Jordan Peterson | Cambridge Union

[Music] [Music] um good evening everyone and thank you so much for coming along tonight uh as you can see in our uh coral draw we have a rather special guest this evening um jordan peterson is a clinical psychologist and author and a public intellectual his book 12 rules for life went stratospheric in 2018 and its follow-up beyond order 12 more rules for life was published this year we are absolutely delighted to be able to welcome him to cambridge and it's my great pleasure to say john peterson welcome thank you very much [Applause] so [Music] oh [Music] shall all yours [Music] one [Music] oh [Music] [Music] any time [Music] till the snakes [Music] turn [Music] is [Music] shall all your [Music] cats oh [Music] [Music] god [Applause] i'd like to move to the audience as quickly as i can tonight because i'm sure people tonight will have all sorts of many varied and wonderful questions to us but i think so let's get us off um to a set and start why the music why did you think that this would be a way to begin our event like well music is a good way to begin anything and so i thought it was an appropriate celebratory gesture and that it would set the proper tone let's say and so that was the reason and what sort of i mean in your work in general at the moment what sort of tone are you hoping to reach for people because i think one of the things that makes you so peace peace and is that is that something that has always kind of run through your your work do you think a tone of peace no not always well you know no no one should claim to be perfect in their actions but generally if i engage in conflict the reason i engage in it is because i think the alternative is worse and so you know if you're trying to settle things with a family member there's often a terrible minefield that you have to wander through to reach anything approximating a lasting peace and avoiding it doesn't make it better and it's terrible to confront it and it can be virtually what [Music] beyond your capacity to tolerate to do it and so people avoid it very frequently but that doesn't make peace it just harbors underground resentment and breeds bitterness and and hatred and so that's not unless that's what you want that's not a good solution do you think that i mean you talk about peace i think a lot of your rules for life can be boiled down to things that probably a lot of us would intuitively resonate with you know tidy your room stand up for yourself you know be careful in what you say these kinds of things the kind of piece of advice that probably would strike people is applicable quite widely why do you think it is that some of the things that you've said and the way you've gone about kind of writing up your stuff has been such a phenomenon and caused so many people to sit up and pay attention well i suppose in some sense those things that we take for granted we regard as obvious but if we take them for granted and we regard them as obvious and then they're challenged we often have no idea why they're valuable you know so for example i've had many clients who were considering getting married or or not getting married and they would say to me well it's just a piece of paper and they thought that was a pretty good argument and that's not a good argument at all that's an argument that shows shallow that you hardly know where to begin but you know if someone comes up to you on the street and say says defend marriage it's like what do you know it's like how are you going to do that it's what's so obvious that it's defensible that you don't have the arguments at hand i mean you know you're not a legal philosopher and so people who do that they think they're intelligent because they can put you on the spot but and merely the mere fact that you can't articulate your a claim you share with almost everyone in some traditional sense doesn't mean either that you're stupid or that the the principle itself is invalid it just means that we tend not to discuss all those things we agree upon it doesn't mean they're without merit so so the rules i mean i've been criticized my books have been criticized well they're you know self-help and i think well i'm actually not contentious of that so that criticism doesn't bother me my clinical practice uh many of my clients were brought to whatever philosophical understanding they had through so-called self-help books and they were reading books you know that's not so bad and what were they trying to do improve themselves i mean how pathetic is that and then to pander to an audience that needs self-improvement no it's like well so yes the rules were obvious but the reasons for them weren't and so i think the reason the books were popular one of the reasons is that i tried to make a case for why these hypothetically simple axiomatic propositional statements were neither simple nor obvious and why they were also necessary and people like to be walked through the whole process of the thought that that underlies the claim let's say partly about you feeling that those simple things are under attack somewhat somewhere actually that really wasn't the motive for the books i mean the motive for the books were was really two-fold i i had written i'd spent some time investigating various social media outlets um back 10 to 15 years ago i suppose and i got interested in the website known as cora which some of you may be familiar with i don't know how popular cora is now but it was popular for a while and on quora anyone could ask any question and anyone could pose an answer which was kind