Jordan Peterson: Beta males, low social status & antisocial behavior

you see the little cartoon of Robert Crumb off to the left there and he's got a big eatable problem or Rob crumb and the problem with him fundamentally is his mother was something like a giant spider and did everything she possibly could to crush the life out of him hence his remaining relationship with women and so that's part of the reason why the femininity can be a something that turns you to stone it's an experience that many men are familiar with by the way because the average man is rejected far more often than he's accepted and since women are the Gateway to reproduction they constitute nature itself and nature itself tells most men you should go home and stay under your bed there's lots of experiments done about this so for example psychologists have an undergraduate woman go out into the concourse and see how long it takes someone her to find someone who agrees to sleep with her and that takes like you know two seconds after she asks the first man and then and then they flip it you know and they get your random undergraduate guy to do the same thing it's well you could imagine the consequences of that since many of you man have lived through it mother nature with a woman wears the face of Mother Nature and the face is generally rejecting especially to men who are low in the dominance hierarchy by the way which is one of the things that irritates guys like Eliot Rogers and one of the things that motivates their desire to take revenge that's a universal phenomena so that's part of the reason that the feminine is nature and why nature by the way is Mother Nature it's like its diagnosis of your status is not good enough higher you are in the dominance hierarchy the more resources you have at your disposal and so the less upset you have to get with anything horrible happens so if your baby or barely clinging to the bottom of the social structure you can be sure that your brain is going to estimate any anomalous occurrence as a catastrophe which is why people don't like being at the bottom of the dominance Harkey and it's also why people who are there die a lot sooner and they do they die a lot sooner regardless of their absolute level of wealth it's relative deprivation that counts one of the things that your brain is very concerned with is relative status that's wired in by the way which is partly why relative poverty is often such a social problem people hate being low in status especially men well the male status hierarchy is a bit different than women and women are pretty sensitive to status too but they use different markers anyways part what happens when your status goes up is though your brain serotonin levels go up and when your brain serotonin levels go up you're less irritable and and you experience less negative emotion per unit of uncertainty or threat and so when you you know when you demean someone and you interfere with and you lower the their presume status as far as a very primordial circuit is concerned you alter the system that regulates their emotions and they hate that people hate that more than anything and it's an unbelievably archaic circuit you can kind of tell this because depressed people basically act like they're low status and depressed people are depressed about everything now it's not easy to be depressed about everything right and so the fact that that's the case means that what's ever gone astray has to be very primordial because it affects everything anyways people often use antidepressants to cure depression hence their name and antidepressants decreased the rate at which serotonin is taken back up by the neurons that produce it well 300 million years ago crustaceans emerged and crustaceans live in dominance hierarchies even though they're not particularly social and if one Lobster fights with another and gets defeated then he won't fight with another lobster even when he beat for 20 minutes unless you give them antidepressants in which case he'll fight again right away the reason I'm telling you this is because the Status structure that underlies your being not just your brain but your being is is so old you share it with crustaceans so you mess with it at your peril it's not learned by no means so anyways you you wander around inside one of these little frames going from point A to point B all the time and one of the annoying things about life and this is sort of this is if his story is that as soon as you climb from point A to point B and you get there then there's another point a and another point B and and that's kind of interesting too because one of the things that suggests is that getting somewhere isn't really what people want because as soon as you get somewhere then you're done going there and then you have to get somewhere else so in some sense it seems it's an accomplishment another sense it's just the next rock up the mountain now you all know this because you know you graduated from university and that was a good day but the next day you weren't a university student you were some unemployed loser you know and so and that's a you know that sets up a whole new set of problems right and I mean that's how the frame shifts and when the frame shifts like that then the value of everything shifts around it so turns out that people are actually more interested in getting from point A to point B than they are in actually being at point B and almost all of the positive emotion that you feel which is related to dopaminergic circuitry by the way you experience in relationship to the pursuit of a valued goal rather than to the attainment of the goal the attainment of the goal actually satisfies you or more specifically