Jordan B Peterson | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep.1

there's lots of times in your life you're not going to be happy and so that's not gonna work you want to have something meaningful that's the boat that will take you through the storm [Music] well here we are with Jordan Peterson and I could not be more excited to talk with the best-selling author of twelve rules for life and I will talk with him but first I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at helix league so there's nobody on the planet like you so why would you buy a mattress built for everyone else working with the world's leading sleep experts helix sleep developed a mattress that's customized your specific height weight and sleep preferences so you can have the best sleep of your life at an unbeatable price here's how it works you go to helix sleep calm fill out their two minutes sleep quiz and they'll design your custom mattress they even customize each side for you and a partner in 2018 helix sleep has taken customized sleep to the next level with their helix pillow it really is fantastic their only pillows are fully adjustable so you can achieve perfect comfort regardless of sleep position or body type helix sleep has thousands of five-star reviews plus you get a hundred nights to try them out go to helix sleep calm slash been guest right now and you'll get up to 125 bucks toward your mattress order that's helix sleep calm slash been guest for up to 125 dollars off your mattress order again that's helix sleep calm slash bed and guests get the deal with Ben guests and make sure that they know that we sent you okay so I could not be more excited to speak with Jordan Peterson well as Jordan knows before the show we talked for an hour before the show just about interesting things we should have caught on tape but now we're actually gonna get a chance to do it live so here is the Jordans new book if you haven't bought it yet everybody on planet has bought this book I was walking through the office today we didn't have a copy in the office the person to front desk had a copy your book just sitting on your desk so that's the way this works twelve rules for life in antidote to cast fantastic book obviously topping all the bestseller lists all over the world Jordan thanks so much for joining the show really appreciate it thanks for the invitation well you know obviously your your prominence has just blown up in the last year and a half when we were talking before the show about why that is and why there are so many people who suddenly are very angry about you I noticed there was an article in Politico suggesting that young angry white males you are now their their leader so congratulations oh yes I want to ask you about that why do you think that number one your profile has become so big of late and number two why do you think it is that so many members of the of the left are so angry about that why are they characterizing people who listen to you as angry enraged well we could we could look at the characterization to begin with you know because I think it speaks to the pathology of the radical left instantly they're absolutely incapable of viewing the world except through group identity terms you know and so if someone comes out and disagrees with them then they have to characterize them by their fundamental group attribute whatever that happens to be maybe its gender because that's a favorite or maybe it's race and so angry white men young there we go sexist ageist and racist all at once right they're angry young white men well it has to be that way if you're going to be the if you're gonna play the leftist game because that's the only way that you can look at the world and then if you can't make your opponent reprehensible in some manner and it's strange that they would attempt to make them reprehensible on the grounds of race age and sex sense that's precisely what they stand against hypothetically but if you can't make your enemy reprehensible along some dimension then you have to contend with them seriously and so you know if I'm not an all right fascist like Hitler you know or my low you know polis which was how I was characterized in Canada because the radical leftist can't even get their bloody insults straight he's like Hitler or Milo you know Poulos it's like because there's no difference between them right no obvious difference it's just another attempt to Hillary as far as I can tell and I think that it's it's dreadful I really think it is there was an article written in by the I believe the editor of the New York Review of Books that was just republished in The Globe and Mail talking about the emergence of hyper masculinity and how I was somehow responsible for that or contributing to it like Mussolini and I read that and I thought yeah like miscellany and I thought okay so what are you doing I see you're you're defining masculinity or conflating masculinity and hyper masculinity at the same time then your virtue signaling by being against hyper masculinity but really what you're trying to do is bring down whatever it is that's masculinity and what masculinity is in in this frame is something like competence and so it's part of the radical leftists general war on competence as well which I think is one of the most pernicious elements of the culture wars that is lucien of hierarchies the the assumption that every hierarchy has to be based on power and served them the needs of your group whatever that happens to be that there's no such thing as confidence and so and then the other thing that's reprehensible about it because that's not enough is that it's just wrong like there's I've got tens of thousands of letters from people and people come up to me all the time on the street I'll give you an example this is a great story this is really touching so I was in LA about a month and a half ago and I was downtown LA and Downtown LA's kind of rough and I was wandering around and with my wife and this young guy pulled a car up beside he hopped out and he was kind of a stylish looking 21 year old Latino guy something like that it was all excited he said he asked me who I was and I told him and he you know that's what he had presumed and so he was kind of excited about that he said look I've watched all your lectures and it's really helped me and I've been straightening out my life and trying to get my room clean and he laughed about that but you know developing some aims and trying to tell the truth and and look I've really fixed up my relationship with my father and so then he said wait wait just wait a minute and I thought sure what sure so he went back in the car and he God is farther out of his car and he came over with his dad like they had their arms around each other and he said look we've really improved our relationship and they're both smiling away and you know that's man if you're gonna target me for that just go right ahead and as a relay supremacist oh yeah yeah and it's wherever I go now and this is one of the things this is the thing that's so wonderful about that all of this as far as I'm concerned is that people come up to me all the time and that's exactly what they say they say look I was lost aimless depressed nihilistic anxious drug-addicted alcoholic wasting my time masturbating too much although they don't generally use that particular example you know loss essentially and and and hopeless in some sense and I've been watching your lectures and they've really helped and I've really been putting my life together and I've been trying to say what I believe to be true and develop a vision and it's really helped and like and it's so overwhelming you know like if I'm doing book signings after a talk then there'll be a dozen people or more who