The Michael Knowles Show - September 18, 2021


Why JORDAN PETERSON Considers Himself a ＂TRADITIONALIST＂

Topics
ideology ideology vs. archetypal narratives suffering
Hosted by
Michael Knowles
Mentioned
Solzhenitsyn Jehovah Carl Jung Peterson Gandhi Michael Oakeshott Viktor Frankl Donald Trump Václav Havel Ben Shapiro Dostoevsky Tolstoy Milton Hitler Stalin
Ep. 845 - 2021 Just Got Even More Ridiculous Ep. 846 - The Invasion You're Not Allowed To See

Episode Stats


Length

27 minutes

Words per minute

165.53

Word count

4,515

Sentence count

309

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

15

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Dr. Larry Peterson joins me to talk about the role of ideology in shaping Western culture. Dr. Peterson is a philosopher and philosopher-in-chief at the University of Southern California, where he is a professor of cognitive psychology and the author of several books. He is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times, and is a regular contributor to Salon.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Dr. Peterson, thank you for joining us.
00:00:09.900 My pleasure. Thanks for the invitation.
00:00:11.900 Absolutely. So I want to dive right into it.
00:00:14.400 I really admire you and I really admire all of your work
00:00:16.980 and I agree with very much of what you say.
00:00:21.720 Let's begin with ideology. 0.96
00:00:24.380 You have said that ideology is a parasite.
00:00:26.800 That's a sentiment with which I thoroughly agree.
00:00:30.560 You've explained the conflict between ideology
00:00:32.840 and traditional strains of thought in the West.
00:00:36.140 I think most people, even on the right, even conservatives,
00:00:38.980 would find that statement startling.
00:00:40.940 What is so bad about ideology?
00:00:43.400 Well, it provides a one-size-fits-all answer to every question
00:00:47.640 and there's a variety of problems with that.
00:00:50.500 I mean, and it's a one-sided, biased, one-size-fits-all answer.
00:00:54.580 The bias depends on your particular ideological stance.
00:00:58.020 In some ways, biases themselves aren't as bad as you might think
00:01:04.380 because they're not that distinguishable from heuristics,
00:01:07.020 which are simplifications that you need to operate in the world.
00:01:09.960 I mean, we can't operate in the world as in considering it in all of its complexity.
00:01:14.920 We have to simplify it.
00:01:16.320 But there's dangers in the simplifications and then there's dangers in a consistently biased simplification.
00:01:23.400 And ideologies are consistently biased simplifications.
00:01:27.000 Now, the right sometimes, you see, part of the reason that the Western democratic systems work
00:01:32.100 is because they allow people who have specified biases to compete in an open market of biases.
00:01:38.840 A liberal exchange of ideas.
00:01:40.200 Exactly, exactly.
00:01:42.060 So, you know, sometimes the right is right.
00:01:45.060 Sometimes the extreme right is right. 0.59
00:01:47.060 Sometimes the left is right, so to speak.
00:01:49.240 And sometimes the extreme left is right.
00:01:51.100 The extremes aren't correct, let's say, very often.
00:01:54.560 Well, certainly not the extreme left.
00:01:56.440 Sorry, go ahead.
00:01:57.400 But there, you know, there are situations that arise where less generally applicable principles may sporadically hold.
00:02:07.500 But anyways, the point is, is that in an open exchange of ideas,
00:02:10.740 you get the opportunity for multiple people to put forward their biased heuristics,
00:02:16.040 their biased oversimplifications,
00:02:17.380 and to engage in the kind of debate that raises the resolution of the question and answer at hand.
00:02:24.440 And that's necessary because the environment is shifting underneath you all the time.
00:02:29.120 And so what was right yesterday, what was correct yesterday, isn't necessarily correct today.
00:02:33.540 And so you have to continually engage in negotiation and discussion to stay in the middle, let's say, in the correct place.
00:02:42.440 Yeah, not to formalize too much, not to abridge too much.
00:02:45.340 And you bring up there are ideologies on the right.
00:02:48.840 We, you know, we see them, they change, some pop up, some fall out of fashion.
00:02:52.660 But there has been a question for a long time that conservatives have debated.
00:02:57.240 Can a real conservative be an ideologue or should conservatives ground their view of the world in something more substantive than an ideology?
00:03:10.540 Well, I think genuine thinkers should ground their worldview in something more substantive than an ideology.
00:03:15.940 And 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,
00:03:25.020 to the underlying psychological substructures that the psychologist, psychiatrist Carl Jung described as archetypal.