it satisfies that motivational circuit but then the damn thing just shuts off and another one starts yelling at you so it's like a perverse form of victory so one answer to that that's universal in some sense is that you should establish a relationship with a transcendent value because it never runs out of motivational power and as soon as things fall apart which they always do you're in chaos and as soon as you're in chaos then your body defaults to emergency preparation and you're stressed and if you're stressed long enough then you die and so you don't like that stress say when your body gets stressed what happens is because it doesn't really know what's going on it prepares for everything that's the generalized stress response cortisol production does that cortisol production is good it wakes you up in the morning but if it's chronic you get old like it's soul general in its negative actions that the best way to conceptualize its detrimental long-term effect is that it accelerates aging so it makes you more likely to have heart disease and cancer and depression and Alzheimer's and diabetes and obesity that'll do it's enough any of those are enough to kill you alright so there's a hierarchy that's a hierarchy of values the higher the value the more the less you want to have it disrupted now this psychologist named Piaget some of you might know about him mm-hmm Piaget was very interested in what happens to value structures and their hierarchical organization once they have to apply outside of the confines of a body so so here's a way of thinking about it two-year-olds basically hypothalamic that's why there's so much fun first they're happy then they're sad then they're hungry then they're tired you know they just zip from one pretty straightforward and rather awe-inspiring motivational state to another and but at two they can't play they can play with by themselves but they can't play with other children they can't get that until they're three and they need to get it by the time they're three because if they don't get it by the time they're four they will never get it and then you have an antisocial kid who's going to be an outsider for his entire life and there isn't anything you can do about it so that has to happen between two and four so what happens at about age three is that the kid learns how to play a game with another person and what that game is is fundamentally the development of the ability to share a frame of reference which is what you're doing when you play Monopoly it's like it's stupid to play Monopoly obviously who cares if you have a whole pile of counterfeit paper right but doesn't matter a because the way you're constituted is that your brain will treat anything you act like constitutes a valuable goal as if it's a valid framework of reference and if it couldn't do that a you couldn't abstract and B you could not get along with other people so you can sit around the table and you could say let pretend that monopoly is a reasonable facsimile of reality which you wouldn't say but it's what you mean and everybody says yes that would be a music and so then you set your goal which is to get all the little hotels and all the money and poof your emotions go along for the ride and what's so interesting about that is you can get everybody into the game and so one of the things that's really interesting about people is that we can establish a shared fictional frame of reference and it organizes all our emotions so they're predictable that's also why we can watch movies you go to the movie you identify the hero you figure out what the hero wants poof you're the hero and the way that works is you don't look at the hero and think about what he's doing and evaluated emotionally and then feel it what you do is you specify the hero's goal and then you map him on to your body and you read off the emotional responses of your own body and that's how you understand the hero so it's a it's embodied you're using your your embodiment as a computational device that can run simulations of other consciousnesses they have these shared frames of reference like when we're playing Monopoly okay so children at three learn how to play games and that means they learn how to organize their own internal motivational States into a hierarchy that includes the motivational states of other people and that means they can play and that's what you guys do when you're out in the world like we're playing a game right now we all know the rules that's why we can all sit in this room and play the game without fighting with each other you know and the room is set up like a theater and we all know the theater game and so and the chairs are always facing this way at the moment and so that's a hint that you should look forward and this is raised so you know the room is basically telling you what to do because it's a stage like all rooms and because you're smart and socially conscious you can walk into a stage group and your body knows what to do and if you're civilized and social you just do it then all the other primates can predict what you're up to

Channel: Essential Truth

Views: 3,004,501

Keywords: Jordan B Peterson, Jordan Peterson, Essential Truth, bite-sized philosophy, beta males, alpha males, dominance hierarchy, high status, low status, psychology, transliminal, manofallcreation, Gravitahn, M Czerna, 50 stars, the rubin report, PowerfulJRE, ScienceNET, StevenCrowder, philosophyinsights, social status, intense 5, Ramble, Sorting Myself Out, men and women, self-help, what's trending, h3 podcast, jocko podcast, bearing, independent man, Gad Saad, archangel911, psyche matters

Id: sZH0N9aECa0

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2018