Hedonism, Taboos, Society, and Deprivation | Ben Shapiro | EP 418

hello everyone I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024 beginning in early February and running through June Tammy and I an assortment of special guests are going to visit 51 cities in the US you can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on my forthcoming book out November 2024 we who wrestle with God I'm looking forward to this I'm thrilled to be able to do it again and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon bye-bye I think almost all postmodernism is a form of projection and so when they suggest that all narratives are about power dynamics I think what they are saying is they wish to use their narrative as a power Dynamic narrative they understand is the thing that drives human beings uh and so what they do is they read their own willingness to drive human beings via a narrative like victim victimizer into every narrative so it must be that every narrative is driven by an underlying power substructure because their narrative they believe is driven by an underlying power [Music] substructure hello everybody I'm talking today with Ben Shapiro Ben and I have had occasion to speak privately and publicly a number of times and he participated in the Exodus seminar that we released last year and we've been able to deepen and extending extend the U dimensions of our conversation as we progressed today I'm going to talk to him about the counter Enlightenment the realization across many disciplines that imperm and rationality are insufficient processes and modes of conceptualization to orient Us in the world I think that's an established fact now and it's a revolutionary fact means that we see the world through a story and so Ben and I are going to talk about just exactly what that means not least about the fact that the left in particular the radical left has insisted that the fundamental story that the world should be viewed through and is inevitably viewed through as one of power that leads to the victim victimizer Nar that characterized characterized Marxism and that now so bitterly characterizes whatever the hell it is that we have in front of us now this demented pasti of postmodernism and a kind of metam Marxism that makes everyone either a victim or a victimizer we talk about that in detail and so if you're interested in that then this is the talk for you so happy New Year beny to see you yeah great to see you hey so I thought we would um avoid the political at least to some degree for the majority of this conversation I actually have some ideas I want to talk to you about and so um I'm going to run them by you and then I'm and I want your reactions obviously so here's the first thing I've been thinking about so I'm writing this new book called we who wrestle with God and one of its presumptions is that I suppose this is something I just talked about with John verv too we've been conceptualizing it I suppose as a counter Enlightenment so here's what I think's going on at the deepest level so the enlightenment was predicated on the idea that we could Orient ourselves in the world either empirically as a matter of course with regards to the data at hand or rationally using a prior structures of logic or as a combination of both but that turns out to be wrong which is what the postmodernists figured out and it wasn't just the postmodernists the AI Engineers figured it out at the same time the cognitive scientists the affective neuroscientists people who are studying narrative the fundamental problem with the empirical and rational hypotheses start with empirical is that we can't Orient ourselves by the data alone because there's an infinite plethora of data and there's no way of wending our way through the data without prioritizing it in terms of importance and that can't be done using empiricism per se or even rationally because you have to specify a goal you have to bring in the domain of values now my hypothesis is at the moment working hypothesis is that the structure that we use to prioritize the facts so that we can navigate forward is when described a story a story is a representation of a hierarchy of attentional priority now the reason this is revolutionary I think is because it puts the story back at the center of the stage okay so the I'd like your comments about that first and then I'll turn to the next part of this I mean I I think that that's totally true when you say that you have to have some sort of values frame to determine exactly how you view the data that's that's obviously true because as you say there's an entire ocean of data out there and how you prioritize which data is more important is dependent on on how you value that data that's true you know in everything from abortion to you know the trolley problem any anytime you you get into some sort of dilemma about what human beings should do the should is a question of values and you can have as many facts as you want on the utilitarian after effects of that but even the questions of U utilitarianism are dependent on questions of values at the end and that that's why utilitarianism as a sort of Standalone philosophy tends to fail and when you say that the the the fill in there is story because story is a representation of values in an easily understandable way that that that is absolutely true I mean the fact is that what a story is is by nature something that is being told to you and there's something deeply human about that when When someone tells you a story you don't tend to question the story in the way a journalist would question a story when someone says I'm going to tell you a story now you listen all the way through to the story with Reliance on the Storyteller and that innately is an act of faith and so when you do that what you're really saying is that I'm assuming the set of values for the sake of this story I'm assuming the set of values that under GD and is embedded in the story and then we can operate from those premises and what makes a story good or bad to to pretty much everyone is our innate understanding of the under underlying coherence and values that are embedded in the story okay so so that touches on a couple of other things that I think have become much more clear recently too so I was playing with chat GPT yesterday and I have a employee used to be a student who's an expert at large language models now the way that large language models work essentially is that they calculate conditional probabilities and so you could imagine that there's a pretty high conditional probability that an S will follow an e for example if you look at how letters are segregated and a very low probability that X will follow Zed and so you can you can model words based on the statistical likelihood of the juxtoposition of letters and then you can model word to word correspondences and then word to phrase and phrase to sentence and sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph and the large language model AI Learning Systems derive a p a picture of the statistical relationship between words at pretty much every level of stat a possible statistical relationship so it's not just word to word like the old Markov Chains It's word to Fourth word and word to fifth word and word to 10th word and and we we we actually have no idea how deep the models go the answer is they go deep enough so that the output that they produce is sufficiently indistinguishable from Human output so that we find it acceptable as such that's really the criteria but this is very cool Ben because when I talk to Sam Harris one of the things he said to me repeatedly and he said such things to other people is that our interpretations of narratives are arbitrary so he kind of goes postmodern on that front is that if you if you're trying to interpret biblical stories for example all you're doing is reading into them right it's a projection that the story as such has no intrinsic meaning but I think that this is not only wrong but now but now demonstrated to be wrong because what the ailm systems can do is map out the relationship between words and Concepts statistically so now we have an empirical validation for the Freudian or yian notion of symbol so yesterday for example one of the things that I've noted in stories you see this in Disney movies for example is that a character like a witch which is a from a union perspective a symbol of the negative feminine that' be associated with nature and chaos and the unknown and darkness and fecundity and like there's a web of associated ideas and you might say well those associations are just arbitrary but now we can say well no they're not because if you look into the entire linguistic Corpus you can map out the semantic different distance between Concepts and that means that there's going to be clusters of Concepts and a cluster of Concepts is no different than an archetype or a symbol and so now we have at at hand the possibility of an empirical mapping of such things and we've been playing with these systems so we've designed systems for example that can interpret dreams so you can type in your dream and the system will tell you what it means you might say well that interpretation is just arbitrary and I would say that's it's not arbitrary at all every in a dream exists within a framework of meaning the meaning is something like SE is something like statistical distance from a web of associated meanings if you fles out that web of associated meanings that's no different than delving more deeply into the substructure of the dream that's no different than a formal analysis of a text you know that a real literary critic whose mind has been shaped in some ways the same way that an llm model has been shaped would would so someone with a great Corpus of literary knowledge is going to be able to perform the same kind of analysis as an llm and none of that's arbitrary okay so the reason I'm pointing to all this is twofold so you tell me what you think about this so let's say that we've reached a kind of revolutionary agreement that the story is primary so there's an implicit framework of value weights through which you look at the world that constitutes your character and your ethical pres presuppositions if I told a story about how that if I gave an account of how that M pattern made itself manifest in the real world that would be a story and I can infer from the story what your weights are and I can use them to adjust mine okay so so let's say that all seems appropriate and I don't think it's just appropriate I think this is been absolutely demonstrated in multiple disciplines simultaneously in the last 30 years and that it's culminated in the large language model um demonstration which is an unbelievably compelling demonstration okay so let's say now we've agreed that the story is primary now the that's what the postmodernists basically concluded in the 1960s but here's what they did they said the story's primary then which was a great observation and a brilliant deduction but then they said and the primary story is victim victimizer right and that's a that's a strange Twist on the Marxism that most of them were already encapsulated in now I've been criticized for my views on postmodernism my assumption that it's a form of Marxism and so here's what I think Marxism and postmodernism share and here's how I think they're different and this is a good thing for conservatives to know he because so they they share the victim victimizer narrative and that in itself isn't Marxist that's a variant of the story of Cain and Abel it's an ancient it's the ancient way of viewing the world through the lens of resentment and Marxism was a variant of that now the postmodernists dispensed with Marxism and they did that partly because people like Soul niten show how brutal and catastrophic by necessity Marxism became now all those French postmodernists they were steeped in marxis Marxism they didn't want to give it up so they kept the victim victimizer narrative and they turned it into something multi-dimensional right that would be the intersectional postmodernism where you can be a victim or a victimizer on any dimension of comparison and all of them simultaneously so it's like a metam Marxism it's like it's like the full flowering of bitter resentment but here's a here's the difference and this is so stunning it it just hit me hard this week the marxists insisted that the primary dimension of victim victimizer and and really the only one worth considering given their Universal human Vision was economic and the Bloody postmodernists put that at the bottom of the intersectional hierarchy so and weirdly although they accepted and propagated the victim victimizer narrative they inverted the hierarchy so that see you can think about someone like Claudine gay like there's no way you can make the case that Claudine gay was oppressed