In this episode, Dr. Jordan Peterson joins us to discuss the big questions: Does God exist, is ideology a destructive parasite, and has campus snowflakes and pajama boys destroyed our civilization? Plus, we discuss Trump's surprise Obamacare smackdown, and an American family freed after being held hostage by the Taliban for five years.
00:03:40.720Well, it provides a one-size-fits-all answer to every question.
00:03:45.600And there's a variety of problems with that.
00:03:47.400I mean, and it's a one-sided biased, one-size-fits-all answer.
00:03:51.900And the bias depends on your particular ideological stance.
00:03:56.720In some ways, biases themselves aren't as bad as you might think because they're not that distinguishable from heuristics, which are simplifications that you need to operate in the world.
00:04:06.960I mean, we can't operate in the world as in considering it in all of its complexity.
00:04:25.200You see, part of the reason that the Western democratic systems work is because they allow people who have specified biases to compete in an open market of biases.
00:04:55.200But, you know, there are situations that arise where less generally applicable principles may sporadically hold.
00:05:04.380But anyways, the point is that in an open exchange of ideas, you get the opportunity for multiple people to put forward their biased heuristics, their biased oversimplifications, and to engage in the kind of debate that raises the resolution of the question and answer at hand.
00:05:21.560And that's necessary because the environment is shifting underneath you all the time.
00:05:26.240And so what was right yesterday, what was correct yesterday isn't necessarily correct today.
00:05:30.400And so you have to continually engage in negotiation and discussion to stay in the middle, let's say, in the correct place.
00:05:40.400Yeah, not to formalize too much, not to abridge too much.
00:05:42.460And you bring up there are ideologies on the right.
00:05:45.960You know, we see them, they change, some pop up, some fall out of fashion.
00:05:50.180But there has been a question for a long time that conservatives have debated.
00:05:54.280Can a real conservative be an ideologue?
00:05:57.360Or should conservatives ground their view of the world in something more substantive than an ideology?
00:06:07.520Well, I think genuine thinkers should ground their worldview in something more substantive than an ideology.
00:06:13.040And one of the things that I've studied for a very long period of time is the relationship between, let's say, ideologies or belief systems, for that matter, to the underlying psychological substructures that the psychologist, psychiatrist Carl Jung described as archetypal.
00:06:29.040And so you could think of these archetypal substructures as the grand stories by which people conduct their lives.
00:06:37.780And they're structured in a very particular way.
00:07:18.500And so nature can be a vicious, brutal force.
00:07:20.980And everyone who's alive and thinks knows that.
00:07:23.320But by the same token, it's also the place, the unknown and nature is the place that you can go and explore and find new and wonderful things.
00:07:33.740Well, that's an interesting one to bring up because we'll return to that.
00:07:37.780We'll return to that because there's a counter narrative to that.
00:07:40.460So nature has its positive and negative element.
00:07:43.840It's often represented with feminine symbols, by the way, mother nature, let's say.
00:07:47.840And then culture has the same structure.
00:07:50.160There's like the tyrannical king and the benevolent king.
00:07:52.600And the tyrannical king is the part of culture that crushes you and destroys you and mangles you and forces you to be a cog in a wheel.
00:08:00.980And the benevolent part is the part that educates you and disciplines you and shelters you and teaches you to speak and imbues you with all the facets and traits that a civilized person would have.
00:08:11.740And again, a story that doesn't involve both of those forces is incomplete, even though they're contradictory.
00:08:18.860And then on top of that is the individual.
00:08:21.840And in an archetypal story, the individual has a heroic element and an adversarial element.
00:08:26.600And so in Christianity, that's represented by the, say, internal conflict between Christ and Satan, if you're thinking about it psychologically.
00:08:33.940It's reflected in the story of Cain and Abel as well and in typical hostile brother stories, very common narrative tropes.
00:08:40.660And so a comprehensive view of the world offers a representation of all of those elements.
