Jordan Peterson ｜ Chaos, God, and Alcohol
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Summary
In this episode, Dr. Dan Peterson joins me to discuss his new book, An Antidote to Chaos, and to talk about a dream he had that changed the course of his life and how he came to understand the world.
Transcript
00:00:11.720
So let's get into trouble with the frivolous thought police right off of the bat.
00:00:19.800
You describe order as masculine, the wise king at best, the tyrant at worst,
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These days we're told that gender is socially constructed.
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How far back do our categories of masculine and feminine go?
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Well, they go back hundreds and hundreds of millions of years.
00:00:46.480
And they do seem to form part of our fundamental cognitive architecture.
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We tend to see the world in social cognitive categories.
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We tend to see the world as if it's an animated place.
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And the idea that sex is a large part of being animated is an extraordinarily deep biological perceptual category.
00:01:08.600
So it can't be dispensed with in any straightforward manner.
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Dan, the idea that the way that we express ourselves sexually, say, let's call that gender, is malleable,
00:01:27.540
Because human beings are extraordinarily malleable creatures.
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You can tell that just by looking at fashion variation.
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But that doesn't mean that gender differences are all sociocultural constructs.
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In fact, the evidence that they're not, I would say, is crystal clear.
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The political types are about 30 years behind the social science.
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That's why they're desperately turning to legislative means to enforce their idiot view of humanity on the rest of the world.
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That is something I frequently notice about politics and culture, is the pop culture and the politics, they are always lagging several decades behind.
00:02:04.040
So you'll see people espousing some relativistic or nihilistic view of the world.
00:02:09.340
And you say, like, listen, man, I know you think you're sophisticated, but you're actually several decades behind.
00:02:15.100
I want to talk about a dream that you write about in the book.
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You had a dream when writing Maps of Meaning, your first book, that you were hanging from a chandelier in a cathedral with tiny little people below.
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And you woke up in your bed and you still saw cathedral doors.
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Close your eyes again, you're back in the center of the cathedral.
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Or was it the fever dream of an academic who's been thinking too much?
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I mean, it took me a long time to understand what the dream meant, but I eventually did.
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I mean, I knew at that point, or I had figured out as part of the process of interpreting that dream, let's say, that cathedrals were constructed in the shape of a cross.
00:03:01.740
And so to be hanging at the center of the cross, which is essentially where the dream put me, was, well, obviously, you know, that's something that can be read in terms of its fundamental religious significance.
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But that isn't the most appropriate level of analysis, I wouldn't say.
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The reason that cathedrals are constructed in the shape of a cross is because the cross is an X that marks the spot, so to speak.
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And we're each at the center place of being, and that's a place of suffering.
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And so part of the Christian injunction is to voluntarily accept that and to thereby transcend it.
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And the dream was pointing to me, was pointing out the inevitability of that, the fact that I was being driven towards that conclusion.
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You see, I'd been spending years, I would say, by that point, meditating and thinking about the fact of the Cold War and about this terrible ideological catastrophe that we had placed ourselves in the midst of, partly ideological possession, driving our proclivity to put the world at risk.
00:04:11.540
And as an alternative to that, kind of a nihilistic hopelessness that involved no central narratives whatsoever, I suppose that would be the postmodern conundrum.
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And I was trying to see if there was a pathway between those extremes that was functional.
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And the dream was part of that process of realization.
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And the alternative to ideological possession and nihilistic hopelessness is something like the lifting up of individual responsibility as the proper mode of being.
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And that involves voluntary acceptance of suffering.
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You're not going to act responsibly and forthrightly in the world if you're bitter and resentful because of the fact that your life is tragic and that things often go wrong.
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So you have to transcend that and that the dream was part of the process by which I was starting to understand that.
00:05:01.660
I do want to get back a little bit to that X marks the spot later because we see it in the Christian tradition.
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We see traditionally the cross is represented with a skull at the bottom of it because it's Adam's skull and Christ is the new Adam.
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Well, the idea there, that's an unbelievably profound idea.
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The idea there is that the first man, so to speak, the man who's laden with original sin and the knowledge of death is Adam, of course.
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And that Christ, what Christ represents is the antidote to what brought Adam down.
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And so Adam was brought down by knowledge of death and knowledge of good and evil, knowledge of mortality, knowledge of nakedness.
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So that's an emergence into self-consciousness and the emergence of the tragedy of the self-conscious world.
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And then Christ is portrayed as an antidote to that.
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And the antidote is voluntary acceptance of that burden and simultaneous transcendence of it as a consequence of the voluntary adoption.
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And that's put forth in the Christian corpus as the imitation of Christ, which is a theme, of course, that runs through Catholicism and Protestantism and Orthodox Christianity alike.
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I don't think it's something that's attended to enough in the Western Christian traditions, which tend to emphasize our universal salvation through the sacrifice of Christ, which is, well, it has its utility in that it takes some of the moral responsibility off human beings.
