Beyond Order: Montreal Lecture | Jonathan Pageau | EP 262

and now please welcome tonight's host from the symbolic world podcast jonathan pageau [Applause] welcome everybody i am very excited because for the first time jordan peterson is in montreal it is the first time that he's speaking here jordan has lived here he lived here for eight years he was at mcgill and he loves this city and so it's really great to have everybody here to uh to listen to him speak i want to um rewind you in my life to 2015. this is before jordan peterson was famous he was a psychologist at the university of toronto and i was driving down the road and i was listening to the cbc and i don't know i was just getting my son at his friend's house on one evening and there's this conference on on the cbc and here's this professor and uh he's saying things that i am not used to hearing on the cbc the way that he was speaking the references that he was making he was going through solzhenitsyn and milton and dostoevsky he was talking about the nature of reality using words like logos which you usually don't hear on the radio i was really surprised i was very surprised because he was saying things that were connecting to something that i was already thinking and this is an experience that i've heard many people say about jordan's work which is that when they hear him he's expressing something that they had on the tip of their mind that they could almost see that they could kind of perceive and jordan is able to bring it together for them in a in a more succinct and very powerful way and i was so excited that i would i was hitting the steering wheel i was like screaming in the car i am not like that this is not usually the way that i act i was so excited that i i went to get my son and all i could think about was what i was what i'd heard on the radio i couldn't believe it i got home you know i'm online on google who is this jordan peterson fellow i find him u of t you know he's a professor of psychology start listening to some of his lectures and every lecture i'm astounded at the way in which he's talking about the world and especially for me what was fascinating was that he was giving he was helping the secular world understand what some of the religious patterns some of the mythology some of the rituals that we engage with what it is that they could mean for them what why do they make sense why do we do these strange things like have rituals why do we you know how why do we have these strange stories that when you look at them on the surface are completely absurd he was really helping people to gather that together so i was so excited i wrote him a little email and uh and i said uh thank you so much for everything you do and i sent him a link to a talk that i had given talk that i had given at a university also at a college in in ontario at king's university i think and i was talking about similar things as jordan in that conference i was talking about the problem of complexity and how you know how patterns come together and manifest certain realities but you know i just said i'll just thank him because i i like i said i've never done this before so i write him i'm like thank you so much and uh the next day i get an answer nice little answer you know thank you so much for your your message with a link to a few more videos but then two hours later he calls me i did not expect that either he and and i was as much shock as i was experiencing i felt like on the end of the phone he also had the same kind of shock because he had detected in the things that i was talking about similar patterns to what was interesting him uh and so since then since that moment in 2015 jordan and i have been having an ongoing conversation conversation about the pattern of reality conversation about how complexity relates to the question of religion and uh because he was coming to montreal jordan said why don't we why don't we try to continue this conversation together so tonight with jordan that is what i hope to do we'll be going through the different arguments about the question of the pattern of reality of how complexity comes about and how it moves into all the way that we act how we decide what is good and how we move into the good so i'm i'm super excited to have jordan with us and i'm really i know he's excited to be in montreal so everybody please welcome dr jordan peterson [Music] thank you thank you yeah well it's great it's great to be here it's such a it's always such a thrill for me to come to montreal this is such a great city i loved living here and we haven't been here for i don't know five years or six years i have lots of friends here my my former advisor and business partners here he's in the audience tonight robert peel bob was one of the people who helped design the self-authoring program and understand myself program and got lots of old graduate student buddies in the audience tonight so that's pretty fun and i wish i could go out and walk wander around the streets and see how the city's doing but it looked great when we came in today so i'm really happy to be here and thank thank all of you for coming and and i'm really happy to be talking to jonathan as he pointed out we've been conversing seriously with a variety of other people too including bishop baron and john verbaki in particular i just jonathan came up to my house in toronto a week ago a week ago oh yeah not very long and we had a three-hour conversation with professor verveiki at the of the university of toronto and and that went really well we're going to really set on youtube at some point in the relatively near future and and so we're hammering out the same problems in some sense from different perspectives and that's quite fun and so i thought it would be a good opportunity to i like to use these lectures or these opportunities to push my thinking on a particular question farther than i've been able to push before you know i don't like to give the same lecture and i like to discover some something new and jonathan's a really good person to talk to when you're trying to discover something new especially on the symbolic front and we've had quite a fruitful interaction especially about ritual i would say and and and traditional belief and and the ideas of of traditional not just christianity it's broader than that jonathan is very well versed in post-modern theory which is extremely helpful and also in in cognitive science as well as deeply read theologically and a great artist you should check out his website he's really something he's made some lovely pieces for us so well so away we go thank you very much for agreeing to do this and again thank you all for coming i hope we have a bang-up evening that's the plan man so one of the things that prompted your foray into religious thinking there are different different venues that you kind of brought you into it but one of them was definitely the problem of perception that is the man in which humans perceive and the the place where cognitive science was coming and realizing the limit of perception or at least how objects in the world aren't just self-evident and that there's a process by which we're able to come together and the way in which the world kind of shows us or manifests to us how it is that we're supposed to inhabit it so maybe you can start with that and talk a little about that okay so we can hit that from a variety of different perspectives i mean the first problem the cognitive scientists really stumbled across and and the ai types who are developing robots same thing and the postmodernists the literary critics they all run across this problem at the same time which was that any reasonably complex environment is susceptible to a near infinite number of interpretations and so when you hear the post modernist say things like uh well there's no fixed meaning for a text which is something they really started to understand i would say really in the 1960s they're actually right you know you think about uh shakespearean play or a biblical story well how many interpretations are there of hamlet or of the story of cain and abel well there's an indefinite number of interpretations maybe one for every reader now there's some overlap because we can commonly understand the stories but well if there's that many interpretations which one's right and if none of them are right well then are none of them right and is there even any such thing as right in that situation and so that's the problem with textual analysis and then in the real world outside of text let's say every visual scene is incomprehensibly complex there's an indefinite number of ways of seeing everything and this is partly why we don't have general purpose robots is because ai engineers originally believed that the problem of robotics would be the computation of action in the world but it turned out that the problem of robotics was seeing the world and that really shocked everyone because when you look at the world it's like well there it is you know no problem you just open your eyes and bang there are the objects and yeah they're objects it's like well how many of them well you could get lost in the details of this carpet if you were a photorealist painter you know you could take just a section of the carpet and it would take you maybe three weeks to paint it in a high resolution manner and even then you wouldn't have captured anywhere near the detail and you'd only have done it under one condition of illumination and that's just a fragment of a visual scene and so i started to get extremely interested in this problem which was the problem of attention how do we reduce the indefinite multiplicity of the potential landscape of perceptions to the self-evident things that we see and the answer to that turns out to be extremely bizarre partly it's uh well we don't see objects we see meaning and we infer objects and that's quite the bloody revelation when you start to understand that because you know modern people atheistic materialist types they think what's sort of a dead world intrinsically and you overlay a meaning on top of that and that's a secondary overlay because the object perception is primary and it's not real the meaning it's like that isn't how your brain works you see meanings so for example with little children there's this experiment for example called a visual cliff if you if you take a baby who can crawl and you put imagine uh a table like this and then another table the same set here and then a plate of glass between them if you have the baby crawl towards the visual cliff the baby will stop and the reason for isn't the reason isn't that the baby sees like an objective pattern and thinks oh no i can fall they see a falling off place and then they maybe they can infer some common objective pattern out of that but we see meanings our primary element of our perception is meaning mapped right onto our body and that's that really upends the whole in some sense the whole empirical notion of the way that we act in the world the whole rationalist enterprise although less that um and it poses very strange epistemological questions so that's questions about the theory of knowledge but also very strange ontological questions so for example if you're a darwinian think okay well we evolved to perceive the world in a manner that's accurate enough to ensure our survival and that's about as accurate as it gets in some sense if you're a darwinian well we perceive the world through stories actually like technically well does it does that mean that the world is a story or if not what does it mean and the answer to that is it's not so obvious and one thing that has become obvious that jonathan and i have talked about a lot is that it's clearly the case that we see the world through something that when we describe it is a story so you prioritize your attention through a structure of value and you can't see unless you do that and so that even means that the objective world and this is something the post-modernist also kind of pointed out the objective world isn't even so clearly objective not not in the way we thought because you can't even see objects except through a hierarchy of value and so we've talked a lot about what what that hierarchy of value might might be and you've hit that particularly from a more theological perspective well one of the surprising thing that comes out of it is the idea that we