Struggle Between Chaos and Order
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 57 minutes
Words per Minute
160.63556
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson delivers a lecture recorded in Zurich, Switzerland on January 19, 2019. Dr. Peterson's lecture was recorded in the wake of his daughter's recent ankle replacement surgery, and was recorded while he was with her in the hospital in the Swiss city of Zukunst, where she was recovering from the procedure. In this lecture, he talks about his experience with the procedure, and how he and his daughter managed to get through it, as well as how he handled the aftermath of the surgery and the media's reaction to it. If you're struggling with anxiety, depression, or another mental health condition, or simply want to learn more about how to manage your mental health, then this lecture is for you! Subscribe to Daily Wire Plus to receive immediate access to all new episodes of the Daily Wire Podcast. Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code POWER10 for 10% off your first month with discount codes POWER10 and receive a FREE copy of his new e-course, 12 Rules for Life: The Struggle Between Chaos and Order, available for pre-sale on December 5th! Learn more about the course on the first day of pre-order! Click here to get a discount on the course. The course will launch on December 17th, with a 35% discount until Friday, December 6th. Check out the course, so you can get the course for as little as $99.99. of $99! You'll get access to the course and a free copy of the entire course, which includes a copy of The 12 Rules For Life: A Guide to the book, The Struggle between Chaos & Order by Jordan Peterson. and Order! by clicking here. Can't get enough? You won't want to miss it? You're not going to get more information about it anywhere else? Click here? Download the course? Subscribe here! Let me know what you think of it? Let us know what works best for you, and we'll be helping you decide what works for you? and what you're going to do with it! or if you're looking for a discount discount? or what you'd like to get the best version of the course that's going to be the best deal? ? Connect with me in the comments section below! Thanks, Mikayla Peterson, the author of the book?
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 Season 2, Episode 37 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.
00:01:02.140
I'm Mikayla Peterson, Dad's daughter and collaborator.
00:01:05.200
Today's episode is a 12 Rules for Life lecture, recorded in Zurich on January 19th, 2019.
00:01:12.000
I've named it The Struggle Between Chaos and Order.
00:01:14.760
This lecture was recorded when I had my ankle replacement re-replaced.
00:01:18.660
Dad came with me to Zurich to basically help cook.
00:01:21.760
This only meat diet doesn't make it particularly easy to stay in hospitals.
00:01:26.640
So he brought me steak and did work while I was morphined up in bed.
00:01:30.500
It wasn't that bad of a time, actually, and the surgeon has managed to fix my ankle.
00:01:42.140
Dad is launching his first e-course December 17th.
00:01:46.120
It's available for pre-sale currently for Cyber Monday.
00:01:48.940
A lot of people have been asking us for a more structured and condensed resource where
00:01:52.680
they can learn about personality without needing to spend 30 plus hours watching videos,
00:01:59.240
So earlier this year, we recorded a new video series that will be packaged as an online course
00:02:03.900
with eight videos, supplementary materials, including lecture notes, additional reading
00:02:08.120
materials and resources, transcripts, a free license to the Understand Myself personality
00:02:15.580
All designed to give you an in-depth look at your personality.
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This is my favorite topic in psychology, so far anyway.
00:02:22.440
It's worth checking out if you've been intending to learn about personality and want to do
00:02:32.240
If you're listening to this while our Cyber Monday promotion is going on, we're currently
00:02:36.020
offering a pre-sale of a 35% discount on the course until Friday, December 6th.
00:02:41.780
If you're interested, this is a great opportunity to get it at a lower price.
00:02:49.000
I sat in all the lectures and fun fact, I've given every person I've dated dad's personality
00:02:57.680
Check out the course at jordanbpeterson.com slash personality.
00:03:15.420
It's good to see that you outnumber the protesters.
00:03:33.400
One reason, obviously, is to have the opportunity to speak to all of you.
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But I'm also here, I was here because my daughter had surgery in Switzerland this week.
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And it didn't work perfectly, although the mechanical joint that was put in worked very
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But her bone structure couldn't handle it exactly right.
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And so she hasn't been as mobile as might be optimal over the last 10 years and in a
00:04:04.260
And so she tracked down the gentleman, the physician who made the joint.
00:04:09.080
And he's Swiss and works just outside of Basel.
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And anyways, she had this joint replaced and fixed this week.
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So we're quite happy about the quality of Swiss engineering at the moment.
00:04:41.000
So since I was coming here, I thought I would also take the opportunity to deliver this lecture
00:04:50.740
And today, I talked to a couple of journalists.
00:04:54.980
So one from Die Welt, got that approximately right.
00:05:11.880
But it was annoying because I didn't give a very good answer.
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And he said, and so I thought I would talk about that tonight.
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Because it's dead relevant to the substructure of the book, 12 Rules for Life.
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And he said, in your book, you identify women as chaos and men as order.
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So I'm going to try to answer that question more intelligently.
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That's what I'm going to try to do that for like 70 minutes.
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And see if I can come to some more concise conceptualization of that.
00:06:04.940
So the first thing is that I don't think that that's my idea.
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Because I'm actually not that interested in convincing people.
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And if that people find the way that I figure things out convincing.
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In fact, the probability that my thinking has errors in it.