economically in fact economically coming from a rich family as she did she's clearly a victimizer but that doesn't count because for some incomprehensible reason maybe and this is where I would like particularly like your comments the postmodern victim victimizer types they abandoned the economic issue that's why like poor white people can't be oppressed even though like I think the most compelling case you can make for the victim victimizer narrative is on the grounds of economic inequality now I'm not saying you can make an overwhelmingly powerful case for it even there but if you were going to make a case that would be you got to give markx credit for at least identifying that as perhaps the Cardinal dimension of potentially tragic inequality so okay so so what do you think about that the prioritization of Marxism as or the victim victimizer narrative as the Cardinal orienting story of mankind and then this weird inversion of Marxism that characterizes the radicals that we see today I mean I certainly think that there's a lot of support for that idea right there are a lot of philosophers who for example have treated Marxism not as an outgrowth of a capitalist economic theory but actually as as a sort of perverse and twisted outgrowth of a misre of Christianity that that Christianity suggesting that the meek will inherit the Earth but the but on an economic level me aren't inheriting the Earth therefore there must be some form of class exploitation that's going on and so reading Marxism as a weird offshoot of Christianity rather than a weird offshoot of capitalism is sort of one way of of seeing that in a misot of Christianity nii actually did some of this right nii actually sort of suggested this when he when he treated Christianity as a perverse version of a victimizer victim narrative that replaced the idea of good strong and beautiful and weak nasty and terrible right that his his moral prism was the idea that just because something is good and strong doesn't mean that it's necessarily bad and he was creating a what I think is a perverse view of Christianity as arguing against that and then creating a victim victimizer narrative in opposition to that uh when when you talk about the postmodernist I think one of the things the postmodernists are doing is I I think almost all postmodernism is a form of projection and so when they suggest that all narratives are about power dynamics I think what they are saying is they wish to use their narrative as a power Dynamic narrative they understand is the thing that drives human beings uh and so what they do is they read their own willingness to drive human beings via a narrative like victim victimizer into every narrative so it must be that every narrative is driven by an underlying power substructure because their narrative they believe is driven by an underlying power substructure and I think obviously that's wrong and again I think that that that also comes from a a postmodernism again is sort of a weird perverse offshoot of the Enlightenment in the sense that if you're talking about an a prior a priori view of the world which is that everything that you have arrived at in society everything that pre-exists to you is effectively arbitrary or a version of cram down power that there's no validity to the world that you inherit which is I think one of the the premises of some of the changes that came about because of the Enlightenment but also one of the premises of postmodern ISM which is you get to wreck all the systems because you were born into an unfair system driven by perverse views of power that's the great lie and so postmodernism has to have its own narrative I mean this of course is the great kind of metap failing of postmodernism is that in its desire to destroy all narratives as forms of power they have to derive their own narrative in order to do that right postmodernism is self-defeating on the very root intellectual level but that doesn't mean that it's not effective and again I I think a lot of this a lot the enlightenment the post enlight a lot of this lies in frankly a perverse misreading of biblical narratives so so let me touch on that one okay so I just wrote about the parable of the unjust Steward now it's very interesting Parable so the story is about this employer essentially and he has an employee a servant but an employee for all in sense intents and purposes and he he threatens to fire him for misusing his funds and the employee goes out to some of his subcontractors and he offers them this deal where if they pay off a certain proportion of their debts immediately so that he has some money so that he can move forward uh in good faith apart from this side deal with his employer then everything will be set straight and so he does that and he generates enough Capital to satisfy his master now there's a certain dishonesty in his maneuverings but Christ says to his followers that the children of Darkness essentially are sometimes wiser than the children of light and that there's some utility in serving Mammon properly as long as you don't prioritize that over Services of what is to the highest it's a very very interesting Parable and because as you mentioned there's a reading of Christianity that has what you might argue is like an anti-materialist anti- capitalist pro-socialist bent but I believe that a close reading of the gospels puts that interpretation completely off to the side there is an emphasis that the those who claim false power will be held to account for that and that those who are just and good but marginalized will be brought to the center but that that has nothing to do with an essential Narrative of like fundamental oppression it it's it's a much deeper idea than that the true virtue will be rewarded and false virtue punished even if the false virtue is associated with material Prosperity right that the truth will be revealed so Christ's point in that particular Parable is that the discipline that you can learn while managing let's say money or managing money for someone else managing material Prosperity is a virtue that is first of all genuinely a virtue and that can be a precursor virtue to service to the highest possible good which it should be a subset of anyways and that it can't just be tossed off casually as you know all service to material prosper it or life more abundant is because of its materialism or its capitalism to be regarded with extreme suspicion you know and it's also not money that's regarded it's not money that's regarded as the primary sin in the gospels e there it's love of money and that means the prioritization of money over God it doesn't mean the pursuit of life more abundant you know this is also a place I think where the Jewish tradition has got things very right because my sense is there's a laudable emphasis in the Jewish tradition on the goodness of a good life right the material present physical goodness of a good life and that is different than that spiritualized reading of Christianity that makes everything in the material world like damned and corrupt by by definition yeah it's a very weird take on on Christianity that Christianity is all about vows of poverty I mean given the development of the western world is the richest civilization in the history of the world is and driven largely by religious Christians if you look at the generation of American Wealth particularly in the late 19th century for example this is all religious men me John J Rockefeller is attending church and and dedicating churches I mean like this is this kind of bizarre notion that you know Christianity is in direct conflict with capitalism or property rights or anything like that that's obviously it's obviously foolish and and wrong but that's why I say I think that that Marxism is a bastardization in many ways of a misread of of the Bible and I think that that so many of our problems because let's be real about this the Bible shaped the modern world and so that means that even the perverse offshoots of the Bible shap the modern world and so even even the victim victimizer narratives that we see in the Bible many of them are deliberately or or maybe not deliberately missing the point you when people look at the Cain versus Abel narrative and they say that that what that story is actually about for example is Cain being being you know some he's vicious and he's and he treats himself as a victim and Able's the victimizer and therefore he kills he kills Abel and therefore he's punished the reality is what that story is about is him recognizing the sin of that I think that the K Nable story what's fascinating about the C Nable story is everybody misses the end of the Cain and abble Story the very end of that story is not just Cain going wandering in the wilderness it's that he's the first person in the Bible who actually does repentance before God he says I've sinned and then God marks him with The Mark of Cain and The Mark of Cain is meant to protect him right The Mark of Cain is not meant to Mark him for murder he says I'm going to wander I'm being Outcast people are going to kill me and God says I'm going to give you this Mark specifically to protect you because you've repented of the victim victimizer sin America is currently experiencing an invasion a lot of people coming in from usbekistan Afghanistan Iraq Syria is there a fa a gang affiliation among all always these people are just crossing the border illegally waving their hands in the air at our cameras saying hey here I am come get me we're no longer the border patrol we're the welcome patol the number one site in America for fenel trafficking across the border and if Joe Biden remains in office it's only going to get worse I'm Ben Shapiro and this is the divided states of Biden Invasion on the southern border watch now on dailywire plus starting a business can be tough especially knowing how to run your online storefront thanks to Shopify it's easier than ever Shopify is the global Commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million order stage Shopify is there to help you grow our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise and we love how easy it is to add more items ship products and track conversions Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout up to 36% better compared to other leading Commerce platforms no matter how big you want to grow Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com jbp go to shopify.com jbp now to grow your business no matter what stage you're at that's shopify.com [Music] jbbp well and he also says you know he says that the sin that he's committed is more than he can bear and I believe the reason for that it's very much gerain to the current political situation too is that if you associate success of any sort with power oppression and Corruption and we should say that when success goes wrong by the way it does go wrong in the direction of power right so that power is a corrupting force and there is a narrative of power it's just it's not the fundamental narrative when Cain tears down his ideal right because his ideal is clearly able it's able he wants to be and he wants the relationship between abble and the Divine to characterize his life and then he destroys that completely in a fit of absolute Spite and resentment and that's when he goes to God and says that his punishment is more than he can bear and that's because if you do tear down the ideal like if you identify success with oppression then well all your success instantly becomes nothing but evidence of your evil well you can't imagine as a psychologist understanding how reward works I can't imagine a conceptual scheme more devastating to the function of the natural reward systems than to associate the attainment of a goal with what's most malevolent right there's nothing worse you can do than that and you know to give the devil is due so one of the things I've been thinking F tell me what you think about this I've been writing about this with Jonathan pajo we wrote an article for the Ark on this topic pel walked me through one of the images in the Book of Revelation and the Book of Revelation you see the of Babylon on the back of the Beast that represents the state this mult multi-headed Beast so the multi-headed Beast is sort of a degenerate version of the unity of the state it started to deteriorate so now it sprouts multiple heads right diversity heads you might say right well and I mean that in some real way because if the state isn't unified it's fragmented and a fragmented Beast has multiple heads and the heads can fight so there's the demented State on top of the demented State on its back is the horror of Babylon and so the way that we've read that is that when the patriarchal structure deteriorates so when masculinity itself becomes corrupt the corruption of femininity accompanies it and the the the destruction of femininity