00:03:31.940 And so you could think of these archetypal substructures as the grand stories by which people conduct their lives.
00:03:40.680 And they're structured in a very particular way.
00:03:44.380 They're very balanced stories.
00:03:46.620 So, for example, in a typical, properly constructed archetypal narrative, you have a representation of nature or chaos or the unknown.
00:03:57.160 Those are symbolic categories that are quite similar.
00:03:59.620 They sort of represent what exists beyond the safety of the campfire and the town and the city and familiar territory.
00:04:07.880 You could think about it as the archetype of unexplored territory.
00:04:11.260 And it's negative and positive at the same time.
00:04:14.320 It's negative because you better watch your step when you aren't where you think you are because you'll die if you're not careful.
00:04:19.720 Right.
00:04:19.780 And that's the negative element.
00:04:21.400 And so nature can be a vicious, brutal force.
00:04:23.880 And everyone who's alive and thinks knows that.
00:04:26.220 But 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.
00:04:34.180 Go west, young man.
00:04:35.440 Exactly.
00:04:35.960 That's exactly.
00:04:36.620 Well, and that's an interesting one to bring up because we'll return to that.
00:04:40.680 We'll return to that because there's a counter narrative to that.
00:04:43.340 So nature has its positive and negative element.
00:04:46.300 It's often represented with feminine symbols, by the way, mother nature, let's say. 0.87
00:04:50.660 And then culture has the same structure.
00:04:53.040 There's like the tyrannical king and the benevolent king.
00:04:55.780 And 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.
00:05:03.860 And 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.
00:05:14.640 And, again, a story that doesn't involve both of those forces is incomplete, even though they're contradictory.
00:05:21.340 Of course.
00:05:21.680 And then on top of that is the individual.
00:05:24.940 And in an archetypal story, the individual has a heroic element and an adversarial element.
00:05:29.980 And so in Christianity, that's represented by the, say, eternal conflict between Christ and Satan, if you're thinking about it psychologically.
00:05:36.520 It's reflected in the story of Cain and Abel as well and in typical hostile brother stories, very common narrative tropes.
00:05:43.560 And so a comprehensive view of the world offers a representation of all of those elements.
00:05:50.460 Whereas an ideology, what an ideology does is slice that representation into a partial formulation.
00:05:56.480 So, for example, when feminists talk about the patriarchy, they essentially assume that the social world is only a negative force. 1.00
00:06:07.540 It's only tyrannical.
00:06:08.840 Well, it is tyrannical, but it's not only tyrannical, right?
00:06:12.460 And that's a very, very important distinction.
00:06:13.180 Try as I might, we cannot force an only tyrannical patriarchy on them.
00:06:17.640 That's right.
00:06:18.160 That's exactly it.
00:06:19.020 There's too much pushback, right?
00:06:20.740 And, 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, or that you know absolutely nothing whatsoever about history or the current world.
00:06:36.980 And those may not be mutually exclusive. 0.96
00:06:39.460 You may be ideologically possessed and ignorant. 0.98
00:06:42.400 Well, and you said go West, young man. 0.99
00:06:44.320 Okay, so let me unravel that a bit.
00:06:46.620 So that's the frontier narrative.
00:06:49.360 So the frontier narrative is untamed nature, positive culture, positive individual.
00:06:57.280 So it's the heroic individual spreading the benefits of benevolent culture into the wild, untamed wilderness.
00:07:04.380 Okay, 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.
00:07:13.400 But the counter narrative emerged to that.
00:07:15.760 Let's say that was the narrative that settled the United States.
00:07:18.140 Okay, but the counter narrative emerged, and that's the environmental narrative.
00:07:22.420 The environmental narrative is benevolent nature, toxic culture, adversarial individual. 0.61
00:07:29.500 So this essential ideological environmental narrative is terrible human beings that are a cancer on the planet are spreading their toxic patriarchy and raping mother nature.
00:07:39.880 And 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.
00:07:50.240 There was the major ideology of the left that crumbled before our eyes.
00:07:53.920 And now this new ideology of environmentalism seems to have largely taken its position of prominence.
00:08:02.000 Well, see, okay, so that's an interesting observation.
00:08:04.960 No, I don't disagree.
00:08:05.920 I don't disagree.
00:08:06.620 And I think it's actually one of the things that really pollutes the argument about environmental sustainability.
00:08:12.800 You know, like, obviously, exploiting the planet, let's say, in a way that produces unsustainable externalized costs is a bad idea, clearly.