and these aren't like I'm only talking to people for about 15 seconds but you can have a very intense conversation in 15 seconds and they'll say look you know like I was suicidal man like I was really hanging on to the edge of the earth by my fingernails and I'm better and they have tears in their eyes it's like it's amazing little of that goes a long way well I think that when I look at your eyes and look I talk to people who love what you do I mean every time I go on the road and I'm speaking at a campus you're the number one name that gets mentioned that people would by people who come to my lectures and I think that the reason for that that I've that I've seen is is really twofold one is that one of the things that you really talk a lot about is the notion of self discipline and purpose in your life and control and the idea that you are in control of your decision-making and your decision-making matters that's one and the other reserves you have you have a unique capacity to say no to things and when somebody says something to you that is illogical but popular then you have the capacity to say no that's what happened in that Kathy Newman interview that then somebody was saying something to you that made no sense and you just said well no and then you just stood on that now and when you stand on that no I think it gives people a lot of courage yeah well I mean the the gender issue is really an interesting one because one of my professional domains of expertise is individual differences I'm a personality psychologist and so I know the gender difference literature and it's it's a very solid literature well first of all it's very solid it has a 30-year history once per psychologist got the personality models down so that would be the big five model all empirically derived straight statistics right brute force empiricism nobody had a theoretical axe to grind with the big five except to say maybe there are human traits maybe they're encapsulated in language we can use statistical techniques to find out what they are that was it that is the whole ideology so very very neutral as far as ideologies go five traits emerge okay are there differences between the sexes turns out there are all right they're not massive although if you sum them across all the traits you can separate men and women with about 75 percent accuracy so it's not trivial but you have to sum across all the traits then another question comes up well are those differences socio-cultural or biologically okay we can test that we'll go around the world we'll look at cultures will rank order them in terms of the gender equality of their sociological policies we can do that with broad agreement from the right and the left then the hypothesis would be if gender differences decrease among more egalitarian societies then the gender differences are socio cultural or at least more socio-cultural that's exactly the opposite of what was found repeatedly that's pseudoscience it's like no that's mainstream psychology those papers have thousands of citations and write the average humanities paper has zero citations right and then the next most common one has one 3,000 that's an that's an unbelievable classic and and here's the other bit of fruits like you say well how do you know that you can trust someone's judgment about a fact the fact emerges despite their ideological presuppositions okay so it's well known that the social sciences and the humanities have a have a left tilt and a lot of that Stamper mantle and the tilt has become more pronounced but as Jonathan Hyde has pointed out there are no conservatives among social personality psychologists or none to speak of here yes very few vanishingly feeling and if the field has a bias it is definitely and indisputably a left-wing bias okay so you have to fight that if you're if you're a scientist right even if you're left-wing scientist you have to fight that because you want to get to the facts it was these social scientists who generated the data that suggested that the gender differences not only were real but that were bigger in egalitarian societies they didn't do that to grind their ideological axe because their ideological presupposition was no no you make the society you latarian men and women get more of the same it's like no they get more different Oh Ruth isn't that something and so then there's a corollary there which is all right you could still say and they're kind of pushing in this direction in Scandinavia boys and girls are different men and women are different it looks biological but because people are malleable you could push the socio-cultural structure harder and harder to minimize the biological differences okay well first of all maybe and maybe not maybe you'd get a rebound and they'd get even like the kids would rebel that could easily happen but let's say okay you could the problem with that is is that if you seed that much power to the state like you're basically giving the state the right to socialize your kids rights like you you really you really you really want to do that I mean people in Israel couldn't do that with the kabuto right it didn't work so people aren't gonna give up their children to the state and thank God for that well I mean this is one of the big questions that we were discussing earlier is that we were talking about the polarization in politics between right and left and obviously you're you're a psychologist you're a philosopher but you've been dragged almost kicking and screaming into this political sphere because everything has been so politicized and so when you say when you cite social science statistics and they're scientifically based you're called a racist you're called the sexist you're called the homophobe and exactly so so why is it that so why do you think it is that so many folks on the Left who purport to be all about reason and science and an objective fact are so willing to throw those out the window the minute that it becomes politically inconvenient well because you imagine that cognitive system so an interpretation of the world has levels there axiomatic levels some fundamental presuppositions are more fundamental than others and you could say well the leftists historically maybe because of their atheistic rationality are more on the side of science than say the fundamental isms of any sort but when push comes to shove you find out how the axioms are are nested there's deeper axioms underneath that which is that all hierarchies are based on power and all power plays are based on group identity tribal identity essentially and that the entire history of the world is nothing but a power play between between these different identity groups it's like okay well if the science indicates that some of that's wrong then do you alter those beliefs or do you alter the science and the answer to that question is well it depends on how you hierarchically arranged those if the science is at the bottom then you alter your beliefs right if it's the scientific facts or the axiomatic some structure then you then you alter your beliefs if your beliefs are the axiomatic sub structure then you alter the science well we've seen how that plays out and one of the things I've tried to do so to speak is to diagnose the axiomatic structure it's like ok what's the what's the metaphysical presumption structure of the radical left well what what it is is you're basically your group your groups are basically engaged in warfare right and the warfare is arbitrary except insofar as it serves your group ok I don't buy any of that I think that's I think that's a route to certain disaster I think it's a degeneration into tribalism and that we will seriously pay for it not only because it returns us to tribalism and tribes fight as the