00:08:47.300Whereas an ideology, what an ideology does is slice that representation into a partial formulation.
00:08:53.940So, for example, when feminists talk about the patriarchy, they essentially assume that the social world is only a negative force.
00:09:17.920And, I mean, to think about the social structures in the West as fundamentally tyrannical means that you're either, well, ideologically possessed to the degree that's almost incomprehensible,
00:09:29.320or that you know absolutely nothing whatsoever about history or the current world for that matter.
00:09:34.440And those may not be mutually exclusive.
00:09:36.540You may be ideologically possessed and ignorant.
00:09:39.500Well, and you said go West, young man.
00:09:47.320So, the frontier narrative is untamed nature, positive culture, positive individual.
00:09:54.380So, it's the heroic individual spreading the benefits of benevolent culture into the wild, untamed wilderness.
00:10:01.500Okay, so that's an ideology, and it's a powerful one because it draws on these underlying archetypal symbolic themes that are deeply motivational, meaningful to people.
00:10:10.240But the counter narrative emerged to that.
00:10:12.860Let's say that was the narrative that settled the United States.
00:10:16.280Okay, but the counter narrative emerged, and that's the environmental narrative.
00:10:19.520The environmental narrative is benevolent nature, toxic culture, adversarial individual.
00:10:26.120So, the essential ideological environmental narrative is terrible human beings that are a cancer on the planet are spreading their toxic patriarchy and raping mother nature.
00:10:36.980And I think it's no coincidence, by the way, that the environmental movement as we see it today really sprung up in the 90s in the wake of the fall of communism.
00:10:47.440There was the major ideology of the left that crumbled before our eyes, and now this new ideology of environmentalism seems to have largely taken its position of prominence.
00:10:58.360Well, see, okay, so that's an interesting observation.
00:11:03.740And I think it's actually one of the things that really pollutes the argument about environmental sustainability.
00:11:10.320You know, like, obviously, exploiting the planet, let's say, in a way that produces unsustainable externalized costs is a bad idea, clearly.
00:11:21.900Now, the time frame matters, but it's clearly a bad idea.
00:11:24.720The problem is, is that it's almost impossible to engage in a discussion about environmental sustainability without also simultaneously engaging in a discussion that's anti-capitalist.
00:11:37.020And so, for me, as soon as an environmentalist becomes anti-capitalist, then I can't trust them as an environmentalist because I don't know if their environmentalism, it usually is a cover for their neo-Marxism or another ideology.
00:12:04.460And, you know, the conservatives, part of the conservative ethos is try not to do anything too stupid.
00:12:11.640You know, whereas you could say that the liberal ethos is try actively to improve things, you know, and that's great.
00:12:19.220Act as stupidly as you may, yeah, in order to do it.
00:12:22.780Well, the problem is that on the liberal end of things, and this is a temperamental problem, is that many ideas that are designed to generate solutions to problems actually generate more problems.
00:12:35.460Right, and so an informed conservative says something like, well, yeah, there's a problem there, but let's not get ahead of ourselves and presume that we actually know how to fix it in a way that won't just make it worse.
00:12:51.100And for me, like, I'm kind of temperamentally predisposed to be more on the liberal left end of things from a personality perspective, because I'm high in a trait called openness, which is a good predictor of, say, liberalism and more left-wing thinking, although I'm also high in conscientiousness, which is a good predictor of more right-wing thinking.
00:13:09.060But what really convinced me to become more of a traditionalist, I would say, was this realization of unintended consequences, is that it's very, very difficult to make alterations to a complex system in a manner that doesn't make the system function worse instead of better.
00:13:26.060And so I think, generally speaking, that especially when you're perturbing extraordinarily complex social systems, that you should be firmly aware of the limits of your intelligence and the probability of your biased interpretations.
00:13:41.720Of course, and I love that you've brought up this term traditionalism.