are aiming when we're acting that is in the world when we're moving when we're doing things we're always kind of aiming towards the good and avoiding the bad we could say and that actually becomes in a certain manner the definition of how we perceive objects themselves right like if i see an apple without even thinking about it i'm always asking myself is it a good apple is it an apple that will reach its purpose and when we say its purpose it's actually our embodied human purpose that is right i see an apple i'm asking myself is it good to eat right and then well and you're also assuming then there's a platonic element to that too so like does it fulfill its function as an apple which would be for us it would be well it's ripe and it's not rotten and it's delicious and and then the reason you see it it's it's tied into an ethic and you might say well how what kind of ethic is it tied into it's like well do you want to eat and do you eat because you want to live and do you want to live because you think living is worthwhile and to what end are you devoting your life and you think well none of that's there when i see an apple and that's absolutely 100 wrong all of that is there when you see everything and so you're embedded in an ethic of aim and you can't organize your perceptions with it without that and that ethic of aim fundamentally the the highest order aims or the most fundamental aims you can use either metaphors so the most basic things or the highest things they are phenomenologically religious in structure and i mean that by definition so like when you talk about the deepest things and so those would be the things that move you the most or the things that are your ultimate aim you're in the landscape that produces religious experiences when people are in that domain and that's deeply rooted biologically so one of the religious instincts for example is the instinct that's associated with awe and with the compulsion to imitate so you know we maybe you imitate a hero you know and the ultimate hero would be a divine figure and so that's why for example religious people might talk about the imitation of christ but that experience of awe which you might have when you look up at the night sky that's associated with pilo erection which is the feeling of your hair standing on end and or chills running up your and down your back which sometimes you'll feel for example if you listen to music and you're deeply moved by it and that is a reflex that's probably 60 million years old because it's the same reflex that you when you see a cat when it sees a dog you know maybe it's afraid it puffs itself up that's pilo erection and does that so it looks big and then it dances sideways and it's the experience the cat is having is something like the experience of awe and and that's not cognitive like that's 60 million years old it's really old and it's a primary religious experience and so and it's it's tied into perception in an extraordinarily deep level partly because the things that you're in awe of will be the things towards which you aren't your perceptions and your actions at the highest level of organization and so that's actually what the awe experience in some sense is for right it's to show you what is at the top of the structure that directs your attention and that happens with everything you do so in a way it also becomes a way to understand two aspects of the religious you could say one which is the terrible aspect of it this idea of this terrifying figure and the other is the imitative part right so you have this notion that uh the the cat sees the dog or let's say a young boy sees this giant warrior that you know walks out in front of him and he feels this sense of mixture of fear of being impressed and of wanting something from that or like wanting to move up towards towards that yeah well i think we've we talked about this in relationship to the night sky you know um there's a there's a very famous image of mary that renaissance artists really went to town on there's hundreds of paintings of this so it's mary with her hair head in the stars and her foot on this on a serpent so it's that serpent is the serpent in the garden of eden or satan or evil and the idea there it's an image of the divine feminine and the idea is that in order to protect the vulnerable from evil you have to be oriented to the highest that the cosmos has to offer and and the reason that's assimilated to some degree to the stars is because when you go out at night and you look up at the heavens well first of all notice that you're looking up at the heavens that that that's the term we use but that you also do come face to face with the infinite in in some real sense right i mean you're looking out towards the nearest thing to the infinite you're going to encounter and that does produce a sense of awe and that's in one part of that that's a humility like the cat might feel in relationship to a dog but in another thing it's a call to imitate even the cosmos because along with that sense of being awe inspired by the heavens and feeling insignificant in some sense and humble there's also a call to a greater form of being and that's you know one of the things human beings did because we were preyed upon and became predators one of the things we did was imitate the predator you know and so we were in awe of a predatory animal like we still might be if you meet a grizzly bear in the in the woods you know it's you might freeze and you're certainly going to attend to it but then there's part of you that is deeply called upon to imitate the the capacity for aggression of the predator so that you can defend your loved ones against predatory action and some of that would be to be the warrior that can fight off the grizzly bear but then abstract it up into the religious sense it would be to be the ethical actor who can protect your family from um from unscrupulous psychopaths you know forces of malevolence that border on the on the satanic and so and that's all part of the ethical enterprise and weirdly enough all of your acts of perception are necessarily nested inside a structure that's pointing to what's what is at the highest or you're incoherent those are the options well that's a strange thing right because you can say well maybe your hierarchy of value isn't unified and there's nothing at the top it's like okay it's not unified well then you're confused and if you're with someone and your hierarchies of value aren't unified then you are in conflict or you're aimless or you're hopeless or you're anxious or you're lost that's the phenomenological consequence of lacking this united pyramidal pyramidal ethic so you can't get away from the necessity of this unless you want to live you know aimless nihilistic confused hopeless all of that so we've got awe and we've got the desire to imitate and i think the third part that that i'd like to to bring up and hear what you want to you think about that is the notion of celebrating that's something that's something that i don't know it seems to be particularly human maybe there's examples of that in the animal world i don't know but there's something about humans which celebrate and in celebrating what we're doing is we're recognizing these pinnacles whether it be celebrating a great basketball player or celebrating the the images of our nation or the you know the unity of our family when we come for thanksgiving there seems to be something you you really helped me understand the relationship the technical relationship between the concept of worship and the concept of celebration because you might say well you know what does it mean to worship and a cynical person would say it means to believe things that no one but a damn fool would believe you know and that's kind of the dismissive modern attitude but that isn't what it means like worship is it has this celebratory aspect and that is tied into this instinct to imitate so if you have a sports hero first of all he's a hero and he is someone you put on a pedestal which indicates a kind of right an elevation towards the divine or towards the sky metaphorically speaking and then there is this compulsion to imitate and that's no different than celebration and so partly what's happening in a church ceremony for example is that an object of celebratory worship is specified and in the christian tradition that's christ and which is a very strange thing because of course he met absolutely abysmal end and that's an unbelievably complicated idea too that that the the tragic the ultimately tragic element of human life is to be voluntarily apprehended in the deepest possible sense and that what that produces paradoxically is a celebration and then also a vision of the resurrection and that's an idea that's so deep you you could you can lose yourself in that well we've lost ourselves in it for 2000 years because one of the things that this attention problem brings about is the question of sacrifice too and you see it in the in religious ceremonies but you realize that in order to exist in the world you're constantly having to sacrifice that is you have to sacrifice the idiosyncrasies in order to be able to grasp the the object because this can be all kinds of things right i could be a dog's true toe it could be could be a million things but in order to be able to grasp it i have to sacrifice idiosyncrasies and i also have to somehow let's say recognize it in its highest form or kind of move it towards its highest form and that seems to be an aspect of religious thinking which is actually part of attention which is exactly well the sacrificial aspect of attention in part is that whenever you see something as that thing you sacrifice the possibility of all the other things it could be and that's delimiting to a large degree you know it hems you in but but that's also a relief because you know how many bloody million things do you want to attend to at one time but so part of the reason you know the idea of sacrifice conscious idea of sacrifice emerges very easy early on for example in the biblical writings because the second story in in genesis i think it's genesis 3 is that the canaanite is that the canaan able stories genesis three or two after genesis three genesis four okay so it's very early on and there's this insistence that so human beings are already destined to work as a consequence of the fall out of the garden of eden but the cain and abel story is specifically about sacrifice and about the degree to which a sacrifice has to be of the highest quality so you have this one protagonist abel um who's a prototype for a mode of being that stretches throughout history and abel's sacrifices are to the highest to to that which is the highest imaginable so he's aiming as high as he can and they're genuine and honest and the consequence of that is that god smiles upon him let's say but that his life is extremely successful he gets everything that a sensible human being would want and need and he's contrasted with cain who's bitter and arrogant and makes second-rate sacrifices and you want to think about that personally it's like well did you give it your best shot when when you failed and if the answer is no it's like well who are you trying to fool exactly you trying to fool yourself well good luck with that you're trying to fool other people it's like well who made you so smart and those them so dumb and is that how you think about other people you can just pull the wool over their eyes and then is it more than that do you think you can bend the structure of reality and so you're gonna make these half-witted sacrifices and that's going to please god too and that's what you believe and you know cain is very annoyed that his sacrifices aren't being rewarded and he goes and talks to god and basically calls him out and says something like you know kind of stupid cosmos did you make here here i am breaking myself in half and all the good things are going to able it's like what's up with you which is really quite the thing to do you know and if you don't think people do that you don't know much about them and god basically tells them what people do that all the time which is why it's an archetypal story and god basically tells cain that he doesn't make good sacrifices he knows that perfectly well that he was tempted by bitterness and arrogance and deceit to enter into a consensual sexual relationship