of an interesting technological experiment and then the answers would be upvoted and i answered about 50 questions on quora just as an experiment and um the likes for the answers were pareto distributed so a very small proportion of my answers got all the likes like two of them out of 50. and i didn't necessarily think those answers were any better than the rest maybe they were but they struck a chord obviously and one of them was very popular it was a list of 42 rules that i had written in response to i believe a young man's questions about what sort of general principles might be useful in orienting him in life and so i'd done a lot of clinical work by then and so i kind of whipped off this list of 42 and it went it went quite viral it became one of the most popular answers on quora within about a two week period and then when a book agent i was working with had approached me at one point about writing something more popular than maps of meaning my first book which i wouldn't describe precisely as popular and i had i've done a lot of lecturing by that point and i thought well this list of rules seemed to be seem to strike a chord you know and so in some sense that was a market test you could look at it that way or you could look at as the initiation of dialogue with a potential reading audience and so i derived 12 rules i thought made a reasonable narrative whole and wrote about them and then while i had 30 rules left after that for for the second book to draw from and so no it wasn't there were chapters that were affected by what i would say emerged as the culture war but that wasn't the motivation for writing the book the motivation was really a clinical and pedagogical motivation i mean i'd done a lot of clinical work by that time and i kind of knew how to unpack things down to the point where they were pragmatically applicable which is something you learn by the way if you're trained as a cognitive behavioral psychologist and the psychoanalytic types they're more concerned with broad-scale meta-narratives you know and the general themes of your life but if you're a cognitive behavioral psychologist everything that you do with your client has to be actionable right it has to literally be implementable and i really like the fact that in my clinical practice i can span that entire spectrum from sort of the highest order moral discussions to well extremely detailed strategic discussions about how to help people organize their immediate environments and and that's not trivial it's very difficult to properly organize your immediate environment and that's another thing i try to do with the books is show that some of these so-called simple things clean your room it's like i'll tell you this this is the truth i've been trying to organize my office for three years i was flooded by so much mail and so much catastrophe that i felt way behind in my ability to keep my closet organized my clothes organized i had three years worth of mail sitting in my office at the university thousands of pieces of mail and it took a lot of work to and it's still not done i hope i'll i hope i'll have my damn room clean by the time i go out on tour which is going to happen and we go back we go back on the road on 25th of january that's and i'm hoping for symbolic purposes among other reasons to have my house in order and my and beautified again as well but uh i like to show that simple things aren't so simple especially if you try them you know i had clients one client his mother had died and it was a large family and the family kind of fell into disorder after she died because it was all boys it was all sons and a father and no one had really picked up the maternal role you know the stereotypical maternal the necessary stereotypical maternal role and he decided he was going to try to do that and man you know his brothers and his father they weren't happy when he first went to get groceries you know they felt that he was kind of trying to take the place of the mother so there was all that grief that was still there and then who the hell did he think he was and etc etc i mean people's houses aren't in order because that's really hard it's really hard and so and it causes a lot of chaos and strife to try to do it and so usually it isn't done and it isn't until you actually try it like right down to the detail that you start to understand how difficult it is and then also how to appreciate you also start to appreciate how necessary it is so it's functioning it's fun shedding light on that sort of thing and the the non-triviality of the ordinary and part of the reason i concentrate on the individuals because i don't think the things we do are trivial if you think the things you do are trivial then you're either bringing a trivial attitude towards them or you're doing things that you're not doing the things you should be doing or you're not framing the situation appropriately so and you know you might dispute that but that's okay you could but you know one thing that i my depressive clients for example would say i can't really figure out why anything is worth doing if we're all going to die in the end it's like you know it's fair enough but i said i think it was last night at my lecture i said if a baby's crying in front of you and you know it's cold or hungry you don't cease to attend to its distress because the sun is going to envelop the earth in four billion years you think that's not a good excuse well why not why not use that time frame and your instinctive answer is well that's just not the appropriate time frame and so i would