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But it has its price, too, because it does the same thing.
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It lessens the importance of what each of us do to some degree.
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You know, there is the, Christ tells us, take up your cross.
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But he also says, my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
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Certain traditions fall a little bit too much to one side or to the other.
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And they don't hold that tension that you see in your dream, that it clearly pervades the book.
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Well, that idea, too, of the burden being light, that's a very interesting one because it's a very great paradox.
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But, you know, one of the things that's quite interesting about attempting to only say things that you believe to be true and then also to acting in a manner commensurate with that is that it does make things lighter.
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Because you're much less likely to be burdened by your past, you know, you're not guilty and afraid that the terrible things that you've done are going to come to light.
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And you're not sleeping uneasily on a bed of nails that's your guilty conscience.
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And so there's a lightness about it and a lightness about accepting things.
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Even though it's a very dark act in some sense to accept things, there's a lightness that comes along with it.
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But it's the lightness of being all in, I would say, something like that.
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And the opposite of that, when one doesn't have that, the culture is so burdened by itself, it begins to hate itself.
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Now also another problem has arisen, which was perhaps less common in our harsher past.
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It is easy to believe that people are arrogant and egotistical and always looking out for themselves.
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The cynicism that makes that opinion a universal truism is widespread and fashionable.
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But such an orientation to the world is not at all characteristic of many people.
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They shoulder intolerable burdens of self-disgust, self-contempt, shame, and self-consciousness.
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Well, I think that paragraph does lay out a lot of it.
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But we've added additional sources of guilt to that that are, I think, part of the modern, what would you call,
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manifestation of the idea that human beings have original sin and are fallen creatures.
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Like, we blame ourselves en masse for the depredations that the planet suffers at our hands.
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And let's say, without any commensurate sympathy for ourselves.
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You know, we're going to hit 9 billion by midway through this century.
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And then it looks like things will probably level out.
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And we're putting a very heavy load on planetary resources, let's say, and out-competing a lot of animals.
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And, well, you know the whole environmental catastrophe story.
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But, you know, mostly what we're trying to do is to survive and survive with a relative minimum of excess misery.
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And we're trying to do that the best way we can see fit.
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It's only been since the 1960s that we've started to recognize ourselves as a force of planetary significance.
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You know, a hundred years ago, we believed the oceans were inexhaustible.
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That was a conclusion that was drawn by a commission that was set up by the British Parliament.
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And so it's only been, not even in my lifetime.
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You know, I'm older than the idea that we are a planetary shaping force.
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But we carry terrible guilt about the price we have to pay for existence, you know.
00:10:06.840
And you hear people say things like, well, the planet would be better off without us, which is like an absolutely horrifying thing to say.
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But I can understand why people say it, even though I think it's a dreadful thing to say.
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Like, we're fighting against mortality itself and all the suffering that goes along with that.
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It's not surprising that we don't do it perfectly.
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And so if you add that existential load as the member of a species, say, with the kind of power we have,
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to the knowledge that each person has of their own inadequacy and failings,
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then, you know, we carry a heavy existential burden.
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It was something that was very well developed by the existential psychologists of the 1950s.
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And people feel guilty and ashamed about being, just about being human.
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And then they don't treat themselves very well.
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It isn't even anti-American or anti-Western or this.
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And you quote the Columbine shooter in the book who wrote,
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And one aspect I really enjoy about this book is the constant weaving together of different disciplines,
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Everybody and her mother is on depression drugs these days.
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And yet I suspect a great deal of apparently psychological problems are really essentially philosophical problems.
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This pervasive cultural nihilism that robs people of meaning, of a sense of meaning.
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What portion of our social malaise do you think is philosophical?
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Like I think the culture war that we're in is essentially a theological war.
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It's a war on the very idea of the transcendent individual.
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And some of that can be conceptualized psychologically.
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But that's not the deepest possible level of conceptualization.
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I mean, our culture is predicated on the idea that each human being,
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this is the source of the idea of natural right, let's say, or of individual sovereignty.
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There's an idea that each person is touched by divinity, let's say, and is made in an image of God.
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That actually means something in the context of the story within which it's to be interpreted.
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So the word of God, which was active at the beginning of time in the Judeo-Christian account of creation,
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used truthful language to extract habitable order from chaos.
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I don't think we've ever formulated a more accurate representation of the nature of human consciousness
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We confront an infinite landscape of potential.
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And we choose how we're going to make it manifest itself in concrete reality.
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Like that is really what our consciousness seems to do.
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And our legal systems are predicated on the idea that that capacity should be given all due respect, right,
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as the generator and recreator of culture itself.
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And the postmodern neo-Marxist types are after that idea, hammer and tongs.
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And so that's why I think it's a theological battle.