with the spirit of vengeful sin itself which is a hell of an accusation and well you know these people who shoot up high schools for example they dwell on their sin for months or years before they commit that act and they are entering into a creative relationship with temptation they let a terrible spirit inhabit them and they enter into a creative union with that it's not it's it's they brood and you know that's a sexual metaphor too and they go to some plenty dark places you have to go to some plenty dark places before before you take an automatic rifle out in an elementary school and so if there's you don't think there's any brooding in that in any communing in a creative way with the spirit of vengefulness and misplaced aim then you don't have much of an imagination for that sort of thing and then you know good for you but you better be careful if you meet someone like that and so there's this this idea of necessary sacrifice right and yeah and that sacrifice is necessary for even for seeing for any like think of a basketball player i like to always bring it to something that at first not religious at all for people to see what we're talking about the basketball player has to one sacrifice million things that all his friends are doing that are fun or that that he could be doing he has to just he has to take away all the idiosyncrasies and focus on one thing and then he has to that's when the able sacrifice comes in he has to give his best if he doesn't give his best then he won't make it there's no way and so the the sacrificial pattern enters into pretty much any type of excellence or excellent behavior we can yeah well and it also might so it's integrally tied with the problem of perception itself and the fact that we have to sacrifice a multiplicity of potential interpretations or patterns of action to focus on one but it's also integrally associated with the idea of the future because to ensure that you know people are aware of the future in ways that animals aren't or animals are only partially aware we're very aware of the future and aware of our mortal limitations in a manner that seems unique to human beings and we sacrif we constantly sacrifice the present to the future that's actually the definition of work and that emerges very early on in the biblical narrative corpus the idea that humans are destined to work but that also work is the sacrifice of the present and that's part of the fall in some sense it's the sacrifice of the present to the future and we regard that as the hallmark of maturity fundamentally right can you delay gratification well if the answer is no it's well then you're two can you delay gratification well then i mean that technically um because two-year-olds can't delay gratification which makes it very difficult for other people to play with them for example um if you can delay gratification then you can work if your work if you can work then you're mature it's the definition of maturity and responsibility and it does pervade it's so interesting to see that it pervades the act of attention itself and that there's no because you know i used to ask my students because i was trying to figure this out i'd ask them a question like well why are you why are you writing this essay or what are you doing when you're writing this essay that's a better question so you think what is someone doing when writing an essay and one answer is say they're doing it on a computer well they're moving their fingers up and down and that's actually a really good answer because that's not an idea right moving your fingers up up and down that's not an idea that's where your spirit meets your body you're actually moving something physical and you you don't really have consciousness of the musculature or you know you don't know how you move your fingers but you can do it and so at the most the highest level of resolution when you're writing an essay you're moving your fingers and now you know how to type and you have automated structures for doing that and then you're composing words and the words are in phrases and the phrases are in sentences and the sentences are in paragraphs and the paragraphs are in sections and the whole thing makes an essay but then that's a subset of a class and you want to grade for the class because you want to pass the class because you want to get your degree but why do you want to get your degree it's well maybe you're interested in that field of study and you think being a scholar is a good thing and you want to have a job and so while you're writing an essay you're what are you doing preparing to have your career and then does that are you doing that because you want to be a good citizen and a good father perhaps good mother and do you want to do that because you want to be a good person and are you mixed up in all of that and but so you're doing all of those things well or badly at the same time all the time with everything you do all the time and there's no way around that it can't be simplified the whole structure has to be there and that's another reason why we don't have general purpose robots yet is that they're just not embedded in that ethic that stretches all the way up from the most minute motor patterns of action and perception to the highest possible ethical striving and then the question becomes two is like what's at the top and that's the fundamental religious question and that the idea of what's at the top has transformed across the centuries the ancient egyptians they put two things at the top they put a god um known as osiris who is basically the spirit of the state so you could think about him as the spirit of tradition and the problem with osiris was that he was old and anachronistic and willfully blind and lost in the underworld all of those things real problem and it's sort of like when everybody complains about how corrupt society has become and how they feel alienated from their culture um that's all osiris fundamentally that's that's how the egyptians represented it and so that was one part of what should be at the highest tradition and the other part was horus and horus is the famous egyptian eye and horus is a falcon because falcons have great vision and so horus is the spirit of living attention and the egyptians believed that the pharaoh who was sovereignty embodied was the incarnation of the union of tradition and vision and so that's what they thought should be at the highest which is and that's what they symbolized by the gold cap by the way on the pyramids and so because the gold cap is it's at the top of the pyramid which is a uh ethical hierarchy a pyramid and the top is qualitatively distinct in some sense from the structure itself it's it's because it's in the highest place it's it's different than everything else that is underneath it and we all wrestle with the problem of what should be in the highest place there's no way of escaping that problem and you might say well nothing is fine you're polytheistic you're confused you're all over the place you're scattered that's the consequence of not having this unified internal structure and if your society doesn't have it well then you can't get along with people and you're in conflict and so these aren't none of this is optional it's we're doomed to well my new book is going to be called we who wrestle with god and i would say well because that's israel right that that's the definition of the term israel is we who wrestle with god which is so interesting and uh those are god's chosen people we who wrestle with god and it's because that's our fate we're we're going to wrestle with ethical issues period it doesn't matter if you're atheistic or religious in fact lots of people who are atheistic are way more obsessed with religious ethics than religious people are well they are right because they well they are because and and they're more honest about it sometimes because they'll advance genuine confusion and distress which is appropriate but it's not like they just ignore it it's they're often so anti-religious that it consumes their life it's like well that's fine there wrestle away man if you're wrestling with god it's like i don't believe in him it's like yeah he doesn't believe in you either but you know or maybe he does which would even be worse and so we have the we have the pyramid and in the bible we have especially the mountain we have a few structures like that there's the mountain the mountain of paradise in particular or the mount sinai on zion we also have the temple itself which has this structure in terms of it's a pyramid towards unity this invisible unity or this transcended unity and so the question is what comes down from the mountain this is because one of the things we talk about is how we most of the things we've been discussing from the beginning and a lot of the big discussion that's happening is bottom up and i'm totally fine with that but there is something which comes down from the mountain let's say the law but what is that how do you see that what it is what kind of nominal or or structural power or authority comes down from that hierarchy well one thing maybe before we address that precisely maybe you could just run through the sorts of things we talked about in relationship to sacred architecture and the relationship between the sacred architecture and the structure of of a perceptual or cognitive category because that's extremely interesting so so why don't you lay out the this church structure with the holiest of holy and this is this is very common anthropological structure so most well the idea is that just like jordan was talking about in terms of multiplicity and the problem of complexity we have that problem when we act we also have that problem in space that is how do we encounter space how do we embody space and our spaces end up being hierarchical right a house is a hierarchical your house has a has a porch where you meet strangers you know you have an entry where you maybe let a few people in you'll have your dining room where it's more intimate ultimately you have your bedroom when all where only you and your lover will be in this secret place so there's this hierarchy of intimacy that we normally have that you have to live with or else you'll go crazy but you can understand that as scaling up in terms of societies as well where there were these spaces these temples usually would have three sections and there would be a section that was more open in the jewish temple for example you had courts for the strangers courts for you know uh people that were still kind of impure they weren't supposed to go in then you had people a court for the the israelites then accord for the priest then ultimately you had to place this one invisible place that only one person was allowed to go in and that's where they would receive the revelation of god you see the same thing with uh with moses going up the mountain at the bottom of the mountain all these crazy people worshipping golden calves and then it's kind of wild and crazy and as he goes up there's this let's say uh rushing away of multiplicity the elders remain on the mountain then he moves up and then he he enters into that space alone so you can see that space itself has that kind of hierarchy and when you experience it yourself you can do it go up a mountain i always tell people if you want to understand what holiness is just go up a mountain because at the bottom of the mountain you see idiosyncrasies you see little things you see details you don't have a big picture and as you go up the mountain that picture starts to become clear and clear and when you reach the summit of the mountain you have you you have the experience of seeing all reality in one breath like in one moment and that is really this kind of hierarchy of a perception but it's also the hierarchy of the good so we have the idea that ultimately that's the same thing for ethics that there is something there is a good up there there's something which binds them all together in that structure this is a difficult leap but that structure manifests itself with every act of perception you make so for example you know i can look at the scene i'm in a lot of different ways i can look at most of you are in the dark so i can't see you very clearly but i can i can you know see a bunch of people i can see one person or i can see the arm of one person or i can look at the floor here or or i can