00:13:44.480I actually made the case a couple days ago that I think Donald Trump himself, maybe counterintuitively, exhibits many aspects of traditionalism in the Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott sort of sense of things.
00:13:57.960And I wonder if now, as you've noted, channeling Nietzsche, that, you know, at a certain point in our culture, God died for our cultural purposes and ideology replaced it.
00:14:17.840Well, the thing is, one of the things that's really necessary to note about Nietzsche is that when he made the pronouncement that God was dead, it was by no means triumphant.
00:14:31.060The full phrase is, I'm paraphrasing, but the full phrase is something like, God is dead, we have killed him, and we'll never find enough water to wash away the blood.
00:14:41.100Right, and that was associated with thoughts he had at the same time, that the consequence of the death of this traditional value structure and the idea of a transcendent moral structure and ultimate moral responsibility would be replaced by two things.
00:14:54.560One would be a kind of hopeless nihilism, and the other would be a swing, especially into leftist totalitarianism, which he directly predicted, as did Dostoevsky, although that wasn't the only logical totalitarian outcome.
00:15:10.620It's actually one of the most amazing prescient predictions that I've ever encountered.
00:15:17.280And do you, in any way, do you find a link between that nihilism that came out of the death of God and left-wing totalitarianism and these campus snowflakes and the Peter Pan syndrome and the pajama boys, this apathetic, malaise, whiny, bratty culture that we're seeing among a perfectly luxurious, young, healthy, wealthy generation?
00:15:45.960And without that, you're bereft, certainly, of positive emotion, but you're also hyper-anxious.
00:15:52.920You know, that's the thing that's kind of odd about having direction and responsibility, is that it gives meaning to your life because it helps you understand how the small things you do every day are related to crucial and important goals.
00:16:06.020Without that, it's very, very difficult to orient yourself in the world.
00:16:09.520And Dr. Peterson—oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.
00:16:11.340Well, it also makes you anxious because there's no limit, say.
00:16:15.620And people say, especially people who are high in openness and low in conscientiousness, so they're the liberal left types, they say, well, limits are only constraining.
00:16:23.900It's like, no, no, limits aren't only constraining.
00:16:27.580Like, fences keep snakes out as well as keep you in.
00:16:35.560And, you know, the funny thing, too, about the radicals on campuses is that they just have no conception of how many walls are protecting them.
00:16:44.900Like, they're inside a wall, often actually a literal wall, because many of the campuses are walled.
00:16:50.800And then they're inside—you know, those walls are inside the city, and the city is inside the state, and the state is inside the government.
00:16:56.860The government is protected by the military.
00:16:58.580And there's just—and that's all governed by tradition.
00:17:01.440There's just wall after wall after wall.
00:17:03.800And they say, well, I don't see any danger.
00:17:08.420It's like, well, yeah, you don't see any danger.
00:17:10.440You know, you remember in The Lord of the Rings—you may remember this or you may not—the hobbits, you know, they're these little people who are sort of self-satisfied and smug and naive and completely ignorant about the surrounding world.
00:17:26.180And, of course, there's evil gathering all around them, which is the archetypal state of mankind.
00:17:30.940And they're protected by the striders, one of whom is Aragorn.
00:17:37.000And they are the descendants of ancient kings.
00:17:40.180And they patrol the boundaries and keep the hobbits safe.
00:17:43.820And the hobbits know about them, but they just think they're despicable tramps.
00:17:47.860So it's brilliant, because we are protected by the descendants of ancient kings.
00:18:02.300They lack a sense of history, and they certainly lack a sense of human fallibility and malevolence.
00:18:07.680And I must note, you've brought up Tolkien, and I don't want to allow the early brief discussion of Christianity go totally without further discussion.
00:18:16.660You, in your description of ideology and your description of traditionalism, of symbols, of the symbolized, of the logos as transcendent and divine, if I didn't know any better, I would guess that you were a Catholic.
00:18:32.440You sound an awful lot like a Catholic, and I wanted to know if you had any thoughts about that description.
