#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
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You have given a set of lectures on nature as part of the new Petersen academy, and the lectures were powerful. There are some element of the contradictions, the tensions, the draw of the way you like log in and an idea. But they are struggling with that idea. All of that that feels like it's it's initial yeah well.

here's a big influence on me stylistically and like in terms of the way I approached writing and also many of the people that were other influencing of mine were very influenced by him. So I was blown away when I first came across these ratings. They're so they're so intellectual dense that I don't know if there's anything that approximates that dust.

Sk, maybe although he's much more wordy niche is very success CT party because he was so L A because he would think all day he couldn't spend a lot of time writing, and he condenses writing into very short while. This authorised s sti had an it's, it's really something to strive foreign. And then he's also an exciting writer like dos si, and and dynamic and and romantic and that emotional way.

And so it's really something, and I really enjoy doing that. I did that lecture that you describe. That lecture series is on the first half of beyond good evil, which is a stunning book. And that was really fun to take pieces of IT and into described what they mean and how we've echoed across the decade since he wrote them on yeah, it's been great .

taking each sentence seriously and deconstructing IT and really struggling with this. I think underpinning that approach to writing requires deep respect for the person. I think if we approach riding with that kind of respect, you can take all well, you can take a lot of writers and really dig in on singular sounds.

yeah, those are the great writers, because the greatest writer ers, virtually everything they wrote is worth attending to. no. And and I think niche is in some ways, the ultimate examples of that. Because often when I read a book, a mark, one way another, I often fold the corner of the page over to indicate something that i've found that's worth remembering.

I couldn't do that with a book like beyond god evil, because every page ons are marked and and that's in mark contrast, so to speak, to many of the books I read now where it's it's quite frequently now that you'll read a book and there won't be an idea that I haven't come across before. And with a thinker like nature, that's just not the case at the sentence level. And I don't think there's anyone that I know of who did that to a greater extent and he did.

So there's other people who whose thought is of equivalent value. I i've returned recently and i'm going to do a course on to the work of this romanian history of religions, murch ellida, who's not nearly as well known as he should be, and whose work, by the way, is a real antidote to the postmodern nyalong tic. Markus stream of literary interpretation at the universities as a whole have adopted, and illiad is like that too.

I I was, I used this book called the sacred in the proofe quite extensively in a book that i'm releasing in mid november. We who rested with god, and it's of the same sort. It's endlessly analyzable.

I had to walk through the whole history of religious ideas, and he had the intellect that enabled him to do that. And everything route is dream, dream, like in its density. So every sentence or paragraph is evocative in an image rich manner.

And that also, what would you say, deepens s and broaden the scope that's part of often what is wishes writing that has a literary and from writing that's more merely technical like the literary writings have this image stic and dream like reference space around them and IT takes a IT takes a long time to turn a complex image to something semantic. And so if you're writing evokes deep imaging, IT has a depth that can be captured merely words. And the great romantic poetic philosophers nature is a very good example, dusty, if keys, a good example.

So it's much early at a, they have that quality and it's good way of thinking about IT. It's kind of interesting from the perspective of technical analysis of intelligence. There's a good book called the user illusion, which is the best book on consciousness that I have ever read.

IT explains the manner in which our communication is understandable in this manner. So imagine that when you're communicate doing something, you're trying to change the way that your target audience perceives and acts in the world. That's an embodied issue. And but you're using words which aren't when obviously aren't equivalent to the actions themselves.

Imagine that the words are surrounded by a cloud of images that they evoke and that the images can be translated into actions ah and and the greatest writing uses words in a manner that evokes images that profoundly affects perception and action and that's the so I would take the matter which I act and behave. I would translate that into a set of images. My dreams do that for me, for example.

Then I impress them into words. I tossed you the words. You decompose them, decompress them into the images and then into actions. And that's what happens in a meaningful conversation. It's a very good way of understanding how we communicate .

linguistically. So of the word spring to the visual full visual complexity. And that can then transform itself into action.

That's that. And changing perception because change in well, those are both relevant. It's an important thing to understand because the classic imperial ists make the presumption and neronian presumption that perception is a value free enterprise.

And they assume that partly because they think of perception is something passive. You just turn your head and you look at the world, and there IT is is like perception is not passive. There is no perception without action, ever, ever. And that's a weird thing to understand.

Because even when you're looking at something like your eyes are moving back and forth, if they ever stop moving for a tenth of a second, you stop being able to see so your eyes are giggling back and force just to keep them active. And then there's involuntary movements of your eyes, and then there's voluntary movements of your eyes. Like what you're doing with your eyes is very much like what a blind person would do if they were feeling out.

The countdown of object, your sampling and you're only sapling, a small element of the space that's in front of you. And the element that you choose to sample is dependent on your aims, in your goal. So it's value saturated.

And so all your perceptions are action predicated and partly what you're doing when you're communicating is therefore not only changing people's actions, let's say, but you're also changing the the strategy that they use to perceive. And so you change the way the world reveals itself for them. See, this is why it's such a profound experience to read a particularly deep thinker because you could also think of the your perceptions as the asians of your thought.

That's a good way of thinking about IT. A perception is like a what would you say? It's a thought that so set in concrete that you now see IT rather than conceptualized, a really profound thinker changes the way you perceive the world. That's way deeper than just how you think about IT or how you feel about IT.

What about not just profound thinkers, but thinkers that deliver a powerful idea? For example, utopian ideas of Marks, or utopian ideas, you can say, disobeying ideas of hitler. Those ideas are powerful, and they can saturate all your perception with values. And they they focus you in a way where there's only a certain set of actions.

and right, even a certain set of emotions as well.

And its intense is direct, and they're so powerful that they completely alter the perception. And the word spring .

to life acts like a form of possession. So there's two things you need to understand to make that clear. The first issue is that, as we suggested to imply that perception is action predicated, but action is goal predicate, right back towards the goal. And these propagandists, thinkers that you described, they attempt to unify all possible goals into a coherent singularity. And there's advantages of that.

There's the advantage of simplicity, for example, which is a major, and there's also the advantage of motivation, right? So if you provide people with a simple manner of integrating all their actions, you decrease their anxiety and you increase their motivation that that can be a good thing if the unifying idea that you put forward is valid. But it's the worst of all possible ideas if you put forward and invalid unifying idea, and then you might say, well, how do you distinguish between a valid unifying idea and an invalid unifying idea? Now nature was very interested in that, and I don't think he got that exactly right.

But the post modernist, for example, especially the ones, and this is most of them with a new markers spent, their presumption is that the fundamental unifying idea is power, that everything about compulsion and force, essentially, and that that's the only true unifying eth OS of mankind, which is, I don't know if there's the worst idea than that, mean, there are ideas that are potentially as dangerous. The analytic idea is pretty dangerous, although it's more of a disintegrating notion than a iifx idea. The headmaster idea that you live for pleasure, for example.

That's also very dangerous. But if you wanted to go for sheer pathology, the notion that, and this is, for coin, a nutshell, and Marks for that matter, that power rules everything, not only is that a terrible unifying idea, but IT IT fully justifies your own use of power. And and I don't mean the power nature talks about his will to power was more his insistence that a human being is an expression of wheel rather than an mechanism of self protection and security.

A key thought of the life force in human beings is something that strived not to protect itself, but to exhaust itself in being and becoming. It's it's like it's like an upward oriented motivational drive, even towards meaning. Now we called IT the will to power and that had some unfortunate consequence, at least that's how it's translated. But he didn't mean the power motivation that people like the cor Marks was became so hung up on.

So it's not power like you're trying to destroy. The other is power full flourishing of a human being, the creative force of a human. Yeah that way you .

can imagine that. And and you should you could imagine that you could segregate competence and ability. I imagine that you and I were going to work on a project.

We can organize our project in relationship to the ambition that we wanted to attain, and we can organize an agreement so that you were committed to the project voluntarily, and so that I was committed to the project voluntary arly. So that means that we would actually be united in our perceptions and our actions by the motivation of something approximating voluntary play. Now you could also matter another situation where I said, here's our goal and you Better help me, or i'm gonna kill your family.

Well, the probability is that you would be. Quite motivated to undertake my bidding. And so then you might say, well, that's how the world works, its power and compulsion. But the truth of the matter is that you can force people to see things your way, let's say, but it's nowhere nearest go to strategy, even practically. Then the strategy of that would be associated with something like voluntary, voluntary joint agreement of pattern of movement strategy towards the goal. This is such an important thing to understand, because IT IT helps you start to understand the distinction between a unifying force that based on power, compulsion, and one that is much more in keeping, I would say, with the ethos that govern western, western societies, free western societies, there's really a quality native difference. And it's not some morally relativist illusion.

So if we just look at the nuance of me, just thought, uh the idea he first introduced and thus spoke artua uh of the uber match, yes, that's another one that's very easy to misinterpret because that sounds awfully lot like it's .

about power yet, right?

For example, in the twenty years century was mister represented and corporate by hitler er to advocate for the uh extermination of the inferior non area on races yeah .

and the domination of the superior areas and yeah well, that was partly because niches work also was misrepresented by his sister after his death. But definitely, but I also think that there's a fundamental flaw in that needs and conceptualizing. So nature, of course, famously announced the death of god, but he did that in a manner that was accepted by dire warnings like na said, because people tend to think of that is a triumph lym statement.

But nejan actually said that he really said something like the unifying ethos under which we've organized ourselves cycle logically and socially, has now been fatally undermined by, well by the rationality procured ity by the imperial paris procurement. There's a variety of reasons. Mostly IT was conflict between the enlightenment view, let's say, in the classic religious view, and and that there will be dire consequences without a nature new.

Like to the f sky news that see, there's a procurement for the human psyche, for human societies to move towards something approximating a unity, because the cost of disunity is high fractionation of your goals. So that means you're less motivated to move forward than you might because there's many things competing for your attention and also anxiety, because anxiety is actually signals something like cal conflict. So there's an unescapable procurement of value systems to unite.

Now if you kill the thing that's uniting them, that's the death of god, they either fractionate and you get confusion, anxiety and hopelessness, or you get social unity, or, and you get social disunity, or something else arises out of the abyss to constitute that unifying force and niche. A said specifically that he believed that one of those manifestations would be that of um communism and that that would kill he said this will the power that that would kill tens of millions of people in the upcoming twenty century to keep he he could see that coming fifty years early on dosy sk did the same thing in this book, demons. So this is the thing that the a religious have to contend with.

Its a real conundrum because I mean you could dispute the idea that our value systems tend towards a unity and society does as well as otherwise we're just unified but the cost of that disunity, as I said, is goal confusion, anxiety and hopelessness so it's like a real cost so you can dispense with the notion of unity altogether. And the post modern did that to some degree, but they pulled off a slide of hand too, where they replaced by power. Now, na did.

He's responsible for that to some degree, because nature said, with this conception of the overman, let's say, is that human beings would have to create their own values, because the values structure that had descended from on high was now shunted aside. But there is a major problem with that. Many major problems.

The psychoanalysts were the first people who really figured this out after nature. Because imagine we don't have. Relationship with the trans and dental anymore that orientation.

Okay, now we have to turn to ourselves. okay. Now if we were a unity, a clear unity within ourselves, lets say then we can turn to ourselves for that discovery. But if we're a fractionated plurality internally, then when we turn to ourselves, we turn to a fractionated parity. Well, that was fraud is observation is like, how can you make your own values when you're not the master in your own house? I car a war of competing motivations or maybe you're someone who's dominated by the will to force in compulsion.

And so why do you think that you can rely on yourself as the source of values? And why do you think you're wise enough to to consult with yourself to find out what those values are or what they should be, say, in the course of a single life? I mean, you know it's it's difficult to organize your own personal relationship, like one relationship in the course of your life, let alone to try to imagine that out of whole cloth you could construct on an ethos that would be psychologically and socially stabilizing and last over the long run.

It's like, and of course Marks people like that. The the, the people who reduce human motivation to a single access. They had the intellectual hubris to imagine that they could do that. Post moderns are good example of that as well.