focus on this and you know by focusing on this i center it i privilege it right i give it i give it a sacred quality and you might think well no you don't it's like yes you do really because now you've determined that this is the most important thing that you can do at this moment at in this place in relationship to the entire ethic that you inhabit and you can't see this without doing that and if you get it wrong you pay for it yeah well you might spill it for example or if you're driving and you don't end up focusing on the right thing you you will die you die yeah yeah yeah yeah and so it's it's it's not it's not a theoretical problem it's a real problem of structure it's a very strange thing to understand that you inhabit this sacred architecture with every perceptual act you undertake and and also perception is an act by the way you know you think well you just open your eyes and then you see the world it's like no that isn't how it works your eyes are moving all the time if they stop moving for more than a tenth of a second you will go blind because the the cells exhaust themselves and so there's all sorts of little micro movements that your eyes are making some of them involuntary and some of them voluntary without which you can't see and the act of visual perception is very much like the act of exploring something with your hands which is why you know if you close your eyes and someone hands you a cup you won't be able to tell if it's transparent or not but you can feel it out and you can develop a pretty good visual picture of the of the of the object so you can see with your hands and that's partly why kids want to grab everything because it's hard to see with just your eyes and if you can add your hands to that it makes it easier to see and so and that's active exploration and you're feeling out the world with your eyes it's you're never a passive recipient of a priory sense data so the empiricists are just wrong and then the rationalists have been arguing with them for centuries because the rationalists always presumed that you you didn't just get raw sense data you had to impose a a priory interpretive schema on the world and that's the difference between rationalism and empiricism and the rationalists are right although they thought that was just rational and that's where they were wrong so it's it's it's not rational in in the same sense that a reductive materialist atheist would use that term and so it's very strange that the structure of of sacred architecture say duplicates the structure of cognitive category and also the structure of perceptual category so we inhabit a temple corrupt though it may be with every interaction with the world that we undertake and that's really quite a frightening thing to realize uh very it's a very frightening thing to realize when you really realize it it's like oh oh oh this is real and it's even worse than that it's like it's the precondition for the idea of reality itself which is that's really real right i mean you've got real that's nothing it's the precondition for reality itself that's super real and you know to some degree the the christian idea of the logos and the greek ideas well is the expression of the recognition of the precondition for the real itself and that's really something to understand as well you know scientists i talked to richard dawkins when i was at oxford you know and one of the things that characterizes dawkins is that dawkins believes that the truth will set you free that is not a scientific presupposition that is a religious presupposition but it also might be the religious presupposition without which science is not possible because all the scientists i know who are real scientists they're un they abide by the truth to an unbelievable degree you know if you're a social scientist and you have a data set in front of you you know say 200 columns of 500 rows you know a complex data set man there are a lot of ways you can get that to talk to you statistically and you make thousands of decisions when you're doing a statistical analysis and every single one of those is an ethical decision and one of the decisions is well do i prioritize my career or do i prioritize my pursuit of the truth and so often those are antagonistic because if you have a big data set you want to discover something in it and maybe there's nothing there and then you've wasted two years and like that's pretty hard on your career and so that battle between career promotion and adherence to the truth goes on with every statistical decision and so much of social science is just not true because the incentive structures are set up badly and so people will falsify their data with a million micro decisions and produce nonsensical patterns as a consequence it's all an ethical enterprise and not just nonsensical but dangerous like dangerous for society as well oh yeah these have consequences yeah well yeah yeah if you falsify what hypothetically constitutes objective truth that's it's it's it's devilishly awful because you actually harness the validity of science to your to your own self-aggrandizement or your own ideology and that's happening that's happening plenty at the moment folks so yeah it's really bad one of the things that you you've been able to bring about as well is this idea that of aiming or the notion of sin as missing the mark let's say there's a great quote by saint paul that says everybody knows it says the wages of sin is death but there's a manner in which that's even technically it seems like something that we could defend like that if you do not aim properly right so the wage of the the price of not aiming property that's not pessimistic enough yeah because death is one thing but hell is another thing you know and so hell is the place that you go when you'd rather be dead yeah and if you haven't been there well that's great for you but but death wages it's like a technical description of the place where unity breaks down like that you know when you die that's what happens your body stops to cohere your cells start to go their own way and things start to break down and if we don't aim properly then that's death yeah well that's well that that touches on another interesting problem so i talked to sam harris relatively recently again it's about the fifth or sixth time i've talked to him publicly and uh i i did it better this time one of the problems with the discussions i had with sam harris for those of you don't know he's one of the world's most famous atheists um and i suppose that's his primary claim to fame um well i'm not no i'm not being i'm not being uh sarcastic about that like he was well known with christopher hitchens and richard dawkins and uh um the the uh then it tough yeah bennett the four of them the four atheistic horsemen essentially and they well that's what that's how they were known and he he he became very well known as a an advocate for this rationalistic atheism along with these other three and they're you know they're pretty damn good at defending it um but i talked to harris and for the first four or five times i talked to him i did something i don't usually do when i talk to people which is i was having an argument i was trying to win i wanted to establish a point because i believe that the way he was looking at things was wrong and that was my role to show how that was wrong and i don't do that when i'm talking to people generally generally what i do is listen to them and try to figure out what they think and the last time i talked to harris that's all i did i just asked him questions and we got way farther in our discussion than we ever had and i found out that with harris he identified the spirit of totalitarian certainty with the religious impulse so for him there was no differentiation between those things and so what harris is objecting to when he objects to religion apart from the meditative religion that he practices um was the was totalitarian dogmatism of the sort that might be responsible for you know social atrocity and so fine no wonder you're against that it's like is that the same as the religious enterprise it's like no i'm afraid not that's not a very differentiated analysis but i get your point at least and then the other thing harris wanted to do is he wanted partly because he was so upset about the moral relativism that threatens us let's say and that he believed was responsible for such things as the auschwitz nightmares that he wanted to ground an ethic in objective fact because the only thing he believes is real is objective fact and so that's his motivation now that's problematic as far as i'm concerned because of some of the issues we already raised which is well which objective facts there's like an infinite number of them and that's actually a fatal error that's a fatal problem with your supposition now it's complicated right because you say well the wages of sin or death you can take an ecological and evolutionary view of that it's like obviously whatever ethic we use to organize our behavior and our societies has to serve the functions of let's say reproductive fitness so there's got to be a concordance between the domain of ethics and the domain of evolutionary biology let's say and then it's an open question to what degree you can use the findings of evolutionary biology to buttress your ethical claims so here's an example i i talked to france to wall two weeks ago and that'll be out soon and he's the world's greatest living primatologist perhaps um the the only his only competitor would be um what's his name he wrote catching fire richard rangham who i also talked to about a week ago and uh dewalt's work is unbelievably important it's unbelievably important because he's concentrated on the idea of the alpha male and you know we have in part popular parlance we have an idea of the alpha chimp right or the alpha male for that matter and it's pretty much a postmodern neo-marxist view of primate primate sociology and that is that the biggest ugliest meanest male dominates by brute force and so now he's at the top of the pyramid and so the implicit claim there from the biologists is that power those who express power most effectively power being the ability to compel those who express power most effectively will dominate the pyramid of of uh of of dominance of of social hierarchy and they'll prevail reproductively well that's pretty gloomy that idea you know but people think well that's what that's how you look at the world if you're sensible it's like well france dewall's been studying chimps for 30 years and that's not true that is not what happens he told me flat out that frequently a small male can become alpha especially if he has the support of a influential female and the small male becomes alpha and has the support of the influential female not because he expresses arbitrary power but because he's unbelievably good at mutual reciprocation and so he has friends and he does things for his friends and they do things for him and they trust each other and he has lots of friends which also means he has no enemies which turns out to be really important because the brute chimps like the psychopath alphas they do rule now and then but they get torn to shreds by their enemies because you know they're tough let's say and mean but they have an off day and two chimps they stomped a week before ally together and tear them literally tear them into shreds and so the the psychopath chimp types who use power to attain dominance get have very short rules and end in a very bloody way and so dewall has pointed out like piaget did among children that power is an unstable uh uh ethic upon which to base a social hierarchy even for chimps and chimps are male dominated they have a patriarchal society and they're relatively brutal and it doesn't even work for them it certainly doesn't work for human beings so whatever is at the apex of the pyramid it's not as the bloody marxists insist you know the raw expression of power and and exploitation wrong wrong not the case doesn't even work in nature doesn't work for rats doesn't work for chimpanzees certainly doesn't work for people and then there is a kind of natural ethic that emerges out of that right because with rats and with chimps and other social animals it varies to some degree from species to species there's the necessity for something like mutual reciprocity as the basis for successful social