00:18:39.560Well, if you aren't yet a Catholic, can I be your godfather eventually when you do?
00:18:43.640Well, the Orthodox—I've been contacted by a number of Orthodox Jews who think that I'm pretty much an Orthodox Jew, and a lot of Orthodox Christians who think that I'm pretty much an Orthodox Christian, and also a number of Mormons who think—or no, sorry, not—no, who were they?
00:19:06.600It's because I've been contacted by people from a lot of different denominations, and they've said the same thing, which is that I'm putting the finger on what they believe is at the core of their belief system.
00:19:15.300But, you know, and I've been looking at this primarily from a psychological perspective, like I'm not denying or even commenting on the underlying metaphysical realities, you know, technically speaking, because it's sort of outside of my domain of competence.
00:19:29.840I'm not denying their existence or making a case for their existence in my public presentations.
00:19:35.440But one thing I have discovered is that there's something really fundamentally important about the idea of the Logos, you know, because the Logos is the idea that the individual is—the soul of the individual and the value of that soul transcends the value of the state.
00:19:55.980I think that's the central Western proposition, is that the state itself has no final dominion over the individual.
00:20:03.100Certainly right. We may appeal to heaven, as General Washington once put on a flag.
00:20:09.540So, and the reason that that's so psychologically significant, as far as I'm concerned, is that the state—and this has been realized by a number of cultures in a variety of different ways—the state has a tendency to become too static, right?
00:20:22.740And state and static are obviously the same word.
00:20:24.780And without the dynamic consciousness of the individual continually transforming and expanding the boundaries of the state, the state collapses into a type of totalitarian rigidity, and then everyone dies.
00:20:37.460So, if you don't keep the state subservient in some sense to the free consciousness, and that's the moral consciousness of the dedicated citizen, then everything goes to hell, and very, very rapidly, and almost literally.
00:20:52.160Because, I mean, if you look at places like, you know, Stalinist Soviet Union, and especially in the 1930s, and Mao's China, and Cambodia, and these places where these totalitarian systems got the upper hand, I mean, to describe them as hellish is an understatement, I would say.
00:21:08.940Yeah, it's a world of lies. It's a world of lies that wreaks havoc in hell.
00:21:13.400Well, that's the other thing that's so interesting, is that the really informed commentators on those totalitarian states have drawn a very direct causal path between the proclivity of the individual citizen to falsify their own experience, so to lie by commission and omission, and the emergence of these totalitarian states.
00:21:33.140So, what they essentially make isn't an economic case or a political case.
00:21:36.920They make a psychological and ethical case, and that's especially well documented.
00:21:41.820Well, Viktor Frankl does a pretty good job of that in Man's Search for Meaning, and Vaclav Havel made the same sort of connection, so did Gandhi.
00:21:50.180But I think it's been best laid out, well, partly by Tolstoy, who was a huge influence on Gandhi, but most particularly, I would say, by Solzhenitsyn in his documentations of the Gulag Archipelago.
00:22:01.280Like, his entire 1,700-page case is that the reason that the totalitarian state got the upper hand in the Soviet Union was fundamentally because too many citizens decided that it was in their best short-term interest to lie about everything, including their own suffering.
00:22:41.560And that, there is, we have all these discussions about which pronouns we should use, which bathrooms people can use, and they seem to be really highly politicized for precisely this purpose.
00:22:53.820They say, it's trivial, it doesn't matter, it's just a little lie that we're telling each other.
00:23:14.520See, I mean, one of the things that Solzhenitsyn documents in the Gulag Archipelago is his realization that he was his own tyrant.
00:23:21.900You know, and it's so fascinating because he wrote the Gulag Archipelago when he was in the prison camps, and he basically memorized the book.
00:23:30.360And that's, you know, to memorize a 1700-page book is really something that is inconceivable, especially a book like that.