anthropological evidence for that is overwhelming right tribes fight it doesn't even matter if they're chimpanzee tribes even chimpanzee tribes fight so not only do you regress to a tribalism but you also invalidate the one proposition that's being able to help us arise above the tribal which is the idea that the individual should be sovereign and so I think the culture war is about what's the proper framework within which to view human identity and what's the relationship between the individual and the group in relationship to that identity and the leftist answer is it's all group and it's all power it's like okay so in just a second I want to ask you a little bit about is some of the some of the more enlightenment minded thinkers who are out there right now because it seems like we've been discussing the big gap in in Western civilization right now which is between the collectivists and the individualist if you're broadly but I want to talk about some of the divisions among the individualist in just a second first I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Birch gold so with the uncertainty of the of the market right now with all of the volatility a lot of Americans are increasingly concerned about the security of their savings and the Federal Reserve obviously has a loose monetary policy it's been shoring up recently but there's a lot of volatility in the markets well this is the reason why I need to talk to my friends over at Birch 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style thinking at least in the essence that individuality matters and at the individual is sovereign the scientific matters read data matters are useful exactly and and in this group you know I consider myself as part of this group people have started to call it the intellectual dark web sam harris is part of this group there they're a wide variety of folks with a lot of broad political differences that are part of this group but there are some real differences that are broken out even among people who consider themselves part of this group right steven pinker it has a different perspective on the world then then you do I have a different perspective than sam Harris does you and I have our differences probably on some matters of philosophy so where do you think the vulnerability lies in the in the possibility of revivifying enlightenment mentality because it seems me that one of the big problems that's that's popping its head up above the water now is the rejection of the Enlightenment in favor of this old-style tribalism that you've been talking about that we're now going to repeat history because we benefited so much from the Enlightenment that we forget that things don't have to be this way we've got so much nice stuff we live in so much freedom that we forget that if we just toss those Enlightenment ideals out the window things get really ugly again I think that's what unites well that that's the question is that what what what do you toss out the window before things get ugly right and the Enlightenment proponents you could say Harris you could say Pinker Charles Taylor in Canada they trace back the development of the modern self let's say Taylor wrote a book called sources of the modern self to the Enlightenment and it's quite interesting because like if you look at the typical academic psychologists say their historical knowledge generally runs back about 15 years and so because they are all concerned with the with the modern literature and there's some utility in that but that the downside is they don't have any historical context so you read someone like Taylor and you think wow he's stretching it back 500 years you know but there's there's reading that goes way beyond that to look at the sources of the self and the source of the modern ethos and this is a huge bone of contention between people like me say and people like Harris and I think between people like you and people like Harris is that my sense is that the Enlightenment values themselves are grounded in an ethos that's much deeper and much less articulated and that would be an ethos of metaphor image drama ritual religion art music all of that dance even for that matter the nonverbal the the pattern recognition ian McGilchrist has written a book called the master and his emissary which lays that out white knight nicely with regards to hemispheric specialization it's kind of predicated on Alcoa and Goldberg's observation that the left hemisphere is specialized for what we know and the right hemisphere is specialized for what we don't know so that's an order chaos dynamic and the rough idea would be that the left hemisphere generates paradigm attic systems so that would be like the Enlightenment system actually imprinted right even stainable axiom predicated but that that entire XE ematic system is based in a nonverbal in the nonverbal domain that's associated with while it would be associated with the right hemisphere but it would also be associated with deep motivations biological motivations and emotions and so because here's one way of looking at it you think well how do you validate an axiomatic system of ethics and the answer is quite straightforward Jean Piaget figured this out is you play it out in the world literally you act it out in the world and then you watch each other's emotional responses and if the thing that you're playing out is the axiomatic system that you're playing out satisfies the motivations and the emotions of the people who are engaged in that system then the system is justified and then you say well it's not just that their motivations and emotions are satisfied it's more complex it's that the motivations and emotions of each individual are satisfied but not only now but now next week next month and next year so you have to extend it across time and not only my emotions and motivations but yours as well now next week next month and across time so this there's terribly tight constraints they are placed upon an hour an axiomatic systems validity now the way Jean Piaget thought of that he said well think about it like a child's game a bunch of kids get together and they decide to play pretend okay and pretend is let's model the world right and and as a place to act because to pretend you ever do' right so the kids get together and they assign roles and they say well you're gonna be mom you're gonna be dad you're gonna be the dog and we're gonna play house and then they they act it out and what they're doing is seeing if they can regulate the manner in which they're constructing the game so that everyone's emotions and motivations are so well satisfied that they want to continue the game okay and so that's so cool so what it shows you is that's how an ethical system is is tested and justified it's like you play it out and you see if everyone wants to keep playing and so that's a whole different methodology than the scientific domain right so the axiomatic system isn't the ethical axiomatic system isn't justified by reference to the scientific method it's justified by reference to the emotional and motivational well-being of all the players of the game now that game emerges this is the second part of this and this is so cool then the question is well how does that game emerge and the answer is the same way that children's games emerges so what Piaget noted is that kids would get together and they'd play marbles and if they were young kids they could all play marbles say six six years old they could all play marbles and and if they were in a group they were playing marbles and it all worked out fine squabbles and all that but you know the kids would keep playing right validating the games but if you took the kids out of the game and you said what are the rules of the game they