organization and that's something like treat your neighbor like you would want to be treated it's something like that it's the behavioral equivalent of that and you asked earlier you know from whence does the highest injunction emerge or yeah or what comes down yeah yeah well it's strange right because some of it's bottom up it's like even among animals mutual reciprocity seems to be a cardinal organizing feature even done in the spirit of play interestingly enough because play is a mammalian universal and that's kind of bottom up but then at the same time and this this i suppose pertains to the role of the mysterious role of consciousness in the world it's like well we're also aware of this right and we also we also think about it abstractly as a good and we don't only learn it bottom up we also conceptualize it top down and then they meet and that is the that's moses coming down the mountain with the tablets and and so what did he meet on the mountain well god well he meant whatever is at the highest place and we all are stuck with the problem of determining what we are going to put in the highest place and increasingly i've been viewing the biblical corpus as an attempt to cast narrative light on the nature of the spirit that should be at the highest place so i can give you an example of that so in in the earliest stages of genesis god is so what should be in the highest place remember that's ineffable and non-utterable in some sense and also incomprehensible that's that's technically insisted upon by the religious types but whatever it is is it's that which encounters chaotic potential and then uses truthful language rooted in love to extract habitable order that's what should be in the highest place and then that's the spirit in which me men and women after which men and women are men and women are fashioned and you might say well i don't believe that it's like well i don't know what you mean when you say that because like do you believe that people have intrinsic worth and you might say no it's like well is that how you treat the people around you because if you don't treat them like they have intrinsic worth if they have any sense they're going to get the hell away from you real fast right because that's the one thing that everyone wants is they they want the relationship they have with another person to be predicated on mutual recognition of intrinsic worth and that's very much tied in the idea of starting with the idea of the logos that inhabits us all it's certainly tied in with the idea of self-evidence in the declaration of independence the american declaration of independence you know we hold these truths as self-evident well what do you mean self-evident exactly well part of it is you know individuals people are fashioned in the image of god well i don't believe that well who says you don't believe that and maybe you don't but that's not so good for you and it's certainly not so good for the people you're interacting with even if that person happens to be you because like what's the alternative people have no intrinsic worth then you're in dostoevsky in territory it's like his book uh crime and punishment because raskolnikov the protagonist decides that all this is nonsense right there's no intrinsic worth there's just power and so he decides he's going to murder his landlady who's a really nasty piece of work and you know he can make a real good case that the world would be better without her in it and he makes that case she's horrible she's a horrible person she basically enslaves her niece and tortures her and she's like this mentally impaired young woman and she's a grasping greedy uh psychopath who makes everyone's life brutally miserable and so rick skaltnikov thinks well you know it's the act of the ubermensch to dispense with this woman and he lays out the argument perfectly coherently well it's a complete bloody catastrophe because he commits the murder and he get he gets away with it not really because you can't really and so that's the pathway and dostoevsky do this perfectly well he said if there's no god everything is permitted you know when modern people especially the atheist materialist types they look at that they think well no that isn't what we mean it's like yeah maybe you're not dostoevsky you know like he was a man who could see way down into the bottom of things and so you might disagree it's like well fair enough but you're you and he was dostoevsky so you know you might wonder who you should be listening to yeah and we if you look at historically you can see that at the first moment when the let's say the religious ideal starts to crack you get some positive things like you know science and the enlightenment but marquis de sade is right there waiting to manifest the spirit that dostoevsky finds in raskolnikov it's it's there in terms of sam one of the things that i haven't heard you talk about too much but there's something about what what you said with him that that brings it up to me is that he sees this hierarchy or this this is a religious structure as a totalitarian impulse it's this kind of structure that comes down and manifests itself one of the things that comes down from the mountain let's say in religious stories is also compassion without the hierarchy there is is it possible for there to be compassion because compassion is also the manner in which we accept that nothing ever reaches the ideal that we can recognize it but we also know that it's always kind of beyond us and so there is a sense that it's judging us there's also a sense in which it kind of yields because you know every glass is imperfect and everything every every house is imperfect every building everything that we notice or we can also see that it doesn't reach that ideal i don't know if you ever thought about that a little bit well let me think about that for a second we've never talked about compassion before so yeah well when i when i think about compassion i mean first of all i do not believe that compassion is an untrammeled moral virtue and i think one of the terrible things about our society one of the deadly eatable things about our society is that we've put compassion in the highest place unthinkingly and compassion is for infants and i really mean that technically so like if if imagine that that your ethic was that you were 100 compassionate okay so what are you like well you're like a good mother with a child under six months of age because because human babies are born premature in some fundamental sense so you know the average gestation period for a mammal of about our size should be two years and so our babies are born radically premature and there's complex reasons for that one is that there's a arms race an evolutionary arms race between the circumference of the infant's head and the dimensions of the pelvic hole through which the baby has to pass to be born and if the pelvis of women was any wider they couldn't run and if it was any narrower than the child would die like many children did right i mean the human birth mortality rate was abysmal right up until about well certainly a hundred years ago and the baby's heads are compressible right the bones aren't fully formed when they're born and often kids are born and their heads are cone-shaped because they've been subject to such pressure during birth so it's a really it's a it's a narrow needle to thread and there's been a lot of evolutionary tinkering to get that right um now why in the hell did i say that they're talking about compassion sorry sorry just lost my my place compassion right yes you were talking about the excess of competitive passion yes yes yes sorry about that so so you know our our infants are born unbelievably helpless and they are basically uh prenatal until they can crawl and that's say seven or eight months and so prior to that because they're so utterly helpless everything they do has to be regarded as above moral reproach and 100 right and so if you have an infant who is crying who's six months old or four months old your job is not to judge the infant or to punish the infant or to discipline the infant it's like the infant has a problem and all of your attention is to be focused on solving that problem period 100 that's it and that's great for people who are under six months but it's deadly it's increasingly deadly as the child matures because that kind of all-encompassing i will do everything for you is also the enemy of development and that's that's the whole freudian nightmare i mean that's what freud put his finger on and he knew that that was the pathology of the age the eatable mother and it's like yeah well welcome to the age of the eatable mother everyone because that's certainly what we see now and so if you put compassion in the highest place well then that's what you have is you have a state of being where everything is an infant and the only hallmark of ethic is pity now jung talked about classic conceptions of what is in the highest place god he said well god rules with two hands mercy and justice and that's that discrimination you know how bad discrimination is it's like well no it's not it's differentiation it's judgment it's it's putting things in their proper place it's it's setting the highest above the lowest it's it's formulating a pathway for further development and you know a mother might say you're just fine the way you are but what's that to say to someone who's well 10. it's like you're not fine the way you are you're 10. you've got a lot of growing up to do and you're probably not fine the way you are when you're 20. it's like you're just a fraction of what you could be and if it's all maternal compassion and and i mean that in the symbolic sense it's all maternal compassion it's where's the impetus for development and there's no judgment there and i think the most dismal thing you can tell 18 year old boys in particular especially if they're miserable is well you're just okay the way you are and you're they're not first of all and no one thinks they are including them well they don't not no one gives a damn about malfunctioning 18 year old boys like [Applause] you know but you but you can say with the proper admixture of justice and mercy it's like yeah well you know you're not so bad for 18. and and you could be way more and good for you and then you can encourage that and and that's a that's the spirit of justice and that's a patriarchal spirit fundamentally it's the encouragement and the calling forth of further development and so you could see it like in terms of we bring it back to something very ground like very technical which is walking down the street and so i'm walking from this point to that point and there is a perfect way which i could get there but i if i do that i might spend all my time trying to figure what that out and i might not even be able to move there's also a man in which i could go anywhere and fall over so there has to be even in almost every act of perception that right hand and left hand that you talk right right that mercy and justice has to have heart there has to be allowance for imperfection and error well well also also orientation towards the aim yeah and and getting that balance right well that's part of what consciousness does i would say is it constantly adjudicates between those two higher order principles now those aren't the only principles but and that and there's no final solution to that right you can't just say well we're all compassionate and we're done with it's like no and it's it's an ongoing problem right with your kids you're always wondering they make a mistake it's well how much do you forgive them and how much do you say you know how about you don't do that again it's really embarrassing it's terrible for you if you replicate that error your life is going to be a bloody catastrophe you're old enough to figure it out it's like clue in and you might say well who loves the child more the one who says oh it's okay everything you do is lovely which it isn't or or the person who says you could do better and you know the answer is well it's it's a discussion between those two viewpoints constantly constantly because and and and in your relationship with yourself it's like how much do you forgive yourself and the answer certainly is zero it's not zero that's no one can live without being able to forgive themselves to some degree but by the same token you