00:23:38.820And he didn't write the book until he was struck very hard by the realization that his ethical faults had directly contributed to the situation that he found himself in.
00:23:50.980And, you know, interestingly enough, too, he said that he came to that realization in large part, although not solely, by watching the very few people that he saw in the prison camps resist the lie, the demand for lies on the part of their jailers.
00:24:07.320He said most of those people had a deeply rooted religious faith, and that seemed to enable them to refuse to cooperate with the authorities when that cooperation was demanded, which would also preclude them partaking in such roles as being camp trustees.
00:24:25.420Because in the Gulag system, interestingly enough, most of the positions of tyranny were held by the prisoners themselves, which is—now, there is a great definition of hell.
00:24:37.160Hell is a prison where all the prison guards are prisoners.
00:24:40.500That's precisely right, which actually, I suppose, is the Christian definition of hell, certainly Milton's definition of hell.
00:24:47.380Well, this does bring up another point, which is if we are to look at the man in the mirror and take responsibility for ourselves and recognize that much of our suffering and our oppression is—it comes from within and our own ethical failures, then I have to ask—this has been a meme going around the Internet for a long time—do I really have to clean up my room?
00:25:10.900Well, you don't have to, but you have to suffer the consequences.
00:25:17.380Well, that's the thing, is that, you know, it's—in many situations in life, you get to pick your poison, right?
00:25:25.700And that's really worthwhile knowing, because it isn't that there's a pathway that you can take that's going to make your life—well, let's call it simple and happy, because life—whatever life is, it's not simple and happy.
00:25:38.280It's certainly not those things, right?
00:25:42.060And you can ennoble that with a certain mode of being, and that mode of being has to be associated with a willingness to abide by the truth.
00:25:53.180And, like, I don't even really think about these things as ethical commandments in some sense, and it's something that's also struck me as I've become more and more familiar with biblical writings, is that most of the time they're simple statements of fact.
00:26:06.060So, imagine, you know, reality has a structure, it's complex, and you can tell it has a structure because it punishes you very badly when you do some things you shouldn't do.
00:26:15.820Like, you know, toddlers learn very rapidly not to stand up underneath tables when they're first learning to walk, right?
00:26:21.860Don't touch the burner on the stove, right?
00:27:06.160But the arrogant part—that's exactly it.
00:27:07.640The arrogant part is on my terms and I'll get away with it.
00:27:10.780And it's such an absurd proposition because the probability that you can bend the structure of reality in your favor without it having it snap back and hit you in the face,
00:27:20.580which is, I suppose, in some sense a definition of God in a perverse way, is it's zero.
00:27:27.220Like, in my clinical practice, and I swear that this is the case, and I would say also in my private life, observing people over long periods of time, I have never seen anyone get away with anything.
00:27:38.740It always comes back to haunt them in one form or another.
00:27:41.900And they may not realize or understand the causal connection.
00:27:45.200Sometimes that's what psychotherapy is about.
00:27:47.080But the causal connections are there, and that's the sort of thing that Solzhenitsyn detailed in the Gulag Archipelago.
00:27:53.500You know, it's so weird because he was a victim of Hitler because he was on the front lines, and then he was a victim of Stalin.
00:28:01.160And, I mean, if you want to make a case for being a victim—
00:28:07.300But instead, he decided that he was going to take the responsibility on himself.
00:28:12.020And become one of the greatest men of the century, right?
00:28:15.300Well, that's the thing that's so incomprehensible, is that that book really was—there was a few death blows to the integrity of the communist system.
00:28:25.120But from an articulated and verbal perspective, an intellectual perspective, nothing topped the Gulag Archipelago.
00:28:32.960It took the substructure out from underneath any moral claim that communism had.
00:28:40.260I do—I know I said that was the last question, but I actually have one more.
00:28:43.020Do you—this is a very practical question.
00:28:45.700For young people or people who are wandering around in these shallow ideologies and this sort of nihilism, living in lies, whatever you want to call it, what advice would you give to them?