would give completely disparate account so they knew how to do it it was like the wisdom was in the group mm-hmm the wisdom was fragmented enough among the individuals so if you pulled the individuals out they'd give disparate accounts but if you put them all together they could play the game but then if you waited till they were 11 or 12 and you pulled them out of the game then they could tell you the rules then at 14 or 15 they they would be willing to this is with more sophisticated games they would be more willing to regard themselves as makers of the rules okay so here's how it happens in an evolutionary sense people going all the way back to our primate forebears organize themselves into functional hierarchies okay and now the hierarchies are complex and they're not just based on power despite what the idiot Marxists say even to do all has noted that chimpanzee hierarchies are unstable if they're only based on power they don't last they may generate into violence so you have a hierarchy that's that works but it's acted out no one knows why it works it works because everyone seems to be happy with it okay and so those hierarchies get more complex and more sophisticated and then people start to observe them and talk about them it's like well we've got this hierarchy here what's it like and then they spin off dramas about the hierarchy here's a hero who climbed up the hierarchy and here's what a hero looks like okay so then you get the idea of hierarchy and then you get the idea of the hero as the person who moves up the hierarchy and generates it okay then out of that you get the extraction of the idea of the hero and then you get development of that idea and it's out of that you get the monotheistic religions and so it's like the procedure and the hierarchy come first no one knows what the rules are it's all played out the same way that wolves play it out in a pack or chimpanzees play it out in a troop then we wake up and think oh we live in a structure mm-hmm here's the structure that would be Osiris in the Egyptian mythologies here's the structure here's how the structure goes wrong here's what the structure does here is it's tarin a tyrannical aspect here's what you have to do to generate the structure and to thrive in it okay that's even more important the hierarchy is important enough what we want to know is how to master the hierarchy okay that's where you get the mythologies of the hero okay and then so then this generates all sorts of different heroes because there's different ways of him being successful then you have a panoply of heroes then you think okay well now we've got all those heroes that's a set we can move pull back and say okay something about all these heroes is what makes them heroes that's when you extract out the monotheistic Savior okay so that's why in Christianity Christ is the king of kings it's actually you can think about it as a literal statement for forget about the religious overlay it's like okay you got a bunch of people some of them are kind of King like okay so you admire them it's like for whatever reason that is it's not easy to figure out why you admire someone right that's complicated but let's say you've got admire admirable people you start telling stories about them that's why you go to a movie reni want to watch someone you don't care about your board by know you want to go watch someone admirable and interesting or maybe the opposite of that but doesn't matter it's the same thing then you think okay well we've got all these admirable people they're generating the world properly that's what makes them admirable there's a principle they embody and that principle is the process by which the admirable world is generated that's the logos okay that's the thing that's operative at the beginning of time so here's my it say here's my question about about all this because now we're really not talking about 12 rules for life as much as maps meaning which is your first book which are your doing me the audio it's it's definitely a harder book than 12 rules for life in a much more complex book in a lot of ways than to for life so how Universal are these systems meaning why is it that the enlightenment only arrives at one time in human history and one place in human history as opposed to if human biology is essentially consistent across you know across humanity then why is it that that you know if at the at the apex of the levels you have the Enlightenment idea which is when I started this particular question then why is it that it only arrives in one place at one time as opposed to arriving in a variety of places in a right it's a great question okay the first thing we would say is the process by which this the hierarchy itself and success within the hierarchy is generated that's to be accounted over millions of years at least hundreds thousands of thousands of years but I would push it back because you can see analogues in the chimps so 20 million years let's say that's a long time on that time scale the fact that the enlightenment values arose in Europe 500 years ago before anywhere else it's like well who cares it's it's it's five old men long right if you put five 100 right old men in line it's like it's yesterday it's this morning so we've we've evolved these hierarchical structures that's our culture we've evolved ways of maneuvering within the hierarchical structures that are successful and now we've started to evolve ways of mapping our our adaptation not just adapting but mapping it okay so how does the mapping occur first admiration second imitation of admiration and that would be drama it's like you you dramatize Shakespeare extracts out what's admirable and interesting and plays it out so that's the use of the body as a representational structure of the body so we act out what's admirable they think okay now we've kind of got to drama down we're all captured by this drama it's like well then the literary critics come along the philosophers and they say oh what are the principles by which the admirable people operate it's like chimps woke up and said oh well some chimps are more successful than others what are the rules of success it's like well there were no rules because they weren't running by rules right there aren't rules until you describe the patterns then you have a rule okay that's what happens with by the woman right Moses has a revelation here's the rules right yeah we've been living out those rules forever yeah we didn't know what they were because they weren't rules they were customs right okay so you start by mapping your customs in drama and story and that way you can represent them and you can transmit them then once you have them in your grip say they're represented now not just acted out well then you can move one step backwards from them and you can say well what's the commonalities among these what are the general principles that would be the development of something like the Code of Hammurabi right it's like well we've got all these customs what are they right revelation it's like oh here's how you map the customs that's the Decalogue it's the same idea so I took human beings a very long time to evolve their hierarchies to evolve their structures of success and then to have enough people around with enough spare time to engage in the cultural process of the artistic cultural process of mapping the adaptive structure that only merges in mythology and drama then that lays the groundwork for philosophy then the Philosopher's could come in especially once it's written like in the judeo-christian pantheon it's like oh now we've got it written down oh well we don't have to remember it right we can read it and while we're reading we can think about it and so then out of that starts to come the semantic