Okay, but we are on the table. Religion, communism, not seem they are all unifying ethos. They're unifying ideas, but they're also horribly dividing ideas. They both unifying divide. Religion has also divided people because in the new answer of how uh, the different people's wrestle with god, they have come to different conclusions, and then they use those conclusions that perhaps the people in power use those conclusions to then start wars, to start hatred, to divide yeah well.

it's one of the key subthemes in the gospel is the subtheme of the furies and so the the fundamental enemies of Christ in the gospel are the faris and the scribes and the lawyers. So what does that mean? The ferries are religious.

Hip rates describes our academics who worships their own intellect. And the lawyers are the legal minds who use the law as a weapon. And so they are the enemy of the redeemer.

That's a lot. That's a supt. In, in, in the gospel stories. And that actually all mean something. The ferash problem is that the best of all possible ideas can be used by the worst actors in the worst possible way. And maybe this is an existential conundrum, is that the most evil people use the best possible ideas to the worst possible ends. And then you have the construction of how do you separate out, let's say, the genuine religious people from those who use the religious enterprise only for their own mash instance.

Were seeing this happen online like one of the things that you're seeing happening online, i'm sure you've noticed this, especially on the right wing tools, right wing psychopath thc troll side of the distribution is the west ization of a certain form of Christian radiation. And that's often marked, at least online, by the presence of, what would you say, cliches like Christ is king, which has a certain religious meaning, but a completely different meaning in this sphere of emerging right wing pathology. Right wing, the political dimension is in the right dimension of analysis, but it's definitely the case that the best possible ideas can be used for the worst possible purposes. And that also brings up another spector, which is like, well, is there any reliable, invalid way of distinguishing truly beneficial unifying ideas from those that are pathological? And so that's another thing that I tried to detail out in these lectures, but also in this new book, is like, how do you tell the good actors from the bad actors at the most fundamental level of analysis.

and good ideas from the bad ideas and electron truth they need to also struggle with? So how do you know, how do you know that communism is a bad idea versus is a good idea implemented by bad actors? right?

right? That's a more subbed vary of the religious problem. And that's what the that's what the communist st say all the the modern day communism, like real communism, has never been tried. And you could say, I suppose with some justification, you could say that real Christian has never been tried because we always fall short of the ideal mark.

And so I mean, my regional to the common ist is something like every single time it's been implemented, wherever it's been implemented, regardless of the culture in the background of the people who've implemented IT, it's had exactly the same catastrophic consequences. It's like I don't know how many examples you need of that, but I believe we've generated sufficient example so that, that case is basically resolved. Now that generally rejoinder, that is, it's really something like, well, if I was in charge of the communist st enterprise, the youtube a would have come about, right? But that's also a form of dangerous pretence.

Part of the way, see that problem is actually resolved, to some degree, in the notion of, in the developing notion of sacrifice that emerges in the western canada over thousands and thousands of years. So one of the suggestions, for example, this is something exemplified in the passion story, is that you can tell the valid holder of an idea, because that holder will take the responsibility for the consequences of his idea onto himself. And that's why, for example, you see one way of conceptualizing Christ in the gospel story is as the ultimate sacrifice to god.

So you might ask, what, what's the ultimate sacrifice and the variance of the answer to that one form of ultimate sacrifice, the sacrifice of a child, the offering of a child. And the other is the offering of the self. And the story of Chris brings both of those together because he's the son of god that's offered to god.

And so it's up marketplace resolution of that tension between ultimate sacrifice, ultimate. Because once you're a parent, most parents would rather sacrifice themselves than their children, right? So you have something that becomes of even more value than yourself.

But the sacrifice of self is also a very high order level of sacrifice. Christ is an archetype of the pattern of being that's predicated on the decision to take to offer everything up to the highest value, right? That pattern of self sacrifice.

And I think part of the reason that's valid is because the person who undertakes to do that pays the Price themself. It's not externalize. They're not trying to change anyone else except maybe by example, it's your problem that like soga, it's and pointed that out to um when he was struggling with the idea of good versus evil.

And and you see this in more sophisticated literature, you know, in really unsophisticated literature, drama, there's a good guy and the bad guy. And the good guy is all good, and the bad guys are bad. And in more sophisticated literature, the good in bounder, abstracted, you can think of them as spirits. And then those spirits possess all the characters in the complex drama to a late, greater, lesser degree. And that battle is fought out both socially and internally, in the high order religious conceptualizing in the west, if they cultivate, let's say, in the Christian story, the notion is that battle between good and evil is fundamentally played out as an internal drama.

Yes, so the uh for a religious ethos, the battle between good and evil is fought within each individual human heart, right?

It's your moral duty to contain, constrain evil within yourself and what there's or do IT than that because there's also the insistence that if you do that, that makes you the more most effective possible, like warrior, let's say, against evil itself in the social world, that you start with the battle that occurs within you in the soul, let's say, the soul becomes the battle ground between the forces of good, evil. The idea, there's an idea, there are two, which is, if that battle is undertaken successfully, then IT doesn't have to be played out in the social world as actual conflict, right? You can rectify the conflict internally without IT having to be played out as fate, as Young put IT.

So what would you say to nature, who called Christianity the slave morality and has critique religion in that way? Was slave morality, for matter, morality. And then you put in women into that.

that I would say that the woke phenomenon is the manifestation of the slave morality that feature criticized, and that there are, there are elements of Christianity that can be Jerry banded to support that mode of perception and conception. But I think he was wrong. And he was wrong in his, the central criticism of Christianity in that regard.

Now it's complicated with nature because nation never criticizes the gospel stories directly. What he basically criticizes is something like the pathologies of institutionalize ed religion. And I would say most particularly of the, what would you say of the sort of casually too nice protestant form you know, that's A A thud il sketch and perhaps somewhat unfair.

But given the alignment, let's say, of the more mainstream protestant movements with the woke mob, I don't think it's absurd criticism and it's something like the degeneration of Christianity into the notion that good and harmless are the same thing, or good and impair ic are the same thing, which is simply not true and and far too simplified. And so and I also think nature was extremely wrong in his presumption that human being should take IT to themselves to construct their own values. I think he made a colossal in that presumption.

And that is the idea that were mention that the great individual, the best of us now to create our own values.

And I I think the reason that he was wrong about that is that so when god gives instruction status and eve in the garden of v he basically tells them that they can do anything they want in the wall garden. So that's the kind of baLance between the order and nature that makes up the human environment. Human beings have the freedom vote safe to them by god, to do anything they want in the garden, except to mess with the most fundamental rule.

So god says to people, you're not to eat up the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good evil, which fundamentally means there is an implicit moral order, and you're to abide by IT. Your freedom stops at the foundation, and you can think about that. I'd be interested, even in your ideas about this as an engineer, let's say, is that.

There is an eth uce that's implicit in being itself, and your ethie has to be a reflection of that. And that isn't under your control. You can't Jerry mender the foundation because the your foundational beliefs have to put you in harmony, like musical harmony, with the actual structure, reality of such.

So I can give you an example of that. So our goal in so far as we're conducting ourselves properly, is to have the kind of interest in conversation that allows both of us to express ourself in a matter that enables us to learn and grow such that we can share that with everyone who's listening. And if our aim is true and upward, then that's what were doing well.

That means that we're going to have to match ourselves to a pattern of interaction. And that's marked for us emotionally, like you and I both know this. If we're doing this right, we're going to be interested in the conversation.

We're not going to be looking at or watch. We're not going to be thinking about what we're aiming at. We're just gonna communicate.

Now the religious interpretation of that would be that we were doing something like making the redemptive logos manius between us in dialogue, and that something that can be shared. To do that, we have to a line with that pattern. I can't decide that there's some arbitrary way that i'm gonna a play.

You I mean, I could do that if I was a psychopathic manipulator, but to do that optimates, i'm not going to impose a certain mode of a certain a prior aim, let's say, on our communication and money and manipulate you into that. So the constraint on my ethos reflect the actual structure of of the world. And I can't this is, this is the communist presumptions, like we're going to burn everything down and we're going to start from scratch.

And we've got these axiomatic presumptions and we're going to put them into place and we're going to socialize people. So they now think and live like communists from day one. And human beings are influences medium, and we can use a rational set of presumptions, tions, to decide what sort of beings they should be. The transit ministers doing this too. So like, no, there's a pattern of being that you have to fall into alignment with and IT, I think it's the pattern of being, by the way, that if you fall into alignment ment with IT gives you hope IT IT IT protects you for maximum IT gives you a sense of harmony with you're surroundings with other people and none of that arbitrary.

But don't you think we both arrived to this conversation with rigid acms that we have? Maybe we're blind to them, but the same way that the markus came with very rigid act seems about the way the world is in the way should be aren't going to that.

We definitely come to the conversation with the hierarchy of foundation laxities, right? I would say the more sophisticated you are as a thinker that the deeper the level at which you're willing to play. So imagine first that you have presumptions of different depth.

There's more predicated on the more fundamental axioms and then that there's A A space of play around those. And that space of play is going to depend on the sophistication of the player, obviously, but those who are capable of engaging in deeper conversations talk about more fundamental things with more play. Now we have to come to the conversation with a certain degree of structure because we wouldn't be able to understand each other, communicate if if a lot of things weren't already assumed or taken for granted.

How rigid is the hierarchy of axioms that religion provides? So i'm trying to understand the rigidity .

of that play or play .

is not rigid at all.

No, no, no, no.

It's some constraint.

IT took me about forty years to figure out the answer to that question. So wasn't i'm serious post that. So IT wasn't IT wasn't a random answer, so play very rigid in some way.

So I give you and I go out to play basketball or chest like there are rules and you can break the rules because then you're no longer in the game, but then there's a dynamism within those rules that well, with chest, it's virtually infinite. I mean, I think what is that there's more patterns of potential games on a chess port. Then there are subatomic particles in the observable universe.

I can insane space. So it's not like there's not freedom within IT. But but it's a weird paradox, in a way, isn't that because music is like this too, is that there are definitely rules.

And so and there are things, you can throw a basketball into a chess board and still be playing chess. But weirdly enough, if you would hear to the rules, the realm of freedom increases rather than decreasing. And I think you can make the same case for a playful conversation is like we're playing by certain rules and lot of them are.

But that doesn't mean that you might mean the reverse of constraint, you know, because in this seminar, for example, that I was referring to, the exit of seminar and then the gospel seminar, everybody in this seminar, there's about eight of us played fair. Nobody played used power. Nobody tried to prove they were right.

They put forward their points. But they were like, here is a way of looking at that assess IT and they were also doing IT genuinely, it's like this is what i've concluded about, say, this story and I and i'm going to make a case for IT. But i'd like to hear what you have to say because maybe you can change IT, you can extend IT, you can find a flaw in IT.

And that's well, that's a conversation that has flow and that's engaging and the other people will listen to as well. And that's also see, I think, that one of the things that we can conclude now and and we can do this even from a neuroscientific basis, is that that sense of engaged meaning is a marker not only for the emergence of harmony between you and your environment, but for the emergence of that harmony in a way that is developmentally rich, that moves you upward towards, what would you say? Well, I think towards a more effective entropic state. That's actually the technical answer to that. But IT makes you more than you are, and there's a directionality in that.

Well, I would like to be sort of the reason I like to talk about communism, because IT has clearly been shown as a set of ideas to be destructive to humanity. But I would like to understand, from an engineering perspective, the characteristics of communism versus religion, where you can identify religious thought, is going to lead to a Better human being, a Better society, and communist marx's thought. Yeah, not because there's ambiguity.

There's room for play in communism and market ism because I kind of had a european sense of where everybody's headed. Don't know, hot gonna happen. Maybe revolution is required, but after the done will figure that out. And there's an underlying assumption that maybe human beings are good. They'll figured out when once you remove the oppressor, yeah, I mean, all these ideas kind of until you put into practice, you could do you IT can be quite convincing very in the sixth century, if always reading, which is kind of fascinating nineteen century produce such powerful ideas, Marks and nature.

