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.
00:02:17.380and to engage in the kind of debate that raises the resolution of the question and answer at hand.
00:02:24.440And that's necessary because the environment is shifting underneath you all the time.
00:02:29.120And so what was right yesterday, what was correct yesterday, isn't necessarily correct today.
00:02:33.540And so you have to continually engage in negotiation and discussion to stay in the middle, let's say, in the correct place.
00:02:42.440Yeah, not to formalize too much, not to abridge too much.
00:02:45.340And you bring up there are ideologies on the right.
00:02:48.840We, you know, we see them, they change, some pop up, some fall out of fashion.
00:02:52.660But there has been a question for a long time that conservatives have debated.
00:02:57.240Can a real conservative be an ideologue or should conservatives ground their view of the world in something more substantive than an ideology?
00:03:10.540Well, I think genuine thinkers should ground their worldview in something more substantive than an ideology.
00:03:15.940And 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,
00:03:25.020to the underlying psychological substructures that the psychologist, psychiatrist Carl Jung described as archetypal.
00:03:31.940And so you could think of these archetypal substructures as the grand stories by which people conduct their lives.
00:03:40.680And they're structured in a very particular way.
00:04:21.400And so nature can be a vicious, brutal force.
00:04:23.880And everyone who's alive and thinks knows that.
00:04:26.220But 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.
00:04:36.620Well, and that's an interesting one to bring up because we'll return to that.
00:04:40.680We'll return to that because there's a counter narrative to that.
00:04:43.340So nature has its positive and negative element.
00:04:46.300It's often represented with feminine symbols, by the way, mother nature, let's say.
00:04:50.660And then culture has the same structure.
00:04:53.040There's like the tyrannical king and the benevolent king.
00:04:55.780And 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.
00:05:03.860And 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.
00:05:14.640And, again, a story that doesn't involve both of those forces is incomplete, even though they're contradictory.
00:05:21.680And then on top of that is the individual.
00:05:24.940And in an archetypal story, the individual has a heroic element and an adversarial element.
00:05:29.980And so in Christianity, that's represented by the, say, eternal conflict between Christ and Satan, if you're thinking about it psychologically.
00:05:36.520It's reflected in the story of Cain and Abel as well and in typical hostile brother stories, very common narrative tropes.
00:05:43.560And so a comprehensive view of the world offers a representation of all of those elements.
00:05:50.460Whereas an ideology, what an ideology does is slice that representation into a partial formulation.
00:05:56.480So, for example, when feminists talk about the patriarchy, they essentially assume that the social world is only a negative force.
00:06:20.740And, 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.
00:06:36.980And those may not be mutually exclusive.
00:06:39.460You may be ideologically possessed and ignorant.
00:06:42.400Well, and you said go West, young man.
00:06:49.360So the frontier narrative is untamed nature, positive culture, positive individual.
00:06:57.280So it's the heroic individual spreading the benefits of benevolent culture into the wild, untamed wilderness.
00:07:04.380Okay, 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.
00:07:13.400But the counter narrative emerged to that.
00:07:15.760Let's say that was the narrative that settled the United States.
00:07:18.140Okay, but the counter narrative emerged, and that's the environmental narrative.
00:07:22.420The environmental narrative is benevolent nature, toxic culture, adversarial individual.
00:07:29.500So 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.
00:07:39.880And 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.
00:07:50.240There was the major ideology of the left that crumbled before our eyes.
00:07:53.920And now this new ideology of environmentalism seems to have largely taken its position of prominence.
00:08:02.000Well, see, okay, so that's an interesting observation.
00:08:06.620And I think it's actually one of the things that really pollutes the argument about environmental sustainability.
00:08:12.800You know, like, obviously, exploiting the planet, let's say, in a way that produces unsustainable externalized costs is a bad idea, clearly.
00:08:24.780Now, the time frame matters, but it's clearly a bad idea.
00:08:27.620The 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.
00:08:39.540And 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.
00:09:07.340And, you know, the conservatives, part of the conservative ethos is try not to do anything too stupid.
00:09:14.780Whereas you could say that the liberal ethos is try actively to improve things, you know.
00:09:20.620And that's great if you're optimistic.
00:09:22.360And act as stupidly as you may, yeah, in order to do it.
00:09:25.640Well, 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.
00:09:38.340Right, and so an informed conservative says something like, well, yeah, there's a problem there.
00:09:45.880But 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.
00:09:54.160You 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.
00:10:01.560Because 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.
00:10:11.940But 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.
00:10:28.940And 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.
00:10:44.620Of course, and I love that you've brought up this term traditionalism.
00:10:47.380I 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.
00:11:00.840And 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.
00:11:21.200Well, 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.
00:11:33.960The 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.
00:11:43.980Right, 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.
00:11:57.560One 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.
00:12:13.520It's actually one of the most amazing prescient predictions that I've ever encountered.
00:12:20.160You, 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.
00:12:35.640You 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.
00:12:42.560Oh, well, if you aren't yet a Catholic, can I be your godfather eventually when you do?
00:12:46.660Well, 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?
00:13:08.060But 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.
00:13:18.440But, 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.
00:13:32.720I'm not denying their existence or making a case for their existence in my public presentations.
00:13:38.920But 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.
00:14:06.840We may appeal to heaven, as General Washington once put on a flag.