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And I'm always trying to find out what those errors are.
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And you want your map of the world to be accurate.
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Because otherwise, when you use your map, you wander into a pit.
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And unless you're, you know, inclined to wander into a pit.
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Then it would be better if your map was as accurate as possible.
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And so you should be trying to find out constantly where you're not so accurate in your mapping.
00:07:08.820
And that's a lot better than trying to convince people.
00:07:11.360
Or trying to convince yourself that you're right.
00:07:13.900
You know, you can convince yourself that you're right.
00:07:23.260
And a tremendous amount of our cognitive structure is something approximating a map.
00:07:31.900
And the reason for that is we have to make our way in the world, right?
00:07:35.800
This is part of the tension between the religious viewpoint, let's say, and the scientific viewpoint.
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Because the religious viewpoint, part of the dramatic viewpoint, part of the narrative viewpoint,
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part of the literary viewpoint, it's all associated with stories.
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And the scientific domain has to do with the nature of the objective world.
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And, like, there's truth in both of those approaches.
00:08:03.180
It's also not obvious which truth is the more fundamental.
00:08:10.120
It's certainly the case that you have to contend with the objective world.
00:08:13.280
But it's also certainly the case that you have to make your way as a living creature through the world.
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And so, I'm interested in the structure of maps.
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And a story presents you with a compelling way of perceiving the world and acting in it.
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Okay, and now, so, that doesn't seem to be too contentious, that idea.
00:08:46.560
You wouldn't listen to a story if it wasn't compelling.
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We wouldn't tell each other stories if we weren't compelled by them.
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We wouldn't be compelled by stories if they weren't useful.
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Stories present heroes and adversaries in conflict.
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And a story has a moral, which is the point of the story for your perception and action.
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And so, that seems, I think that's solid, that set of ideas.
00:09:25.260
And a story isn't the same as a scientific description.
00:09:29.480
If you go watch something like Sleeping Beauty, the Disney movie,
00:09:39.160
But you go watch it, and there must be some truth to it.
00:09:44.100
Because, well, unless you just think it's mindless entertainment.
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But the question then is, well, why are you entertained in that mindless way?
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Like, why does that mode of presentation of information grip you?
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I would say the reason that it's entertaining to go see something like a movie
00:10:02.300
is because movies are, the story is so deep and so important
00:10:06.740
that you're actually biologically prepared to enjoy it.
00:10:10.520
It's actually an indication of its depth, the fact that it's entertaining, that it's gripping.
00:10:15.700
And I would say that the most gripping and memorable stories
00:10:35.800
But it seems useful that we might make the effort to understand them.
00:10:41.100
And so I spent a long time trying to get to the bottom of stories.
00:10:45.140
Because I think stories are at the bottom of the way we think.
00:10:51.260
You know, even when you talk to someone about your life, you tend to turn it into a story.
00:11:03.560
And so what's it like down there at the bottom?
00:11:05.940
It's not, the story world isn't the same as the objective world.
00:11:19.260
Science maybe does when you're generating hypotheses.
00:11:23.360
You're trying to get to something that's clearer and more objective, whatever that means.
00:11:34.260
Well, they have to be metaphors you understand.
00:11:36.020
Because otherwise they're not good for anything.
00:11:44.620
I think the fundamental metaphors are something like chaos and order.
00:12:04.980
It's not really a description of the objective world.
00:12:07.220
It's a description of universal human experience.
00:12:19.180
Order is where you are when what you want is happening.
00:12:30.640
Because order isn't what you expect, for example.
00:12:33.780
Which is, psychologists like to think that we predict the world.
00:12:36.700
And that we're trying to make what we expect happen.
00:12:43.420
You don't want the unexpected to emerge too dramatically.
00:12:47.280
But it isn't that you're running around trying to make the world turn out the way you expect.
00:12:50.720
It's that you're running around trying to make the world turn out the way you want it to turn out.
00:12:56.720
Because the fact that you want something pulls motivation into the story, right?
00:13:01.720
It makes you more than just a cold, cognitive calculator.
00:13:08.920
And you're trying to make them manifest themselves in the world.
00:13:22.120
But it means that you're in the domain of order.
00:13:34.160
Well, it's because apparently things are under control.
00:13:38.800
The fact that you're getting what you want indicates that it's the definition of being under control.
00:13:44.780
You know, like if you're talking to someone, you're having a conversation with them.
00:13:48.320
The conversation's going in an engaging manner.
00:13:51.760
It's like, you're not anxious and terrified about that.
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If you're at a party and you tell a joke and it falls flat.
00:13:59.280
It's like, well, then you'll, if you're not completely psychopathic.
00:14:09.620
And then anxiety moves up to grip you and freeze you.
00:14:29.940
Because you need to know whether you're in order or whether you're in chaos.
00:14:34.460
You need to know, for example, that being in chaos is, like, that's a, what would you call it?
00:14:41.140
That's a, that's a canonical human experience to be in chaos.
00:14:46.620
When you don't get the promotion at work that you've been working on.
00:14:50.120
And you're disappointed and frustrated and things fall apart on you.
00:14:54.460
When someone you love betrays you, that's chaos.