codes well then you get the Enlightenment it's like oh well here's a bunch of semantic codes it's like yeah yeah those are great so this is really interesting because you know if you read Pinker or three journal Goldbergs new book essentially they attribute the the Enlightenment to Jonah Goldberg calls it the miracle it's almost as though it accidentally occurred in a certain place in a certain time John doesn't quite go quite that far I think to be fair to him but I think that that philosophy that this sort of sprang up randomly here is is very much embedded in a lot of sam harris is thinking a lot of queers thinking and you're taking it further back but i do wonder if this may be an area of actual disagreement of us it should be fun are you attributing the growth of the judeo-christian ethic that emerges into the Enlightenment as also accidental you're just pushing timeline further back oh I don't think it's axe okay and I'm not making a reductionist argument so the first thing is I'm going to say this is how religion evolved but I'm not saying I'm not saying that this explanation exhausts the phenomenon because it's a very strange phenomenon it's very very strange but but that doesn't mean we can't generate a plausible evolutionary account it's like if you have a bunch of motivated emotional limited beings occupying the same territory and competing and cooperating for the same resources including the resource of cooperation which can generate more resources is not a zero-sum game there are going to be patterns of adaptation that emerge from that that are similar so here's a way of thinking about it if you put a bunch of kids together they're gonna evolve games right well which games well a bunch of different games yeah but they're all games right so even though so that's the moral relativist element a bunch of different games okay but the moral absolutist element is yeah yeah but they're all games and the games have to be playable which means they have to continue right in an iterated way right so that's a big constraint people have to want to play them so not only do they have to be games know and comprehensible to everybody and enjoyable but people but they have to be self maintaining and everyone has has to want to play them okay that's the answer to the postmodern conundrum a plethora of potential ethical implications of the world an infinite variety yeah okay fine not an infinite variety of pragmatically applicable interpretations you instantly constrain the universe - Walter - what well this is why there's commonalities in mythologies it's like if you put enough people together in enough different places the commonality of the groups of people there because of the grounding and common motivation and emotion and embodiment because were embodied means that they're going to generate hierarchies that are broadly similar with strategies of success within those hierarchies that are broadly similar with descriptions of the strategies that are broadly similar and so you could say in some sense the ethic that gave rise to the Enlightenment is in place more or less everywhere now it's tricky because not every hierarchical system is as functional as every other hierarchical system some of them can degenerate into tyranny we're talking about the set of all voluntarily playable games right or something like that and that can degenerate out of that you're gonna get common hero myths you have to and then and then that lays the groundwork that lays the groundwork for even our ability to communicate right right so this is the Enlightenment guys they just they're not getting that so and this gets to I think a the broader question that I know you and Sam went on for three hours about about the nature of truth because particularly truth in the moral sphere I think that you know I'm would be fair to say that you guys agree on the idea of truth in the scientific sphere that you know if something is that there is such a thing as objective truth or are you I would say we agree on a lot of that that the question is to some degree why do scientists accept the idea that objective truth is true and then I would say we probably don't agree about that because I would ground that in pragmatism right and Sam would ground out in the idea of an independently existing objective world right which is a leap of faith more like my own actually than the pragmatist view right no and if you believe that there's a god who's out there in the universe who created the structures in a particular certain way then what he created is the truth and it is apart from you that human beings didn't exist and they weren't able to utilize the truth that truth would still exist out there whereas the pragmatist I'd say its truth is in the use that it has for you well that exact thing is that you know I don't know if we would consider a scientific truth true unless we are also simultaneously accepting the idea that scientific truth is good for people so there's one other thing I wanted to bring up that's relevant because you brought up the idea of God so here's a way of thinking about it and and I don't know what to make of this because this is stretching me this is stretching my thoughts out beyond where I've been able to develop them so this is the intuition that I have based on a variety of things experiences I've had so imagine that there's a very wide range of human behaviors okay and some subset of those are both admirable and not admirable so let's call them good and evil at this at the extremes okay then we might say well there's a pad that characterizes all the actions that are good and a pattern that characterizes all the actions that are evil and that's a transpersonal pattern because it's not just about you or me it's about everyone okay and so then that gets personified that's Christ and Satan let's say or Cain and Abel right that gets personified and that's a bad guy and a good guy in a movie like its its personified all the time it's Thor and Loki you know in the Marvel movies you know so now you have the odd state you take the idea of Christ and you think okay so that's the abstraction of everything that's that's admirably good about the set of all human behaviors okay and then you think well what sort of reality does not have and this Bissman pulls back into the reality of the idea of the logos and the idea that it was the logos that God used at the beginning of time to extract order out of chaos so you think well it's transpersonal the goodness because it's not just characterized stick of any one person it's more like something that inhabits a person other than that a person is you can really see this for example on the other end - with a satanic end because if you read the writings of people who do absolutely horrific things like the shooters you can see that possession and extraordinarily clearly if your eyes are open it's like and it's shocking so people don't usually look at it and they even say that themselves like that the Columbine kids their writings are hair-raising you know and they were clearly possessed by an evil that you only encounter if you sit in a dark place and brood on your hatred for months and years right you go places that you go places where all the dark people go right right and then that if that takes you over okay so the good can take you over as well okay so there's this there's the spirit of good let's say and what the spirit of good does is act in the world on the potential of the world to generate the actuality of the world and the judeo-christian proposition is is that if you confront the potential of the world with good in mind using truth truthful communication then the order that you extract is good and then that's echoed in Genesis when God is using the