180 He was running around
00:55:10.600 the house
00:55:10.960 with this little plastic
00:55:11.900 night helmet on
00:55:12.880 and a sword.
00:55:13.680 He was zipping around
00:55:14.300 killing things with it.
00:55:15.680 Doing this all the time.
00:55:16.880 And even when he went
00:55:17.440 to sleep at night
00:55:17.980 he put the sword
00:55:20.060 by his pillow
00:55:21.000 and the night helmet
00:55:21.960 on his pillow.
00:55:22.720 Now, every night
00:55:24.020 or every second night
00:55:24.840 or every third night
00:55:25.440 for six months
00:55:26.100 he'd been waking up
00:55:26.860 screaming.
00:55:27.740 Now, why?
00:55:28.540 Well, he was about
00:55:29.260 to go to kindergarten, right?
00:55:30.340 So that's a real threat.
00:55:31.500 for a kid.
00:55:32.340 Away from maternal
00:55:33.260 dependence fundamentally
00:55:34.260 into the real world.
00:55:35.200 That's a new thing.
00:55:38.260 But also there was
00:55:39.120 upset in his house.
00:55:41.440 So I was there
00:55:42.120 one night
00:55:42.840 when he woke up
00:55:43.640 screaming next morning.
00:55:44.560 I said,
00:55:44.900 well, did you dream anything?
00:55:46.240 And so he launched
00:55:46.760 into this story.
00:55:47.980 He said,
00:55:50.560 dwarf,
00:55:51.600 he was in this field
00:55:53.080 and these little creatures
00:55:54.500 like dwarfs
00:55:55.440 were coming up to him
00:55:56.860 and they didn't have
00:55:57.580 any arms.
00:55:58.020 They just had legs
00:55:58.780 and they had big beaks
00:56:01.020 and they were covered
00:56:01.700 with hair and grease
00:56:02.740 and on top of their head
00:56:04.240 was a cross
00:56:04.900 shaved into this hair.
00:56:07.280 And there's lots
00:56:08.040 and lots of these dwarfs
00:56:09.240 and they were jumping
00:56:10.100 on him with their beaks
00:56:11.040 biting him.
00:56:12.080 We all looked at him
00:56:12.820 and thought,
00:56:14.080 well, it's no wonder
00:56:14.580 you're waking up screaming, right?
00:56:15.880 I mean, you know,
00:56:16.480 that doesn't sound so good.
00:56:17.620 And then he said,
00:56:18.100 well, wait,
00:56:18.600 there's more, right?
00:56:19.860 Back in the distance
00:56:21.060 there's a dragon
00:56:21.900 and the dragon
00:56:23.080 is puffing out
00:56:24.100 fire and smoke.
00:56:25.560 And every time
00:56:26.800 he puffs out
00:56:27.380 fire and smoke
00:56:27.960 it turns into
00:56:28.620 these dwarfs.
00:56:30.220 Big problem, right?
00:56:31.300 Just like the problem
00:56:32.040 with the hydra
00:56:32.700 in Greek mythology.
00:56:33.900 Cut off one head,
00:56:35.560 seven more appear, right?
00:56:37.660 So what are you going to do
00:56:38.300 about these dwarfs?
00:56:39.580 Kill one,
00:56:40.480 big deal,
00:56:41.340 ten more are coming.
00:56:43.460 I said,
00:56:44.040 what can you do
00:56:44.760 about that?
00:56:46.200 Now,
00:56:47.400 in a legal trial
00:56:48.260 that would have been
00:56:48.860 an inadmissible question, right?
00:56:50.860 That's called
00:56:51.320 leading the witness
00:56:52.300 because what I told him was
00:56:53.860 despite the horror
00:56:55.640 of this situation,
00:56:57.660 you maybe could do
00:56:58.800 something about it.
00:56:59.940 And he said,
00:57:00.540 ha,
00:57:00.900 I'd take my sword,
00:57:01.880 I'd get my dad.
00:57:03.100 That's a good idea, right?
00:57:04.160 Dad,
00:57:05.200 there's the real dad
00:57:06.040 and then there's
00:57:06.600 the tradition dad, right?
00:57:07.980 You might as well
00:57:08.380 have your father
00:57:08.920 by your side
00:57:09.500 if you're going
00:57:09.800 to go into battle.
00:57:10.700 I'd take my sword,
00:57:11.620 I'd get my dad,
00:57:12.520 I'd go to where
00:57:13.160 the dragon was.
00:57:15.020 I'd jump up on his head,
00:57:16.080 I'd poke both of his eyes
00:57:17.080 out with the sword,
00:57:18.380 I'd go down his throat
00:57:19.760 to the place
00:57:20.640 where the fire comes out,
00:57:21.780 I'd cut a piece
00:57:22.600 of that box out
00:57:23.540 and I'd use it
00:57:24.100 as a shield.