00:14:59.920
You know, if there's an earthquake or a flood or a revolution or a riot, that's all chaos.
00:15:08.960
And we move between order and chaos constantly in our lives.
00:15:17.020
And so, so chaos is where you are when what you want is not happening.
00:15:22.720
And then that can happen at different levels, you know?
00:15:24.820
It's like, you can go home in the evening and, and you don't get a warm welcome from your wife.
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But that's a whole different, that's a whole different than a divorce announcement.
00:15:39.080
Or to come home and find your partner making love with someone else.
00:15:43.880
That's a real catastrophic and cataclysmic descent.
00:15:47.120
Assuming that you wanted the relationship to be maintained.
00:15:49.380
And, you know, maybe, maybe there's a certain amount of, of, of, what would you call it?
00:15:54.720
Self-satisfaction at discovering that if you didn't like the relationship to begin with.
00:15:59.220
But, you know, you know, well, people are complicated, you know?
00:16:03.020
So, and you never know, you might have driven her to it.
00:16:08.520
Because we're certainly capable of doing those sorts of things.
00:16:13.180
And, you know, so, the great stories talk about chaos and order.
00:16:20.920
You know, they talk about the movement between those two.
00:16:38.100
And so, the Israelites escape from, from, from, from Egypt.
00:16:44.580
It's like, well, you escape from tyranny and everything's good.
00:16:50.940
That could be the tyranny of your own thoughts, right?
00:17:03.820
Because you escape from, you escape from pathological order at your peril.
00:17:13.440
That's why the Israelites worship false idols in the desert.
00:17:23.020
And then something emerges to recreate order and a new order emerges.
00:17:30.760
It's order, collapse, chaos, the underworld, reconstitution, new order.
00:17:37.980
And you might say, well, is the world order or is it chaos?
00:17:43.860
It's the ability to make the movement between those states.
00:17:51.740
Because you might think, you might be tempted to think that you're order.
00:17:57.680
You know, like the radical nationalists do that.
00:18:15.460
And that's a good thing because that's intolerable, right?
00:18:17.760
It's, you can't, you can't live on a non-stop diet of the unexpected and unpredictable.
00:18:31.580
You might feel that your chaos and everything else is, too.
00:18:34.700
That's nihilism and despair and hopelessness and frustration and disappointment and resentment
00:18:45.560
And, you know, but you can be the thing that moves between those states and that transcends
00:18:50.440
And part of the idea, the symbolic idea, for example, that's embedded in the idea of the
00:18:57.580
Is that you're the thing that can dissolve and reconstitute.
00:19:04.420
That you can ride out those movements between those different states.
00:19:09.060
I don't know if there's anything more important you can know than that, except maybe this.
00:19:12.680
Is that that's also, that participating in that movement, especially voluntarily, that's
00:19:20.300
associated with the intrinsic sense of meaning.
00:19:23.660
That's what meaning, that's what meaning guides you to.
00:19:27.600
If it's functioning, if you're functioning honestly and the instinct for meaning is working,
00:19:35.740
It makes you that thing that can make that transition.
00:19:37.780
And hopefully it's a journey like this, but it's upward, you know?
00:19:43.020
Order, catastrophe, reconstitution, but at a higher level of order, right?
00:19:50.420
And so when you put yourself back together, you're more together than you were.
00:19:58.800
Because the chaos is real and it can be deadly.
00:20:01.960
It's nothing to embark on lightly, but you know, your life is punctuated by painful bouts
00:20:11.680
You can be almost certain that you've learned something worthwhile if it destroyed and reconstituted
00:20:21.500
It's partly why people are resistant to learning, because who wants to go through that?
00:20:25.460
But storing up the catastrophes for the future as an alternative, refusing to change when
00:20:32.580
anything happens, well, that just means that one day things will collapse and you will not
00:20:38.480
Better to keep yourself up to date with the little deaths and rebirths that you need on
00:20:48.420
Well, you can't just tell a story about chaos and order.
00:20:53.260
And it's not, you need to represent it somehow.
00:21:02.280
I mean, us as human beings, we needed to represent this in some sense long before we figured it
00:21:06.800
Like what I just told you is an articulated representation.
00:21:10.800
It took me a very long time to develop that representation.
00:21:13.280
And then it took, and I've been building on the ideas of many, many other people.
00:21:17.780
And these ideas have been developing for thousands of years.
00:21:20.360
And so it's not like this is an easy thing to articulate.
00:21:24.280
And there are pro-droma, dramatic or artistic pro-droma to this set of ideas.
00:21:30.960
It's partly what artists do, but it's what storytellers and dramatists do.
00:21:34.460
They dramatize the world and they abstract out the crucial elements and they present them
00:21:44.740
And it's because we tend to, we tend to experience reality as if it's characterized by personalities.
00:21:55.780
And I think that's because most, we're social primates for crying out loud.
00:22:01.740
Most of what we have interacted with throughout our evolutionary history are other social primates.
00:22:07.600
Like, the primary reality for human beings is actually personalities.
00:22:13.480
At least to the degree that our primary reality is ourselves and other people.
00:22:19.740
We tend to look at the world as if it's personalities.
00:22:21.720
And so, chaos and order manifest themselves to us in personified form.