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That's why Derrida said, you know, he called Western culture phallogocentric, phallo, P-H-A-L-L-O.
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And he meant male-dominated and logo-centered, which is, well, it's certainly logo-centered.
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Are you going to criticize the idea of the sovereign individual?
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And that's certainly what the postmodern types do.
00:14:01.640
Didn't he say there's nothing outside of the text or it's all everything is relative,
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Yeah, well, he disputed whether or not he really said that.
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And I think it's a pretty accurate summation of the postmodern ethos.
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They're skeptical of meta-narratives, of transcendent narratives.
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Well, that's all well and good, except that, like, if you and I make an agreement so that
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we can live together peacefully and cooperate and compete over the long run,
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it's because we've established a narrative that transcends both our individual identities.
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And if we're going to live together as a culture, that means that despite our individual
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and cultural differences, let's say, and let's say we can maintain as many of them as
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possible, we need to subordinate ourselves to a transcendent narrative that actually constitutes
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the framework for peace and cooperation and for civilized competition.
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There's no let's dispense with the meta-narrative.
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It's like that means let's dispense with that which unites us.
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And then we're going to fight because human beings tend to fragment towards their tribes
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And that's what I see happening both on the left.
00:15:12.780
The left is pushing it, I would say, with everything they've got.
00:15:25.260
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I love this central theme of the book of culture as a natural fact of the world
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because in our highly scientific age, many people seem to think or take it as a given
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that we just perceive the bare world, the valueless facts of the world without any meaning,
00:16:46.480
and then we ascribe later meaning to those things.
00:16:49.320
You write in the book, quote, there is little more natural than culture that we perceive.
00:16:57.100
Well, my question on this is, what does that say about how we should live?
00:17:01.300
Well, one of the things it says is that you can't exist outside of a framework of value.
00:17:13.660
I outline this in quite a bit of detail in chapter 10, which is called, rule 10,
00:17:20.100
is that the way the world manifests itself to you is integrally tied to your value structure.
00:17:26.820
And that's because, to put it very simply, is that your very vision is dependent on an aim.
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Like whenever you look at the world, you're aiming at something.
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You can't focus on something without aiming at it, and you won't aim at it without valuing it.
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So your very perceptions are dependent on your value structure.
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It means that it does mean that experience is a complex interplay of your value structure
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And then that begs the question, which is, well, if you have to have a value structure,
00:18:02.700
Well, and then that brings us back to the ideas that we were talking about earlier.
00:18:09.880
You should take on the responsibility of being as your highest ethical obligation
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Try to make the most out of yourself in a way that's beneficial to you and your family
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You should aim high, and your perceptions will reconfigure themselves around those aims,
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and that will allow the world to manifest itself to you in the most positive possible
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manner, or at least in the most meaningful possible manner.
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And in the absence of that, all you have is stupid suffering.
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That is the anxiety and depression that we talked about earlier.
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Without a point, without value, without an aim, all you're left with is the misery and
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I love even to bring up the notion of the aim, because one can react to this stupid suffering
00:19:03.420
You write in it, you say, you cannot aim yourself at anything if you are completely
00:19:12.500
You won't fly straight, even if you do get your aim right.
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And then you will conclude there is nothing to aim for, and then you will be lost.
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And these days, the prevailing moral framework, as I see it, is if it feels good, do it.
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How is it that discipline and the straight and narrow offer the best chance for a good
00:19:30.060
And how is it that we have forgotten that is the case?
00:19:33.820
Well, the reason that discipline is necessary is because you're a mass of competing short-term
00:19:43.800
And so the question is then, well, which short-term interests should win out?
00:19:50.760
They need to be organized into a hierarchy that makes them functional across time and across
00:19:58.360
So like a two-year-old is very likely to act out his or her proximal impulse.
00:20:04.720
But of course, a two-year-old can't survive in the world.
00:20:08.180
You have to bring your primary instincts, let's say, under the regulatory structure of a higher
00:20:15.480
order value system that allows them to manifest themselves without undue mutual sacrifice across
00:20:23.600
large spans of time in the presence of large numbers of other people.
00:20:30.680
It's like we already talked about the fact that a meta-narrative is necessary to unite
00:20:35.040
subcultures, say, so that they can operate peacefully and harmoniously within the same
00:20:39.940
The same thing applies within you because you're an internal coalition of warring, single-minded
00:20:47.380
And they have to all be brought under the organizational structure of long-term collective vision,
00:20:54.420
And in order to do that, you have to be disciplined.
00:20:57.580
And any discipline, technically speaking, is an attempt to bring all those competing short-term
00:21:05.520
impulses under a larger scale and more inclusive framework.
00:21:10.020
And so you do that and then, well, that's actually what gives you freedom.