is something like the disinhibition of female sexuality it maybe it's transformation into a marketable commodity that's a good way of thinking about it you can think about that in terms of only fans and online pornography and all of that that that immediate um or even the selling of women in short-term relationships for sexual purposes women can sell themselves just like pimps can sell them and so so there's this correspondence between the Beast the patriarchal beast destabilizing and then the feminine destabilizing and of course it has to be that way because one sex can't destabilize without the other now what's cool about this from a conceptual perspective is that the Beast ends up killing the and so here's a reading of that is that the power mad state will draw you into its clutches with the promises of unbridled Hedonism right says like you give us the power and we'll enable you to do whatever you want right which means to fall prey to your short-term hedonic whims but then the consequence of that of course is that the tyrannical State once instantiated makes any pleasure of any sort whatsoever not only impossible but forbidden and so and then one more thing on top of that so imagine we're in a situation where God has died and so the thing that United us has disintegrated so now we've fallen into a state of disunion then you might ask well what powers arise in the aftermath of the dissolution of what's unified and here's some answers the goddess or God of nature the god of power the god of Hedonism so that would be like motivational whims short-term motivational whims and the god of Despair right of nihilism so those would be powerful uniting stories that don't unite everything but that that carry a substantive amount of explanatory weight you know like Freud for example his explan atory narrative was sex which is an explanation essentially of Hedonism and the biologists like Richard Dawkins they fall into that trap as well identifying even the human impetus to propagate across time with nothing more than the reproductive urge fundamentally so anyways imagine that there's a hierarchy of God so to speak you lose the top unifying God that's the death of God M elad tracked that as a recur occurring phenomenon in history by the way that paralleled the disintegration of the states upon which the the states that were founded on that unifying Vision so then it collapses into the next highest unifying narratives certainly power is one of those Hedonism is one of those and then they have an alignment there's another Twist on that too which is that one of the reasons one of the things you might ask yourself is why would you want to pursue power and the answer would be well so I can compel other people to do things then you might say well compel them to do what and then the answer to that's got to be something like well I want them to do what I want them to do and so that way power becomes the handmaiden of Hedonism and I think we see that in the modern radical leftist movements as well because they are characterized by an Unholy Union of absolute Ely Lous Hedonism and in this insane insistence that power rules everything and as you pointed out that also justifies the use of power I mean I I think that's also the only promise that the left in this context has been able to fulfill meaning the the promise of tearing down the existing systems was that it was going to bring about human fulfillment a Kinder Better World more accepting and tolerant world and unbridled Hedonism well it turns out that the last of those is the only one that has actually been fulfilled in the modern world and the others are all lacking the others are just not there because you actually need intermediate social institutions built from the ground up in order to actually provide for human fulfillment or human Unity or any of these other things but what you can do is if you wreck all the intermediate institutions and you turn everybody into an atomized individual you can certainly guarantee them the pursuit of whatever hedonistic pleasure is available but that's only for a time I mean as you mentioned at a certain point if there is to be any in Factor at all the power is going to have to crush that too because I mean and this is what Orwell says in 1984 essentially is that if the hedonic will exists in opposition to other wills it cannot be a ronian general will right there there can't really be ronian General will to just giant hedonic pleasure that eventually those hedonic Pleasures come into conflict with one each one another right exactly exactly that's exactly why well they're also very there's another reason too so even technically speaking the honic drives are primordial sex for example or aggression and one of the things that characterizes primordial drives apart from their power and their multiplicity which can put them in Conflict as you said is their short-term nature so one of the things Pou has walked through with me is this is a very smart idea too so imagine that the unifying structure of the meta narrative deteriorates and what you get emerging are a variety of states of potential Domination by hedonistic whims emotions and motivations fundamentally now they're very shortterm in their orientation because they want what they want in a single-minded way um that's what a cyclops is by the way they want what they want in a single-minded way and they want it bloody well now and they want it for the person in question now the problem with that is that what I want now for me is not the principle upon which any social relationship can be founded right because if it's for me only now which is by the way the identity claims of the radical leftists right if it's for me now it's certainly not for my wife it's certainly not for my children or my parents it's not for the broader Community like there's no reciprocal Altru there's no productive generous reciprocal altruism in atomized individualism and so then it can't then it can't survive so one of the things we are seeing talked to Louise Perry about this too on the sexual Revolution front is that even without government suppression of sexuality let's say what we're seeing is a widescale abandonment of sexuality such that this is particularly true in Japan and South Korea I think it's 30% now of young people in Japan and Korea under the ages of 30 are virgins we see it now that half of women in the west are unmarried at 30 half of them won't have children and 90% of them will regret it we see the widescale turning to pornography right and you could think about that as the ultimate expression of short-term hedonic gratification but we see the consequence of that and the consequence of that is inability to perform sexually and the disruption of actual relationships so I don't even think we'd have to see the state itself turn into a totalitarian beast and and eradicate Hedonism I think that the pursuit of short-term desire which is also by the way what Psychopaths do right like here's something cool I've looked at the literature psychological literature on this in depth recently so the that that hedonistic mating strategy of one night stand let's say that absolutely characterizes Psychopaths and so one of the Hallmarks of the development of antisocial Behavior among adolescence is early and fre multipartner sexual involvement right so the short-term mating strategy that characterize Hedonism is literally indistinguishable from the dark tetrad orientation which is manipulative Psychopathic narcissistic and sadistic they had to include the they had to widen the nomological Spectrum to include sadism to get all the co-occurring pathologies properly clumped and so it's so interesting a that this is something women should know you know if you're dating a man whose fundamental orientation is short-term sexual gratification he's either pursuing a psychopathic path of manipulation or you're training him to become that person one of the things that that that also is fascinating about all of this is that the amount of sexual boredom in the society is extraordinary so you have more sexual choice and variety available than literally anytime in human history given fre license by the state because there are no intermediate social institutions in which sort of informal mechanisms of disapproval could make themselves felt and one of the things it turns out psychologically that that human beings are turned on by is taboo and so when you get rid of literally every taboo then people tend to get bored and then the question is yeah well there's no novelty right exactly not novelty goes away and particularly men are driven by sexual novelty it's something that that is is very deeply ingrained and and the power of what marriage was supposed to be is it takes this this short-term hedonic desire and it said because female virtue still existed that in order for you to obtain this you're going to have to sublimate that desire for the building of something greater I mean the the part that of Freud that everybody ignores is the part where Freud actually is in favor of sublimation it's only later it's only later psychologists and philosophers who suggest that sublimation needs to be destroyed and done away with in order to free all forms of of human artistic and and material expression but Freud never says that Freud says you actually have to sublimate a lot of those short-term hedonic desires to to something higher but again that gets back to kind of the fundamental premise that you were speaking to which is there is this this Narrative of accepted values that we all used to live inside of and when you destroy that narrative by saying for some reason that it's not true because it's not coming out of your own head well once that happens we don't hold the common narrative there are no common narratives and if there are no common narratives and everything is then acceptable then what exactly is the taboo what what what where does the sublimation take place there is no sublimation and there is no future orientation because what sublimation really is is orientation of short-term in favor of longterm well and in favor of other people right so it's longterm plus the social yeah well so so so you can do that you can think about this technically as well if there's no uniting narrative here here's the necessary consequences first of all there's no higher order superordinate aim and that means motivation itself on the positive side takes a hit because we experience positive motivation and the impetus to move forward so that would be curiosity hope inspiration enthusiasm even aesthetic interest we we experience that only in relationship to an aim and so if you destroy the ultimate aim you destroy the structure upon which reward itself is dependent apart from satiation induced rewards right and they produce quiessence not not movement forward okay so so you lose positive emotion then you multiply negative emotion and the reason you do that is because one of the things that constrains your anxiety response which is actually a calculation of the entropic distance to a given destination technically is if you produce a multiplicity of aims then you increase anxiety proportionately now you know there's probably some optimization function so that like a choice between three aims is great and a choice between 100 is devastating okay so that's two things that happens when the unifying overarching theme disappears but there's a third thing too which is which is something you pointed to so there's a relationship between scarcity and deprivation and value right and so if you are surfed by a stimulus let's say or Reason resource so you're overfed as soon as you're not hungry food is of no interest if you're stuffed food is nauseating now you remember in The Exodus seminar we covered I don't remember if you were there for this but I think you might have been there's this there's a situation when the Israelites are out in the desert wandering around like demanded slaves and bitching about the fact that they have no Tyrant they start complaining about the fact that they have they don't have enough to eat and God sends them like quailes until they're literally coming out of their nostrils yeah first they complain about the Mana and then well they complain hungry and God sends the Mana and then they say we're tired of the Mana we want meat and God says you're going to have as much meat as you could possibly imagine here come here come God actually gets angry and and actually Moses for the first time gets angry at the people over their requests at this point right well and what happens is because they have an absolute surplus of what they hypothetically find desirable it becomes disgusting and this is this is certainly the danger on the sexual front so we don't know like we actually don't know how much deprivation is necessary for proper sexual function