word and he creates cosmos out of potential and every time he does that he says and it was good which is I think it's so interesting because there's a proposition there in the proposition there is that if you encounter potential with truth the cosmos you create is actually good well that's that's just an absolutely overwhelming idea it's like if it's true if it's true it's the greatest idea there ever was ya know your your thoughts on this actually from maps of meaning help generate what we in injury's him clubs VAR torah in hebrew meaning they thought about that about the the bible but it this merged with a little bit versus italian thought led me to the idea that when it comes to the mystical notion of the tree of good and evil in in eden what is that supposed to be what did what did people do wrong by eating from the tree of good and evil and my feeling is that what they did wrong is that god created a universe in which the value was embedded in the object right then in the same way that you in your in your book talk about if you're teaching a child about an object the rules of the object are embedded in the teaching about the object so you use the example of a vase we're discussing this earlier but you use the example of a vase where you teach a child don't touch the base because the base will break so that the rule is embedded in the object in the same way in a wrist italian thought the rules for behavior are embedded in the nature of the universe meaning what makes a man good is what makes a man unique which is the reason the idea is the reason is what makes man unique so acting in accordance with right reason is what makes something is what makes an action good so if you believe that God created the universe along these lines and that what natural law is is just a human attempts to understand the lines along which created God created the universe then we're human beings went wrong is when they decided to separate values from the universe when we decided to take values and say this is a completely separate thing so this base has no rules attached to it anymore it's just a vase and we can construct the rules arbitrarily as to what to do with this vase and so eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil changes the nature of good and evil from the universe comes along with a set of rules to human beings think that they can use their own intuitions who supplant God's rules and to supplant universal rules with their own particular vision of what the universe ought to be and at that point they have to be expelled yeah well ok ok so that's also associated to some degree I would say with milk warning in paradise laws because Milton basically portrays Lucifer who's the bringer of light weirdly enough as the spirit of unbridled rationality which accounts for to say the Catholic Church antagonism the Catholic Church's antagonism towards rationality the idea was same idea and the Tower of Babel that human beings have a proclivity to erect their own dogmatic ethical systems and then to expand them into a grandiosity that challenges the transcendent and that that's a totalitarian catastrophe and for Milton Satan was the spirit that eternally does that right who says everything I know is enough and that's the plants what I don't know that's the plants that transcendent and that that's a catastrophe how that's tangled up with thee with the knowledge of good and evil while you're making some headway towards towards sorting that out I mean there is a cataclysm that's that's explained in in in the story of Adam and Eve right the Cataclysm is the coming to to wakefulness and its associated partly with recognition of nakedness which is recognition of vulnerability and mortality and the discovery of death and then also the discovery of good and evil that goes along with that so you said well that's partly the the cognitive division of ethics from the facts of the object so I have to think that through I would also recommend to people I think I mentioned this before is in McGilchrist book that the master is emissary because he looks at this neural psychologically right and and looks at the the left hemisphere as the hemisphere that's dealing with the explicitly axiomatic systems and the right hemisphere that's dealing with what those systems are embodied in okay so part of what happens with with the emergence of good and evil is as far as I could tell it took me a long time to think about this is that and this is different than the than the hypothesis that you laid forward which is why I can't reconcile it exactly yes you recognize you're naked you know you can be hurt you know you're vulnerable and insufficient you hide from God because that's what happens next and the reason you hide from God say God is your destiny or God is the you're walking with God is a manifestation of your ultimate proper destiny you you doubt whether you're capable of that because now you realize your embodied finitude your nakedness and insufficiency so you hide in your ashamed so there's that you also realize that you can be hurt and suffer and that kind of goes along with God's command that you're going to work in the sweat of your brow and that you're going to die and that women are gonna be subjugated to men which is put on as a curse not as a moral imperative right right um but then what emerges out of that is that as soon as you you know that you can be hurt this is what differentiates us from animals and you really think that through here's all the myriad ways I can be hurt then you're angry about that because you can be hurt but even worse you can figure out how to hurt other people and and so that's part of that knowledge of good and evil you associated with this dissociation of the of the object from its ethical container right now the universe has created by God from our interpretation of the universe that there is a gap between the two and that once human beings begin to supplant their own rationality for a tea house right in the versatility Lee ology you know we end up doing is creating all sorts of awful systems that end up destroying us in the other stuff but there's something about that that's right I mean part of what happens in the New Testament as far as I can tell is that what Christ says so he's trying to transcend the rule structure might not because there's anything wrong with the rules they're necessary precondition for discipline which is actually why I wrote 12 rules right he's like you need rules but they're but rules conflict and they don't always apply and so there has to be an ethic underlying the rules and you should have more respect for the ethic than for the rules right okay Christ's idea and this is part of the idea of the reestablishment of paradise is that you should orient yourself towards the good and that's something like an alliance with God and then that you should tell the truth and that's that's the ethic that generated the rules to begin with okay and then we could be serious about this you know and we could say well how do you adjudicate the reality of that claim alright so then we might think we're we already walked through the fact that the heroes of the past acted on potential to extract out the world of actuality and if they did that properly then the world they extracted was good and that that is a divine principle and then we might say well is it a divine principle onion say well what is it that's acting through people in the good like the Christian theological answer to that would be the Logans right right that's the idea that's the idea of the holy spirit roughly speaking right might think well is that a real thing it's like well to me it's real the same way that consciousness is real and we don't know the role of consciousness in