say well if you have the habit habit the habitual inclination to apply to your own life a time frame or an evaluative frame framework that reduces what you're doing to meaninglessness then you should consider whether or not you're using the wrong time frame right if it all of a sudden becomes meaningless pointless you're suffering and the work you have to do well find a time frame that is appropriate you know sufficient unto the day let's say that's a good start so um i've got a million questions but i do want to pass over to the audience thank you all for coming by the way much appreciated i've been unbelievably warmly welcomed here which is pretty good for a magical super nazi so [Applause] i just want to ask one more thing which is um in the wake of the first book i mean it did phenomenally well and then you had a reaction that i think probably surprised a lot of people you went through um anxiety depression insomnia pneumonia all these sorts of like adverse psychological physical reactions to it um which must have been an awful thing to kind of put yourself through and to kind of suffer from as a result of what happened and my question is at that point were there rules for life that you gleaned from that from the experience of that that have changed the way you look now when you look back at the rules you first come up with on core where you think oh actually there were parts that i missed one of the things that my writing has been criticized for in general including maps of meaning was that there was perhaps not enough emphasis placed on the importance of interpersonal relationships and um there weren't many of the rules that dealt exclusively with that and it certainly was the case that when i was so ill and when other members of my family were so ill at the same time that i i developed a uh more acute appreciation for the necessity of close and honest friendships and close and intimate familial relationships now it wasn't like i didn't appreciate that to begin with i mean i have a very uh i wouldn't say happy marriage because that's not the right way to put it it's a deep and meaningful relationship i have with my wife and it's better than mere happiness although mere happiness is nothing to be despised and i always found my home with my wife and my kids and my extended family i would say to be a place of refuge and warmth and delight and so and i certainly knew when i was dealing with my clinical clients that if they were friendless or lacked an intimate relationship that that left a real void in their life that's a third of your life or half your life perhaps or perhaps more than that um for me that was more an implicit part of my life than something i had made explicit in such a detailed manner and so but going through all this because so much of my survival in fact and depend and this arrival of my wife i would say as well depended on the benevolent actions of people who went far above what you might expect from people even if you were wildly optimistic and that did produce in me a renewed appreciation for what people sat people's capacity to do such things that sort of selfless love under extreme conditions and also the necessity of that so and that i would say in the final analysis enhanced a certain kind of gratitude i have both to my friends and to my family so that's an it's not precisely novel but it certainly deepened my appreciation of such things i also learned i would say more from all of what i went through the physical aspect of it the illness but also the social pressure that you can't do things you should do what you need to do and you should do it well but it's good to have people to whom you're also distributing not only responsibility but opportunity and to let them operate as autonomously as they possibly can around you because that multiplies your efforts and theirs and i was never a micromanager as a as a say a graduate student supervisor i had no interest in that but but i did learn that you extend your efforts immeasurably by properly distributing responsibility and well in the opportunity that goes along with that and i became more acutely aware of that and that's helped a lot because we've had to build fairly sophisticated organizations around us fairly quickly and they had to be extremely reliable and then it's really it's really something to be able to surround yourself with people who are capable of functioning autonomously and competently and creatively in their own domain and there's no loss to you at all in that there's nothing but gain in that you're not competing with them there's plenty there's more than enough for everyone to do like more than enough so it's no zero-sum game by any stretch of the imagination so i just got more acutely aware of all those things i hope and i hope i remember that okay um let's take questions from the floor um please put your hand up we will try and do as many as we can fit in um we'll go to the person in the middle of that row there yes there maybe project if the mic doesn't work okay oh thank you jordan for coming for weeks i was thinking of a question to ask you and i just i just wrote it down um when he talked about your client's family and the maternal role that needed to be filled uh it reminded me of my my father passed away when i was 10 and our mom had to fulfill the paternal role um how did your how was your life you know structured by the relationship with your parents uh what aspects made you into the van you are today and yeah i'd like to answer i don't know if that's too too personal i just interviewed my father