to make itself manifest right is that you have to and it doesn't take much thought to figure this out it's a rare person who hasn't primed their appetite with Hunger before a Thanksgiving feast right you you want to have a plate of pancakes at 5:00 if you're going to have a Thanksgiving feast at 6 and you might say well why not cuz more is better and the answer is no the right amount is better and the right amount involves a certain amount of deprivation and I think that's I I read this interesting article yesterday showing that women are more likely to lose romantic interest as a relationship progresses than men I don't think that's the that's surprising they're higher in trait neuroticism so they're more likely to experience negative emotion and then women are have more their response to sexuality is more multi-dimensional than men because the risks are higher in any case one of the ways around that is for men and women in a marriage to stay apart from each other for periods of these researchers looked at eight hours if you get some distance the desire reemerges then you were talking about novelty and so is pretty interesting too so you said men will chase novelty in a sexual relationship well I think part of what is incumbent on married individuals is to figure out how to keep that novelty alive right so that means that each of them have to be transforming and I think the best way to do that is in relationship to a spiritual Pursuit and then I think women also want novelty but the novelty they're looking for in men is probably more multi-dimensional and performative right because women are hypergamous and they they like men who are above them in the hierarchy of status let's say or ability likely ability and I think what women want are dis novel displays of hypergamous capacity and that that is the novelty orientation for women in relationship to sexuality well one of the things that's actually fascinating about this is that biblically speaking right I mean not to get into abstruse Jewish law but I mean this is actually right in the forget about the absur Jewish law and right in the Bible one of the one of the mandates is that for a period of at least one week out of every month married couples are not supposed to have sex right this is like right in the Bible and so that one of the purposes of that presumably would be to create the scarcity and the novelty that you're talking about because if you're married then obviously there's tremendous availability of sex I mean Contra every single weird public opinion out there married people tend to have sex significantly more than than single people and it is not particularly close but theoretically the scarcity goes away the novelty goes away and then so does the romance and so danger anyways that's a danger right and so the Bible literally says like one week out of the month minimum you're your toast you can't you can't do anything during this particular week and I think that again there there's a good rationalistic and there's a good way I shouldn't say rationalistic because there's a reason for it but it's something inherited inherited wisdom over time is sort of the message of of the Bible and I I think that that's you know not knowing why you do the thing but do the thing and then it works is in some ways much what we're talking about because that's the story of what works is the story right that's that's what we're really talking about at the end of the day once your business gets to a certain size cracks start to emerge and things you used to do in a day are now taking over a week if this is you then you need to check out net Suite 37,000 businesses have upgraded to netsuite by Oracle netsuite is the number one Cloud Financial system streamlining 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narrative right when described now there's a competition between there's a competition for validity between those narratives and here here's what we do so mer Eliot tracked this with regard to the development of religious narratives so you imagine it's easy to understand and it's very much like a large language model derivation by the way you can imagine that there's a bunch of natives sitting around a campfire talking about like their the 10 people they admire the most okay so now what that points to is that there's a commonality across those people and the commonality is commonality of what constitutes what is admirable now you can imagine another person a young person maybe sitting there listening to these accounts right but and then you ask him later what the discussion was and he doesn't tell you all 10 stories he gives you an Amalgamated composite of what constitutes the admirable hero as a consequence of deriving the central point from the amalgamation of 10 stories now this is exactly what young boys do when they play the role of father in a pretend play bout they don't actually imitate directly through onetoone corresponding mimicry the actions of their father they watch their father in multiple situations and Abstract out the commonalities that make him a father right so we abstract out the commonalities of admirability across a set of compelling stories those stories Echo to us because they attract our interest right so that's the correspondence between the archetype and the Soul that's a good way of thinking about it then you can imagine that as the Hero Stories Aggregate and increase in sophistication that they Transcendent nature starts to make itself more and more manifest because you get a pattern that's been applicable across many generations and situations and so this is also the answer to the problem of pathological consensus you know like it's a conservative it's a conservative dictum that you should do by and large what other people do but obviously that goes astray in times like when they're when we're possessed by idolatry and ideological idiot Nazi Germany maest China stalinist Soviet Union and and all modern universities let's say so then you might say well we still need the consensus and and what has worked and what we've observed to work is a consensus what do we do if that goes astray and the answer is well we also have the consensus that's developed across time and the consensus that's developed across time is instantiated in our traditional narratives so there're a they're an anchor that can be used to resist movement let's say in a pathological Direction when the consensus itself goes wrong that's what it looks like to me and I think that's associated with the vertical axis of Mount Sinai symbolically as well as the horizontal axis that really does constitute something like a consensus so Jordan I I wonder what you think about this proposition that's occurring to me while you're talking which is that one of the Great failur that we're that we're experiencing in modern society obviously is a failure of conversation that that there's a difference between verbal and oral learning and just reading things and that as we become a society where we don't talk to each other as much that one of the things you lose about the narrative is the person who's telling you the narrative that when your parent tells you a bedtime story it's not just the Bedtime Story it's that your parents is telling you the bedtime story when you sit around the campfire and you abstract that larger story it's the people who you're talking to who you trust to be good people who are telling you their various stories that allow you to abstract that out and so as literacy has increased over the course of the world that's allowed for the spread of knowledge but it's also shallowed some of the some of the stories themselves because you sitting in a room reading the Bible is actually not the same thing as you sitting in a room with people discussing the Bible like we did during The Exodus seminar and getting various points of view then abstracting out the lesson and so as we move from a so that engages in conversation and oral learning to a society that's very much about you and advice in front of you or you and a book in front of you or you in a Tik Tok video in front of you that that that isn't actually enough that the the form of tradition that we need to get back to is a form of oral learning and conversation a sort of back and forth dialogue that allows us to actually understand the narratives in a powerful way otherwise you do end up with the postmodern dilemma of I'm sitting there and I'm reading a text that I just discovered and I'm bringing whatever my prior biases are to that text you actually do need a teller of the tale in order for you to fully understand what's going on you well you you point to a bunch of things there so one is okay so let's blame some of this on the Protestants and their insistence that the biblical Corpus per se is sufficient now now one of the huge advantages of that was the promotion of literacy worldwide so we're going to give the devil is Du but it it does have the problem that the two-fold problem that you just described the first problem Jung pointed to this the first problem is that Protestant tends towards fractionation and you can see that with the multiplicity of Protestant churches because if it's just you in the text there's an infinite number of 's and I think the logical extension of this are is the identity claims that the radical Types on the hedonic left are now putting forward right I'm The Interpreter I'm the only interpreter right it's between me and God and no one else it's like well that's great unless you're deluded in which case the god that you think you're following might not be God at all now then you might say well how might I determine whether the god that's calling to me is God or Satan let's say and part of your answer is you had a twofold answer one is well is the story being told to you by people actual embodied people that you actually respect as a consequence of your knowledge of let's say their ethical conduct and the other is well is there an active and living discussion around such issues that's conducted by a group of such people so you know one of the things Pou has helped me with a fair bit is understanding more deeply the role of ritual and congregation in the maintenance of social structure but also in the transmission of the stories that that need to be transmitted as an academic type and also as someone let's say as an intellectual prone to The Temptations of the luciferian intellect it's very enticing for me to think that it can just be me in the text but the problem with that is that you're blindest at your blindest spots and you need that additional Community to tap you out of your delusional self delusional unconscious self-serving atomistic individual individuality into something more like the universal space and you know talked to Harris Sam Harris recently and Sam and I and I suspect you as well share a preoccupation with the reality of evil and part of the reason that Sam beat the drum so hard for objective standards of morality grounded in science so an attempt to reduce the narrative to the objective was because he wanted to put a firm foundation under claims that there was a Transcendent good and the only way he could see to do that was through the empirical rote now you know I've been looking at Robert axelrod's work on the emergence of cooperation and iterated systems and and I think so I think there actually is a place where the approach that Sam favors can be integrated with the sort of things that you and I and The Exodus participants for example have been discussing so imagine that there's a landscape of repeated interactions let's say they're voluntary trades of information of emotion of goods the voluntary part's important and that across those trades there's a pattern now Axel Rod showed in his computational Sim simulations that if you and I were trading under certain conditions the best strategy the winning strategy in a competition of strategies would be for you and I to cooperate but if you cheated for me to whack you with proportionate force and then to go back to cooperation that so that's tit Fort now you imagine that our lives are characterized by a sequence of repeated trades in multiple Dimensions with multiple players in a game of indeterminate length and that there's a pattern of interaction that is optimal across that plethora of interactions I think that the highest order narrative that grips us so we'd find that compelling that would be told by the people we admire and that's in concordance with the biblical narrative is a map of the strategy that works best in repeated interactions with multiple people across the broadest possible span of time so that's a place where the empirical and the theological could reach perfect concordance and well I I think the evidence points in that direction yeah I totally agree with with all of that and and I also think that when