determining reality even but even if you're an evolutionary biologist and this is so interesting because the evolutionary biologists actually discriminate differentiated themselves from Darwin on this point like Darwin was very very forthright in his claim that sexual selection was as powerful as natural selection or even more so and so that so here's where this back toes and and because that was because that brought consciousness into the world as an active player the materialistic evolutionary biologist ignored that so like 150 years and only concentrated on natural selection where they could play well this is all chance right it's like sexual selection is not chance okay so here's a hypothesis human being separated themselves from chimpanzees one of the reasons they did that was because human females are sexually selective chimps aren't chimps will female chimps in estrus will mate with any chimp the Maine chimps the dominant ones chased the subordinate males away so they're more likely to have offspring but it's not because of female choice right now female human females have done this whole different thing is that they've they've they have hidden fertility and they're much more likely to go after guys who have climbed up the hierarchy so let's say heroes will give the women some credit for intelligence right and say that that's what they're after even if they're using wealth and so forth and status as a marker they're actually using those as a marker for competence standed yeah and I think that's I think the evidence I think the evidence for that is clear okay so you might say oh well it was human female conscious choice that selected us mm-hmm okay and you think well that's not random that's not random at all it's the farthest thing from random that there is and that means consciousness is making its choices with regards to what propagates but then it's even more complex than that so here's what happens among men the men all get together in their hierarchy they positive valued goal they all accept that as the goal because otherwise they wouldn't be cooperating right then they arranged themselves into a hierarchy and they let the most confident guys lead because they want to get to they want to get to the promised land they want to get it the most competent leaders leading Rea competent defined by that value okay so here's what happens essentially the men all get together and vote on the good man and the good man are then chosen by the women and those are the people who propagate and so it's like men are voting on which men get to reproduce and women are going along with the vote and and and being even more stringent in their in their choices let's say and so then what you get is that the consciousness that through its active expression transforms the potential of the world into actuality also selects the direction of evolution right and that's where the meme darkens term turns into the biological reality it's not so it yeah this is something that's so cool about Dawkins it's like I've often thought this about Dawkins is if he would push his thinking to the limits he would fall right into you well and then he'd be lost that's a whole other universe but if you think that mean seriously like and I mean really seriously think yeah there's some ways of conceptualizing that becomes so all-encompassing yeah that's right they start to become an actual force of evolution itself and so then here's the case you could make consciousness extracts the proper world of being from potential through truth and then it's good okay that's our hard one man that manifests itself in human beings at the individual level of individual consciousness that's the logos within that's the metaphysical foundation of the idea of natural right and responsibility that's a bloody killer idea that's expressed in the hero of Heroes that idea that hero of Heroes is the driving force behind human evolution so not only do you get the action of the logos metaphysically as the process that extracts order out of chaos at the beginning of time you also get it as the me driver of evolution and so then he last okay then what kind of reality does that have because you chase consciousness back and like it disappears into the mystery of our past and we have no idea what its relationship is with matter but it's the force that gives rise to the cosmos and drives evolution it's like you're getting pretty close to God there yeah even just pragmatically speak and you're certainly you know not close to but in the midst of it of an argument about freewill because obviously if you if you make the hard determinist argument that free will doesn't exist and the consciousness is merely a sort of trick that your brain is playing on itself then how exactly does how does culture propagate how do we how do these memes propagate how are people choosing hmm sexual selection of natural selection become one of the same as soon as you boil sexual selection down to natural selection oh you know so I think the freewill argument I mean I see why Harris gets tangled up in that you know because well first of all deterministic arguments are unbelievably powerful and when we use deterministic models for many things they really were right so you could say well we're gonna use that by defaults like fair enough we're gonna deviate from that with care but I don't see people as driven like clocks winding down first of all we don't wind down in any simple way we're dissipative structures to use he wrote Schrodinger what is life a human being is a dissipative structure we're not we're not an entropic structure like a clock running down we are in some sense but as living beings we pull energy in and so we're not winding down like a deterministic structure or something other than that and the way we treat each other is as logos as far as I can tell the way I treat myself right if I'm going to be good to myself in the proper sense is that I'm an active agent of choice confronting an infinite landscape of potential and casting that potential into a reality for good or for evil okay and if I treat myself that way then I have proper respect for myself and proper fear of myself because I can make bad decisions and warp the structure of reality and I think if you read Frankel for example or Solzhenitsyn and you see how your bad decisions could warp the structure of reality then that wakes you up right okay so there's that if you don't treat yourself like an an active agent imbued with logos then your life doesn't go well but more if you don't treat other people that way they do not want to play with you if we set up societies that aren't predicated on the idea that people are like that then the societies become they dissolve or they become totalitarian almost instantly so then I would say well you've got the problem of determinism it's like fair enough man how do you reconcile the fact that if you lay out a society at every level of analysis on strict deterministic grounds it fails so doesn't doesn't that mean your hypothesis has a flaw I mean maybe not maybe you could say no the facts are independent of the ethical code right exactly this is where the truth this is where the truth pragmatism question comes back into being written Samos say well it's true regardless of what the effect is mhm and you would say well it's obviously not true if morals aren't constructed for a pragmatic reason and if this fragment doesn't work if it falls into nothing it also it also depends to some degree on what you're willing to how you're willing to test your hypothesis because I might say well if your hypothesis is factually correct wouldn't you assume that if people based their their their their behaviors individually and familial and socially on that set of facts