00:08:24.780 Now, the time frame matters, but it's clearly a bad idea.
00:08:27.620 The 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.
00:08:39.540 And 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.
00:08:52.020 That's precisely right. 0.94
00:08:52.980 Yeah, it just pollutes the damn problem, and it's really a bad idea. 0.98
00:08:56.660 Well, because you can make a very strong case for a conservative environmentalism. 0.98
00:09:02.860 A conservationism, sure.
00:09:04.500 Yeah, the word is right there.
00:09:06.280 Well, exactly. 1.00
00:09:07.340 And, you know, the conservatives, part of the conservative ethos is try not to do anything too stupid. 0.90
00:09:14.780 Whereas you could say that the liberal ethos is try actively to improve things, you know. 0.93
00:09:20.620 And that's great if you're optimistic. 0.99
00:09:22.360 And act as stupidly as you may, yeah, in order to do it. 0.98
00:09:25.640 Well, the problem is, 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. 0.99
00:09:38.340 Right, and so an informed conservative says something like, well, yeah, there's a problem there.
00:09:45.880 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.
00:09:53.380 Right, right.
00:09:54.160 You know, and for me, like, I'm kind of temperamentally predisposed to be more on the liberal left end of things from a personality perspective.
00:10:01.560 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.
00:10:11.940 But 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.
00:10:28.940 And 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.
00:10:44.620 Of course, and I love that you've brought up this term traditionalism.
00:10:47.380 I 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.
00:11:00.840 And 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.
00:11:12.880 Where are we now?
00:11:13.880 Are we in a post-ideological age?
00:11:15.840 Is God striking back against Nietzsche and his followers?
00:11:20.740 Well, that's a good question.
00:11:21.200 Well, 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.
00:11:29.700 Of course, yeah.
00:11:31.000 People misunderstand that a lot.
00:11:33.100 Oh, definitely.
00:11:33.960 The 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.
00:11:43.400 Right, right.
00:11:43.980 Right, and that was associated with thoughts he had at the same time, that the consequence of the death of this traditional value structure, the idea of a transcendent moral structure and ultimate moral responsibility would be replaced by two things.
00:11:57.560 One 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.
00:12:10.920 Of course.
00:12:11.680 So, I mean, he had that nailed.
00:12:13.520 It's actually one of the most amazing prescient predictions that I've ever encountered.
00:12:20.160 You, 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.
00:12:35.640 You sound an awful lot like a Catholic, and I wanted to know if you had any thoughts about that description, and if you are not yet a Catholic.
00:12:42.040 Well, it's hard to tell, you know.
00:12:42.560 Oh, well, if you aren't yet a Catholic, can I be your godfather eventually when you do?
00:12:46.660 Well, 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?
00:13:02.360 Jehovah's Witness.
00:13:03.640 Jehovah's Witness, was it?
00:13:04.540 I can't remember.
00:13:05.360 No, it wasn't Jehovah's Witnesses.
00:13:07.300 I don't remember.
00:13:07.620 Scientologist.
00:13:08.060 But I mean, it's been funny, it'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.
00:13:18.440 But, 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.
00:13:32.720 I'm not denying their existence or making a case for their existence in my public presentations.
00:13:38.920 But 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.
00:13:56.200 And that's an amazing proposition.
00:13:59.000 I think that's the central Western proposition, is that the state itself has no final dominion over the individual.
00:14:06.260 Certainly right.
00:14:06.840 We may appeal to heaven, as General Washington once put on a flag.
00:14:10.980 So, 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?
00:14:25.780 And state and static are obviously the same word.
00:14:28.240 And 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.
00:14:40.980 So, 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.
00:14:55.380 Because, 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.
00:15:07.580 I mean, to describe them as hellish is an understatement, I would say.
00:15:11.960 Yeah, it's a world of lies.
00:15:13.620 It's a world of lies that wreaks havoc in hell.
00:15:16.820 Well, 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,
00:15:31.580 so to lie by commission and omission, and the emergence of these totalitarian states.
00:15:36.000 So, what they essentially make isn't an economic case or a political case.