when you talk about you know the fact that the these narratives have to be told to you by people that you trust that people who you consider to be virtuous and all the rest of this I think that even people who don't advocate for that understand it innately which is why attacks on the church for example are never attacks on the Bible those are not effective attacks right the sort of attacks that you see from Richard Dawkins for example about the text of the Bible that never has any impact on people who are truly religious because truly religious people exist within the context of religious communities the most damaging thing to any institution is an attack on the people who comprise the institution and make the rules as nonvirtuous and violative of the fundamental principles of that institution this is why the attacks that have been most damaging to the Catholic Church have nothing to do with Catholic Doctrine and everything to do with the activities inside the Catholic Church surrounding for example coverups of child molestation it's why attacks any institution are going to be the most telling based on taking people who you previously thought were virtuous advocates for the system and bringing them low and and tearing them down and I I think that one of the things that that we've seen wholesale well that's also that's Al okay so that's also why so in the gospel texts Christ's fundamental enemies in the Earthly world so to speak so excluding Transcendent evil are the Pharisees the scribes and the lawyers so I've been going through those stories in depth and so the Pharisees are moral Hypocrites they're the people see this is another way that we can sort these dis disputes out with people like Dawkin and Harris because what they do is they identify the religious Enterprise with the totalitarian proclivity but that bespeaks a lack of differentiated judgment because this is where I think the arrow hits its Mark the worst totalitarian Hypocrites use the religious Enterprise as the most effective disguise for their Psychopathic maneuverings and so and I think the separation of church and state is a protection against that so like and we know this clinically to some degree because if I'm a narcissist a psychopathic narcissist I'm going to claim victim status and milk the compassionate for all their worth being relatively kous myself and unfeeling in the in the uh presence of other people's pain perfectly willing to manipulate that and then I'm also going to Proclaim exactly as the Pharisees do in the gospel text I'm going to Proclaim my moral virtue to elevate my standing in the community I'm going to pray in public like the protesters do so and I'm going to take the best seats in the synagogue right by parading around my moral virtue and so that ties into what you're saying because the most effective way of demolishing the traditional proprieties the traditional Endeavor is to claim to embody them while using God's name in vain while pretending moral virtue oriented towards the highest I'm saving the planet well really in reality doing nothing but pursuing your own evil agenda and so we could be wise enough to see the wolves in sheep's clothing to see the totalitarians like the Iranian fundamentalists who use the religious Enterprise to justify their own their own selfing self-serving behavior and then bring they they they milk it and they discredit it simultaneously so that's like a truly malevolent act right it's only for you plus it discredits what what is Holy and that's that's praying in public and and there's tremendous amount of the Gospel texts devoted to insisting that that's a cardinal ill and that's the same thing as using God's name in vain the third commandment of Moses right it's a and I think it's one of the cardinal sins of our time to parade your moral virtue around in the name of what's holiest when all you're doing is elevating your own moral status I mean I certainly think that that's the case and I also think that we have to be careful on the other side not to fall into the easy use of the charge of hypocrisy to destroy the principle because you can see that exact same attack being wildly misused you can see some everyone is sinful and so the idea is that if I can discredit an idea by attacking The Advocates of the idea as sinful well then you can basically destroy any ideology that way it's why religious people for example very often say oh we're held to a higher standard well I mean to be fair you should be held to a higher standard you do Proclaim to be religious but it's also very easy to destroy entire swab of ideology based on this and using using human beings inherent fall and inherent sinfulness in order to discredit you know and you see this literally with every ideology right capitalism is bad because bur made off ex okay so so I got a good story about that for you so you remember in the story of Noah so Noah Shepherds his family and the human race for that matter through the return of the precos moonic chaos right the waters come back God floods everything returning it to the state that preceded creation and brings up a new civilization and Noah is to thank for that now he goes out after he lands because it's been a harrowing trip let's say plants a Vineyard and proceeds to get rip roaring drunk and so that's a human failing and Noah is only characterized in that text as wise in his Generations right he's not a saint he's not the Savior he's a good man but a man so he has f now here's what happens this is so cool so he drinks like three gallons of wine and and passes out and he's St naked I think his like robes are lifted up over his body and he's laying there in his tent exposed and naked and his son Ham comes along and has a pretty good laugh about how stupid his father is which is pretty damn ungrateful thing to do and foolish because ham would be it would be of great it be a great accomplishment of ham to be half the man that his father was so anyways he laughs at Noah and then he gets his brothers and he says you know hey the old man's you know drunk out of his mind why don't we go and and he's all sprawled out let's go over there and we can all join in a good laugh and his other Sons Noah's other Sons take a blanket and they back into the tent and they cover Noah okay and so they show him respect despite his flaws now the way that story ends is that in Tradition is that slaves are the descendants of ham and so the moral of the story is that if you're foolish enough to dispense with your wise traditions because you can point to flaws that inherit to men better than you far better than you let's say Thomas Jefferson for example that you are walking a pathway that will will turn you and your descendants into the slaves of people who have proper respect for tradition and that seems to me to be well like that's spot on that's dead on it it Nails The Pride a because Canada is unbelievably appalling in this regard our politicians will apologize even for Imagined historical wrongs even if they show no sign whatsoever of being anywhere near as wise as the people who hypothetically committed those wrongs just so they can parade their moral virtue in comparison to the Great Men of the past and one of the things too that is worth thinking about in that regard is there's almost nothing more cowardly than attacking the dead because even more than The Unborn they can't defend themselves right so so well and it's very difficult to read into that attempt to demoralize and devalue the past you don't you can't read into that the attempt on the part of the people who are doing the criticism to be better people you can read into that their willingness to condemn and make contemptuous to redown to their unearned moral virtue and that defines the universities now you all these bloody literary critics who are above the people whose Works they depend on and criticize all these art critics who have perverted the the museums with their commentary on the hypothetical sins of the artists that's exactly what they're doing it's very amusing to consider that you know their Destiny their Destiny is going to be indistinguishable from that of slaves I mean one of the things that you're talking about here again gets back to that victim victimizer narrative the more successful you were as a human being dead or alive the more you are then targeted for your for your failings because your success must be a sign of your oppression and that's that's really most of what we're watching right now is the Coalition of the supposedly marginalized who are coming together to destroy the thing that they hate in common not because they have anything in common themselves but because they believe that the reason they're marginalized is out of some sort of unfairness or pure power dynamic as opposed to the fact that in a free Society the people who very often end up marginalized are the people who don't abide by the common rules of the society and in a working Society those rules are good doesn't mean every rule is good but it means that a lot of rules are pretty damn good look look Ben it's also the case that this the intersectionalist basically make this claim even though they don't notice like we could each find Dimensions along which we were marginalized and maybe still are for that matter I mean within every human being there are going to be dimensions of lesser attainment and greater attainment and so there's some Dimension along which we are comparative victims right and I mean it's certainly the case as well and the intersectionalist have this right to some degree is you do run across people from time to time who appear to have very little going for them across very many dimensions right and and their lives are genuinely difficult and hard now I've met many people like that in my clinical practice and I've also observed and this is another eror in the determinism that's characteristic of the victim victimizer narrative and the Marxist and materialist approach to the world you would expect that people who were marginalized on many dimensions simultaneously might Harbor a certain amount of bitterness and resentment as a consequence of that and a certain amount of Justified hatred for the status quo but my experience as a clinician has been that people who have been bittered tormented are they may be more likely to collapse altogether but they also seem to be me to be more likely to have the opportunity to derive an absolutely Stellar character out of their Misadventures right to conclude from everything that they have been subject to that taking on a rule of the bully themselves for example if they were from an abused an abusing family is the wrong conclusion to derive from that example and we know that this is true even mathematically because if all abusers abused it would take no time for every family to be characterized by abuse so what you see in the clinical literature is that people marginalized by abuse let's say genuine abuse if you look an abuser someone who abuses their kids they are statistically much more likely to have been abused as kids but if you take the population of every one have abused by abused in childhood only a small proportion of them become abusers again when when when you talk about the marginalized and and you know the ability to to Rise Up from that it it seems to me that very often the people who are who legitimately experienced the hardship in life as you say the preconditions to success are sometimes there specifically because once the conditions for their marginalization are removed if given the opportunity they can succeed what we're seeing in society is the is a self enervation it's people who are self marginalizing people who don't actually have any reason to claim marginalization or very little to claim marginalization who don't have tons of obstacles and then when they are unsuccessful it is significantly easier to suggest that it must be some external force that is marginalizing me this is how you fall into conspiracism is is by suggesting like well you know you've had AER you see this in cloudine Gay's you know essay in the New York Times where she's a victim of circumstance and she been victimized by everybody no one's had more opportunity in life than clouding gay but it would be much harder for her because she's had all these those opportunities to say okay well the reason I'm failing is because of marginalization and if I weren't marginalized I would do X Y and Z she can't really say that because she wasn't presented with the with the marginalization when when it comes to you know people being bullied and people who are being mistreated I think one of the great lies that that were told is that the reason bullying has to stop is because if you are bullied you are thus much more likely to be destroyed as as a human being I find that many of the most successful people I know uh again