know you don't want to let yourself off the hook for every idiot error you make and because that just doesn't work because there are real errors and yeah there are cons real consequences yes for you and other people and yeah and and there's and there's the real which you know we're all wondering about now this is one of the things that i think is quite comical and i talked to dawkins about this is you know um the the rationalists the scientists the atheists and the postmodernists as well really took the idea of the divine to pieces and even in the dismissive way that you see with someone say like harris although like i said he has his meditation and his he dwells in the realm of the sacred he just leaves it ineffable right and doesn't ritualize it doesn't turn it into any kind of intellectual creed and i think he he does that because if he turned it into an intellectual creed his rationality would just tear it to pieces and so then he would have nothing you know um on in any case um we've dispensed with the idea of the sacred transcendent let's say and that's the hard-headed way of thinking about the world but what the what the uh the reductive atheists didn't quite figure out was the dostoevsky problem it's like well if there's no god everything is permitted well how about we don't believe in objects anymore well that won't happen it's like yeah really that won't happen eh what makes you think that like do the buddhists believe in objects not really you know the world's maya it's illusion there's no transcendent material world that's a western idea and i really think it came out of well partly greece but certainly came out of ideas that are associated with the logos on the logic side and on the out on the religious side it's like there's a transcendent world it's material it's transcendent world you can't just do any old thing you will be the object of world will object to what you're doing and so then it's an inexhaustible source of corrective wisdom and it's the it's the realization of that in some sense that's the precondition for science you have to believe that before you can be a scientist there's a reality out there that transcends your knowledge and the postmodern types i mean technically they just rejected that completely they collapsed ontology which is the study of being let's say into epistemology said no it's all it's all words it's like oh i see so we stopped believing in god now we stop believing in the object and if you're wondering why the dei types are taken on the stem people if you haven't noticed that and are going to win by the way it's because they don't believe in the objective world what the hell you need scientists for you know that's there's no objective reality it's just whim people can't believe that's like that's what people have believed for most of time and what do you mean they can't believe that you mean until the bridges start falling down they'll just blame that on insufficient diversity yeah it'd be funny if it wasn't true i mean i think we are in uh we're in a kind of we're in a moment there's this zeitgeist there's this change that's happened you've been part of it definitely where suddenly people are starting to realize this and i think it's it's also going together with the extremity of the the madness of the ideologues and and that's exactly it that we are at a point where objective reality itself or mathematics themselves are being questioned by ideologues where two plus two equals five where people are arguing for these types of things and how do we exactly how do we come back to that without let's say bringing about this notion this incarnational principle we could say right that even things that we encounter in the world they are embodiments of embedded in higher truth you could say that they kind of scale up and that there is a there's a flexibility to it right it's not it's not hard but that flexibility is part of how we engage with it yeah yeah well as far as i can tell and i mean i think this is happening to some degree in the culture is that i mean jung believed carl jung believed and he was the wisest psychologist i've ever read by a large margin he certainly believed that we had to delve so jung was a student of nietzsche i don't mean he you know formally but he was very well versed in nietzsche in thinking as much or more so than in freudian thinking and he really devoted his life to addressing a proposition that nietzsche put forward and nietzsche said well god is dead and we have killed him and we'll never find the water to wash away the blood you know the holiest that we have created has now died at our own hands and he thought that was an absolute catastrophe because nietzsche was a very smart man and a very wise man but he made a real error i believe and and he he posited that because of this collapse of values this precipitous collapse of the the value that unifies all values or that is the precondition for all values that we would be lost he certainly felt that we would fall into nihilism or that we would fall prey to communist idolatry in particular which he predicted dead on just like dostoevsky did but then he also said that the solution to that will be that the superman will have to appear the ubermensch and he will be that the man who can create his own values and so both freud and jung were interested in that idea um freud more peripherally but yield more more consciously and part of what jung was trying to find out is well could we create our own values and the answer he came up with was no that's not possible and why so the question is why well you know for the psychoanalysts we were beset by fantasies and these are sort of autonomous personalities that dwell in in our subconscious let's say in our imagination in our dreams and that possess us from time to time the spirit of rage the spirit of lust the spirit of envy um these ancient gods that possess us and uh these values that and temptations and impulses that come upon us that we cannot control they're part of our autonomous nature and because they have this autonomy and so that would be the autonomy of emotions and the autonomy of motivations and then even the autonomy of the spirit that unites motivations because we don't know for example in the spirit of play for example play is an instinct play integrates base motivations into a higher unity but it's an instinct and so jung realized very rapidly that it wasn't technically possible for us to create our own values and that's partly his stumbling upon the problem of complexity so the world's just too complex for us to generate our values in the span of a single life out of whole cloth autonomously no matter how much of a superman we were yeah and that partly the reason that's impossible is well okay so generate your own values what the hell are you gonna do with your wife or your husband or your friend they're what are they gonna they're just gonna live by your values all of a sudden well that's what the post-modernists are demanding now the radical types is like my game right my identity i'm whatever i say i am moment to moment and and there's no negotiation and that's because they're two years old and i mean that i mean that i i mean i mean that i mean that i mean that technically i mean one of the things i learned partly from reading freud freud had this idea of developmental fixation and he noticed in his clients and his patients that people would get stuck at a developmental level and so you'd be talking to an adult and all of a sudden they were four years old and i learned to see that in my clients and well and people i talk to i'll do that with if they're annoying me um you know like okay who the hell are you oh i see you're a 13 year old mean girl okay away we go i know who i'm talking to now and these these these solipsistic identity uh uh totalitarians are two years old and two-year-olds are um very governed by emotion they're completely incapable of negotiation they're egotistical in that their worldview dominates they have no notion whatsoever of of negotiated play and their belief is their identity is 100 generated by them dependent on what they feel moment to moment which is exactly how a two-year-old operates and most of them get socialized out of that by the age of four and those that don't have a very dismal time of it after that so and i think we have a lot of people like that now because screens have interfered with pretend play and negotiation and because edible parents and and social systems have produced have enabled a kind of immature narcissism that makes itself manifest in these absurd claims about identity and that's all part of creating your own values i can be whatever sex i want to be moment to moment it's like fine but how how are other people supposed to deal with that because they don't know what to do well it doesn't matter they have to do exactly what i want them to it's like hey good luck with that you and you superman you ubermensch with your own values and this is also partly why the liberals the small l liberal types are wrong in a fundamental sense and this would include most therapists it's like you might think of identity in a and and of sanity itself as sort of an internal psychological arrangement you know so you have your act together it's sort of in your brain or in your psyche and you're saying and there's insane people around you but you're saying it's like that isn't really right it's sort of right but you know you're saying if if you if you're uh what a reciprocal partner in your marriage you're saying if you have three or four friendships that you've been able to maintain because you can act reciprocally and the sanity is actually the balance between you and you and your wife or husband and then you and your wife or husband and your friends or you and your wife and your husband um or your husband and your children and your friends and your larger family it's and it's this nested thing that we already talked about it's like you can't be sane in the absence of that because that's actually the definition of sanity and it's collective as well as that's why the kingdom of god is within you and without you it's exactly that it's like yeah you have a harmonious psyche but you know are you dancing with yourself to music that no one else can hear that's not helpful there's a communal element of it that has to be in place and so if you're saying your marriage is saying and you have sane relationships with your children you have sane relationships with your friends and you're a good employee or a boss and you're a participant in the civic world and all of that is embedded in this hierarchy that has the spirit at the top that enables that reciprocity to operate and you're a devotee of that yeah or you're not right and so yeah and that's the religious domain and you have to actively celebrate at the different levels that you participate in that you know and i think that's where i i kind of bring it back to the to helping people understand like some why do people go to church right because that's what's going on why should they because that's a discussion so jonathan took me to an orthodox uh um uh ceremony in seattle and uh like i wasn't into it um i i found it it grated on me um you're like a ten-year-old boy that we're telling to stop moving yeah yeah that's right so that was my freudian fixations like you're a tan wiggly yeah yes no kidding no kidding but um you know there's been a lot of water under the bridge since then man and i went to an orthodox uh mass here a couple of weeks ago and i found it unbel and a catholic one a week before that i was down at uh franciscan university and i found it unbelievably soothing which is very much unlike the reactions i've had before and that was partly well for complicated reasons because i actually find any place that isn't a bloody nightmarish catastrophe soothing now and so i mean that man and but there was more to it than that too it was because i i also did develop and partly as a consequence of our discussions a deeper appreciation for what was happening in the ritual itself and and also more tolerance for whatever inadequacies i might perceive you know partly that's also realization you know lots of modern people say why don't go to church because i don't believe that it's like well a who cares what you believe like who the hell are you anyways like and why do you even care what you