00:21:15.640
Being impulsive and being free aren't the same things because if you're impulsive, you're
00:21:24.000
That's just, that's the same freedom, so to speak, literally, that a two-year-old has because
00:21:32.100
So it's not, it's a completely, that doesn't function in this sophisticated world.
00:21:48.020
Well, we like to pretend all the time because that's why we go out and drink, you know,
00:21:52.120
because drinking enables you to blind yourself to the long-term consequences of your actions.
00:21:56.760
And there's no doubt that that's very, very rewarding in the short term.
00:22:02.180
But it's also why you wake up the next morning hungover and ashamed.
00:22:07.060
I must tell you, Dr. Peterson, we celebrated St. Patrick's Day and my birthday on this Saturday.
00:22:12.740
And I can attest with real-world experience to your theoretical notions.
00:22:17.620
I have one last question that I want to ask you.
00:22:20.760
You call for people to consider meaning as the higher good.
00:22:25.460
You write, consider then that the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering is a good.
00:22:31.540
Later in the book, you call Satan and our image of hell a dreamlike fantasy.
00:22:37.580
Later still, you say that hell is metaphysically true.
00:22:40.480
In the final chapters, you write a very moving, what seems to be series of prayers to, quote,
00:22:47.280
the source of all revelatory thought in a discussion with God.
00:22:54.080
I'm not asking about metaphor or symbol and symbolized or signifier and signified.
00:23:06.780
But if you had to pick one, I don't mean to be glib about it.
00:23:09.940
Well, no, I don't think you can do that in a discussion like this because you're talking
00:23:15.340
about matters where the distinction between those things actually starts to blur.
00:23:20.220
No, because there's a reality, for example, there's a reality to fantasy that we don't
00:23:31.480
And so, I mean, let's see if I can come up with a bitters.
00:23:40.840
I can't come up with an answer to that that's so blunt because, look, one of the things I
00:23:46.280
mentioned while we were having this discussion was that our legal system is predicated on the
00:23:50.280
idea that each individual is made in the image of God and that there's actually a reason for
00:23:54.760
that, that it's tied into the Judeo-Christian narrative.
00:23:57.280
And the narrative suggests that the way that you bring habitable order, the habitable order
00:24:03.280
that is good into being, so that's what happens in Genesis at the beginning of time, is by
00:24:09.060
using truthful speech and that there's something divine about that.
00:24:12.840
It's like, as far as I'm concerned, that's a fantasy, but it's also factually true.
00:24:17.060
It's a place where the metaphor and the literal unite.
00:24:20.620
But is there a distinction to be made here between metaphor, metaphysical reality, and some
00:24:26.600
sort of fantasy, you know, in the sense that a unicorn would be a fantasy?
00:24:33.020
I don't think a unicorn has metaphorical truth and metaphysical reality, but...
00:24:41.920
Oh, I think there are some forms of fantasy that don't have their literal counterpart, let's say.
00:24:47.620
They don't have their real counterpart, but there are some places where fantasy and reality meet,
00:24:52.260
and we don't understand those places very well.
00:24:57.300
I think part of the reason that I have a hard time answering questions like that is because
00:25:03.700
I actually don't know how to answer the question.
00:25:06.220
Like, I see, because it is the case, as far as I can tell, that the central presumption of our
00:25:11.960
functional legal system is that each person has within them a spark of divinity,
00:25:15.960
and that that spark of divinity manifests itself in the bringing into being of the present from
00:25:26.000
Like, is that the sort of truth that we would call a fact?
00:25:30.460
Well, possibly, but it's not the sort of fact that you discover that it doesn't sit easily
00:25:37.580
in the category of facts that scientists have produced.
00:25:42.320
So, let's say you observe a bunch of people acting a particular way, and then you say,
00:25:48.040
well, here's the rule that describes their action.
00:25:58.180
Well, it represents a reality of sorts, but it isn't the same sort of reality that's represented
00:26:11.260
If people treat one another as if they're touched by divinity, their personal lives improve,
00:26:18.620
their familial lives improve, their social structures stabilize, they produce functional
00:26:29.340
Well, possibly, but it doesn't make the proposition a fact in the same way that scientific investigation
00:26:38.880
I ask the question in this way because I think you write with heartbreaking beauty about Christianity,
00:26:44.740
about the metaphysical logos that is made flesh and dwells among us.
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And watching you write about this in the book is hugely edifying.
00:26:54.980
So, we talk about theological issues a lot on the show.
00:26:58.080
I highly recommend that everybody goes out and reads 12 Rules for Life.
00:27:04.480
And also, I press the question that way because my bishop promised me a toaster if I could baptize you.
00:27:10.360
But then we might have to save that for another program.
00:27:13.140
Dr. Peterson, thank you so much for being here.
00:27:17.420
I will finally allow you to go on and move on with, I'm sure, your very busy rest of your day.
00:27:22.920
Well, thank you very much for the interview and for the conversation.