00:22:29.220
It's not like we know what chaos and order are and we attribute personalities to them.
00:22:33.740
It's that they reveal us, they reveal themselves to us through the metaphor of personality.
00:22:47.820
I've spent a lot of time unpacking three fundamental stories.
00:22:52.820
More than that, but these are the three that I think I've got, delved most deeply into.
00:22:58.040
One of them is creation myth from ancient Egypt.
00:23:00.980
One of them is a creation myth from ancient Mesopotamia.
00:23:10.920
And they've had a determining effect on the fundamental narratives that guide us.
00:23:18.460
At least, they're no more trivial, let's say, than our culture.
00:23:22.940
And then the story in Genesis as well, which is a variant of the Mesopotamian story in particular.
00:23:34.600
So, in Mesopotamia, for example, in ancient Mesopotamia,
00:23:38.000
there were two fundamental forces at work at the beginning of time.
00:23:41.680
One was characterized as Tiamat, and one was characterized as Apsu.
00:23:50.400
And she was often represented as something approximating a predatory reptile.
00:23:59.320
Well, you're in order and things are going well, right?
00:24:12.160
And everything is working out for you just nicely.
00:24:14.900
Maybe you're holding hands with someone you love.
00:24:18.520
And this doesn't necessarily happen in Switzerland.
00:24:40.400
So, like, if you put a grizzly bear in a cage with tigers,
00:24:44.080
which they did in the late 1800s in North America,
00:24:49.900
It's like you don't, no other predator can withstand a grizzly bear.
00:24:53.920
And so, if a grizzly bear appears in your path,
00:25:04.800
Because, you know, that's definitely evidence of error.
00:25:25.600
How about accidental encounter with a carnivorous predator?
00:25:31.360
How about that as a symbolic representation of being off the path?
00:25:35.260
You imagine our archaic ancestors huddled around the fire.
00:25:41.000
You know, there was this predatory cat that was discovered a while back.
00:25:44.160
It's been extinct for a very long period of time.
00:25:55.340
was exactly the size of an ancestral human skull.
00:26:05.300
And this, and like we've been preyed upon by terrible things forever.
00:26:22.660
You know, human beings are prepared to be afraid of snakes, for example.
00:26:34.140
it's not that you're prepared to be afraid of snakes.
00:26:42.540
And it's also the same with chimpanzees, by the way.
00:27:05.720
And other chimps will come and look at the snake,
00:27:07.320
assuming, you know, it's an impressive sort of snake.
00:27:15.420
well, so why would chaos be represented by a predator?
00:27:19.940
Well, it's because if you encounter a predator,
00:28:15.840
So what that means is that order emerges out of chaos.
00:28:31.580
It's your fundamental mode of being in the world
00:28:38.680
is to act such that you make new order emerge from chaos.
00:28:51.900
That's another variant of the fundamental story.
01:23:12.420
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so i have this electronic questioning system set up and you may have been informed about this
01:26:14.480
we did our best to inform everybody but if you have a cell phone and you go to the website sli.do
01:26:25.840
then you can ask questions and you can see the other questions so
01:26:30.840
there's a bunch of questions here already i'm going to answer some of them and then if you want to add
01:26:37.960
your question to the lot then there's some low probability that it'll get answered so
01:26:44.440
well let's try a hard one what are your thoughts on the latest gillette ad
01:26:52.640
well i hate it so that that would be the first that would be the first
01:27:08.960
i don't know if that's a thought it's more like a feeling
01:27:12.920
i'd rather have my corporations greedy than virtuous
01:27:24.360
like this is a strange thing you know it's a strange thing that i see happening on the left
01:27:31.060
it's like the left has always been skeptical of large corporations and like they have their reasons
01:27:36.480
kind of interesting because the left is skeptical of large corporations and the right is skeptical of
01:27:41.020
large governments and they never seem to notice that they're both skeptical about large
01:27:45.160
right and you should be skeptical about large you know that trope from 2008 too big to fail
01:27:52.040
it's like no so big will inevitably fail that's the right trope in any case so the left now is happy
01:28:00.800
about virtue signaling corporations it's like oh i see all of a sudden you trust them that's that's
01:28:05.840
that's all it took is to produce an ad that criticizes masculinity and all of a sudden corporations
01:28:11.160
are trustworthy it's i don't think so now that doesn't mean i think that corporations are
01:28:16.460
particularly untrustworthy compared to other forms of human organization what else it's you see
01:28:25.420
what's happening on the radical end of the left spectrum is i think it's something like this
01:28:33.000
it's very difficult to pull apart completely but ideologies are parasites in my estimation on this
01:28:42.820
underlying symbolic structure that i was talking to you about there's chaos and there's order and
01:28:48.980
order fragments into two categories you could say negative order and positive order and negative order
01:28:54.460
is tyranny and positive order is the wise king for all intents and purposes and the left the radicals on
01:29:01.380
the radical left say the patriarchy is a tyranny and what they say what they are claiming is that
01:29:08.380
society is nothing but the evil king and that's just simply not true i mean society is the evil king
01:29:15.520
because human history is a bloody nightmare and that's true of every culture so if you point to a
01:29:22.840
culture and you say you have an endless plethora of sins on your conscience then you're correct
01:29:30.360
but it's half the story it's like well you don't throw the baby out with the bath water so to speak
01:29:35.780
it's like it look if you're a reader an intelligent reader of a book you keep what's useful and discard
01:29:43.760
what isn't and if you're an intelligent critic of your own culture you don't just say well it's all gone
01:29:49.920