this anecdotal but many of the most successful people I know are viciously bullied his children and in fact use that as as fuel to fire them to Greater success because the idea was okay I do have to work twice as hard I do have to but if I do that then I am going to succeed there's I think in other words there's a difference between labeling the entire system unfair and labeling the situation in which you live unfair those are two very different things if the entire system is unfair there's no way to fight against it if the situation which you currently are is unfair the way to fight against that is to move beyond that particular situation I think you you would be hardpressed to find a man or woman who hadn't been bullied you know I'm I'm thinking about a friend of mine who was a pretty tough kid he ended up going off to work in the rigs when he was about nine and he was a tough kid I think he got kicked out of school when he was in grade nine I mean it was grade 10 I think he got kicked out of school if I remember correctly because he body checked the very well-built and strong gym teacher in a hockey game and then challenged him to a fight so this was a tough kid this this gym teacher could do an Iron Cross by the way like it was a major feat for this 16-year-old kid to stand up to him I'm not justifying it I'm just pointing it out but I also remember him in grade six being chased and pounded daily by by the bullies who were in grade eight you know I mean most boys I don't know any I can't remember any of my childhood friends who weren't subjected to some degree of sustained bullying because even if you're the toughest kid in your class you're not the toughest kid there's no 12-year-old or virtually none who's tougher than like the 15 yearolds that just doesn't happen and then you and then you might say well what about women it's like have you watched women like they may not be getting into physical altercations although that's not as rare as we think it is but the probability that any given woman has been unmercifully bullied by some pack of Mean Girls for some prolonged period of time is virtually certain that could happen within a family as a consequence of sibling rivalry or it can happen in the broader social sphere and you know I've been reading about the the Christmas stories again I've been writing about the gospels which is why I'm bringing them up but you know you see in the birth of Christ the same threatened Beginnings as you see in the birth of Moses right so Christ is born in the lowliest of places and worse than that he's subject to severe murderous persecution by the state authorities now Moses is threatened in the same way he's born to Jewish slaves and the Pharaoh determines that all the firstborns are going to be killed now you might ask well why are these two great Heroes presented as victims and the answer is well the vulnerability that enables us to weave a victim victimizer narrative around our own lives is built into every life like everyone starts out unbelievably vulnerable and sub to the depredations of nature chaos and the depredations of social order and we all have to contend with that and one conclusion to draw from that is that the world is dominated by power the proper story is oppressor and oppressed and the appropriate response is the kind of bitter resentment that characterized Cain and another response is power corrupts and the world is full of unfortunate vulnerability but our job is to act as moral agents to not make a bad situation worse and to strive toward the good and that and it's also the claim that that our reliable Traditions were founded on the latter proposition and not on the basis of power and I also think so I looked into the anthropological literature on the tradition of the Elder so most societies have Elders now if the marxists were correct the ERS would be the rich people who had power and they would they would have been using their socioeconomic status as a kind of cudgel to dominate the positions of authority that isn't what happens in the anthropological literature the elders are I think the easiest way to characterize them them they're people who have a lengthy publicly observable and genuine history of honesty productivity and generosity and they've derived a wisdom from that and the reason they're Elders is because people go to them voluntarily to ask them for their advice right well that has nothing to do with power quite the contrary quite the contrary and you have to be a real bloody cynic to look at a functional Society like the United States and say oh that's all power it's like no some of it is power and when it corrupts it corrupts in the direction of power just like a marriage might if husband and wife start to play Tyrant to one another but that doesn't mean that that's the bloody fundamental Story upon which the whole thing was founded that's exactly obviously we're in agreement on that I mean I I think that the the attempt to do away with traditional wisdom particularly in the form of the elderly has also you know had some pretty dire After Effects not just in terms of loss of wisdom but in terms of of we ourselves one of the purposes of a of a community like a traditional social Community the the elders in that Society provided what you're talking about the wisdom and the knowledge and the advice and in return the people who were younger basically supported them I mean that was the economic deal you you supported your parents and one of the reasons that people had kids is because they knew that in their old age they would have to be supported by their children but their responsibilities were not alleviated the the grandparents had a ma major role to play in kinship networks it's not as though they just sort of dropped off and lived in the back room and watched TV all day they actually had a role to play in child child's care and child's rearing and advice to parents and all the rest of this sort of stuff and then gradually as we saw the encroachment of an Ever larger state that basically took away the responsibility of parents to grandparents what you saw as the marginalization of the elderly it didn't make the elderly more valuable it made them significantly less valuable the the the fact that you as a child were supposed to support your parents meant that you also made demands of your parents like I need your advice on something I want to know what's going on being able to to just you know ship Grandma off to an old age home or Shuffle her onto Social Security and then you know let her spend her her waning years you know watching watching soap operas it's been devastating for not only the the elderly in the United States who have largely been marginalized but to younger Generations who really need the wisdom of the elderly in order to continue to function we we've broken the chain of transmission and we have done that through I think economic methods and one of the great untold stories that I think some of the Nationalist conservatives have right is is that economic conditions have broken down many of the social relationships that were that that were not primarily economic but had economic benefits to them that have now been removed by the state now I think where the Nationalist conservatives are wrong is they attribute that to capitalism whereas I think that it's much more state interventionism in these particular areas alleviating burdens of responsibility but one of the things that at root is there is that we tend to think in Western Society of responsibility as burden when in fact responsibility for the vast majority of people across time is actually a form of Freedom responsibility it's meaning and freedom yes I mean as you become it's why as you become older you as a person want more responsibility you don't just want the ability to go out on a Saturday night you also want the responsibility that comes along with that because every duty every every freedom is going to come along with a certain level of additional responsibility if you want to use that freedom freedom wisely it's why you know when you see small children I watch my own kids right they're 97 three and and seven months when I watch them the thing that they play at is not actually like cruising around in the car what they tend to play at is the role play of responsibility it's why small small girls play at being Mom right they take dolls and they they play at being Mom it's why young boys will play at at building things it's an actual social function that they are playing at very often and that's something that we that kids aspire to then we as adults were like well I can't believe my kids want to they can't wait to become adults look at all the responsibilities I have but I remember back to when you were a kid that was a cool thing responsibility was a cool thing and I mean mean I still think as an adult that responsibility is a cool thing the coolest thing that I do is the stuff that I'm responsible for whether it's my kids and my wife and my household or whether it's the employees of my company like that that the more responsibility you have the I think frankly the cooler your life is because those things don't hem you down they Define you without that what what exactly well well we could say voluntary responsibility voluntarily undertaken and accepted yes right I don't think there's any difference between that and meaning now if it's forced on you that's a different story but we also know from the biblical Corpus as well that there's a tremendous emphasis by god let's say on on uh what objecting strenuously to excessive use of force never use Force if it's not justified and it's justified in the most constrained of circumstances Moses is bitterly punished for using Force even at the end of his life so so you know here's something too with regards to your observation on the elderly older people you know Jonathan height has written a fair bit about the codling of the American mind and we see the infantilization of children and young adults and even adults themselves increasingly characterizing educational institutions say but maybe part of that is a consequence of the breakdown of intergenerational transmission of knowledge with regards to child rearing because one of the things I've noticed with my kids is that like they they had the model of our family for disciplining for disciplinary practices and they know those models but I've watched and it's often useful for them to have the example of the response of Tammy and I to the misbehavior of our grandchildren to bolster my children in their conviction that intervening to discipline them so that they're socially desirable is acceptable so imagine this Ben so the fundamental Drive behind infant care is service to the infant self-sacrificing service to the infant and the rule is if the infant manifests any displays of distress that your primary moral obligation is to alleviate that and that's 100% true for the first 8 months let's say Okay so the default feminine proclivity is the amelioration of emotional distress immediate amelioration of emotional distress now that becomes problematic when there's a conflict between short-term emotional distress and long-term thriving and you might say that the role of wisdom is to know when to step in to allow short-term emotional distress to be tolerated or even encouraged if the benefit is an incremented long-term adaptation now older people are wise enough to know well you know your kid wants that toy in the grocery store right now and is willing to have a fit about it but if you give in to his tantrum and reward it you're going to produce a child who other children can't stand and because he'll play in that infantile manner whenever he's in a social circumstance now you can model that with new parents and say look here's how you regulate the child's emotional distress and you can say and you want to do that so your child's well socialized so that everyone will like him or her so they can engage in productive reciprocal interactions but I don't think you can do that with just advice I think you have to model it I mean I totally agree with that my wife and I are very close with my parents and also with with her parents and one of the rules in the household is that you know my parents discipline my kids when my kids are doing something wrong I actually want them to discipline my kids by the way I don't actually think this is relegated to to grandparents I think that Elders in the community and other other parents we know who have older kids I think it's actually quite incumbent on societes we have this weird thing in the United States actually that is not usual in some other societies in other societies when it comes to Children acting up in public for example it's actually pretty much expected that somebody's going to the kid whether it is the parent or not the parent you see