for my youtube channel about a week and a half ago well i was very fortunate i would say in my choice of parents let's say um my mother my mother is a very good person um she's very easy to get along with she she's a little more agreeable that is probably good for her and that made it somewhat difficult for her to compete with rather disagreeable men when she entered the workforce but she prevailed and had a good career after she had been an at-home mother for a number of years and so she's got a spine that woman and despite the fact of her niceness and her her pleasantness and her emotional stability which was also extremely welcome and um she also has a great sense of humor and one of the things that i really had as a benefit from my mother was that i could always make her laugh and we joked around a lot and and that was that was great that's playful and fun and i i really have no negative memories of my mother i would say and and really have had almost no negative interactions with her and so that's that's quite something that's quite a gift you know and she clearly loved i have a brother and a sister she loved all of us and she was pretty even-handed and she was a reasonable disciplinarian we if our mother ever got upset at us which did happen because we did misbehave we were always felt guilty we never felt that she was oppressing us we just felt guilty because we'd upset her because she was such a sweet person and like i said but she has a spine and she has moral convictions too and um and my father my father's a tough character and he's relatively low in agreeableness especially politeness and although moderate and compassion and he's a pretty harsh taskmaster demanding in terms of his standards and so he was difficult to please and that's both a blessing and a curse you know because the curse is that he's not pleased but the blessing is that he thinks you can do better and so you know it's really hard to say when someone's on your side it's not obvious exactly what that means it's like well they are they on the side of who you are or are they on the side of who you could be and a lot of what is necessary paternal encouragement i would say you know speaking somewhat stereotypically is being on the side of who you could be and i thought this through quite carefully as a clinician because one of the clinical psychologists who had a major impact i would say on me intellectually and practically was carl rogers and rogers preached let's say this doctrine of unconditional positive regard and he's been criticized for that because if you actually listen to rogers even in his interactions with clients it was pretty obvious that his positive regard wasn't unconditional and the problem with unconditional positive regard is well you know you're actually not okay the way you are and right and who thinks they are you know all of us are perfectly if we have any sense cognizant of our imperfections we also hope we're not all we could be because you know especially if you're suffering miserably because of your ignorance and your willful blindness and all and your malevolence you think god i hope there's more to me than this and you really do hope that and then to have someone who's on the side of the part of you that could yet be better that's really something and i told my clients all the time when they came in for therapy when i made such things explicit that you know we were in a partnership to bolster the part of them that was aiming up that was aiming at the good and it was useful for people to partition themselves to some degree into that part that was aiming up and that could be trusted and relied upon as an aid to further growth in that part that was you know bitter and resentful and angry and sometimes homicidal and sometimes worse than homicidal and it was clearly aiming down in every possible way and i wanted to be on the side of the you know the better angels of our nature let's say and i would say my father was definitely that and so that was painful in some ways because it was difficult to please him and he he he applied the same standards to himself and and and paid a certain cost for that but i did know fundamentally that he had my back and i mean really fundamentally and i i knew that that was not all that common because many of my friends growing up especially the group of friends i had before almost all of them dropped out of school so that would have been junior high they had very contentious relationships with their father that weren't predicated fundamentally on something like a mutual respect and that was very hard on them and i suspect also very hard on their fathers and my father when my friends used to come over he cast a dim light on the bunch of juvenile delinquents that i hung around with in junior high and perhaps for good reason but they respected him and they also knew that he was on my side and so my father gave me an abiding and then the other thing i should say about him is he spent a tremendous amount of time with me when i was very young say before i was five or six he taught me to read he did that every night for months and i remember that very vividly and instilled in me a love of books and a fluency in reading he believed that i could do what i set my mind to and he really believed that and to have someone that believed that of you that's something man and you know it was something that i wanted to offer to my clinical clients you know because i did believe that there was more to them than the suffering person that was sitting there and that you know with joint diligent