to hell in a handbasket and it's an oppressive tyranny you say well here's some things that we did
01:29:56.400
pretty badly and here's some things worth preserving and let's like get the things worth preserving to
01:30:02.240
grow and see what we can do about constraining the things that aren't so good that takes discrimination
01:30:08.360
right that takes wisdom to pull that apart you want to pass on what's best and leave what isn't
01:30:14.840
behind you do the same thing in your own personal development but that isn't how it works for the
01:30:20.400
ideologues because they've already decided it's their axiomatic assumption the west is an oppressive
01:30:25.980
patriarchy period and there's no questioning that if you question that then well then then look out
01:30:33.860
for you that's for sure and so then gillette comes along and says well here's men and things men do
01:30:42.360
they're associated with the oppressive patriarchy then they should stop doing them it's like it's not
01:30:48.800
helpful the apa the american psychological association just did the same thing with their guidelines for
01:30:55.720
the psychological treatment of boys and men and i was reviewing that today i'm writing an article
01:30:59.460
about it um you know they claim that the reason that boys and men have poor mental health and the
01:31:07.100
reason that boys and men who are anti-social pose a threat to society is because boys are badly
01:31:13.680
socialized by men that's essentially the claim it's like well how about no how about that's not even
01:31:23.540
vaguely true and so i was thinking about that today um it's it's not only not true it's it's
01:31:31.460
it's it's it's it's antithetical to the truth it's the opposite of the truth and how do we know that
01:31:37.620
it's like well if you study anti-social behavior which is more prevalent among men and then you look
01:31:43.680
at the risk factors for anti-social behavior among men like here's one risk factor alcohol okay if you
01:31:54.120
got rid of intoxication impulsive violent crimes would virtually disappear so that's something that's
01:32:01.120
sort of worth knowing 50 of people who are murdered are drunk and 50 of the people who do the murdering
01:32:07.200
are drunk when they do it and in many altercations it's a toss-up who's going to be the victim and
01:32:13.500
who's going to be the perpetrator that's certainly the case in fights it's also the case for rape
01:32:17.760
so if we're serious about things like aggression and its control we'd look at the direct causes but
01:32:23.300
we're rarely serious about such things alcohol is a major contributor here's another one how about
01:32:29.440
fatherlessness so like if you're a young man a boy raised in a fatherless family you're
01:32:36.980
way more likely to be anti-social way more likely okay so let's think about that for a minute so
01:32:42.960
what does that mean if the american psychological association was accurate what you would see is
01:32:49.180
that boys who have fathers were more violent but that isn't what you see what you see is that boys
01:32:55.560
without fathers are more violent so how does that equate to the proposition that it's the pathological
01:33:02.320
socialization of boys by men that produces violence it's like no that's exactly wrong
01:33:10.140
well the gillette ad it's it's playing on the same tropes is well there's something wrong with men well
01:33:16.300
yeah no kidding it's like it's not like that's news but well it's jesus it's not news you know and
01:33:23.300
we could all be better than we are but to attack masculinity as such it's
01:33:30.280
well maybe it's the maybe it's a form of chaotic challenge i mean i don't really understand it
01:33:40.700
well i do i do so i would do wonder that you know if if that's if that's part of a
01:33:45.140
here's something i'm also getting trouble for this i've been thinking about this that'll definitely get
01:33:50.900
you in trouble you know i already said that one of the functions of women is to challenge men
01:33:56.920
and i mean in the most profound way and that's part of the evolutionary process that's made us
01:34:02.580
what we are it's like women have never organized themselves politically en masse right that's never
01:34:09.280
happened before so now that's happening and i looked at this i looked at this chart the other day
01:34:15.660
and it was a chart of the degree to which university yeah i'm definitely gonna get in
01:34:22.180
trouble for this the the degree to which a university discipline was politically correct
01:34:29.160
rank ordered and then beside it a list of the probability that that university department was
01:34:35.900
female dominated and they match up very nicely the more dominated they are by women the more likely
01:34:41.960
they are to be politically correct it's like hmm that's interesting thought well i don't know why
01:34:47.960
that is and i don't understand it exactly so i've been generating hypotheses which is what you do if
01:34:53.580
you're a scientist by the way is you try to think well what might account for that you don't think it's
01:34:58.320
true when you think it you just think what might account for it thought well maybe that's how women
01:35:05.160
would express themselves politically we don't know women have never expressed themselves politically
01:35:10.720
politically so now they organize and they express themselves politically like what kind of voice is
01:35:14.980
that going to produce well maybe it's a voice that criticizes the patriarchy maybe it's an extended
01:35:20.800
part of the female challenge to the male it's like you're not everything you could be here's my
01:35:27.580
accusations can you withstand them is there enough to you to manage it well i have no idea it's like is that
01:35:35.780
what's happening i can't tell you know i mean we're seeing this degeneration in the universities
01:35:41.440
into this ideological morass as far as i can as far as i can figure it and that the axiomatic
01:35:49.800
presupposition is that our culture is a tyrannical patriarchy it's an accusation well what do you do with
01:35:55.960
an accusation like that you just roll over and die or do you or do you respond to it say look not so fast
01:36:03.980