00:29:05.580How can they pull themselves out of the mire and wash all that blood off of us that Nietzsche said we'd never get off?
00:29:12.700Well, you know, Carl Jung said something that is quite similar to Solzhenitsyn's prescription, which was that with a sufficient moral effort, psychoanalysis was unnecessary.
00:29:24.040I would say that the best advice that I might give to people is that they try to stop saying things that make them weak.
00:29:34.140Which is a variant of trying to learn not to lie because if you pay attention, Nietzsche said, who among us has never sacrificed himself for the sake of his good name?
00:29:45.760And what he meant by that was, well, you know, you're in a social circumstance and you act in a manner that's different than how you actually feel or you refuse to put forward your viewpoint or you can't or, you know, you falsify yourself.
00:30:06.240I'm thinking about the falsification part.
00:30:08.040It's like if you watch yourself very carefully, if you watch what you say, and I would include your nonverbal behavior in that category.
00:30:14.560You'll see that certain things that you say put solid ground under your feet and certain things turn the ground that you're standing on into quicksand.
00:30:22.940And you can feel that in an embodied sense.
00:30:25.400It's something Carl Rogers, who's a great psychiatrist, psychologist, realized quite, I guess, probably in the 50s or the 40s and that there was an embodied sense.
00:30:34.200And in some sense, that would be equivalent to the voice of conscience.
00:30:37.500And so, you know, when you're betraying yourself, you know, when you're weakening yourself.
00:30:41.080And if you start to pay attention to that, you can learn to stop doing that.
00:30:46.600It's interesting because I was just reading Socrates' Apology, which is the description of the trial that eventually ended in his death and his reaction to that, his heroic reaction to that.
00:30:58.140And he talked about the thing that differentiated him from other people.
00:31:02.560And he said, well, he had this internal voice, which he called a daemon, which obviously is related to the word demon.
00:31:09.120But it wasn't that. It's an internal spirit, an internal voice.
00:31:27.900And so the reason he didn't defend himself at his trial, interestingly enough, is because his internal voice, and leave, because really they just wanted him to get the hell out of Athens because he was a troublemaker.
00:31:37.720So they warned him long ahead that he was going to be tried and found guilty, essentially.
00:35:45.160I noticed that all of a sudden the Rand Paul haters on the Trump train are very silent about this, that they're very on board and excited about it.
00:35:56.620If Obama used his executive orders to expand Obamacare, I think it's personally reasonable to say, hey, President Trump, you can use the power of the pen to dismantle Obamacare.
00:36:20.660Why are they going to give President Trump all of the credit for repealing all these terrible Obamacare regulations?
00:36:28.500Oh, man, you know, there's a little bit of an ego trip involved and a little power trip involved.
00:36:32.400But I think what would be really cool is if they get that wall built and then go ahead and Trump can have his like health care plan.
00:36:38.860He can like he can contract like a bunch of artists and then just go ahead and like graffiti like his health care plan on the wall.
00:36:45.860And I think it will make both of which digestible to the to the to the public at large.
00:36:51.280And that's subtlety in the in the age of Trump, you know, just the largest physical structures in human history with just gigantic words written across them.
00:36:58.640I believe it on another strange news story.
00:37:01.420An American woman and her Canadian husband who were held hostage by militants by the Taliban in Afghanistan for five years have been freed along with their children.
00:37:11.640And we I'm sorry, we worked with Afghanistan and Pakistan on this.
00:48:26.160Well, if you work at a state law college, what I would do is put up a nice copy of a very scholarly political tome in the window.
00:48:33.220It's called Reasons to Vote for Democrats a Comprehensive Guide, and that will contribute to the tone of scholarship and seriousness at your office.
00:48:42.920In general, though, you've got to do something.
00:48:46.020I don't have the answer for you right now, but this is not the time to be timid.
00:48:50.200This is not the time to let these guys run over you.