00:15:40.040 They make a psychological and ethical case, and that's especially well documented.
00:15:45.140 Well, Viktor Frankl does a pretty good job of that in Man's Search for Meaning, and Vaclav Havel made the same sort of connection.
00:15:51.940 So did Gandhi, but I think it's been best laid out, well, partly by Tolstoy, who was a huge influence on Gandhi,
00:15:59.260 but most particularly, I would say, by Solzhenitsyn in his documentations of the Gulag Archipelago.
00:16:04.280 Like, his entire 1700-page case is that the reason that the totalitarian state got the upper hand in the Soviet Union was fundamentally because
00:16:14.280 too many citizens decided that it was in their best short-term interest to lie about everything, including their own suffering.
00:16:22.060 To lie to themselves.
00:16:23.600 I think you put it one way, I may have read this from you or from someone else, that to the utopian, suffering is heresy.
00:16:32.100 The acknowledgement of suffering is heresy.
00:16:34.280 I know.
00:16:35.080 Well, that's a really great definition of hell.
00:16:37.320 Hell is the place where you're in pain and you're punished for admitting it.
00:16:41.920 You can't even admit it to yourself.
00:16:44.120 Of course.
00:16:44.780 And we have all these discussions about which pronouns we should use, which bathrooms people can use,
00:16:51.200 and they seem to be really highly politicized for precisely this purpose.
00:16:56.820 They say, it's trivial.
00:16:58.180 It's just a little lie that we're telling each other.
00:17:00.840 What's the big deal?
00:17:01.740 But that is the big deal.
00:17:04.080 When we live in enough lies, when we lie even about our own suffering, you end up in a totalitarian state.
00:17:10.060 Well, and you're the totalitarian.
00:17:14.400 And you are, yeah, that's precisely right. 0.96
00:17:15.920 You are the oppressor.
00:17:17.200 Right.
00:17:17.520 See, I mean, one of the things that Solzhenitsyn documents in the Gulag Archipelago is his realization that he was his own tyrant. 0.53
00:17:23.820 You 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.
00:17:33.400 And that's, you know, to memorize a 1700-page book is really something that is inconceivable, especially a book like that.
00:17:41.500 And 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.
00:17:53.960 And, 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.
00:18:10.320 He 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.
00:18:28.420 Because 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. 0.70
00:18:40.320 Hell is a prison where all the prison guards are prisoners.
00:18:43.920 That's precisely right, which actually, I suppose, is the Christian definition of hell, certainly Milton's definition of hell. 0.85
00:18:51.400 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.
00:19:06.820 —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?
00:19:13.900 Well, you don't have to, but you have to suffer the consequences.
00:19:17.640 That's not a great alternative.
00:19:19.620 Well, that's the thing, is that, you know, it's—in many situations in life, you get to pick your poison, right?
00:19:28.760 And 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.
00:19:38.600 Because life, whatever life is, it's not simple and happy.
00:19:41.280 It's certainly not those things, right?
00:19:43.160 No, it's complex and tragic, and 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.
00:19:56.380 And, like, I don't even really think about these things as ethical commandments in some sense.
00:20:00.760 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.
00:20:09.140 Right. So, 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.
00:20:18.980 Like, you know, toddlers learn very rapidly not to stand up underneath tables when they're first learning to walk.
00:20:24.820 Don't touch the burner on the stove, right?
00:20:26.640 Exactly. And the table is always hard, and the burner always burns.
00:20:31.780 And so you can learn to avoid those things, because they're, you know, they're cut and dried. They're walls.
00:20:35.760 Yes. But, no, unfortunately, I've lost my train of thought.
00:20:40.500 That's fine. When I imagine the suffering of every time I push the burner, that also makes me lose it as well.
00:20:46.280 I would like to take the...
00:20:47.420 Oh, yes. Yes.
00:20:47.740 Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead.
00:20:48.680 Yes, okay. Well, the thing is, is that those elements of suffering are built into the structure of the world.
00:20:54.700 The structure of the world is real.
00:20:55.960 And the problem with lying is that you replace accurate perception of the structure of the world with a wish, an arrogant wish.
00:21:05.200 Like, the wish is that you could have things the way that you want them.
00:21:08.300 On my terms.
00:21:09.760 That's exactly it.
00:21:10.660 The arrogant part is, on my terms, and I'll get away with it.