which is basically what Sam claims about facts to do in with if you base your ethos on that those facts wouldn't it work right well he claims that that's a test you know I would say well then it fails that test yeah it doesn't work we have to treat each other like divine Centers of consciousness in order for society to work yes I think well that's I can't see any way out of those arguments yeah III can't see there obviously which is why you and I agree on so much about this kind of stuff and I think that it's also the reason why people find your work really inspiring you know while the left wants to claim that you are an angry person they'll claim similarly that I'm a deeply angry to person I don't think it's been quite an angry conversation I'm pretty sure it has not been but I'm horrified by what the radical left is capable of but that doesn't make me angry exactly and and I think that it's it's demonstrative of why so many people find what you're doing inspiring because unlike the radical left which is consumed with the idea of victimhood and victimology and we're victims of the system like Marxism makes the claim that the only way that people suck is the claimant Marxism makes but the only way to cure people of sucking is by changing the entire system which will in some magical fashion transform the nature of humanity yeah in the proper direction right exactly the claim that you're making and I hope that I'm making as well is that human beings do suck unless they decide you stop sucking mm-hmm right and then and your whole goal is to tell people exactly how it is that they can clean up their rooms near Venice race Gus yeah well they might as well start with what's right in front of them it's a lot harder than it looks because to clean up your room means to accept that it's actually necessary for you to take that little bit of chaos that's in front of you that chaotic potential and cast it into habitable order and then you have to develop the right attitude towards that it's like okay well I'm gonna put my room in order well what do you mean order is in relationship to something you know like if your desk is ordered it means you've ordered it because you're going to work there and you're working there on something valuable and so the order is conceived of in relationship to a Telos it's like okay you're gonna order your room well what are you gonna do in it like what's your room for what's the purpose what's the purpose you can't or to your room without falling into purpose and I would say well if you're gonna fall into purpose it's like try it out on a local scale first right you don't want to go out there and change the system it's like what the hell do you know leave the system alone see what you can do locally see if you can put yourself together see if you can put your immediate environment together and you'll find if you're in a chaotic household and a chaotic household would be one where no one has any discipline no one has any aims and there's a terrible battle between Cain and Abel going on all the time right so so life sucks and everything's miserable and we're cynical and that's what wisdom is it's like and there's no point trying anything because everything is meaningless and who the hell is gonna care in a million years and you're a fool to move forward in any case it's like there's your household okay and so now you decide no despite all that I'm going to put my room in order it's like you will have a war on your hands because the first thing the people around you who are aiming down will do is think oh you really ate you think you're so much better than we are do you you really think that you and your fancy goddamn plans it's like we're gonna put every psychological obstacle we can possibly think of in your way because if you succeed even in something that trivial you shed a very dim light on our existence and so we're gonna put we're gonna do everything we can to take you out and so this people think oh well it's cleaning your room that's just too cliche it's like yeah really I just go ahead and try it you see how much of a cliche that is and if you've got your room in order then put your office in order see and then you're going to encounter the as soon as you do that you step out into the social world you're gonna encounter the antipathy between men and women you're gonna the identity politics in the workplace you're gonna encounter how you regulate your sexual morality while you're working with people of the opposite sex you're gonna encounter the ethics that are necessary to move your business forward it's like the whole it's a microcosm it really is and so to take those micro causes meant cause them seriously well that's what I'm asking people to do and I'm saying look it isn't only about you being happy it's like yeah whatever HAP there's lots of times in your life you're not going to be happy and so that's not gonna work you want to have something meaningful that's the boat that will take you through the storm right when you batten down the hatches but there's more it isn't even that it isn't even me a meaningful engaged life will see you through the catastrophes even though that's a big deal right that's a great proposition and I really believe it's true because you can say to yourself yeah it's worth it right right and it's great and but there's the other part of it too which is don't be thinking that your errors aren't linked to hell because they are if you look at what happened in the 20th century the brilliant commentators on the on the 20th century totalitarian states and all of their atrocities said the same thing over and over it isn't top-down evil leader manipulating innocent masses that's not it it's the moral failings of every single individual unwilling to say their truth unwilling to act out what they know to be right that accumulate and produced the catastrophic state and so when you're fussing about with your life when you're not manifesting your potential when you're falsifying your speech and your actions in the service of short-term expedience you are working to bring about hell on earth and that's true it's true literally and then it's true it's I suspect it's also true metaphorically and that's a real truth man when you get the literal and the metaphorical working at the same time it's like that's that's real so it isn't just that you have to fix up yourself so that you know you can have a better life it's like who cares about you for a moment you know it's you have to fix up your life because if you don't every time you make a mistake that you know to be a mistake you're leading the world toward health and I believe that I think it's true well Jordan Peterson's book has 12 rules for life honestly I we could do this all day long and we'll certainly have you back I really appreciate the time there's a reason so many people follow Jordan there's some reason so many people are buying this book the book is fantastic and his other book maps meeting is also fantastic so go get a copy of that as well Jordan thanks so much for stopping by I really appreciate it thanks Ben it was great yep [Music] the Ben Shapiro shows Sunday special is produced by Jonathan hey executive producer Jeremy borin associate producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens edited by Alex singhara audio is mixed by Mike Carr Amina hair and makeup is by Jess wah Oliveira the Ben Shapiro shows Sunday special is a daily wire for word publishing production copyright Ford publishing 2018

Channel: DailyWire+

Views: 2,745,634

Keywords: Ben Shapiro, Jordan B Peterson, Ben Shapiro Show, Daily Wire, 12 Rules For Life, psychology, Sunday Special, interview, epic

Id: WT0mbNvaT6Y

Length: 59min 25sec (3565 seconds)

Published: Sun May 06 2018