believe and how is that working for you this belief set that you theoretically have is how sophisticated is that like you see are you plato or what it's like well here's the church and here's me and i'm right it's like well no you're not and first and second you don't even want to be because that's a great place to be like pinnacle of brilliant wisdom it's completely solipsistic no tradition for me thank you very much you know i've got it all right in my head and even if you are right that the bloody institution is chaotic and and and uh decadent in some fundamental sense it's like well good there's something for you to do like there always has been throughout the entire history of mankind because that's osiris right the once great king who's fallen into disrepair it's like well if the church is broken and you're the genius to see it why do you go fix it well then you might say well we'll just abandon it it's like okay well fine you're going to get rid of that are you're going to get rid of marriage you're going to get rid of funerals you're going to get rid of christmas you're going to get rid of any sense of sacred time you're going to dispense with the whole history of what judeo-christian thought you're going to dispense with the idea of the sacred nature of the individual like how far are you willing to go with this and believe me that question is right in front of you because there's a wave of radicals who are asking you at every moment what makes you so sure that there's a difference between a man and a woman like no there isn't or yes there is when we want there to be and no there isn't when we don't want her to be you saw that with the supreme court um appointment it's like we have to have a woman but there's no such thing as a woman it's like and so yeah you you frenchman you know you've you've abandoned your catholicism you think the catholics they were crazy it's like you ain't seen nothing yet and so i'd believe and jung kind of convinced me of that he he more or less posited and you could say the same thing about orthodox he said catholic is as insane as people ever get and that's partly because we have to have one foot in the dream and the mystery we have to you know when i i heard douglas murray speak recently about this that was very interesting because murray is an atheist essentially and he has a variety of reasons for that but he has swung around hard recently and he said when he was talking to dave rubin he said i don't believe that either conservatism or classic liberalism can survive in the absence of the of the religious surround which was really something for him to admit and it's like taking him like five years of thinking to come to that conclusion but then he said something even more remarkable i thought and he said and it's actually the mysterious part of it that has to be retained the virgin birth the resurrection the crucifixion all of that crazy mythology let's say because otherwise it just degenerates into another form of cheap social justice and like don't we have enough of that and i think that's now i don't know what to make of that because well and that's why we have discussion continually about the what would you say well the transcendent i suppose the miraculous the transcendent the idea of the resurrection for example and all of that it's like well what do you do with that and the answer is we don't know but we don't throw it out without having some sense of what's going to come in to replace it and we're seeing that now you know look at us we're so confused no bloody one of the russians are at war with us it's like we're not having anything to do those people they simultaneously proclaim that a woman is absolutely necessary for the highest position in the land or one of them and that the same person says well i don't even know what a woman is it's like well are those people insane it's like clearly clearly that's just way too far right when i talk to my democrat friends i say look you can have one of those you know there's either no distinction between a man or a woman or it's important that a woman is on the supreme court but there's no bloody way i'm giving you both so because i don't even know how to do that i have no idea how to do that like what am i supposed to do celebrate womanhood and simultaneously celebrate the fact that the differences between men and women are so trivial that they're irrelevant and they can be changed at web that is insane it violates the law of non-contradiction and so there's no that's you think religious people are crazy jesus want to take questions well that's a funny place to stop so i think we will stop there and we have some audience questions and so if you if you would like then we'll we'll we'll switch to that and so thanks jonathan that was just fine [Applause] all right and so this is the first time i deal with this thing so hopefully i'll do okay um and so people from the audience were bringing in questions so esteban asks i'm a i am raising three kids one boy and two girls as a young father are there differences in the kind of advice i should give my son and my daughters yes definitely you know because boys and girls aren't the same um so advice well i can i can tell you about my discussion with france to wall again because i think that's germaine and we might as well keep this concrete dewalt has just written a book called different and in that book he assesses the clear and marked differences in in motivational preference between boys and girls but also between male primates and female primates especially chimpanzees who are our closest biological relative and you can calculate that by looking at genetic similarity and those things are calculated with an incredible degree of accuracy um female chimps young ones for example if you give them a block of wood they'll frequently put the block of wood on their back and carry it around and and cuddle it and and take care of it as if it's an infant so they infantilize objects which you know human females do at the drop of a hat and the male chimps if you give them a if you give a female chimp a doll or a teddy bear something like that they'll they treat it like a human female treats a doll they'll take care of it and nurture it and develop an attachment to it and uh they respond very badly if you know maybe they trust the keeper say and they'll give the keeper the doll and if the keeper isn't good to the doll they're not happy and that's a bad idea because chimpanzees are very strong so you don't want to make them angry and so but if you give the male juveniles a doll they'll just tear it apart see what's inside and so you know and and that's that's basically what they do with monkeys because the male chimps juveniles will hunt columbus monkeys they weigh about 40 pounds and they tear them into pieces and eat them and chimps are ravenous when it comes to meat and so and in that manner they're also like us because they are hunters and they also go to war and it's the males who do that and the chimp males they if you give them cars or dolls to play with they will pick the cars now that's pretty weird right because you know chimps and hondas there [Laughter] they just haven't invented hondas you know but there's something about the gadget quality of the car that appeals to the tool use interest of the mail and one of the most reliable differences between males and female humans is different in interest not competence not ability but interest and males are more reliably interested in things and females are more reliably interested in people and that's a big difference so you would have to be at the 85th percentile as a man for interest in people to be as interested in people as the average 50th percentile woman and you'd have to be at the 85th percentile among females interest in things to be as interested in things as the average male and the reason why in the scandinavian countries there's a preponderance of male engineers and a preponderance of female nurses and that that differential has increased as the scandinavian countries have become more egalitarian is because that intrinsic interest is fundamentally biological and so if you make the society egalitarian it maximizes rather than decreasing and of course social constructionist uh postmodernist marxist types just hate that because it implies that there's some sort of limit necessary limit on their social engineering it applies that human beings have an intrinsic nature that that nature is that there's a female nature and a male nature which is so weird because this is another sign of our insanity it's like there's no difference between men and women at all and if there is and there isn't it's only cultural unless you're a girl who's trapped in a boy's body in which case the difference is all of a sudden so important that it has to be mediated biologically and any objection to that is illegal it's like which is all the case at the moment and so that's also insane because sorry you get one you don't get both there's either differences and they're important or there aren't there aren't both and so well okay so back to the kids um well you know it's it's important to see that there are okay when i was talking to d wall he he uh he cited this female author who had forbidden her boy to have guns and she was quite annoyed about this because the little rat made guns out of everything out of soap out of he chased the cat around with the toothbrush you know going bang bang bang bang and she said she like threw her hands up in dismay and and and i thought you evil witch it's like you've done and she said i did everything i could to dissuade my son's interest in guns it's like yeah you did everything you could all right and it still didn't work and that wasn't good enough for you because you know despite the fact that that's your son and that's what he's like your morality your ideological morality is going to take precedence and you're going to crush that out of him you're going to throw up your hands in moral despair because your boy isn't the figment of your bloody eatable imagination it's a appalling and so back to the girls they're going to want to do girl things likely and maybe you'll have some girls that are a little more masculine they'll be a little bit more tomboyish and that's just look fine there's plenty of temperamental variation between boys and girls but you know it's important to know that they're going to have these difference in interests and you want to you want to you want to foster that or at least allow it you know so your girls are gonna they're gonna play with dolls and they're going to have female toy preferences in all likelihood and your boys the same way and if you have any sense you won't punish that you know you might shape it mold it if you have a boy who's aggressive some boys about five percent of two-year-old boys are kick hit bite and steal they're aggressive most of them are socialized by the age of four you can channel that aggressiveness that competitiveness you can socialize it you know you can you can make it pro-social which is what you should do but you know your kid isn't nothing they haven't people have a nature an intrinsic nature and it's up to you to foster that and to direct it and to and to have some respect for it you know both on the feminine and the masculine side so and you all right this is a question that i've never heard you try to answer and so let's see how this goes [Applause] please make us happy okay i understood the question i don't know if that makes you happy or not that's right it would be lovely if you understood a little bit of friends would you we would like to hear you speak no you can't yeah you know when i when i came here when i came here from alberta i had always wanted to come to montreal i was a fan of the montreal canadiens from the time i was a little kid and i always dreamed yvonne cornway and uh and yeah yeah henri richard and yeah it was great and i always dreamed of coming to montreal i always knew i was going to come to montreal from the time i was like 12. and i wanted to learn to speak french and i took french and alberta but that was like impossible because our french teachers could speak french you know so that was impossible and uh i came here with every intent to learn to speak french but i wrote my book maps of meaning and i published a bunch of articles and i really concentrated on