Asm too for that matter.

fashion. So you know if I will sit there um like especially for feeling shit about myself um a lot these ideas of pretty powerful as as a way to plug the analyst hole yeah right.

absolutely. Well, in some of them may actually have an appropriate scope of application IT could be that some of the foundation axioms of communism, socialism lah, communism, are actually functional in a sufficiently small social group, maybe a tribal group, even like I I also have.

I not sure this is correct, but I have a suspicion that the pervasive attractiveness of some of the radical left ideas that we're talking about are pervasive precisely because they are functional within, say, families, but also within the small tribal groups that people might have originally evolved into. And that once we become civilized, so we produce societies that are united, even among people who don't know one another, different principles have to apply as a consequence of scale. So that's that's partly an engineering response.

But but I think there's a more a deeper way of going after the communist problem. So I think part of the communist, the problem, fundamental problem with the communist taxes, is the notion that the world of complex social interactions can be simplified sufficiently so that centralized planning authorities can deal with IT. And I think the best way to think about the free exchange rejoinder to that presumption is, no, the some total of human interactions in a large civilization are so immense that you need a distributed network of cognition in order to compute the proper way forward.

And so what you do is you give each actor their domain of individual choice so that they can maximize the their own movement forward, and you allow the aggregate direction to emerge from that, rather than trying to impose IT from the top down, which I think it's computationally impossible. So that might be one engineering reason why the communist solution doesn't work. Like I read in sodium instance, for example, that the the central soviet authorities often had to make two hundred pricing decisions a day.

Now, if you've ever started a business or created a product and had to wrestle with the problem of pricing, you would become aware of just how intractable that is. Like, how do you calculate worth? Well, there is the central existential problem of life.

How do you calculate worth? It's not something like a central authority can sit down and just manage. And you there is a lot of inputs that go into a pricing decision. And the free market answer to that is something like going if you get the Price right, people or bia, you'll survive.

This is fascine way to describe how ideas fails. So kind is perhaps fails because just like what people believe that are is flat when you look outside, it's IT looks flat but you can't see beyond the horizon I guess is so in the same way with communism, commission seems like a great idea my family and my people I love. But IT doesn't scale .

and IT doesn't need to rate. And that's a former scaling too, right?

Well, I mean, whatever ways that breaks down IT doesn't scale. And we are saying religious thought is a thing that might scale.

I would say religious thought is the record of those ideas that have in fact, scale.

right? And iterated.

What did IT .

does religious thought iterate? So I mean, there's a fundamental conservative aspect to religious .

and tradition. And this is why, like we're chairlie, for example, who I referred to earlier, one of the things elliot did and very effectively, and people like Joseph cambell, who in some ways were popular ers of those of elliot ideas, and carl ungs, what they really did was to vote themselves to an analysis of those ideas, ideas that scale and iterated across the largest possible spans of time.

And so elliot and Young eric nyman, they were looking, and cambell, they were looking at patterns of narrative that we're common across religious traditions that had spent millennia and found many patterns. The heroes myth, for example, is one of those patterns. And it's, I think, the evidence that IT has its reflection and human neurophysiology and neuropsychologist incontrovertible.

And so these foundational narratives, they last, they're common across multiple religious traditions. They unite, they work psychologically. But they also reflect the underlying euphrosine logical architecture.

So I can give an example about so the hero eh, is really a quest myth, and a quest math is really a story of exploration and expansion about apt, right? So bilboa habit, he's a kind of an ordinary every man, he lives in a very constrained and orderly and secure world. And then the quest call comes and he goes out, and he expense his personality and developed his wisdom.

And that's reflected in human neuropsychology ical architecture at a very low level, way below cognition. So one of the most fundamental elements of the mammalian brain, and even in lower animal forms, is the hypotheticals. It's sort of the root of primary motivation.

So IT governs lost and um and IT regulates your breathing and IT regulates your hunger and IT regulates your thirst and IT regulates your temperature. Like really low level biological necessities are regulated by the hypothesis when you get hungry. It's the hypothetical mas when you're activated in a defensively aggressive manner.

That's the hypotheses, half the hypothesis. The origin of the dopamine ergimo acks. And they assume exploration. And so you can think of the human motivational reality as a domain is governed by asiatic motivational states, love, sex, defensive aggression, hunger. And another domain that's governed by exploration.

And the rule would be something like when your basic motivation states are sated, explore well then. And and that's not cognitive. Like I said, this is deep, deep brain architecture.

It's extraordinary, ancient and and the exploration story is something like go out into the unknown and take the risks, because the information that you discover and the skills you develop will be worthwhile, even in stating the basic motivation drives. And then you want to learn to do that in iterative manner. So IT sustains across time, and you want to do IT in a way that you you with other people.

And there's a pattern to that. And I do think that's the pattern that's we strive to encapsulate in our deeper religious narratives. And I think that in many ways, we've done that successfully.

What is the belief in god? How does that fit in? What does that mean to believe in god?

okay. So in one of the stories that I cover in we who rest with god, which I only recently begun to take apart, saving in the last two years is the story of iba ham. It's a very cool story.

And it's also related, by the way, to your question about what makes communism wrong. And dusty eski knew this, not precise the Abraham story, but through the same reason in notes from underground dosy fsi, I made a very telling observation. So he speaks in the voice of a cynical, nyalong tic and bitter bureaucrat who's been a failure, who's talking cynically about the nature of human beings, but also very accurately. And one of the things he points out with regards to modern europeanism is that human beings are very strange creatures, and that if you gave them what the socialist utopians want to give them, so let's say, all your needs are taken care of. All your material needs are taken care of.

And even indefinitely does the sk claim was when you don't understand human beings very well, because if you put them in an environment that was that comfortable, they would purposely ly go insane just to break IT into bits, just so something interesting would happen, right? And he says it's it's the human program ity to kerry and complain and he says this is the quite a cynical and costive manner, but he's pointing to something deep, which is that we're not built for comfort and security. We're not infants.

We're not after association. So then you might ask, well, what the hell we after then? That's what the Abraham story addresses.

And Abraham is the first true individual in the biblical narrative. So you can think about history as the architect story of the developing individual. So you said, well, what's god? Well, in the Abraham story, god is characterised a lot of different ways.

In the classic religious like the bible is actually a compilation of different characterizations of the divine, with the insistence that they reflect an underlying unity. In the story of braham, the divine is the call to adventure. So Abraham has the socialist utopia at hand.

He's from a wealthy family, and he has everything he needs, and he actually doesn't do anything until he's in his seventies. Now, hypothetically, people in those times live much longer. But the voice comes to braham, and IT tells them something very specific.

IT says, leave your zone of comfort. Leave your parents, leave your can, leave your community, leave your try. Leave your land, go out into the world.

And ib raham thinks, well, why i've got naked slave girls peeling grapes and feeding them to be, it's like, what do I need venture for? And god tells them this is the covenant, by the way, part of the continent that the god of the israeli ts makes with his people. It's very, very specific.

It's very brilliant. He says, if you follow the voice of adventure, you'll become a blessing to yourself. So that's a good deal because people generally live odds with themselves. And he says, god says, that's not all.

You'll become a blessing to yourself in a way that furthers your reputation among people and validly so that you will accomplish things that we're real and people will know IT and you will be held high in their a steam and that will be valid. So that's a pretty good deal because social people would like to be regarded as a utility and worth by others. And so that's a good deal.

And and godd says that's not all. You'll establish something of lasting, permanent and deep value. That's why Abraham becomes the father of nations and finally caps IT off.

And he says there's a there's a Better element even to IT. There's a cap stone. You'll do all three of those things in a way that's maximum beneficial, everyone else.

And so the divinity in the Abrahamic stories is making a claim. He says, first of all, there's a drive that you should attend to. So the spirit of adventure that calls you out of your zoe of comfort.

Now, if you attend to that and you make the sacrifices necessary to follow that path, then the following benefits will recruit you. Your life will be a blessing. Everyone will hold you and high a steam.

You'll establish something a permanent value, and you'll do in a way that's maximally beneficial everyone else. And so, so think about what this means biologically. You're from an engineering standpoint. IT means that the instinct to develop that characterizes outward moving children, let cyr adults, is the same instinct that allows for psychological stability, that allows for movement upward in the social hierarchy, that establishes something iteration, and that does that in a manner that allows everyone else to partake in the same process. Well, you know, that's a good deal.

And like I can see how IT cannot be true, because the alternative hypothesis would be that the spirit that moves you beyond yourself to develop the spirit of a curious child, let's say, what is that antha themal to your own nest team? Is that antha themal to other people's best interest? Is that not the thing that increases the probability that you'll do something permanent? That's a stupid theory.

So god is a call to adventure with some constraints.

Call to true adventure, to true and true adventure. Yeah then that's a good observation because that begs the question, what constitutes the most true adventure? Well, that's not fully fleshed out until at least from the Christian perspective, let's say that's not fully fleshed out until the gospel because the passion of Christ is the you could say this is the perfectly reasonable way of looking at IT.

The passion of Christ is the truest adventure of Abraham. It's a terrible thing because it's it's, uh, the the passion story is a catastrophic tragedy, although IT obviously has its redeemed of elements. But one of the things that implied there is that there is no distinction between the true adventure of life and taking on the pathway of maximum responsibility and burden.

And I can see how that cannot be true, because the counter hypothesis, well, like the best thing for you to do in your life, is to shrink from all chAllenge and hide, right? To remain infantile, to remain secure, not ever push yourself beyond your limits, not to take any risks. Well, no one thinks that's true.

So basically, the maximum worthwhile adventure could possibly be highly correlated with the hardest possible available adventure.

the hardest possible available adventure voluntarily undertaken.

Does that have absolutely?

Do you .

define voluntarily?

Well, here's here's an example of that. Um that's that's a good question too. When Christ is the night before the cruise of fiction, which in principle he knows is coming, he asks god to relieve him of his burden and understandably so.

I mean, that's the scene in famously in which she's sweating, literally sweating blood because he knows what's coming. And the the romans design cruise fiction to be the most egan's zing and humiliating possible organizing, humiliating and disgusting possible death, right? So there is every reason to be apprehensive about that.

And you might say, well, could you undertake that voluntarily as an adventure? And the answer to that is something like, well, what's your relationship with death? And that's the problem you have to solve.

And you could fight IT and you could be bitter about IT. And there's reasons for that, especially if it's painful and degrading. But but the alternative is something like. Well, it's what's fletch ed out in religious imagery always it's very difficult to to cast into words. It's like, no, you you welcome, you welcome the struggle that's why I called the book we who rest with god, you welcome the struggle.

And I lex, I don't see how you can come to terms with life without construing IT something like construing IT is something like bring IT on, welcome the struggle. And I can see that there's a limit to that like, well, I welcome the struggle until IT gets difficult. Well.

so there's not a bell curve like the struggle. Moderation basically have to welcome whatever as hard as IT gets. And the Christian in that way is symbol of that.

well. And well, it's it's worse than that in some ways because the crucial fiction exemplifies the worst possible death. But that isn't the only element of the struggle because mythologically classically after Christ, death, heroes, hell.

And what that means, as far as I can tell psychologically, is that you're not only required, let's say, to take on the full existent al burden of life and to welcome IT regardless of what IT is, and to maintain your upper name despite all temptations to the contrary, but you also have to confront the root of male vaLance itself. So it's not merely tragedy. And I think the moez Lance is actually worse.

And the reason I think that is because I know the literature on posture matic stress disorder, and most people who encounter, lets say, a chAllenge that so brutal that IT fragmented them. IT isn't mere suffering that does that to people. It's an encounter with moez ance that does that to people their own.

Sometimes, often, by the way, soldier go out into a battlefield and find out that there's a part of him that really enjoys the may him and that conceptualizing doesn't fit in well with everything he thinks he knows about himself and humanity. And after that contact with that dark part of himself, he never recovers. That happens to people and IT and IT happens to people who encounter bad actors in the world, too. If you're a nave person and the right narcy stic psychopath comes your way, you are in like mortal trouble because you might die. But that's not where the doubles ends.