this in a lot of other societies and it actually makes I think for for better child bearing and rearing because it's considered sort of a social responsibility that if some kid is violating the rules yeah exactly then then there will be someone there to say the thing in the United States because we're very autonomous and we're very autonomy oriented the idea is that if you say a word to my child I'm going to be super duper angry at you and very very upset about that but I I don't actually think that that's right and it's certainly not true in for example my own religious community if we're over at somebody's house and what we're constantly interacting obviously with people in my immediate religious community it's a very tight-knit community and if we're over at somebody's house and my kid does something wrong I I want somebody to discipline my kid and in the context of of generations I mean what you're talking about what what basically the elderly are is they are the living tradition right in fact in in the Jewish Community you're supposed to stand up for an elderly person and a Torah scholar the same way and when they enter the room theoretically you're supposed to actually stand up in respect to that person why well because my parents have already seen the outgrowth of either doing it right or doing it wrong when I was a kid right I only have the immediate knowledge of of how old my kids are right I know how to raise a nine-year-old I don't know how to raise a 16y old I don't have a 16-year-old I know how to I know how to raise my three-year-old to be nine I know how to raise my seven-year-old to be nine I don't know how to raise my nine-year-old to be 16 and so you know that's where my parents really are effective because they've done it four times so they they know how to raise a nine-year-old to be 16 and how not to raise a 9-year-old to be 16 and so again the marginalization of the elderly largely you know for for economic reasons the removal of the elderly from the home for example which again is strange because American homes have have grown we've actually I mean one of the great lies of of modern American economics is that people are somehow living worse now than they were in 1980 which is not true and one of the things that we have is more living room and one of the things that theoretically we could do is have our parents live with us more often if our parents can't afford to live on on their own and I think that would actually be of of great benefit the lack of intergenerational dialogue is truly bad by the way it's working in both directions people who are 40 aren't having kids and also their parents aren't with them and so they're they're just kind of there and you want to talk about prolonged adolescence not having kids and not having parents is the is the definition I think of prolonged adolescence well the other downside of that too is that one thing you can be certain of is that you're going to get old and so there is really no difference there is no difference between how we treat the elderly and how we will be treated like those are the same thing and that should give everyone pause really like that should get everyone pause you know because we tend even the fact that we have a conception category like the elderly in some ways is absurd because well it's a category that will include everyone so how we treat the elderly is no different than how we treat ourselves and The Logical corollary to that is well we should treat the elderly like we want to be treated because well that's coming down the pipelines and a lot bloody f than you think too so you know it's it's obviously complicated because well because life is complicated so there's really no sense in even in going into that but it's definitely something that's that's that's that's much worth consideration yeah so so let's turn from that for a minute I'm curious about what it is that's occupying you intellectually these days what problems are you trying to solve and I I'm also curious about how that might tangle into the daily wire stated ambition to expand their offerings both conceptually and on the popular front beyond the realm of the immediate the political so what what is it that you're trying to think through what are you working on I mean so I'm I'm working on a bunch of projects I'm obviously political I just went down to the southern border to observe what's happening there which is a fullscale disaster area uh and um and you know foreign policy related you know my my thoughts very much these days are about where are the hot spots in the world you know where if there were to be a larger War where is that likely to break out what are the trigger events likely to be there the thing that occupies me I think most of the time these days is what are the principles that a society must pursue in order for it to maintain peace health of its citizens mental health of it citizens the possibility of fulfillment of its of it citizen I think that's the same stuff that occupies us all the time and that manifests in a variety of contexts but to me one of the things that I'm seeing I was talking about this with a friend a little bit earlier is that in the political realm which is where I spend most of my time there's this bizarre situation where so much disillusionment has set in with politics normally disillusionment sets in with politics because we feel that politics is broken with principle we say we have these certain principles and our politicians just aren't meeting with our principles in the same way we were talking about religious hypocrisy earlier that we have a set things that we want from our politicians we're not getting them and so we're very upset with that and so in the name of principle we have to change our politics but one of the things that's that's I think happened is we're so disillusioned with with politics that we've also actually become disillusioned with principles and so I'm not sure where the the potential unification is going to come from do do we need to focus more on the principles or more on the politics because there's great fragmentation on both sides of the political aisle right now over principle itself I think I I I think that and this is in keeping with what we've been discussing in this in this uh in this interview and I think it's in keeping with what we've been trying to do with this Alliance for responsible citizenship Endeavor is that I think we're in a moment of crisis with which is also why concentrated on the counter Enlightenment you know we're at a time where fractionation and disagreement is so profound that we have to go underneath the principles to to what's genuinely sacred and sort that out again I think that's partly why I think you know one of the things I've noticed Ben you tell me if this has been the case for you but especially in the last year it's become increasingly difficult to do a podcast with a political figure of any stature that gets any views you know there's SP sporadic exceptions to that rule but I did one with disantis you know and he's certainly a top 10 political figure I would say worldwide certainly in the US and he did a credible job you know but the view count was not great not great and certainly the Lesser political figures in terms of General popularity that I've interviewed Mike Pence for example and and Chris Christie and others um they're performing dismally we also saw at the ark conference that people who spoke about first principles had videos that went viral when we released them on YouTube and anybody who spoke politically just nothing like it didn't matter what their reputation was man it didn't even really matter what their quality of speech was if they weren't addressing even what was under first principles there was no interest I totally agree with that I mean I'm seeing that myself and you know which is kind of an astonishing thing because it fundamentally presupposes that our institutions are not the issue it fundamentally presupposed like we're all focused on in politics how do you fix the institutions how do you change the the balance of power how do you change the structures but what you're saying and what I think we're all saying is that it's a much more severe problem than that the institutions are sitting at the very top and the institutions are meant to do things like counterbalance interest against interest in the United States but what if there's not even a broadscale recognition of what interests are what what if the fundamental terms of the debate have so radically changed that we can't even decide what we're debating on and anymore and that's also what it feels like it feels like we don't even know very often sort of the rubric that the people we're talking with are are working under because the fundamental terms of commonality the language itself is just not there it's just gone and so you you well you remember that's that's what happens in the Tower of Babel yes right is so this is a tower built to a false god and the consequence of that is that nobody can talk to anybody anymore the language is fragment and that is exactly the situation we're in now I mean I think the best indication of that is that we that we have conversations about what constitutes a woman right exactly and that's that's that's so insane I actually don't think that there's any place to go on the insanity front past that when you lose that commonality when you lose the commonality of sexual identification everything else is completely up for grabs yeah I I mean I think that's totally true I think we listen I think it's gone to we have commonality on what it means to be a human being anymore and so you know and and those lines are actually being blurred more sophisticated fashion by AI than than you have with sexual binary but it's it's it's really you know but at the same time what's made it so difficult is that you know you want to have these conversations with people but there's an entire punishment structure that has now been attached to the conversations themselves and so having a conversation with somebody who's perceived as being quote unquote of the other side even if that's not rooted in principle because you can't name what the other side is based on principle anymore because principles politically don't don't really matter but there is a punishment structure that does exist with finding too much common ground with somebody who may oppose you the Democrats the Democrats are particularly possessed by that Terror you know I've tried for years to get leading Democrats who will happily talk to me privately to come on my podcast and it's been six years that I've been trying to do that and with very very few exceptions the response has been essentially not that they're not interested but that they're terrified that they'll be pecked to death now and now the terrible consequence of that is in part that not only have those conversations not occurred and I would conduct them in good faith and I offer all my guests like editing rights over the outcome or the right even to scrap the whole interview and that's a genuine offer no one's ever taken me up on either of those by the way but um now I think the moment for that kind of I actually think the moment for that kind of political dialogue has probably passed because my sense is now that even if I got leading Democrats with maybe a tiny number of exceptions on my podcast no one would watch them right no I I think that's right so that I think I I think that's totally right and so the question becomes what kind of conversations are productive at this point and and so what what you're seeing is that in that vacuum in the vacuum where the conversation doesn't we can't have that that Council of people sitting around the fire and talking about virtue because nobody has a common concept of virtue you see figures who are arising again across the political aisle who just use extremely charged emotivist language and and that extremely charged emotivist language goes directly to the root of how people feel without any sort of virtuous substructure and so it's I'm making this statement the only reason you would disagree with this statement is because you're an evil person who's a child molester I'm not kidding I mean this is this is literally the level of discourse in in so much of the in so much of sort of the cultural sphere and and so how do you how do you even how do you build on that and and to me what that says is that you know maybe the the time for large scale broad scope 30,000 foot building is ending and and what we actually need to do is go back to the campfire meaning that make people you know privy to the campfire but one of the things that you've been doing a lot with with things like the exies or the Gen or or some of the other things you're doing is getting people giving people access to that campfire of people who they