you know there's some things worth preserving here and a little gratitude is also in order
01:36:09.640
there's plenty of bloodshed and catastrophe and past sins but look at all the good things that you
01:36:14.680
have and have some gratitude and if we're not able to make that case let's say as men or maybe even as
01:36:21.560
standard bearers of our civilization if we're not able to make that case then
01:36:25.120
maybe we're not everything we should be look i talked to this neuroscientist a while back and he told
01:36:32.940
me something very interesting he wrote this book called the master and his emissary
01:36:36.900
ian mcgilchrist very smart man and he was talking about the necessity of opponent processing in complex
01:36:44.540
in in the operation of complex and finely tuned systems he said well imagine you want to move
01:36:49.700
your right hand very slowly and accurately so you can do this but if you really want to do it accurately
01:36:55.640
you do this you put your left hand up and you push against your right hand and then you push a
01:37:01.060
little harder with your right hand than your left and you can move unbelievably finely and accurately
01:37:06.200
because there's forces in conflict that are that are regulating the action it's like i don't know
01:37:13.340
how much force there has to be in conflict to regulate our actions maybe when women rise up
01:37:18.380
politically which is what they've done what will emerge from that is like a challenge to the idea
01:37:23.740
of the patriarchy well the gillette ad goes along with that and why is it a problem well because we
01:37:31.240
risk throwing the baby out with the bath water so that's some of my thoughts on the latest gillette ad
01:37:38.380
elon musk bill gates stephen hawkins and sam harris are all warning about ai what are your thoughts about ai
01:37:51.800
we're going to build very powerful systems that reflect who we are and magnify it so and that's
01:38:01.660
going to happen very quickly and so we better set a good example that's my thoughts on ai you know it's
01:38:11.040
like one of the things i learned from carl jung i like this a lot was that he believed that you know
01:38:17.540
back around the 15th or the 16th century maybe even earlier than that sort of at the dawn of the
01:38:27.820
he laid this out in his studies of alchemy which was the sort of dreamlike precursor to science and
01:38:36.280
alchemy was sort of half mythology and half dawning empiricism and out of alchemy alchemy emerged
01:38:44.680
chemistry and then and physics and then science exploded and and here we are 300 years later and
01:38:51.260
we're way more technologically powerful than we were but part of alchemy was mythology and ethics
01:38:58.240
and it's remained unchanged we haven't expanded ourselves in the same manner and one of his warnings
01:39:05.860
was that we better because the more technologically powerful we become the more ethical behavior becomes a
01:39:12.880
necessity and so we're going to build these incredibly powerful machines very very soon and
01:39:18.780
it's already happening and they are going to reflect who we are and they're going to if they're going to
01:39:23.540
reflect what we want they're going to reflect the way we want things to be as indicated by our actions
01:39:30.500
and so i've thought about such things for a very long period of time and came to the conclusion that
01:39:36.060
the most effective way of dealing with that is to try to encourage people to be better as individuals
01:39:42.420
and so that's what i would say like that's more or less the answer i have to the set of problems that
01:39:48.800
are going to confront us it's like be more honest have your eyes open more be more responsible pay
01:39:59.760
attention to the meaning in your life right act ethically or else and i i think that that's always been true
01:40:09.180
but in some sense it's the urgency for that has become amplified and that's another reason that we have
01:40:16.820
to wake up so you know when i look at the future it's so contradictory at the moment and i would say that's
01:40:25.820
because we're in a period we're strangely enough in this period of chaos you know we've lost our pathway
01:40:32.220
in the west to some degree um we're we're polarizing and then we're confused about who we are and where
01:40:39.500
we're going at the same time there are processes afoot in the world that are so positive that they're
01:40:46.720
almost unbelievable right i mean we've lifted a tremendous proportion of the world's population out
01:40:51.800
of poverty over the last 20 years it's it's it's the biggest economic miracle in human
01:40:55.800
history by a huge like by a huge margin and everyone's being connected to the electrical
01:41:01.360
power grid at an incredible rate and and and everyone has access to unbelievably powerful
01:41:07.360
virtually everyone access or soon will have access to unbelievably powerful computational technology
01:41:12.960
you know and most people in the world are now middle class and starvation is essentially a thing
01:41:18.500
of the past except when it's imposed on one population by another for political reasons you know and
01:41:23.960
and we're we're we've declared war and a number of serious illnesses and are well on our way to
01:41:28.700
eradicating them polio being the first one but it won't be the last one to go you know the the third
01:41:34.720
world has developed immensely in terms of lifespan over the last and and standard of living over the
01:41:41.640
last 20 years you know the child mortality rate in africa is now the same as it was in europe in 1952
01:41:48.520
that's a bloody miracle you know and so there's all these things that are happening that are so
01:41:53.600
incredibly positive and yet you know we're rife with confusion and and there's tremendous tension and
01:41:59.400
and and and there's this sense that that i think everybody shares to some degree that things could go to
01:42:05.140
hell in a handbasket very very rapidly and i think that we're in a situation where
01:42:12.260
what would we say we have to decide what we want and you decide that as an individual it's like do
01:42:19.440
you want the world to get better and better you want to act in a manner that will increase the
01:42:23.760