If there's a Young man and y're twenties listening to this, how do they escape? The poll of that, they ask, is not underground with the eyes open to the world. How do they select the adventure?

So there's other characterizations of the divine, say, in the old testament story. So one pattern of characterization that I think is really relevant to that question is the conception of god as calling and conscience. Okay, so what does that mean?

It's a description of the manner in which your destiny announced itself to you. And i'm amusing that term minos gy and and its its distinguish safe from natural notion that you create your own values. It's like part of the way you can tell that that's wrong is that you can't voluntarily Jerry mander your own interest, right?

Like you find some things interesting and that seems natural and and autonomous and other things you don't find interesting and you can't really force yourself to be interested in them now. So what is the domain of interest that makes itself manifest to what it's like an autonomous spirit? It's like certain things in your field of perception or illuminated to you think, oh, that that's interesting, that's compelling, that's gripping.

Rudolf to who studied the phenomenology of religious experience, described that as nominees think grips you because you're compelled by IT. And maybe it's also the somewhat to anxiety provoking. It's the same reaction that like a cat has to a dog when cats hair stands only.

And that's an all response. And so there's gonna things in your phenomenal gc field that pull you forward, compile you. That's like the voice of positive emotion and enthusiasm. Things draw you into the world. Might be love, might be athel interest IT might be friendship IT might be social status IT might be um duty and and and and industriousness.

Like there's various domains of interest that shine for people that sort of on the positive side god is calling right that would be a in to the spirit of adventure for Abraham. But there's also god is conscience and this is a useful thing to know too certain things bother you. They they, they take root within you and they they turn your thoughts towards certain issues like these things you're interested in that you pursue your whole life.

There are things i'm interested in that that I felt as a moral compulsion. And so you can think, and I think the way you can think about IT technically, is that something pulls you forward so that you move ahead and you develop. And then another voice, this, a voice of negative emotion, says, while you're moving forward, stay on this narrow pathway, right in little mark deviations.

And mark deviations was shame and guilt and the anxiety, regret. And that actually has a voice. Don't do that well, why not while you're wonnerful off the straight, narrow path? So the divine Marks the pathway forward and reveals IT, but then puts up the constraints of conscience and the divine in the old testament portrait, not least as the dynamic between calling and conscience.

What do you do with the negative emotions? Didn't mention envy, really dark ones that can really pull you into some bad places. V fear.

yeah. And this is really bad one. Pride and envy among the worst. That was at the sense of cane, by the way, in the story of canendesha, e fails because his sacrifice is are insufficient.

He doesn't offer his best and so he's rejected and that makes him bitter and unhappy. And he goes to complain to god, and god says to him some two things. He said, if god tells them if your sacrifices were appropriate, you'd be accepted.

It's a brutal thing. It's a brutal rejoinder and he also says, you can't blame your misery on your failure. You could learn from your failure when you failed.

You invited in the spirit of envy, resentment, and you allowed IT to possess you. And that's why you're miserable. And so cane is embittered by that response. And that's when he kills able.

And so you might say, well, how do you fortify yourself against that pathway of resentment? And part of classic religious practice is aimed to do that precisely. What's the antithesis of envy? Gratitude as something you can practice, right? I mean, literally practice.

I think enemy is one of the biggest enemies for Young person because basically you're starting from nowhere. Life is hard, you've achieved nothing and you're striving and you're fAiling constantly because and you see other people whom .

you think aren't having the same problem yeah and they succeeded .

and they could be your neighbor. They could be succeeded by a little bit, or somebody on the internet succeeding by a lot. And I think that that can really pull person down. That kind of envy can really destroy person.

Yeah, definitely. Well, the gratitude element would be something like, well, yeah you don't know anything and you're at the bottom but um you're not eighty. You know one of the best predictors of wealth in the united states is age.

So then you might say, well, who's got a Better the old rich guy or the Young poor guy? And I would say most old rich guys would trade their wealth for youth. So it's not exactly clear at all at any stage who's got the upper hand, who's got the advantage.

And you know, you could say what i've got all these burns in front of me because i'm Young and oh my god or you could say every dragon has its treasure and that's actually a pattern of perception. You know, i'm not saying that people don't have their chAllenges. They certainly do. But discriminating between a chAllenge in an opportunity is very, very difficult. And learning to see a chAllenge as an opportunity that the beginning of .

wisdom it's interesting. I don't know how IT works. Maybe you can elude IT, but when you have any tour, somebody, if you just celebrate them, the gratitude, yes, but actually as supposed to ignoring and being grateful for the things you have, like, literally celebrate that person IT transforms IT like IT lights the way. And I know why that is exactly.

The only reason your envious is because you see someone who has something that you want. okay. So let's think let's think about IT.

Well, first of all, the fact that they have IT means that in principal, you could get IT, at least someone has. So that's a pretty good deal. And then you might say, well, the fact that I am envious of that person means that I actually want something.

And then you might think, well, what am I envious of? I'm envious of their attractiveness to women. Like, okay, well, now you know something about yourself. You know that one true motivation that's making itself manifest to you is that you wish that you would be the sort of person who is attractive to women.

Now, of course, that's an extremely common longing among men, period, but a particularly among Young men like, well, what makes you so sure you couldn't have that? Well, how about here's an answer, you don't have enough faith in yourself. And maybe you don't have enough faith in all, I would say, the divine.

You don't believe that the world is characterised by enough potentiality so that even miserable, you has a crack at the breast ring. And like I I talked about this actually practically in one of my previous books, because I wrote a chapter or called the compare yourself to who you are and not to someone else at the present time. Well, why? Well, your best benchmark for tomorrow is you today.

And you might not be able to have what someone else has on the particular access you're comparing yourself with them on, but you could make an incremental improvement over your current state regardless of the direction that you're aiming. And IT is the case, and this is a law. The return on incremental improvement is expansion.

Al or geometric cannot linear. So even if you start, this is why the hero is always born in a little lowly place mythologically. right?

Christ, who redeems the world is born in a major with the animals to poverty stricken parents in the middle, a god for second desert in a nondescript time and place, isolated. Well, why? Well, because everyone, Young, struggles with their insufficiency. But that doesn't mean the great things can make themselves manifest.

And part of the insistence in the biblical text, for example, is that it's incoming on you to have the courage to have faith in yourself and in the spirit of reality, the essence of reality, regardless of how you can grow the evidence at hand. right? Look at me.

I'm so useless. I don't know anything. I don't have anything.

It's hopeless. I don't have IT within me. The world couldn't offer me that possibility. Well, what the hell do you know about that? This is what job figures out in the middle of his suffering in the book of job. Because job is tortured terribly by god who makes a bet with, set himself to bring him down.

And jobs decision in the face of his intense suffering is i'm not going to lose faith in my essential goodness, and i'm not going to lose faith in the essential goodness of being itself, regardless of how terrible the face is showing to me at the moment happens to be. And I think, okay, what do you make of that claim? Well, let's look at IT.

Practically, you're being tortured by the arbitrariness of life. That's horrible. Now you lose faith in yourself and you become cynical about being. so. Are you infinitely worse off instantly and then you might say, well, yeah but it's really asking a lot of people that they maintain faith even well even in their darkest hours like yeah that that might be asking everything from people. But then you also might ask, this is a very strange question, is if you were brought into being by something that was essentially good, wouldn't that thing that brought you into being demand that you make the best in yourself manifest and wouldn't IT be precisely when you most need that, that that would be that you'd be desperate enough to risk what I would take to let IT emerge?

So you kind of make a seem that reason could be the thing that takes you out of a place of darkness. So finding that calling through reason, I think, is also possible. When reason fails you to just take the leap, navigate not by reason, but by finding the thing that scares you the risk to take the risk, take the leap and then figure IT out while you're in the air yeah well.

that I think that's always part of a heroic adventure know is that ability to cut the gordian? Not, but but you could also ask, from an engineering perspective, okay, what are the actors that make a decision like that possible? And the answer would be something like, i'm going to make the presumption that if I move forward in good faith, whatever happens to me, we'll be the best thing that could possibly happen no matter what IT is.

And I think, I think that's actually how you make an alliance with truth. And I also think that truth is an adventure. And the way you make lines with truth is by assuming that whatever happens to you, if you were living in truth, is the best thing that could happen, even if you can see that at any given moment, because otherwise you'd say that truth would be just the hand made enough advantage.

Well, i'm going to say something truthful and I pay a Price. Well, that means I shouldn't have said IT. Well, that possibly, but that's not the only possible standard of evaluation you can because what you're doing is you're making the outcome your daily right? While I just reverse that, say, no, no truth is the dad, the outcome is variable, but that doesn't Erica the initial action. Where's the constant? right? Where's what's the constant?

He maybe, uh, when you said the Abraham was being fed by negative dies, that's an interpolation.

obviously, but would have been out of keeping for the times.

But IT make me think sort of in star contrast to each his own life, that perhaps getting weight early on in life as a useful starter, a step one, get laid and then go for adventure. There's some basic business association of design. It's perfectly .

reasonable to bring the sexual element in because it's a powerful motivating force and IT has to be integrated. I don't think it's adventure. It's romantic adventure.

right, right. But the the lack of basic interaction, sexual interaction, I feel like, is the engine that drives towards that .

cynicism of the inside. There is very little doubt about that. We know perfectly well anthropology, the most unstable social situation.

You can generate these Young men with no access to women. That's not good. And they'll do anything, anything to reverse that situation.

So that's very dangerous. But then I would also say there's every suggestion that the pathway of adventure itself is the best pathway to romantic attractiveness. And we know this in some ways in very blunt manner.

The google boys, the engineers who are two, what would you say? Naively orient towards empirical truth to note when they're being politically incorrect. They wrote a great book called a billion wicked thoughts, which I really like.

It's a very good book, and it's engineers as psychologists. And so theyll say all sorts of things that no one with any sense would ever say that that happened to be true. And they studied the pattern of pornographic fantasy.

And women, like pornographic stories, not images. So women's use of pornographic pornography is literary. Who are the main protagonists in female pornographic fantasy? Pirates were wolves.

Vampire surgeons? yeah. billionaires? Tony stack? no. yeah. And so the basic pornographic narrative is beauty in the beast. Those five categories, terrible, aggressive mail table, table by the right relationship, hot erotic attraction.

And so I would say to the Young man who and I have many times to the Young man who are locked in isolation, it's first of all, join a bloody club because the default ue of a fifty neural mail on the mating market is zero. And there's reason for that. You know, when zero is a bit of an exaggeration, but not much.

And the reason for that is, well, what the hell do you know like you're not good for anything. You have potential and maybe plenty, and hopefully will be made benefits, but you shouldn't be all upset because you're the same loser as everyone else. Your age is always been since the beginning of time, but then you might ask, what what should I do about at the answers? Give yourself together, you know, stand up straight with your shoulder back, take on some adventure, find your calling, abide by your conscience, put yourself together, and you'll become attractive.

And we know this is, look, we know this is true. The correlation between male sexual opportunity and relative masculine status is boat point six that's higher than the correlation between intelligence and academic achievement. I don't think that there is a larger correlation between two independent phenomenon in the entire social science and health literature than the correlation between relative male social status and reproductive success is by far the most fundamental determined what's .

the cause and effect that to loop manner motivated .

to attain social status because IT confers upon the reproductive success. And that's not only timely, but biologically. I'll give you example of this. There's a documentary I watch from time to time, which I think is the most brilliant documentary i've ever seen. It's called crime, and it's the story of this underground cartoon's.

Robert crime, who was in high school, was in the category of males for whom a date was not only not likely, but in uni maginness. So he was at the bottom of the bottom wrong, and almost all the reactions he got from females weren't, wasn't just no IT was like, are you out of your mind right? With that contempt? right? And then he became successful.

And so the documentary super interesting, because IT tracks the utt pathology of the sexual fantasies, because he was bitter and presentable. And if you want to understand the psychology of serial sexual killers and the like. And you watch chrome, you'll not find out a lot more about that than anybody with any sense would want to know.