see as virtuous that they can actually have that sort of conversation be in dialogue with that but a lot of that's going to have to take place on the small scale and social media radically opposes the small scale it's a scalable Enterprise in which the person with the most hits is is rewarded I'm not sure there's going to be a substitute in the future for in-person events and meetings with people that are going to allow them to find again the the little platoons of society that have been broken up are going to have to be rebuilt well I I think that that's partly why my tour tours have been popular because it's a mystery in some ways right because much of what I say you can get your F of whatever I have to say online now I do say new things in my public appearances but I don't think that people fundamentally come there for the new things that's like a bonus the reason they come there is to find a community right to do something Collective exactly to engage in a collective celebration and Gathering and so and it does seem to me too that especially as the ability to produce fake videos propagates and we're going to be increasingly unwilling to separate the wheat from the chaff in the virtual world that the value of in-person meetings is going to increase so so and with regards to the shallowness of the political dialogue you know I've been following this bill acman Chris rufo Claudine gay Harvard episode Amman as you know is a billionaire who's now a Democrat political activist taking a somewhat conservative Tack and I've been watching that him working at least side by side with Christopher rufo but and I'm not displeased about the outcome but when I'm watching that I keep thinking well it's good that Mr Amman has noticed the corruption of Harvard but he's just it's the wrong level of analysis because the corruption that made Claudine gay a reality and then even more profoundly made the spectacle in DC where the upen MIT and Harvard presidents made absolutely Dreadful prosterus parody fools of themselves that's reflective of a conflict that's almost unimaginably deep and dispensing with Claudine gay there will have virtually no impact on that I mean I totally agree with that I will I will say that that Amman himself has become an anti-de activist which means that he is engaging at a level that I frankly didn't expect him to to engage at or or many other people in this particular battle but yeah I mean I think that the the the problems in American society run so deep and in Western Society run so deep that the only way to fight them is the is the hard thing that nobody wants to do right the easiest thing to do in politics is to speak into camera and distribute it on YouTube to a million people you can do that that's not super hard to do the hard thing to do is to raise a good family the hard thing to do is to join a religious Community the hard thing to do is to actually build again those structures that we all took for granted for literally dozens of generations over time that have been completely eviscerated and destroyed that that that's so hard to do and so intimidating to do that it almost feels useless while you're doing it because the scale of the problem is so large that it feels like when you're piling a pebble you know a top of a wall and then the tsunami is coming what are you doing but the answer is that again it's going to take a lot of Pebbles to actually Build That Wall well it's also the case too that that that in some ways even within the scope of your AR own argument is an illusion like if it turns out that the stability of the West is predicated on the sanctity of marriage and the stability of the family then what that genuinely means is that there is nothing more important than you can do that you can do despite surface appearances than to be faithful to your wife and to rais your family properly and that any Temptation you have on ideological grounds to downplay the significance of that you know what's one family in a in a sea of two billion families that's the quick nihilistic response that's all delusion and that you may that the idea that what you're doing is pointless because it's just you against the mass let's say that's also that's the voice of the Devil Himself so to speak proclaiming the nihilistic you you uselessness of your mortal life it could easily be and I I do believe this I've believed this for many decades is that there is literally nothing more important or effective than you can do then to get your moral house in order and then to build those subsidiary organizations around yourself that are predicated on that Foundation that all other Pathways forward in the absence of that lead nowhere yeah and I mean I think that that's exactly right the the I think one of the predicates to conservatism or frankly to to just you know basic human responsibility is the acknowledgement that it's very anything that's worth building has to be built from the ground up and if you try to impose it from the top down it it not only tends to fail it tends to fragment everything that if you one one of the things that you see in the temptation of politics I think one of the reasons why interviews with politicians don't work anymore uh is because the temptation of politics is fundamentally a lie and people understand it which is okay if you put a bunch of weight at the top of the system but there's nothing at the bottom of that pyramid all the all these societal substructures have been destroyed it's just going to collapse and we keep arguing over who should put the pressure at the top of the system but any pressure at the top of the system is just going to is just going to essentially create larger cracks in the foundation the we have to rebuild and and and the rebuilding process is so long and so hard and as you say it's easy to fall pre to nihilism in that but the reality is that societies are filled with people over time Society is filled with graveyards filled with people whose names you don't know and you'll never know right we know a few names from any generation one of the intimidating things about being you know in the public eye is that we all tend to think of ourselves as quote unquote having a legacy how many names do you know from 1810 right I mean like anyone even the most knowledgeable people how many names do you know a couple hundred names from 1810 how many people were alive in 1810 a lot hundreds of millions of people were alive in 1810 right I mean the the reality is that the vast majority of human beings over the course of time won't have a quote unquote Legacy except for the part that they played in the building of the social fabric that is going to be past down generation to generation and which we just accept with literally our mother's milk as we're born into that Society so you can either be a part of that social Fabric or it cannot be a part of that social Fabric and hand something down that's good to your kids or hand something that's that's worthless down to your children and and so again I think that the fundamental battle and you're you're seeing it it's it's it's true in every area of life and it's it's frustrating to have to fight these battles because again I feel like I grew up in an arena I think we all feel like this actually if you're above a certain age meaning like if you're above 30 right I'm not I'm not all that old I'm turning 40 right now know like if you're above a certain age you remember when basic truths were just taken for granted it is good to have a mother and a father in the home it is a positive good to have children we it's not a matter of apathy as to whether people have kids people should have kids it is good to have kids it is good to have multiple kids right these were all things that everybody when I was growing up used to it is good to see people as individual human beings and not as members of races these were all things that we took for Grant and now we're having to reargue First principles and that that's and and I think that one of the things that that I've found and that's that's frustrating to me on a personal level because again I spend my life arguing these principles on on a day-to-day basis is that in reality some of those arguments are going to be won and some of those arguments are are going to be lost but the real effect that I'm going to have on the world is what my four kids end up doing right that that's actually what the real effect that that I'm going to have on on society that's true for nearly everyone on planet Earth you know I may be able to have like a slightly outsized effect in just the fact that I can convince some people that they should do the things that I think are are worthwhile in life get married have kids maybe there'll be a few thousand people over the course of my career who who do better things with their life because they listen to my show but in reality like the most longlasting thing that you can do is not the rational it's actually the it's it's the things that we do and we don't know why now one one of the things that that I think you know the rationalists have have gotten totally wrong and there's a lot of good psychological and and biological evidence that you know way better than I do is that we tend to come up with rationalizations post Haw right that there's plenty of evidence to this effect that that if you literally if if you literally you know are are the the study that I'm thinking of is one where effectively speaking you are prodded to to move your your limbs in a particular way and then you are asked about why you moved your par your limbs in that and you will make up an excuse you will actually try to justify why this thing happened and you weren't just like physically you know forced to do the thing that is the the reality of human life is that most of the things that we do are not driven by us rationalizing the things that we do we're we're R we're rationalizing activities that have been promulgated and made second nature to us and sometimes first nature to us over time and you wreck those fences you wreck that whole system at your own Peril and that's what we have done and so rebuilding that is not a matter of of a of a day it's not a matter of a week or a month or a year it's a matter of centuries when when when you shatter a stained glass window it took you a moment to shatter the stained glass window it may take years to rebuild that that stained glass window and that that's the part that's intimidating and very difficult and the way the stain glass window is actually rebuilt is not even by drawing the schematic of the stained glass window which is I think something you and I both try to do daily somebody's actually going to have to like go out find the sand make the glass color the glass create like all of those structures and that that's the hard part yep well that's a good place to end Ben and it's a good time to end um most of you watching will know that I'll follow this with another half an hour on the daily wi side and I'm going to walk Ben through some autobiographical material which I'm looking forward to and so yeah well thank you for talking to me today and for helping me explore these ideas a bit further um we're going to do a gospel seminar you and I have discussed this and your possible participation in that just for everybody watching and listening who knows about the Exodus seminar we're going to do the same thing with the gospels at the first week of April with many of the same um many of the usual criminals you might say and so you might I hope some of you are interested in that I'm certainly interested in that it's going going to be very um I learned a tremendous amount in that Exodus seminar and I'm hoping to that the same thing will happen when we reconvene um and I'm very happy happy with the daily wire for facilitating that and also for all the success we had with the Exodus seminar which that that's gone extraordinarily well and uh and I think it speaks that fact which is a very unlikely fact that that did happen that it went well and that it was popularly received also speaks to exactly what we were discussing today which is this widespread cultural hunger for a proper discussion of really the sacred what's under what's even underneath first principles and so it's very uh useful to be engaged in yet another conversation that pushes that along so anyways we'll turn over to the Daily wire plus side for everyone who's watching and listening you could join us there and to you Ben thank you for talking to me today and to everybody here in Toronto for making this possible and the film crew there all right Ben good talking to you thanks so [Music] much

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 571,347

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: iRREGG6hLVU

Length: 109min 5sec (6545 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2024