effort we could sift our way through the chaff and find the wheat and that things could be better and one of the lovely things about practicing as a clinician was that that was that almost inevitably happened sometimes really radically and and then of course later it started started to happen on a broader scale and i was seeing that happen in the lives of maybe thousands of people and so well so and my my parents they're still both alive and they're both doing quite well for people in their mid 80s and they still have my back and they were they spent a lot of time with me last year when i was desperately ill and they were very helpful and you know they've struggled in their marriage like many people do because they're very temperamentally different my mom and dad they share conscientiousness but my mom is an extrovert my dad is an introvert and my mom is very agreeable and my father is relatively disagreeable and he's very masculine and she's very feminine and there's a lot of gap to bridge there you know a lot of a lot of difficulty and temperamental understanding but they're both people of good character and so far they've for 50 years it's not too bad or longer even because they knew each other when they were quite young they've managed to keep their marriage intact and they've been there for me and my brother and my sister and while my children who knew them who we sent them to frequently and who knew them well and so so i was fortunate in that and we've also been able to negotiate you know i had my differences with my dad when i was a teenager surprise surprise but as far as i can tell there aren't any skeletons in the closet in in that part of my family there's no snakes under the rug that's all been at least in relationship to me that's all been dealt with and that's a great relief [Music] thank you for coming often you talk about one way to find meaning is in the journey between who you are and who you could be but how do you make sure that when deciding like who you could be that you're not aiming too high right because then potentially you could be disappointed oh that's a good that's how do you make sure that it's challenging enough to keep you engaged yeah that's a really good question yeah yeah well that's that's something you encounter practically in a clinical setting all the time well you know let's say i was dealing with a client and maybe that was somebody who say a man 35 years old he still lived at home um so he's too dependent his room is a complete bloody catastrophe and you know he's living like a bratty 13 year old and that gets pretty ugly by the time you're 35 you know and he knew it and i'm sure his mother knew it although obviously she put up with it which was probably her mistake at least in part but maybe we decide well you know let's start by cleaning your room and so as a cognitive behavioral psychologist you engage in a process called collaborative empiricism and that's partly to solve the problem that you described as well how do we know we set the right goal well i'd say well go try it and just watch yourself like you don't know who you are and come back next week and we'll see how you did and maybe i remember this one quiet he came back and he said you know i went and got the vacuum cleaner from the closet which is something i really never done and i i put that vacuum cleaner in the doorway of my bedroom crossways so it blocked the doorway and then i just walked over it for a whole week you know like he was completely non-plussed at his own intransigence and look what he did she was so resentful and so angry that he instead of vacuuming his damn bedroom like he planned he just stuck the vacuum in his own way and then martyred himself over it every day for a week it's like okay then we're starting to get somewhere with the whole you living at home thing here and so well that was too high a goal for him and you say well how do you know that it's like well he didn't do it did he so then what you do practically is you say well how about you bring that vacuum cleaner into your room this week and that's your whole assignment and just watch what happens when you bring it in watch the fantasies that flicker in the back of your mind as you live out your resentment at your therapist for daring to make you bring that vacuum across the threshold of your bedroom and so if people catch those fantasies that's quite the bloody nightmare and quite the revelation to themselves i can tell you because you have to be one angry person to put a vacuum cleaner in your doorway and walk over it every day for a week and so then we'd get somewhere it's like okay now we're getting to the bottom of things you know and but maybe the next week he'd come back well with the fantasies at hand and rather shocked as a consequence but the vacuum cleaner was then in his room and so he broke the threshold there you know and then maybe we'd have to maybe all he could do was sort out a drawer or half a drawer something like that so what you do is you know you pick a target that you think is probably reasonable and you can negotiate that with yourself and what what i would do often practically with my clients is i would say well we're gonna your life is not going very well and that's why you're here i mean that wasn't a pronouncement on my part and i would ask them you know what what problems they were suffering from what what they were suffering from but i would usually do a i would say a pragmatic analysis of the generic quality of their life and it's not that hard to do you can do this for yourself it's part