probability of that occurring that seems like the right way forward so we wake up and we and we get
01:42:31.220
our act together and we move forward into a future that's better and better that would be a good thing
01:42:35.700
but it's not going to be a straightforward thing so i think too and i you know i've tried to say this in
01:42:43.320
my lectures and you know we all bear the responsibility for this it's one of the things that that i think is
01:42:53.100
so perverse and strange about the structure of reality it's like i do believe that there's something
01:42:58.360
true about the idea that the direction of the world rests on your shoulders like uniquely which
01:43:06.160
is weird because of course look at all of you there's seven billion of us is how can the weight
01:43:10.360
of the world the future of the world rest on each of our shoulders well reality is a very strange
01:43:17.100
reality is very incomprehensible that's one thing you can say for certain and it seems to me that it
01:43:25.640
could be structured that it's your responsibility and i think it's worth taking that seriously
01:43:32.060
so if you could debate karl marx what would you tell him
01:43:37.460
how about you won't live long enough if you counted a corpse a second you wouldn't live long enough to
01:43:50.900
i would tell him that he underestimated the scope of the problem and that this is also something that
01:44:07.320
i believe is true of the leftists who follow marx one of marx's propositions was that
01:44:14.600
capital would accrue in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority of people under a capitalist
01:44:20.120
state it's like um that's actually true in some ways you know and we all know this because we all
01:44:28.560
know that i think the world's richest 80 people have more money than the bottom two billion something
01:44:34.740
like that you know there's a real proclivity for complex systems to tilt into a winner-take-all
01:44:41.020
situation but the and that's true and so you could say well marx was right it's like no he wasn't
01:44:47.840
because he blamed that on capitalism it's like it's a way worse problem than marx thought
01:44:52.560
because it's characteristic of every system that we know of we don't know what to do about it
01:44:57.640
you know it and this is graphed in this function that i've talked about quite frequently called the
01:45:02.740
pareto distribution pareto distribution um systems tilt towards winner-take-all situations and you see
01:45:11.000
this in all sorts of domains so um hardly any musicians sell all the recordings right how many
01:45:21.660
musicians are there in the world i don't remember there's there's some untold millions of numbers of
01:45:26.680
songs on the net right the original songs what fraction of them get listened to like none a thousandth
01:45:34.460
of a percent and those songs take all the listeners it's like the same thing happens if you sell a book
01:45:40.980
it's like almost no books sell well it's like you shouldn't even write a book because the probability
01:45:48.480
that it won't sell is virtually certain now now and then a book sells a tremendous number but it's the
01:45:54.500
same thing and i have a friend who's an author and he's been an author a long time and he explained at
01:45:59.640
least partly why this happened so imagine you write a book of fiction okay you think well where do people
01:46:04.160
it's just an example where do people buy fiction books well how about the airport think well there's
01:46:09.920
thousands of airports it's like yeah and each of them has a bookstore and the bookstore has a kiosk
01:46:15.860
out front and the same five books occupy the top rung of every single kiosk i'd say it's a it's a real
01:46:22.420
estate grab in some sense and if you have the top left hand corner you're number one you sell all the
01:46:27.040
books and the people down in the corner they hardly sell any books but at least they're on the damn
01:46:31.640
kiosk and there is this proclivity for the winner to take all in every situation and we don't exactly
01:46:39.300
know what to do about it and so that's another thing that i would tell marx is like you underestimated
01:46:44.340
the problem so he blamed that on capitalism and actually capitalism is pretty good at churning because
01:46:50.920
there is a one percent that has most of the money but that one percent actually changes the the fact of
01:46:56.280
the one percent stays quite constant but the people who constitute that one percent churn quite
01:47:01.500
regularly you know so for example a fortune 500 company tends only has a lifespan of 30 years
01:47:08.900
and a family fortune generally has a lifespan of three generations and even in the in the course of your
01:47:15.420
own life each of you i think has a something like a 10 chance this isn't exactly right but it's
01:47:21.380
approximately correct each of you has at least a 10 chance of being in the top one percent at some
01:47:27.780
point in your life and so the the structure the unequal distribution is really stable but the the
01:47:33.840
composition changes and that's another thing marx really didn't take into account if you examine
01:47:38.980
paleolithic grave sites way before the dawn of capitalism you find that a small number of people
01:47:44.960
were buried with all the gold right most graves nothing small number of people tremendous riches
01:47:51.940
and and you see this you see this in the size of cities so a small number of cities have almost all the
01:47:57.920
people a small number of planetary bodies have almost all the mass the same applies to stars and so
01:48:05.880
there's this deep tendency for the winner to take all it's expressed in the new testament there's a
01:48:12.420
statement a statement of christ he says uh to those who have everything more will be given and from
01:48:18.380
those who have nothing everything will be taken which is well a rather harsh observation about the
01:48:25.200
structure of the world and and also one that doesn't seem particularly fair but i would say to
01:48:29.580
marx and to the leftists who follow him is if you really cared about the poor you take the problem
01:48:35.680
of unequal distribution a lot more seriously than you do when you blame it on capitalism and the west