But then he makes this transition in party because he does take the heroic adventure path. And he actually has a family and a and children, and he is actually a pretty functional person as opposed to his brothers, one of whom commit suicide and one of who is literally a repeat sexual offender. It's a brutal documentary, but he what he did in his at lessons after being rejected was he found what he was interested in, his very good artist, he was very interested in music, and he started to pursue those sort of single mindedly, and he became successful.

And as soon as he became successful in the documentary, drugs this beautifully, he's immediately attractive to women. And and then he might ask to, even if you're cynical, like, why do women? Why do I have to perform for women? And the answer that is something like, why the hell should they have anything to do with you if you're useless? They're gonna have infants.

They don't need another one, right? Part of the reason that women are hyper gameless, they want males who are of higher stas than they are because are trying to redress the reproductive burden and is substantial. I mean, the female of any species is the sex that devotes more to the reproductive function.

That's a more fundamental different definition than chromosome mal differentiation, and that's taken to its ultimate extreme with with humans. And so of course, women are gonna want someone around that's useful because the cost of sex for them is an eighteen year old period of dependency with an infant. So.

so so I think .

the adventure comes .

first paroe adventure comes well.

it's complex because the other problem, let's say, with the crown boys is that their mother was extremely pathological and they didn't get a lot of genuine demining defection.

Of course, for the family and society are not going to help you most of the time of the heroic adventure, right? They're going to be a barrier.

This is in good families. They're both because they put up constraints on your behavior. But they like i've interviewed lot of successful people about, they're calling, let's say, because that I do that with all my podcast, is how how did the path that you took to success make itself manulife? It's very the patterns, very typical.

Almost all the people that I have interviewed had a mother and a father. Now it's not invariant, but i'd say it's there ninety nine percent of the time, it's really high. And both of the parents, or at least one of them, but often both were very encouraging of the person's interests and powers to development.

That fact that i've heard you analyzed at that way before, and I had a reaction to that idea because you focus on the positive of the parents, I feel like I was the maybe I I see biographs differently, but he feels like the struggle within the family was the catalyst for greatness. In, in, in a lot of biography. Maybe i'm misinterpreting IT.

No, I don't pay. I don't think you I think that that reflection maybe correct me if I am wrong. I think that's a reflection of that dynamic between positive and negative emotion like my son, for example, who's doing just fine um he's firing on all cylinders as far as I am concerned as a nice family, he gets along with his wife.

He's a really good musician. He's got a companies is running well um he he's delighted to be around. He was a relatively disagreeable infant.

He was tough minded and so and he he didn't take no for an answer. And so there was some tussle in regulating his behavior. He spent a lot of time when he was two, sitting on the steps trying to get his act together.

And so that was the constraint and and but that was that wasn't something that was it's an opposition to him away because IT was an opposition to the immediate manifestation of his headmistress, sires. But IT was also an empathetic to further development. Made the rule for me when he was on the stairs was, as soon as you're willing to be a civilized human being, you can get off the stairs.

And you might think, well, that's nothing but arbitrary, super ego patriarchical oppressive constraint. Or you could say, well, know, what i'm actually doing is facilitating is critical maturation because when a child misbehaves, it's usually because they're under the domination of some primarily emotional and motivational impulse. They're angry, they're over enthusiastic, their, they are upset, their selfish, like its narrow, self centered ness expressed in a imaums manner.

But okay, tell me far wrong. But IT feels like the engine of greatness, at least on the male side of things, has often been trying to prove the father wrong, or trying gain acceptance of the father. So that tension, where the parent is not encouraging the invention, but is basically saying, no, you, you won't be able to do this.

So my observation as a psychologist has been that it's very, very difficult for someone to get their act together unless they have at least one figure in their life that's encouraging and shows them the pathway forward. So so you can have a lot of adversity in your life. And if you have one person around who's a good model and your neurologically intact, you can latch into that model.

Now you can also find that model in books. And people do that sometimes, like I, i've interviewed people who had pretty far fragmented childhoods, who turned to books and found the pattern that guided them in, like, let's say, the adventures of the heroes of the past, because that's a good way of thinking about IT. And I read A A book called Angeles ashes that was written by an irish author, Frank mccourt s fantastic book, beautiful book.

And his father was an alcoholic of gargantuan proportions. He just an irish drinker who drank every cent that came into the family, and many of whose children died in power. And what Frank did is a testable to the human spirit, as he sort of divided his father conceptually into two elements.

There was sober morning father who was encouraging, and with whom he had a relationship. And then there was drunk and useless later afternoon and evening, father, and he rejected the negative. Any amplified his relationship with the positive.

Now in like he had other, he had other things going from. But he, you know, he did a very good job of discriminating and and I mean, partly the question that you're raising is to what degree is that useful to have a beneficial adversary? Yeah I mean, struggle.

Free progress is not possible. And I think there are situations under which where you know you might be motivated to prove someone in your. Immediate circle wrong. But then that also implies that at some level, for some reason, you actually care about their judgment. You know you just didn't write them off completely.

What I mean is that why I say there's an architect of a Young man trying to gain the approval of his father, and I think that repeats itself. And a bunch of biography that have read, I don't know, there must have been in an engine somewhere that they found of approval, of encouragement, maybe in books, maybe in the mother, or maybe the the role the parents is flipped.

Well, my my father was hard to please. Very.

did you ever succeed?

Yes, but IT wasn't easy, ever.

when? When was the moment when you are succeeded late?

Pretty late, like forty, maybe later.

was IT a gradual or a definitive moment when the shift happened?

My father always was always willing to approve of the things I did that were good, although he was not effusive by any stretch of the imagination, and the standards were very high. Now I was probably fortunate for me, you know and and IT does bear on the question you're asking is like if you want someone to motivate you optimally got it's complicated because there has to be a temper mental dance between the two people like what you really want is for someone to apply the highest possible standards to you that you're capable of reaching, right?

And that's that's a that's a vicious stance because you have to have a relationship with your child to do that properly, you know, because you want to if you want to be optimal motivating as a father, you keep your children on the edge. It's like you might not reward something in your child that you would think would be good in someone else because you think they could do Better. And so my father was pretty clear about the idea that he always expected me to do Better.

And was that troublesome? IT was like, I felt often when I was Young that there was no pleasing him. But I also knew that that wasn't, I do that, that wasn't right.

See, I actually knew that wasn't right. Because I could remember, especially I think when I was very Young, that I did things that he was pleased about. I knew that was possible. So IT wasn't IT wasn't unpredictable and arbitrary was just difficult.

That sounds like he's hit a pretty good optimal, but it's a for each individual human and optimal differs.

Well, that's what you have to get relationship with your children. You have to know them and and well with yourself too and and with your wife. You, you, you can't hit that optimal.

That optimal is probably love. It's because love isn't just acceptance. Love is acceptance and encouragement.

And it's not just that either. It's also, no, don't do that. That's beneath you.

You're capable of morning. How hard should that be? So like, that's a really hard question. You know like if you really love someone you're not going to put up with your stupidity, don't do that.

You know, one of the rules I had with my little kids was, don't do anything that makes you look like an idiot in public. why? Because I don't want you disgracing yourself.

Why not? Because I like you. I think you're great, and you're not going to act like a bloody fool in public so that people get the wrong idea about you.

No, what a about inside a relationship, how a successful relationship is, how much chAllenge, how much peace is .

a successful .

relationship, one that is easy, one that is chAllenging.

I would say, to some degree, that depends on your temperament. My wife is quite a provocative person, and there are times when I I suppose, do I wish that there are times when I casually wish that he was easier to get along with. But as soon as I think about IT, don't think that yeah, because i've always liked her.

We were friends ever since we were little kids and she's SHE plays rough and I like that as IT turns out. Now that doesn't mean that isn't the pain from time to time, but you know when that is gonna a temperamental issue to some degree in and an issue of negotiation like he plays rough but fair. And the fair part has been establishing that it's been part of our ongoing negotiation .

and part of IT is in the play. You get to find out about yourself for what your temperate is because I don't think that that's clear until it's tested.

Oh, definitely not, definitely not. You find all those all search of things about yourself in a relationship that's for sure. Well, in partly, the reason that there is provocativeness, especially from women in relationship to men, is they want to test them out.

So like, can you hold your temporary when someone is bothering you? Well, why would a woman want to know that? Well, maybe he doesn't want you to, uh, snap and hurt her kids and so how's you're gona find that out?

Ask you, well, you're gonna. Well, i'd never do that like never a let's find out if it's never. So we don't know how people test each other own relationships but or why exactly, but it's intense and necessary.

What's your and what's in general should a man's relationship with temporary?

You should have one and you should build to regulate IT like that part of that attractiveness of the monsters that characterises women's fantasies, right? Because and nature pointed this out to back to nature, you know, nature, one of natures claims was that most of what passes for morality is nothing but cowardice.

I'd never cheat on my wife, just like, uh, is there anybody asking you to that you actually find attractive? Or are there dozens of people asking you to that you find attractive? It's like why I would never cheat.

It's like, no, you just don't have the opportunity. Now I don't i'm not saying that everyone's in that position. You know that they would cheat even if they had the opportunity because that's not true.

But and it's the same with regards to i'm a peaceful man it's like, no, you know you're just a weak coward. You wouldn't dare have IT to have a confrontation physical or meta physical, and you're passing IT office morality because you don't want to come to terms with the fact of your own weakness. And countess, and part of the that what I would say is twisted pu du Christian morality that nature was criticizing was exactly of that sort, and IT tied into resentment in envy. And he tied that in, explicitly said that failure in life, masked by the morality that's nothing but weak coward us, turns to the resentment that undermines and destroys everything. And that does that purpose.

Li, yeah, I think you're criticizing if under the fact of nicely there's an ocean of resentment.

yeah, that's for sure. That's for sure. That's also the danger of being to forthcoming with people. See, this is another thing, let's say, about my wife who's not particularly agreeable.

It's like she's not particularly agreeable, but she's not resent for and that's because he doesn't give things away that that SHE isn't willing to. And if you're agreeable and nice and your conflict avoiding, you'll push yourself too far to please the other person and then that makes you bitter and resent ful. So that's not helpful.

Do you think you will be in trouble for saying this on a podcast later?

No, no. We know each other pretty well. And like I said, it's it's not it's a trait that I find IT admirable. Its provocative and um chAllenging and .

IT seems .

to work well. We've been together fifty years.

So uh quite part bathroom. K, if we can descend from the round ideas down to a history in reality, I would say the time between worlds, AR one and world's two, was one of history's biggest .

testing .

of ideas, and really the most dramatic kinds of ideas that helps us understand the nature of good and evil. I just want to ask you some a question about good. evil.

A virtually in many ways, was not a good man. Stan, as you've documented extensively, was a horrible man. But you can make the case that both were necessary for stopping, and even worse, human being in hitler. So to what degree do you need monsters to fight monsters? You need .

bad men.

You be able to fight off greater evils.

It's everything in proper place is the answer to that. You know, we might think that our life would be easier without fear, let's say. We might say that our life would be easier without anger or pain.

But the truth of the matter is, is that those things are beneficial, even though they can cause great suffering, but they have to be in the proper place. And that capacity that couldn't one context be a terrible force for evil can, in the proper context, be the most poin force for good. A good man has to be formidable.

And partly, what that means, as far as I can tell, is that you have to be able to say no and no means like I thought a lot about no working as a clinical because I did lot of strategic counseling with my clients, a lot of extremely difficult situations. I learned to take apart what no man, and also when dealing with my own children, because I use no sparingly because it's a powerful weapon, let's say. But I meant IT.

And with my kids, what I meant was, if you continue that pattern of behavior, something you do not like will happen to you with one hundred percent certainty. And when when that's the case and you're willing to implement IT, you don't have to do IT very often with regards to monsters city, it's like weak men aren't good. They're just weak.

That's nature's observation. That's partly, again, why he was tempted to place the will to power, let's say, and to deal with that notion in a manner that when IT was tied with the revaluation of all values was counterproductive, counterproductive. In the final analysis, it's not like not like there wasn't something to what he was driving out.