00:57:25.100 And I thought,
00:57:25.720 wow,
00:57:26.400 that's unbelievable,
00:57:27.760 unbelievable
00:57:28.320 that he could do that.
00:57:29.260 It's perfect, right?
00:57:29.940 There's no sense
00:57:30.420 going after the dwarves
00:57:31.400 because there's
00:57:31.820 thousands of them.
00:57:33.400 You might as well
00:57:34.020 go after the dragon.
00:57:36.460 What happens
00:57:37.080 if you go after the dragon?
00:57:38.140 You get a piece of it,
00:57:39.820 right?
00:57:40.000 A piece of its center nature,
00:57:42.240 a piece that can defend
00:57:43.140 you against anything,
00:57:45.420 including other dragons.
00:57:46.500 So what if this was
00:57:48.180 the case,
00:57:48.780 you think,
00:57:50.180 evolutionarily speaking
00:57:51.980 or religiously speaking?
00:57:53.660 What if we were
00:57:54.460 adapted to the world?
00:57:56.360 What if it's not
00:57:57.140 the simple place
00:57:58.300 of dead objects
00:57:59.220 that we think it is?
00:58:00.020 What if it's something
00:58:00.960 a lot more alive,
00:58:02.380 a lot more like a story?
00:58:05.000 What if the story
00:58:05.880 is something like this?
00:58:08.060 You have absolutely
00:58:09.400 everything you need,
00:58:11.380 but you have to use
00:58:13.220 all of it.
00:58:14.680 If you run away
00:58:15.400 from any of it,
00:58:16.840 and in particular,
00:58:17.700 the parts of it
00:58:18.200 that frighten you,
00:58:18.920 which, you know,
00:58:19.680 there's endless reasons
00:58:20.660 to run away from.
00:58:21.620 If you run away
00:58:22.280 from any of it,
00:58:23.580 you don't get
00:58:24.180 that piece of the dragon.
00:58:25.920 If you miss
00:58:26.700 even one piece,
00:58:28.380 there's a chink
00:58:29.000 in your armor.
00:58:29.800 There's a place
00:58:30.420 where you're vulnerable.
00:58:31.560 If you make
00:58:31.940 even one mistake,
00:58:33.420 you lessen yourself.
00:58:34.540 If you lessen yourself,
00:58:36.260 you're going to
00:58:36.800 run away more.
00:58:37.720 Not only that,
00:58:38.400 when someone wants
00:58:38.980 to lean on you,
00:58:40.660 they're not going
00:58:41.080 to be able
00:58:41.340 to lean on you
00:58:41.900 because you'll
00:58:42.240 just fall over.
00:58:43.980 What if it was
00:58:44.600 the case that
00:58:45.180 we were adapted
00:58:45.940 to the world,
00:58:47.000 really adapted to it,
00:58:48.620 so that if we made
00:58:49.540 full use of all
00:58:50.760 the talents we had,
00:58:52.320 we'd be okay?
00:58:53.620 What if it was
00:58:54.340 the case that
00:58:55.020 if we set out
00:58:56.840 consciously
00:58:57.940 to never run away
00:58:59.920 from something
00:59:00.460 we know we shouldn't
00:59:01.400 run away from,
00:59:02.480 that everything
00:59:03.000 would be all right?
00:59:05.120 Well,
00:59:06.300 you can think
00:59:08.140 whatever you want
00:59:08.760 to think,
00:59:09.080 but this is what
00:59:09.560 I think.
00:59:10.040 I think it's
00:59:10.980 bloody amazing
00:59:11.700 that that little
00:59:13.040 kid's book
00:59:13.540 that I read you
00:59:14.200 at the beginning
00:59:14.680 of this lecture
00:59:15.360 had all that
00:59:17.200 information in it.
00:59:18.960 And so you might
00:59:19.440 ask yourself
00:59:20.020 when you leave,
00:59:21.420 if that information
00:59:23.060 isn't true,
00:59:24.500 how the hell
00:59:25.260 did it get there?
00:59:29.020 That's it.
00:59:29.660 Thank you for listening
00:59:38.680 to episode six
00:59:40.020 of the Jordan B.
00:59:42.080 Peterson podcast,
00:59:44.040 Slaying the Dragon
00:59:45.120 Within Us.
00:59:46.940 To support this podcast,
00:59:48.640 you can donate to
00:59:49.240 Dr. Peterson's Patreon
00:59:50.440 account by searching
00:59:51.440 Jordan Peterson Patreon
00:59:52.920 or looking at the link
00:59:53.880 in the description.
00:59:55.320 You can also check out
00:59:56.380 selfauthoring.com
00:59:58.060 Please review this
01:00:00.400 podcast on iTunes.
01:00:02.020 Thank you.