of this self-authoring program that i have online um well i'm miserable and i'm anxious and i'm better and i'm angry and i'm stuck in my career and i don't seem to be able to get anywhere and god dammit life isn't worth living anyways and so half the time i'm suicidal it's like okay okay you know we right now we've established the problem domain right at least somewhat and then i would say well hypothetically you'd rather that some of that wasn't the case right so because we want to establish a goal what is it you want more misery or less misery and usually by the time people had come to therapy unless they were mandated to do so which never works by the way they wanted things to be better that's why they were there you know now and then you get someone who was there just to you know maybe please someone else or but i could usually get beyond that because if they were willing to come there there was at least a part of them that was hoping that there was such a thing as up and then we'd just walk through their life it's like okay well let's do a an assessment do you have any friends how often do you see them well i have six friends but i only see them once every six months you know one of them every six months well you know that's pretty low on the friendship hierarchy so i just file that away as as a piece of evidence do you have an intimate relationship are you as educated as your intelligence would indicate might be useful do you have a job do you have a career or failing that a job right because generally people need at least a job and perhaps hopefully a career um how do you regulate your drug and alcohol use because that's a major pitfall for people how do you use your leisure time how do you take care of yourself mentally and physically now that's not everything about life right but but if you don't have any of that well we have a place to start then you know like maybe maybe you should try to make one friend you know and there are there are ways of doing that so for example one of the things that my wife and i used to do when we moved to a new place which we did fairly often was we'd pick some local hangout place restaurant bar something like that and we just go there every week and until we started to know at least the proprietors we'd introduce ourself and we'd make that a routine and then you know you can get to know people and sometimes with my clients i would have to some of them were incredibly not socially skilled like in ways you can just you just have no idea well maybe some of you do how well because i don't mean you specifically although maybe i do but um but you may you certainly may know people like this um yeah i have one client who was literally so socially anxious he could not use a telephone and so he was just terri he was absolutely terrified of people he'd been horribly bullied he was three quarters deaf he had obsessive compulsive disorder he had an intellectual impairment i mean this guy had a rough time man and he was so terrified of he could hardly talk to men and women man they were so terrifying to him he just didn't even know literally where to start well sometimes when people are extremely impaired they don't know anything basic they have no friends it's why well they they introduce themselves like this what's your name and then maybe you say it but they're so preoccupied that they don't hear it and then they shake hands so let's shake hands that's not good that's not good you don't remember the name you're not making eye contact so you can't see the person's emotional response and then you're afraid and that's why you're looking away and then because you're afraid and you're looking away you don't pick up the social cues about how to initiate conversation even if you know how to do that so then you're awkward and because you're looking away you don't listen and then you can't enter into the flow of conversation and so we'd practice shaking hands you know maybe 20 times till the person could do it and was comfortable with it and you know that's how you start at the bottom of things and that's a goal for someone like that because you have to look at well you don't have any friends like what the hell's going on here well for him like i said he had intellectual impairments and well the deafness didn't help and neither did the obsessive compulsive disorder i mean the guy had a lot of obstacles standing in his way and so we had to find you know a place to start but we would set those seven goals it's like well you know maybe you could have a friend or two and maybe you could do something that would educate yourself to some degree and maybe we can take some steps towards moving you towards a job with him i started trying to get him a volunteer job which you think would be easy but which is actually practically just so you know it when you're thinking about people struggling at the bottom who are unemployed it's like why don't they get a volunteer job say to start them in the process it's bloody well harder to get a volunteer job than a real job you need a police check for most volunteer positions if they deal with personal care because people are so afraid of litigation and for someone who's basically illiterate and also who has extreme social anxiety the whole police check being just that wasn't just wasn't working and i sent him to an employment office and they said well type up your resume and distribute it it's like that's real helpful he can't type you know he's barely literate he's never used a computer he doesn't know what a resume is even it's like type up your resume