No formidable men are admirable and you know don't mess with them dog. This man is a good example of that is, you know he's a rather slight guy, but he's got a spine of steel and there's no more than a bit of what's a monstrous in him. And joker willink is like that and joe rogan is like that, and you're like that.

But there's a different level. I mean, if you look to me, church on my represent the thing you're talking about, but world war two, hit or not, be stopped to the stone.

Well, I wonder, yes.

yes. And you, if I may insert to this picture of complexity, hiller would have not stopped until he instated, exterminated the entirety of the slavic people. The jewish people are slowly people, the gypsies, to everybody who's none area, but then stalled in the mass rape of german women by the red army as they marched towards berlin, is a kind of manifestation, the former city, that a person can be you.

you can easily be in a situation. You can easily and unfortunately find yourself in a situation where all you have in front of you are a variety of bad options. You know that's partly why, if you have any sense, you try to conduct yourself very carefully in life because you don't want to be in a position where you've made so many mistakes that all the options left you are terrible.

And so you said, well, was IT necessary to ally with stolen. It's like, well, it's very difficult. Second guess, the trajectory of something as complex as world war two. But we could say casually, at least as westerners have in general, that that alliances was necessary.

Now I think the mistake that the west made in the aftermath of world war two was in not dealing as forthrightly with the catastrophes of communism as an ideology as we did with fashion. And that's especially true of the intellectuals and the universities. I mean, I was very common when I was teaching, both at harvard and at the university of toronto, for the students in my personality class where we studied social.

Non, who's that actually an existent al psychologist in many ways, in a deep one. None of them know anything about the soviet atrocities. None of them know anything about what happened in ukraine and the death of six million productive people had no idea that the communist sts killed tens of millions of people in the aftermath of the russian revolution.

And they know even less about more.

And the great right right, which some estimates are one hundred million people. Now, you know, when your error bars are in the tens of millions, well, that's a real indication of a catholic. M and nobody knows how many people died from direct Operation or indirect in the soviet union. Twenty million IT seems like a reasonable estimate. Social eton's upper bound .

was higher than that. And how do you a measure, the intellectual output that was suppressed and killed off the number of intellectuals, artists, an briers that were put into .

the farmers for that matter? And anyone who is willing to tell the truth, right? absolutely. So yeah, catastrophic. And so I think the west failure wasn't so much applying with stolen.

I mean, IT was dug, this mastha who wanted to continue, he thought we should just take the soviet out after the second world world. And they removed him from any position of authority where such a thing might be made possible. And people were tired.

And but was mccarthy wrong? Well, he certainly wasn't wrong in his insistence that stolen was as big a monster as hitler or bigger. So the validate zone of the leftist procurement, the radical leftist procurement, is in the west, I think, more intensely than a lying was stolen.

TRicky knew on topic. But if you look at the modern day in the threat of communism, marxism in the united states, a to me, it's disrespectful to the atrocities of the twenty twenty century to call some a comerica, a communist st. But I see this sort of escalation of the extremest of language being used when you call somebody down a triumph of fascist.

And IT makes total sense to then use similar extreme terminology for some very common hairs. But maybe I could ask your evaluation. If you look at the political landscape today, somebody like joy and coma hair, well.

the first thing I would say is that I think that viewing the political landscape of today as a political landscape is actually wrong.

I think it's not the right frame of reference because what I see happening are a very small percentage of dark tetrad personality types, so maciver an manipulative, narcissistic, wanting, undeserved detention, psychopathic that makes them predatory parasites and statistic, because that goes along with the other three. That's about in the serious manifestation. That's probably three to five percent of the population.

And they're generally kept under pretty decent control by civilized people and stable social interactions. I think that their mashinka disinhibited by cost free social media communication. So they gained disproportion and influence. Now these people want undeserved recognition and social status and everything that goes along with IT, and they don't care how they get IT because when I say they want that, I mean that's all they want.

So around the media imagined ah yes, but are you also suggesting that they're overrepresented in the realm of politics, politicians and so they're .

overrepresented in the realm of fractious political discourse because they can use ideas. First of all, they can use, let's say, the benevent lent ideas of the right and the benevent lent ideas of the left, either one and switch back and forth for that matter, as a camfed ge for what they're actually up to.

So how do you you interview a lot of people. You have really powerful mind. You have a good read on people. So how do you know when you're sitting across from a psychotic?

I wouldn't say that. I do know. In Normal social circumstances, we have evolved mechanisms to keep people like that under control. Let's say that you now have a series of interactions and you screw me over once. I'm not going to forgive that.

Now I might not write you off because of the one time, but if IT happens three times, it's like we're not going to play together anymore. And in Normal times, most of our social networks are connected and interacting. So like if you ripped me off three times and I noted that i'm gonna tell everybody I know and they're going to tell everybody they know, and soon everyone will know, and that's the end of your tricks.

But that assumes that we know who you are and we're in continual communication or all of that's gone online. So anonymity does that. And so does the amplification of emotional intensity by the social media platforms and the algorithms. I think what we're doing this is happening on twitter continually, is we're giving the five percent of psychopath a radically disproportional voice. And what they're doing is there's a bunch of them on the left and they're all we're so compassionate and there's a bunch of them on the right and at the moment, they're all we're so Christian and free speech orient. It's like, no you're not you're a narco stic psychopaths and that's your camouflage and you hide behind your anonymity and you use um fractious and divisive language to to attract fools and to elevate your social status in your cloth and and not only that, to gain what would you say satisfaction for your statistic .

impulses see the problem is is hard to tell who is the psychopath and who .

is a heterodoxy .

truth seeker yeah well if you were .

charitable about talker cross in recent interview, you'd say that was exactly the concern he faced. And IT is hard like i've thought about, for example, interviewing and to tate. And I thought I don't think so.

And then I thought why. I figured it's not obvious to me at all that he wouldn't charm me. So I knew this guy, Robert hair.

Robert hair was the world's foremost authority on psychopathy. He established the field of clinical analysis of psychopathic behavior. And here was a pretty agreeable guy. So, you know, he would give people a benefit doubt. And he interviewed hundreds of serious psychopath, like imprison violent offenders.

And he told me in one of our conversations that every time he SAT down with a violent offender, psychopath, and he had a measure for psychopaths y, that was a clinical checklist, so he could identify the psychopath from just the, say, run in the medal criminals, every time you SAT down with them, they pulled the world over, resize. And IT wasn't an, he videotape the like, the interviews. And IT wasn't until later, when he was reviewing the videos, that he could see what they were doing. But in person, their tricks were more sophisticated than his detection ability. Well.

okay, this is fascine because, again, you're a great interviewer. I would love IT if you interviewed some people like putin. So this idea that you are a fool in the face of psychopathy just isn't job with me.

I an agree guy, that's the problem. I'll give people the benefit of the dot, right?

But that's good because the way you reveal psychopathy is by being agreeable, not weak, but are seeking with empathy to understand the other person and in the details in the little nuanced ways that they struggle with questions. Yes, the psychotic is revealed. So yes, so from a we are kind of just to separate the two things.

So one over representation, sec up with the online, uh, with anonymity. That's a serious, fascinating problem. But in the interview, one on one, I don't know if the job of human being in conversation is to a, not talk to psychopaths, but to talk, I mean, like how you into you hitler.

well, i've know i've had very difficult clinical interviews with people in my clinical practice.

And so what do you, how do you.

how do you approach that? Well, I I really probably approach that the way I approached most conversations and it's something like i'm going to assume that you're playing a straight game, but i'm gonna ch. And if you throw at the odd crooked move maneuvering, then i'll noted.

And after you do at three times, i'll think, okay, I see I thought we were playing one game, but we were actually playing another one. And if I smart enough to pick that up, that usually works out quite successfully for me. But I not always smart enough to pick that up.

But here's a nice thing. This one on one conversation is not recorded, is different than one that's listened by a lot of people because I would venture, I trust the intelligence of the year and the listener to detect even Better than you.

yes. And I think that's true, by the way, to detect the psychotic. I've had the odd interview with people that I wasn't happy with having organized because I felt that I had brought their ideas to a wider audience that might have been appropriate, but are my conclusion and the conclusion of my producers and the people I talked to was that we could run the interview, the discussion and let the audience sort IT out.

And I would say they do. So I think as a general rule of thun, that's true. And I also think that the long form interviews are particularly good at that because it's not that easy to maintain a manipulate tive stance, especially if you're empty for like two and half hours. So you get tired to get your table, you show that you lose the track, you you're going to start leaking out your mistakes.

And so in that actually is the case for all the world leaders. I would say one hours too short in something happens like two hour plus mark where you start to leak and I trust in the intelligence of the of the listener to set of uh to detect that yeah and .

IT might be the intelligence of the distributed crowd. And I mean, that is what i've seen with the youtube interviews, is that it's hard to fool people as such over a protracted period of time. And I I guess it's partly because everybody brings a different, slightly different set of falsehood detectors to the table. And if you aggregate that, it's pretty damn curate.

But of course, you know it's it's complicated because of ideas of nausea ology spread in the twenties, there was a real battle between xian and noises. And I believe there are some attempted censorship of ideology. Censorship very often does the opposite. IT gives the fringe ideologies power if they're being sensor because that's an indication that the um the the the man in power doesn't want the truth to be heard yeah this kind of idea. And I just puts fuel to the fire and .

also motivates the paranoid types, because just one of the reasons that paranoid spirals out of control is because paranoid d people almost inevitably end up being persecuted, because there are so touchy and so suspicious ous that people start to walk on, eg. Shells around them as if there are things going on behind the scenes.

And so then they get more distrustful and more paranoid, and eventually they start misbehaving so badly that they are actually persecuted, often by legal authorities. And so it's down the rabbit hole, they go. And so, you know, musk is betting on that to some degree, right? He believes that free expression on twitter ex will sort itself out in the of net benefit.

And I follow a lot of really bad accounts on x, because I like to keep an eye on the pathology of the left, lets say, in the pathology of the right thinking, at least in my clinical way, that i'm watching the psychopath dance round and try to do what their subversion. And it's an ugly place to inhabit, that's for sure. But it's also the case that a very tiny minority of seriously bad actors can have a disproportionate influence.

And one of the things i've always hope for for social media channels is that they separate the anonymous accounts from the verified accounts. They should just be in different categories, people who will say what they think and take the hits to the reputation anonymous types. If you want to see what the anonymous types say, you can see that, but don't be confusing them with actual people because they're not the same.

We know that people are we know that people behave more badly when they're ony mous. It's a very well step of psychological finding well, and I think the danger to our culture is substantial. I think the reason that everything perhaps the reason that everything started to go sideways pretty seriously around two thousand and fifteen is because we invented these new modes of communication.

We have no idea how to place them. And so the psychopathic manipulators, they have free rain. About thirty percent of the internet is pornography.

A huge amount of internet traffic is out right criminal. And there's a panel around that that's know psychopathic narcissist trouble making tools. And that might constitute the bulk of the interactions or online, and it's partly because people can't held responsible. So the free riders have free rain .

is a fascinating technical chAllenge, yes, of how make our society resilient to the psychopath.

the left in the right. Yeah, IT might be the fundamental problem of the age. Given the amplification of communication by our social, by our social networks.

And so to generalize across psychopath, you could also think about bots yeah, which behaves similar to psychopath in their certainty and not caring, their maximizing some functions .

ort term and even SE yeah, because you might, you know that another problem is, like if the algorithms are maximizing for the grip of shorter of attention, they're acting like imaging agents of attention, right? And so then imagine the worst case scenario is negative emotion gardeners more attention, and short term gratification gardeners more attention. So then you're maxi zing for the grip of shorter attention by negative emotion.

I mean, that's not gonna be a principle. If we are talking to earlier about you unsustainable unifying aims, that's definitely, that's definitely one of them. Maximize for the spread of negative attention, negative emotion that garner shorter of attention. Jesus, brutal.

I just I tend to not think there's that many psychopaths. So maybe to push back a little bit, he feels like there's a small number of psychopath.