00:21:13.800 And 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, which is, I suppose, in some sense, a definition of God in a perverse way, is it's zero.
00:21:30.000 Right.
00:21:30.220 Like, 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.
00:21:41.760 It always comes back to haunt them in one form or another, and they may not realize or understand the causal connections.
00:21:48.080 Sometimes that's what psychotherapy is about, but the causal connections are there, and that's the sort of thing that Solzhenitsyn detailed in the Gulag Archipelago.
00:21:55.740 You 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.
00:22:04.160 And, I mean, if you want to make a case for being a victim, that's a good case, man.
00:22:07.300 He had a rough go of it.
00:22:09.140 That's for sure.
00:22:10.080 Right.
00:22:10.700 But instead, he decided that he was going to take the responsibility on himself.
00:22:15.080 And become one of the greatest men of the century, right?
00:22:18.100 Well, 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.
00:22:28.120 But from an articulated and verbal perspective, an intellectual perspective, nothing topped the Gulag Archipelago. 0.87
00:22:35.960 It took the substructure out from underneath any moral claim that communism had.
00:22:41.400 Just a glimpse of reality, does it?
00:22:43.280 I do, I know I said that was the last question, but I actually have one more.
00:22:45.580 Do you, this is a very practical question, for 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?
00:23:03.460 Is it go worship God?
00:23:04.860 Is it read the Bible?
00:23:05.900 Is it accept the tragic fact of life?
00:23:08.740 How can they pull themselves out of the mire and wash all that blood off of us that Nietzsche said we'd never get off?
00:23:15.580 Well, 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.
00:23:27.060 I would say that the best advice that I might give to people is that they try to stop saying things that make them weak, which is a variant of trying to learn not to lie.
00:23:41.420 Because if you pay attention, Nietzsche said, who among us has never sacrificed himself for the sake of his good name?
00:23:49.520 And 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.
00:24:01.740 Mm-hmm.
00:24:32.160 Realized quite, I guess, probably in the 50s or the 40s, and that there was an embodied sense.
00:24:37.180 And in some sense, that would be equivalent to the voice of conscience.
00:24:40.440 And so, you know when you're betraying yourself.
00:24:42.560 You know when you're weakening yourself.
00:24:44.220 And if you start to pay attention to that, you can learn to stop doing that.
00:24:49.560 It'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.
00:25:01.140 And he talked about the thing that differentiated him from other people.
00:25:05.540 And he said, well, he had this internal voice, which he called a daemon, which obviously is related to the word demon.
00:25:12.240 Right.
00:25:12.480 But it wasn't that.
00:25:13.000 It's an internal spirit, an internal voice.
00:25:15.020 And he always listened to it.
00:25:17.340 And it never told him what to do.
00:25:19.740 But it told him what not to do.
00:25:21.900 Mm-hmm.
00:25:22.360 And so, if the internal voice objected to something he was doing or saying, he would stop.
00:25:27.680 He would stop doing it.
00:25:28.920 He would stop doing it.
00:25:29.860 He'd reformulate it.
00:25:30.900 And 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.
00:25:40.720 So, they warned him long ahead that he was going to be tried and found guilty, essentially.
00:25:45.540 And his friends told him to leave.
00:25:47.620 And he went and consulted his daemon.
00:25:49.960 And it said, no, don't leave.
00:25:52.360 And he thought, like, well, what the hell?
00:25:55.460 What do I do now?
00:25:56.720 Yeah, exactly.
00:25:57.880 And then he thought it through.
00:25:58.960 And he thought, well, he was getting very old.
00:26:01.140 And maybe the gods had granted him the opportunity to step out of life gracefully and put his affairs in order and so on.
00:26:08.800 You know, I mean, you can think about it as a rationalization, but it was Socrates that we're talking about, so I wouldn't do that too quickly.
00:26:15.080 Of course.
00:26:15.420 I must say, my internal voice is telling me not to end this interview for several more hours because it is just so illuminating and I could talk to you all day long.
00:26:26.580 But unfortunately, the voice of Ben Shapiro in the next room saying that we need to close off the show is the one that writes my check.
00:26:34.080 So unfortunately, we'll have to end it here.
00:26:37.300 Dr. Peterson, thank you so much for coming on.
00:26:40.120 This has been a wonderful discussion and I hope that we can have you back.
00:26:44.280 Thanks a lot for the invitation and for the discussion.
00:26:46.560 Thank you.