00:14:10.980So, 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?
00:14:25.780And state and static are obviously the same word.
00:14:28.240And 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.
00:14:40.980So, 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.
00:14:55.380Because, 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.
00:15:07.580I mean, to describe them as hellish is an understatement, I would say.
00:15:13.620It's a world of lies that wreaks havoc in hell.
00:15:16.820Well, 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,
00:15:31.580so to lie by commission and omission, and the emergence of these totalitarian states.
00:15:36.000So, what they essentially make isn't an economic case or a political case.
00:15:40.040They make a psychological and ethical case, and that's especially well documented.
00:15:45.140Well, Viktor Frankl does a pretty good job of that in Man's Search for Meaning, and Vaclav Havel made the same sort of connection.
00:15:51.940So did Gandhi, but I think it's been best laid out, well, partly by Tolstoy, who was a huge influence on Gandhi,
00:15:59.260but most particularly, I would say, by Solzhenitsyn in his documentations of the Gulag Archipelago.
00:16:04.280Like, his entire 1700-page case is that the reason that the totalitarian state got the upper hand in the Soviet Union was fundamentally because
00:16:14.280too many citizens decided that it was in their best short-term interest to lie about everything, including their own suffering.
00:17:17.520See, I mean, one of the things that Solzhenitsyn documents in the Gulag Archipelago is his realization that he was his own tyrant.
00:17:23.820You 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.
00:17:33.400And that's, you know, to memorize a 1700-page book is really something that is inconceivable, especially a book like that.
00:17:41.500And 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.
00:17:53.960And, 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.
00:18:10.320He 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.
00:18:28.420Because 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.
00:18:40.320Hell is a prison where all the prison guards are prisoners.
00:18:43.920That's precisely right, which actually, I suppose, is the Christian definition of hell, certainly Milton's definition of hell.
00:18:51.400This 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?
00:19:13.900Well, you don't have to, but you have to suffer the consequences.
00:19:19.620Well, that's the thing, is that, you know, it's—in many situations in life, you get to pick your poison, right?
00:19:28.760And 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.
00:19:38.600Because life, whatever life is, it's not simple and happy.
00:19:41.280It's certainly not those things, right?
00:19:43.160No, 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.
00:19:56.380And, like, I don't even really think about these things as ethical commandments in some sense.
00:20:00.760And 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.
00:20:09.140Right. 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.
00:20:18.980Like, you know, toddlers learn very rapidly not to stand up underneath tables when they're first learning to walk.
00:20:24.820Don't touch the burner on the stove, right?
00:20:26.640Exactly. And the table is always hard, and the burner always burns.
00:20:31.780And so you can learn to avoid those things, because they're, you know, they're cut and dried. They're walls.
00:20:35.760Yes. But, no, unfortunately, I've lost my train of thought.
00:20:40.500That's fine. When I imagine the suffering of every time I push the burner, that also makes me lose it as well.
00:21:10.660The arrogant part is, on my terms, and I'll get away with it.
00:21:13.800And 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.
00:21:30.220Like, 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.
00:21:41.760It always comes back to haunt them in one form or another, and they may not realize or understand the causal connections.
00:21:48.080Sometimes 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.
00:21:55.740You 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.
00:22:04.160And, I mean, if you want to make a case for being a victim, that's a good case, man.
00:22:10.700But instead, he decided that he was going to take the responsibility on himself.
00:22:15.080And become one of the greatest men of the century, right?
00:22:18.100Well, 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.
00:22:28.120But from an articulated and verbal perspective, an intellectual perspective, nothing topped the Gulag Archipelago.
00:22:35.960It took the substructure out from underneath any moral claim that communism had.
00:22:43.280I do, I know I said that was the last question, but I actually have one more.
00:22:45.580Do 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?
00:23:08.740How can they pull themselves out of the mire and wash all that blood off of us that Nietzsche said we'd never get off?
00:23:15.580Well, 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.
00:23:27.060I 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.
00:23:41.420Because if you pay attention, Nietzsche said, who among us has never sacrificed himself for the sake of his good name?
00:23:49.520And 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.
00:24:32.160Realized quite, I guess, probably in the 50s or the 40s, and that there was an embodied sense.
00:24:37.180And in some sense, that would be equivalent to the voice of conscience.
00:24:40.440And so, you know when you're betraying yourself.
00:24:42.560You know when you're weakening yourself.
00:24:44.220And if you start to pay attention to that, you can learn to stop doing that.
00:24:49.560It'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.
00:25:01.140And he talked about the thing that differentiated him from other people.
00:25:05.540And he said, well, he had this internal voice, which he called a daemon, which obviously is related to the word demon.
00:25:30.900And 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.
00:25:40.720So, they warned him long ahead that he was going to be tried and found guilty, essentially.
00:25:58.960And he thought, well, he was getting very old.
00:26:01.140And maybe the gods had granted him the opportunity to step out of life gracefully and put his affairs in order and so on.
00:26:08.800You 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.
00:26:15.420I 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.
00:26:26.580But 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.
00:26:34.080So unfortunately, we'll have to end it here.
00:26:37.300Dr. Peterson, thank you so much for coming on.
00:26:40.120This has been a wonderful discussion and I hope that we can have you back.
00:26:44.280Thanks a lot for the invitation and for the discussion.