Three to five percent is is the is the estimate worldwide?

In terms of humans, sure. But in terms of the the the pattern stuff we see online, my hope is that a lot of people on the extreme left and extreme right, or just the tools in general, are just Young 皮肤科 kind of go into the similar stuff that we've been talking about， trying on the cynicism in the resentment others. There's a drug aspect to IT is a pole to that to talk about, about somebody to take somebody down.

I mean, there is some pleasure in that. There is dark poll towards that. And I think that's the statistics. And I think a lot of people, I mean, you see what you say, statistic IT makes the slick some kind of pathology.

It's pleasure in the suffering of others.

right? But I just think that all of us have the capacity for that. All you must have the capacity for that.

some more than others, but everyone to some degree.

And when you're Young, you don't understand the full implications of that on your own self. So if you participate in take another down, that's gna have a cost on your own development as a human being, like it's going to take you tourist A D esq. Notes from underground in the basement, cynical, that one, which is why a lot of Young people try IT out, you know, the reasons you get older and older, you realized that there's a huge cost less.

You don't do IT, but the Young people that so like I I would like to serve, believe and hope that a large number of people who are tools are just trying out the derision, no doubt. And then so they can be saved, they can be held, they can be shown that there's more growth, there's more flourishing to, uh, celebrating other people and IT actually and criticizing ideas, but not in the way of derision L L, L. But by formulating your own self in the world by formula your ideas in a strong, powerful and also removing the cloak of anonymity and just standing behind your ideas, you to Carry the responsibility of those ideas.

Yeah, I think all of that is right. I think the idea that that's more likely to OK r ong people, that's clear. People, as they mature get more agreeable and conscientious.

So I actually know that that what you said is true technically, it's definitely the case that there's a an innate tilt towards pleasure in that sort of behavior and IT is associated to some degree with dominant striving. Um and I do think it's true, as you pointed out, that many of the people who are toying with that pattern can be socialized out of IT. In fact, maybe most most people, even even the repeat chino al types, tend to assist in their late twice.

So imagine that so one percent of the criminals commit sixty five percent of the crimes. So imagine that that one percent are the people that already concerned with. They often have stable patterns of offending that emerged in very, very Young, like even in infancy, and have and continued through at at lessons and into adult.

If you keep them in prison until they're in in the middle, their late twice, most of them stop. And that might be these est way to understand. That might just be delayed maturation.

So our most people self visible. Yes, definitely is everyone's visible. Well, at some point IT becomes, first of all, they have to want to be served as a problem. But then IT also becomes something like, well, how how much resources are you going to vote to that? Like though the father down the rabid whole you've done, the more energy IT takes to haul you up.

So there comes a point where the probability that you'll never get enough resources devoted to you to rescue you from the pit of hell that you've dog is zero. And that's a very sad thing. And it's very hard to be around someone who's in that situation very, very hard.

And IT seems that it's more likely that the leaders of movements are going to be psychopath, and the followers of movements are going to be the people that were mentioning that are kind of lost themselves in the .

ideology of the movement. Well, we we know that what you said is true even historically, to a large degree, because germany was successfully deos fied. And it's not like everybody who participated in every element of the nac movement was brought to justice. Not not least the same thing happened in japan.

So to some degree the same thing happened in south africa, right? And so and it's the case, for example, also in the stories that we were referring to earlier, the biblical stories that patriarch of the bible, most of them are pretty bad people when they first start out. I Jacobs are really good.

Jacobs is the one who becomes israel. He's a major player in them biblical narrative and he is a pretty bad actor when he first starts out is a mama's boy. He's a liar. He, uh, he steels from his own brother and in a major way deceives his father. He's a coward, you know and yet he turns his life around.

So be careful, the leaders you idolized .

and worship so but then .

it's not not always clear to know who is the good and who's the evil. And as hard you have been through some dark places in your mind over your life, what have been some of your darker hours and how did you find a way?

Well, I would say I started contending with the problem of evil, very Young, thirteen or fourteen, and that that's been the main. That was my main motivation of study for. Thirty years, I guess, something like that, at the end of that thirty years, IT became more and more.

I became more and more interested in flushing out the alternative. Once I became convinced that evil existed. And that was very Young.

I I always, I always believe that if you could understand something well enough that you could formulate the solution to IT. But IT turns out that seeing evil and understanding that IT exists is less complicated than a technical description of its opposite. What is good?

You can say, well, it's not that for sure. It's not a schwirtz. How about we start there? It's as far from oswalds as you can get. It's as far from enjoying being a oswaya amp guard as you can get. okay.

Well, where are you when you is far away from that as you could possibly get? What does that mean that and IT does have something to do with play as far as i'm concerned, like I think the antithesis of tyrAnnies play. So that took me a long time to figure out that specifically, you know um and so that was very dark like I spent a lot of time studying the worst behaviors that I could.

Discover abstractly in books but also in my clinical practice and and in my observations of people. And so that's that's rough. Um more recently, I was very ill and in a tremendous amount of pain like that lasted pretty much without any break for three years.

And what was particularly useful to me then was the strength of my relationships, my immediate relationships, my friendships, also the relationships that I have establish more broadly with people in no, because by the time I became me, alight was reasonably well known and people were very supportive when I was having trouble. And that was very helpful. But it's certainly the case that IT was the connections I had, particularly with my family, but also with my friends, that were the saving Grace.

And that's something to know. You know, I mean, it's unnecessary to bear the burdens of the world on your own shoulders, that's for sure. The burden of your own existence and whatever other responsibly lit E. S, you can mount. But that by no means means that you can or should do IT alone.

And so, you know, you might say, well, welcoming the university of life as a redeemed tive chAllenge is uh task that's beyond the ability of the typical person or even maybe of anyone but then when you think, well, you're not alone, maybe you're you're not alone socially, you're not alone familiar. Maybe you're not alone made physically as well there. There is an insistence and I think it's true.

There's an insistence, for example, in the old and the new testa like that, the more darkness you willing to voluntarily encounter, the more likely IT is that the spirit of Abraham and the patric will walk with you. And I think that's right. I I think it's sort of technically true in that the best parts of yourself make themselves manifest.

If you want to think about IT that way, the best parts of yourself, whatever that means, make themselves manifest when you're contending actively and voluntarily with the most difficult chAllenges. Why wouldn't IT be that way? And then you could think, well, that's yourself.

It's like, what are the best unrevealed parts of you yourself? Well, no, there are a kind of metaphysical reality. They're not yet manifest. They only exist in potential. They transcend anything you're currently capable love, but they have an existence you could call that yourself.

But like IT was Young contention, for example, with regards to such terminology, that the reason we use the term self instead of god is because when god was dispensed with, let's say, by the process is need to described. We just found the same thing deep within the instinctive realm. Let's say, we founded at the bottom of the things instead of at the topics that IT doesn't matter.

IT doesn't matter fundamentally. What matters is whether not that's a reality, and I think it's the fundamental reality because I do think that the deeper you delve into things, this is what happens to moses when encounters the burning bush. So moses is just going about his life.

He's a shepherd. He's adult. He has wives. He has children, has responsibility, ie.

s. He's left his home and he's established himself. And so things are pretty good for moses.

And then he's out by amount pour in that story. But it's the central mountain of the world. It's the same mountain in sni, which is the place we're having the earth touch.

And he sees something that grabbed his attention, right? That's the burning bush. And bush is a tree. That's life. That's the tree of life.

And the fact that it's on fire is that life fix, exaggerate, because everything that's alive is on fire. And so what calls to moses is like the spirit of being itself. And IT attracts him off the beat and track, and he decides to go investigate.

So moses is everyone who goes off the beat track to investigate. And so as he investigates, he delves more and more deeply until he starts to understand that he's now walking on sacred ground. So he takes off his shoes.

And that's a symbolic reference of identity transformation. He's no longer walking the same path. He no longer has the same identity.

He's in a state of flux. And that's when what happens is that he continues to interact with this calling. And mosses asks what IT is that being revealed in god says, i'm desperately of being itself.

That's basically the answer. I am what I am. It's it's a more complex others than that. I am what I will be. I am what was becoming. It's all of that at the same time, it's the spirit of being that speaking to him and the spirit of being and becoming. And IT tells moses that he now, because he's debt so deeply into something so compelling, his identity is transformed and he become the leader who can speak truth to power. And so he allies himself with his brother iron, who's the political armen, who can communicate.

And he goes back to egypt to confront the and that's that's an indication of that idea that if you wresting with life properly, that the spirit of being and becoming walks with you and like like how can that not be true? Because the the contrary would be that there would be no growth in chAllenge. Well, that's you have to be infinitely analyti C2Believe tha.

t it' s obv ious. But it's also just fascinating that hardship is the thing that is that ends up being the catalyst for delving deeply. It's hardship .

voluntarily undertaken. What is is crucially ly true. Look, if you bring someone into therapy, let's say they're afraid of elevators and you trick them into getting near an elevator, you'll make them worse. But if you if you negotiate with them so that they voluntarily move towards the elevator on their own recognizance, they they'll overcome their fear and they become generally braver. But IT has to be volunteer.

So I got ta push back and explore with you the question of voluntarily. Yes, let's look at nature. Yeah, he suffered through several health issues throughout his life, migraines, eyesight issues, digestive problems, depressions, al, societal thoughts. And yet he is one of the greatest minds in the history of humanity. So were these problems that he was suffering, arguably involuntarily, a feature or a bug?

That's a good question. The same thing happens in this story of job because job is a good man. God himself admits IT and the the city comes along and says to god, I see you're pretty proud of your your man there job god is yeah he's doing pretty and said and says, I think it's just because things you're easy for him let me have a crack out am, and see what happens and god says, yeah, I think you're wrong.

Do your worst right and that's how people feel when those slings and arrow come out and let's say, like nature. Well, jobes response to that. Now the story set up so that what befalls job is actually quite arbitrary.

Ite, these catastrophies that you're describing, the voluntarism in job is his refusal to despair, even in the face of that adversity. And that seems like something like an expression of voluntary free will. He refuses to lose faith.

And the the way the story ends is the joke gives everything back and more. And you also, that's a descent and ascent story. And accent ic might say, well, the ends don't justify the me. I would say fair enough, but that's a pretty shallow interpretation of the story. What that indicates instead is that if you're fortunate, because let's not forget that and you optimize your attitude even in the face of adversity, that there is not infrequently the case that your fortunes will reverse.

You know, when I found that in many situations, the journalists whose who, whose goal was most malicious in relationship to me, who are most concerned with improving their own, what would you say? Fostering their own notoriety in gaining social status at my expense were the ones who did me the greatest favor. Those were the interviews that went viral. And so that's that's interesting, you know, because they were definitely the places where the most disaster was at the hand. And I felt that in the aftermath, every time that happened, our my whole family was destabilized for like two months because things IT wasn't obvious at all which way the days we're onna role, but you leaned into that.

So in a sense that there's a kind of transformation from the involuntary to the voluntary, basically saying bring IT on that act of bring IT on turns the hardship in volunteer, hardship into .

volunteer. Not necessarily, let's say, but you could say that your best bet, well, you know and i'm i'm never going to say that you can transcend orchids strophe with the right attitude because that's just too much to say. But I could say that in a dire situation, there's always an element of choice. And if you make the right choices, you you improve the degree, you improve your chances of success to the maximum possible degree. IT might .

be too much to say, but nowhere less could be true victo franco market is.

Well, that's what the direction story proclaims, is that now, even under the darkest imaginable circumstances, the fundamental finally is the Victory of the good. And that seems to me to be true.

But you have regrets when you look back at your life in the analysis is of IT.

Well, as I said, I was very ill for about three years, and I was seriously brutal. Like every this is no lie. Every single minute of that three years was worse than any single time i'd ever experienced in my entire life up to that. So that was rough. Was the roughly.

the physical or psychological pain? Just little pain?

Yeah, yeah. I was walking like ten to twice miles. A day rain or shine, winter didn't matter, not good and IT IT was IT was worse than not because.