what i was doing at mcgill and that went by the wayside and i really regret it because you know i had that opportunity and i can more or less understand it's spoken if the person who's speaking isn't very bright and speaks slowly and i can sort of read french but my spoken french is abysmal and embarrassingly so and so and i do regret that because this is i loved this city it was a great place to live uh i had a great time at mcgill my my advisor robert peel is here somewhere in the audience um and he was a wonderful advisor and as i said the uh the co-author of the self-authoring program and um i love this city and there's something about montreal culture that's it's so it was so cool to come here from alberta because everyone moved to alberta it's a new place you know it has no history and there's some advantage in that but people live in montreal and has a real culture you know and people live out on the streets and there's a vibrancy to the culture here that's such fun and although you have kind of a fascistic bureaucracy it's it's uh yeah it's uh but the city itself is so free and it's so peaceful there's no crime to speak of the streets are safe you could go anytime anywhere you want day or night the comedy festival is great the jazz festival is great the the the spontaneous celebrations in montreal if soccer team wins a victory there's a spirit of joy there's none of that malevolence that you feel in in the center of american cities often for example that sort of lurking danger this is an amazing place and i really hope we don't muck it up you've done a lovely job on the waterfront so you know and i i feel too that you know i had no obligation in some sense as a canadian to to become bilingual and to do that fluently and that just didn't happen and it's it's uh it's a regret that's for sure so my apologies so do you wanna keep wanna go do another one pretty good yeah yeah all right let's do two more says do two more all right and so um all right i got one here this is a tough one too you often use but i like you that's why you often use post-modern marxism as a catch-all term for wokeness can you explain what you mean considering both schools of thoughts are diametrically opposed like like the postmodernists care about that like i just hate this criticism it's like well you know they were contradictory it's like yes actually i do know do they know and you say well you know they're diametrically opposed it's like yes i know that because the postmodernists are skeptical of grand narratives and marxism is a grand narrative let's point that out okay so then why were all the french post-modernist marxists because they didn't care about coherence how about that or how about maybe they were trying to justify their own narcissistic drive to power how about that you explain it why are all the french intellectuals marxists in the 1960s and 1970s until solzhenitsyn published the gulag archipelago in which case they were still marxists they just went underground because they're all so embarrassed as they should have been you know sartre marxist communist dereda foucault darida wrote a book on the relationship between his philosophy and marxism right it's not my imagination and so people say well don't you know that there's a contradiction it's like you think you think deconstruction is care about contradictions that's how much you understand about deconstructionism it's like they don't care about contradictions at all it's irrelevant and why did they do why did they what would you say sort of divert towards marxism or or default default towards marxism i don't know maybe because academics are jealous of rich people i don't bloody well know well i've seen that among academics you know they're hyper intelligent generally speaking and competent in their domain but they don't make that much money compared to rich people and that irritates them a lot and so what do they do well they criticize capitalism it's like well they're completely 100 percent protected by capitalism they're the most protected people the world of it has ever generated and unbelievably ungrateful and they want to have the their intellect and the protection of the capitalist system and simultaneously befriend to the poor and i've watched what sort of friend to the poor most left-wing academics are and i can tell you man you have a friend like that you don't need an enemy so so it's like it's like it's like foucault and and derek that's like well we don't believe in grand narratives except for marxism it's like that's real convenient boys and and has anybody pointed out the contradiction well you know us french intellectuals we don't talk about that it's like yeah no kidding you don't talk about it because it's scandalous to say the least to be a marxist to be a marxist now really after what 120 million deaths how much bloody evidence do you need and the answer is i'm so arrogant that all those corpses make no difference to me and that's the answer so yes i'm perfectly aware that the deconstructionists and the marxists exist at odds with one another so but they do have something very uh similar in common which is that they both see the notion that quantity devours quality that the mass takes over the hierarchy and that we destroy invert subvert any form hierarchical yes that's true that and that's that's a good observation yeah so you see that in daredevil right because there it is all for derek uh western culture was foul logo centric which is exactly the case you just made right that we have something at the center and that it's hierarchical and it's patriarchal it's like he's right about that and we should bring the margins in that's darada's idea because he's a clown a fundamental i mean he's a joker really i mean that he's he's a he's a he's a trickster daredevil right to the core absolutely 100 and he's full of tricks and that's one of the tricks is to bring the margins into the center and he knew perfectly well that if you bring the margins to the center you just have a new margin which is why we have christian satirists now like the babylon bee you know it's because everything's upside down yeah and so the of tiffany could predict no i don't think so either i don't think so either it's like when did the christians become funny when the world turned upside down that's right well it's so weird it's like because i've i've watched the babylon bee guys and i watched their interview with you which was like the weirdest interview i've ever seen in my life these crazy frat boy christian fundamentalists which is weird enough in itself interviewing you about sacred architecture and monstrous gargoyles in renaissance architecture and the relationship between that and cognitive categorization and then making like weird frat boy jokes the whole bloody time while you were keeping up with some producer laughing maniacally in the background it's like oh wow so this is where our culture's at so it was strange but all right one last canadian question so gabriel v asks do you believe that pia poliev could be the next prime minister of canada [Laughter] [Applause] you know i've been watching the conservative party federally since i was a kid it's a long time now like so i've been watching them with some degree of interest for 50 years and they always do this they almost always do the same thing when when it comes to leadership selection they'll have a candidate who's got a bit of a spine and this is independent of what you think of him or his policies polio has a spine and then so they have a candidate with a spine and he's got a little bit of spark and then they have a leadership convention and people are alienated by him because of his spine and also because he's a victor and so and he'll have an opponent and people are opposed to him and then there'll be a third candidate who doesn't annoy anyone like joe clark and then that's who they'll elect and so then we just have a we just have a sequence of these leaders for the conservatives who the liberals can just and the radicals can just chase around non-stop and who try not to offend anyone and who are embarrassed about being conservative and that's probably what the conservatives will do again because that's what they do and that's what canada does and so you know we could easily could we have trudeau for eight more years god yeah well we sure could we certainly gonna have him for two or three years unless he implodes and that's some that is which i doubt because you know in the last six months the trudeau government has done i would say 10 things so scandalous that when i was younger 20 to 30 to 40 maybe even any single one of those things would have brought down a government and he's just doing like one a week and so and and nothing happens and you know he doesn't refer to parliament oh well parliament what was that it's just annoying you know the chinese communists they have it right they're going to impose those environmental policies with with no discussion and that's what we'd like because that's what we admire who cares about parliament we can freeze bank accounts we can lie about the truckers we can subsidize state media so that now we have a fascistic collusion between government and media and if you don't think that's true it's like well you do think that's true because otherwise you wouldn't be here and so so what would i say about pierre pauliev well he had enough guts to come on my youtube channel and you know i didn't give him any questions beforehand zero there was no preparation um we didn't do any post hoc editing and he didn't ask for any he answered all the questions i asked him with no prevarication you know there was a few kind of prepared political talking points and uh but i thought he handled himself extremely well he was a very good conversationalist he could really take turns into conversation he was thoughtful i believe that his care for working-class people is genuine i think his economic policy is unsophisticated to the point of um would you say danger insufficiency and i've talked to some very sophisticated economic players in the canadian market and they believe that our basic legal framework and our economic framework is 40 years out of date and these are people who've played let's say on the international market and got burned badly by hyper qualified american legal experts who just tore them into shreds when they tried to compete you know on broad scale in international markets we don't have good policies for data ownership in canada we're way out of sync with the digital age we have no idea what we should be owning and what we shouldn't be owning in in terms of our our personal information our data and it isn't obvious that polio has the sophistication to develop those policies but i think he would and could learn and he's young he's only in his early 40s and uh i think he would be willing to repair our relationship with the united states too and maybe do something quasi-intelligent on the energy front which would be you know kind of delightful and maybe he'd defund the cbc and christ we should vote for him for just for that yeah because the faster they go the better the better 1.2 billion dollars a year to generate zero audience and to lie and to lie to their funders so that he can continue to believe all the idiot things he believes it's really quite something i don't know if polyeth can manage it you know i mean the legacy media hates him yeah and uh yeah maybe that's a good thing because lots of people hate the legacy media so yeah you know i i think not no i can't do that yeah because we have a procedure and you know i'm a conservative so all right i sort of all right all right thank you great thank you very much everyone thanks jonathan thank you all pleasure to see you all here yeah hopefully it won't be five years before i show up again so yeah yeah thank you all right yeah such a good looking crowd good night thanks man

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,746,467

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Karl Jung, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson, montreal lecture, 12 rules for life lecture, beyond order lecture, Jordan Peterson lecture, Jordan Peterson Jonathan Pageau, Jonathan Pageau, The Symbolic World, Jordan Peterson religion, Build society

Id: iPcILp35oU4

Length: 105min 8sec (6308 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2022