01:48:41.060
it's a way deeper problem than that and so so i would tell carl marx that he was nowhere near pessimistic
01:48:49.560
enough so all right ah lewis asked what is music to our psyche yeah i really like that question music
01:49:04.880
has really been an interest of psychological interest of mine because it's you know i've been obsessed by the
01:49:10.940
idea of meaning trying to understand what it is and whether it's something real and i do believe
01:49:15.900
it's something i think it's the most real thing actually i think your instinct for meaning is the
01:49:21.440
the best guide that you have and i think that meaning is is is the ultimate reality i i do believe that
01:49:29.420
i think that we have intimations of meaning in music and that's why we love music
01:49:36.040
you know no matter how nihilistic and hopeless you are i always thought about punk rockers in that way
01:49:43.860
because you know especially when i was writing my first book because punk rock was pretty popular
01:49:48.280
then it's like this nihilistic violent sort of music about the pointlessness of things and yet
01:49:55.940
the punk rockers listened to it and they were like having a fine time listening to it it was so
01:50:01.340
paradoxical it's like at the same time the music was blasting forth the message a message of say
01:50:06.840
nihilism and destruction and i know some of that was social criticism and some of it was irony
01:50:11.320
i'm not criticizing punk rock it's just so it was just so perverse to me that
01:50:16.420
the punk rockers who were decrying the structure of reality on nihilistic grounds were fully engaged
01:50:24.960
and immersed in a meaningful experience while listening to the music and they didn't notice the
01:50:30.020
contradiction and and and and they were they were feeding on them the meaning you know i mean i
01:50:37.040
don't know if it's possible for people to live without music and i think it's because music provides
01:50:42.060
a direct intimation of meaning it it's actually the most representative form of art and the reason i
01:50:49.220
think that's the case is because i don't think the world is made out of objects i think the world
01:50:54.420
it's better to conceptualize the world as made it as made out of patterns objects are patterns
01:51:01.000
but they're a subset of patterns and you want it's something like this is that
01:51:07.600
when the patterns of your life are interacting harmoniously
01:51:12.080
then the sense of meaning prevails it's it's part of being in order but it's more than that because
01:51:19.340
order isn't enough you have to be on the edge of order in order for things to be properly balanced
01:51:25.760
harmoniously because you have to be improving the order that you inhabit at the same time that you
01:51:31.240
inhabit it that's where that that's where meaning exists it's on that boundary and that's where music
01:51:37.120
puts you you know music shows you the structure of the world in these nested patterns and then the
01:51:43.240
patterns transform and you you you bring yourself into harmony with the transformation of those
01:51:48.860
patterns and that that gives you a deep intimation of meaning and it it illustrates to you how to
01:51:55.680
dance with the world like the world has a musical structure and you're you're if you were if you
01:52:05.200
were dancing properly you would be in alignment with those patterns and music intimates that you know
01:52:14.180
and that's why well that's why so much music is sacred you know it's used in religious ceremony
01:52:19.340
because it it provides a direct and incontrovertible demonstration of the meaning of the harmony of
01:52:26.840
patterns it's something like that and so it was music has always been fascinating to me because it it
01:52:32.320
escapes from rational criticism you know it's because it's it's easy for us we're we're intellect intellectual
01:52:39.160
and we're cynical and we're critical and we can take things we can believe and we can break
01:52:43.160
them apart and have nothing left you know and it's it's the fate of many a neurotic intellectual to do
01:52:48.360
precisely that to take their own belief systems and to subject them to radical criticism and to leave
01:52:53.800
themselves with nothing but the broken pieces of osiris right it's like well none of that worked and now
01:53:00.240
where am i there's nothing but nihilism and hopelessness and then music comes along and it speaks of this
01:53:07.340
harmonious relationship between the patterns of being and you what you what do you what do you do
01:53:12.540
if you're a critical intellect you say well you can't you can't launch an intellectual attack on the
01:53:20.060
aesthetic experience that music produces it's immune to that you know it's a primary experience and
01:53:26.540
thank god for that because it gives us this link to something that's of transcendent reality that our
01:53:32.700
our critical intellect cannot break apart and so
01:53:37.900
well so that's what music is to our psyche as far as i'm concerned and there's more to it than that i
01:53:45.420
mean that's that doesn't exhaust what music is but it's a it's a good start
01:53:49.900
all right well that's a good place to end i guess that's a positive place to end so
01:54:04.300
it was a pleasure talking with all of you good night
01:54:21.340
if you found this conversation meaningful you might think about picking up dad's books maps of
01:54:30.220
meaning the architecture of belief or his newer bestseller 12 rules for life an antidote to chaos
01:54:34.940
both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the jordan b peterson podcast
01:54:39.500
see jordanbpeterson.com for audio ebook and text links or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller
01:54:45.260
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01:54:55.420
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01:55:03.340
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01:55:11.740
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01:55:17.500
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01:55:24.380
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01:55:29.840
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