As the day progressed, my pain levels would fall until by ten, eleven night, when I was starting to get tired, I was approaching. What would you say? I was approaching something like an ordinary bad day.

But as soon as I went to sleep, then the clock was reset d and all the pain came back. And so he wasn't just that I was in payment, was that sleep itself became an enemy. And that's a really rough man, because sleep is where you take refuge.

You know you're worn out, you're tired and you go to sleep and you wake up. And it's generally it's something approximating a new day. This was like synapse on steroid and that was IT was very difficult to maintain hope in that because I would do what I could like.

There were times when I took me, like, an hour and half in the morning to stand up, and so I do all that, and more or less put myself back into something remotely resembling human by the end of the day. And then I knew perfectly well, exhausted, if I feel asleep, that I was going to be right at the bottom of the bloody hill again. And so after a couple years of that, IT was definitely the fact that I had a family that that Carried me through that.

What did you learn about yourself, about yourself at, about the human mind from that, from all of those days?

Well, I think I learned more gratitude for the people I had run me. And I learned how fortunate I was to have that and how crucial that was.

My wife learned something similar SHE SHE was diagnosed with a form of cancer that as far as we know, killed every single person whoever had to accept her, it's quite rare um and her experience was that what really gave her hope and played at least a role in saving her was the realization of the depth of love that her son in particular had for her and that that says nothing about her relationship with mega with her daughter is just so happened that IT was the revelation of that love that a made tam I understand the value of her life in a way that SHE wouldn't have realized of her own accord were very, very there's no difference between ourselves and the people that we love. And there might be no difference between ourselves and everyone everywhere. But we can at least realize that to begin with, in the form of the people that we love.

And I hope i'm Better at out than I was. I think i'm Better at IT than I was. I'm a lot more grateful for just ordinary, ordinary than I was, because when I first recovered, I remember I was standing.

First started to recovered. I was standing in this pharmacy, waiting for a prescription in little town and they wouldn't be in particularly efficient about. And so I was in that, standing in the eye for like twenty minutes, and I thought i'm not on fire.

I could just stand here for like the rest of my life, just not be an in pain and enjoying that. And, you know, that would have been something that before that would have been, you know, I would have been impatient, rare into go, cause I enough twenty minutes to stand in middle an oil. And I thought, well, you know, if if you're just standing there and you're not on fire, things are a lot Better than they might be and I certainly I know, and I think I remembered almost all the time .

you gain a grater ability to appreciate the mundane e moments of life.

Yeah, definitely the miracle of the mundane.

right?

yeah. I think nature had that because he was very ill. And so I suspect the had IT, you know him. He was regarded by the inhabitants of the village that he lived in near the end of his life as something approximating saint. He apparently conducted to himself very adorably.

despite all his suffering now, but that still there's this tension, as there's in much of natures work between the a, the miracle of the mundane, appreciating the miracle of the mundane, versus a, fearing the tyranny of the mediocre.

It's more than mediocre resenting.

yes, but as you giving him a pass .

or seeing the grave.

there's a kind of, I mean, the tyranny, the media oka. I I always hated this idea that some people are Better than others, and I understand that, but it's a dangerous idea.

This is why I like the story of can enable, I would say because can is mediocre, but that's because he refuses to do his best. It's not something intrinsic to him. And I actually think that's the right formulation because, you know, I had people in my clinical practice who were.

They were lost in many dimensions from the perspective of comparison. One woman I remember in particular who man he had a lot to contend with SHE was not educated. SHE was not intelligent SHE had a brutal family like terrible history of psychiatric hospitalization.

um. And when I met her. At a hospital. SHE was an outpatient from the psychiatric ward, and he had been in there with people that he thought we're worse off than her and they were.

And that was a long way down that was like daunted in fernal level down. IT was a long term psychiatric inpatient ward. Some of the people had been there for thirty years.

IT IT made a one, flew over the cook's nest, look like a romantic comedy. And SHE had come back to see if he could take some of those people for a walk, and was trying to find out how to get permission to do IT. And so you know Better, Better than other people.

Some people are more intelligence, some people are more beautiful, some people are more athletic. Is maybe it's possible for everyone at all levels of attainment to strive towards the good and maybe those talents that are given to people unfairly don't privilege them in relationship to their moral conduct. And I I think that's true.

There's no evidence, for example, that there's any correlation whatsoever between intelligence, morality. You're not Better because you're smart. And what that also implies is if you're smart, you can be a lot Better at be and worse.

I think for myself, i'm just afraid of dismissing people because of my perception of them. Yeah well.

that's why we have that metaphysical presumption that everybody's made the image of god right. Despite that immense diversity of apparent ability, there's that underlying mental physical assumption that yeah we all vary in our perceived and actual utility and relationship to any proximal goal. But all of that independent of the question of asiatic worth and that proposers is that notion appears to be IT seems to me that societies that accept IT as a fundamental asiatic presumption are always the societies that you'd want to live in if you had a choice. And that, to me, is an existence proof for the utility of the presumption.

And also, you know, if you treat people like that in your life, every encounter you have, you make the assumption that it's an assumption of what would it's radical quality of worth despite individual variance, inability, something like that, man, your interactions go way Better. I mean, everyone wants to be treated that way. Look, here's the developmental sequence for you knife and trusting heart and cynical okay, well, it's hurt.

Cynical, Better than I ve interesting. It's like, yeah, probably is that where the ends? How about cynical? interesting. A step three, right. And then the trust becomes courage. It's like all of my hand out for you, but it's not as i'm a fool and I think that's right because that's the restante ation of that initial trust, right that makes childhood magical and paradigm but it's the admixture of that with wisdom like yeah you know we could be we could walk together up hill, but that doesn't mean and i'll presume that that's your aim, but that doesn't mean that i'm .

not going to watch was a Better life cycle and safe for hopeful and vulnerable to be hurt.

Oh, you you can't dispence with vulnerable to be hurt. That's that's the other realization. It's like you're gona take your life on something. You can take your life on security, but it's not gonna help. You don't have that option.

So what do you do when you're betrayed ultimately buys some people? You come across.

grieve and look elsewhere, do what you can to forgive. And not least so you light your own burden. Maybe do IT you can help the person who betrayed you. And if that all proves impossible, then wash your hands of IT and move on to the next adventure .

and do IT again. Yeah, boy, this life, something else, say, we've been talking about some heavy, difficult topics, and you've talked about truth in the nature lectures and elsewhere. When you think, when you write, when you speak, how do you find what is true? You know, having way said, all you have to do is right, one true sense. Yeah, how do you do that?

Well, I would say first that you practice that. It's like IT that question is something and in hemingway knew this at least to some degree, and he certainly wrote about IT, is that you have to offer your life upward as completely as you can, because otherwise you can distinguish between truth and falsehood. IT had has to be a practice.

No one for me. I started to become serious about that practice when I realized that IT was individual. IT was the immorality of the individual, the resent for craven, deceitful immorality of the individual that LED to the terrible atrocities that humans engage in, that make us doubt even our own worth.

I became completely convinced of that, that the fundamental root cause of evil that say wasn't economic or sociological, that IT was spiritual to psychological, and that if that was the case, you had an existential responsibility to air upward and to tell the truth, and that everything depends on that. And I became convinced of that. And so then, look, you set your path with your orientation.

That's how your perceptions work. As soon as you have a goal, a pathway opens up to you, and you can see IT, and the world divides itself into obstacles and and things that move you forward. And so the pathway that in front of you depends on your aim, the things you perceive are concretization of your aim.

If your aim is untrue, then you won't tell the difference between truth and falsehood. And you might say, well, how do you know your aim is true? It's like, well, you course correct continually and you can aim towards the ultimate. Are you ever sure that your aims the right direction, you become increasingly accurate in your apprehension.

is IT like part of the process to cross the line to a, to go outside the over, to wind up the outside window? Forbid, of course.

that's what you do in part play. Um I was at the comedy mothership in every single comedian was like completely reprehensible. All they were doing was saying things that you D I I can't say, yeah well but I was in play.

What i'm trying to do in my lechers is i'm on the edge like I have a question i'm trying to address and i'm trying to figure out I don't know where the conversation is going, truly like it's it's an exploration. And I think the reason that the audiences respond is because they can feel that it's a high wire. Aq, you know, and I could fail.

And you know, my lectures have degrees of success. Sometimes I get real fortunate. There's a perfect narrative arc. I have a question i'm investigating IT IT comes to a punched line conclusion just at the right time and it's like the whole act is complete and sometimes it's more fragmented. But I can tell when the audience is engaged because everyone is silent, you know, except maybe when they're laughing.

but is a kind of sense that you are arguing with yourself and your lecturing is beautiful. It's it's really beautiful and powerful to watch that need you does the same as contradictions. And what you are saying, there's a small global what you're saying. But I do think that when you are doing the same on the internet, you get punished for the deviation, you get punished for the exploration, especially when that explores outside the over to window.

Look, if you're gone to play hard in a conversation to explore, you're gone to say things that cost Better, edgy, right, that are going to cause trouble and there might be wrong. And that that's another reason why free speech protection is so important and you actually have to protect the right, let's say, in the optimal circumstance, you have to protect the right of well meaning people to be wrong.

Now you probably have to go beyond that to truly protect that. You have to even protect the right of people aren't meaning well to be wrong, you know. And we also need that because we're not always well meaning. But but I don't know the alternative to that protection would be the insistence that people only say what was one hundred percent right all the time.

I'm also, I guess this is a call to our fellow humans not to reduce a person or particular statement. That is what the internet was to want to do.

especially if it's the worst thing they ever said, yeah yeah. Because god, well, let anyone judged by that standard is doomed unless they're silent.

But IT also just makes you not want to play, yeah, not want to, uh, take sort of radical thought experiments .

and Carry out arian state. Yes, playing in a total term state ever.

but in this case is an emergent one. Yeah, with psychopaths. H rome, the landscape.

Well, know that might be the general pattern of totalitarian. M.

well, in totality ism, there's usual psychopath about the yeah.

but everyone, well, everyone else is complicated, at least in their silence. Yeah.

does the study of the pathology psychopath online?

Where are you? Yeah, they will consider .

doing a less of that.

Yes, yes, definitely. But you know.

Probably I experiences most of that on x, but that's also where I found most of my guests. That's also where I get a sense of the site guys, which is necessary, for example, if you going to be a podcast host, is necessary for me to make my lectures on point up to date to get a sampling of the current moment. You have to be of the moment in in many ways to function at a high level. Is there a there's a prize to be paid for that because you're. You exposed everything in the center.

and you can also oversample the darkness.

Yeah.

yeah, definitely. And I can make you more, more signal. yeah. Well, it's a danger.

right? Yeah, yeah. Well, luckily for me, you know, I have many things to counterbaLance that. The familiar relationships we talked about, the friendships, the and then also all of the public things I do are positive. The lecture tours, for example, which I want a lot, there are basically one hundred percent positive. So i'm very well, butch, against that is great .

deal as .

a fan in the arena .

watching the glad her's fight your mind is too important to be lost to the cynical, to the, to the battles with the.

with the abyss. Well, you have a moral obligation to to maintain a positive. Positive orientation is a moral obligation. The future is, of course, right, with contradictory possibilities. And I suppose in some ways, the more rapid the rate of transformation, the more possibility for good and for evil is making itself manifested any moment. But IT looks like the best way to ensure that the future is everything we wish you would be is to maintain faith that that is the direction that will prevail. And I think that's a form of moral commitment when it's not just naive optimism.

Jordan, thank you for being encouragement and being the light amid the darkness for many, many people. And thank you for once again talking there.

Thanks very much for the invitation and for the conversations, but always a pleasure to see you and uh, you're doing a pretty decent job yourself about their illuminating dark corners and bringing people upward. I mean, you've got a remarkable thing going with your broadcasting. You're very good at IT.

Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jordan Peterson. To support this pocket, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from frija nature. I would like to learn more and more to see as beautiful, that which is necessary and things, then I should be one of those who make things beautiful. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.