and distribute it jesus how pathetic so so one of the things you do if you negotiate with yourself is i'm going to set a goal and then see if you move towards it and if you don't well maybe it's the wrong goal maybe it's too large maybe it's too small for you right so now it's not engaging you um maybe you didn't really want to pursue that goal and you're just deluding yourself and you know it's helpful to have someone to talk those things over with but i would say start from the pers if you're not doing what you want to do or what you think you should be doing drop the presumption that you know who you are and start to negotiate with yourself like you're a stranger who needs to be enticed forward because you don't know who you are especially if you're not able to regulate your behavior because that's evidence that you don't know who you are something is driving the ship it's not you or it's not the you you think you are and that's often extremely humiliating to people because you may have to pick a goal that's so low so lowly right that you embarrass yourself half to death by recognizing the necessity of you having to practice that but the upside of that is that improvement incremental improvement scales exponentially so even if you have to start somewhere really trivially man once you start you can really scale up quickly and so you know and with an exponential increase which i think improvement is the the trajectory of improvement is characterized by a power law function it doesn't really matter where you start if you're doubling look i mean think you get one percent better a week that's not that high a goal right maybe you could get rid of one percent of your stupidity and malevolence a week or maybe every two weeks because that compounds in three years you are a completely different person and it doesn't end there so even if you're starting with you know the horrible mixed bag of catastrophes that you actually are if you're if you're diligent in your attempts to rectify your errors and to aim higher man and then with regards to your goals let's say you don't know what to do well maybe you're high in openness and so you're pulled in all sorts of directions or maybe you're low in conscientiousness or you're confused because you're anxious or you haven't had any direction you haven't had good mentoring etc etc there's lots of reasons well i would say pick something right pick something and a nameable goal and then try to implement it and what'll happen is you'll learn a lot by trying to implement it and one of the things you might learn is what the a slightly better goal might be you know because if you try something diligently and you succeed or you fail um you're going to learn from the the effort expanded in the detailed implementation of the goal it's going to inform you it'll also transform you physiologically it does that at a very basic level neural physiological level you will be slightly different as a consequence of the attempt and what that will mean is that the next goal you pick will be a little more suited to you and so it's this kind of pathway right it's like maybe the goal you should be attaining is here but you don't know that because you're clueless and so you aim there well it's better than there and it's not nothing it's not cessation of movement and you know if you if you're supposed to go there and you go here but you walk diligently towards it you're a little closer once you get to here than you were here and it's this oscillating self-corrective process that leads you to the final star and you have to be willing to engage in erroneous experimentation to to manage that but it is a self-correcting process and so one of the things i always talk to my clients about is well well let's try something you know and and we'll reserve to ourselves the right to alter our trajectory and then i would use as a corrective there because you might say well how do you know when you're not just giving out right instead of thinking maybe you need a different goal and i would say well you can if you're really concerned about your proclivity for self-deception you can enter into a contract with yourself that you won't replace any goal you've set with a goal that's easier and so you can switch your goal but it has to be a little harder so that you check yourself against that tendency to withdraw and avoid and be self-deceptive and that works like a charm and if you do that with some degree of diligence your goals will get better and more attainable and you'll get happier too because you don't experience happiness except in relationship to a goal and that's really worth knowing you know that's another thing to think about too if your life is meaningless well you're not pursuing a valued goal i mean you might be depressed too and sometimes that can be like an illness you know something that is really wrong with you but a good rule of thumb is that if you find new joy in life there's a very low probability that you're pursuing a goal that you regard intrinsically like in the depths of your temperament that's worthwhile and that's technically true because we do in fact experience most of the positive emotion let's say that's associated with it with uh with emotions like joy we experience that in relationship to a goal so well then you want to find a goal that regulates your negative emotion and that brings you a certain amount of positive emotion and that expands your competence as you pursue it and you will experience that as meaningful that's really what meaning signals meaning signals you're doing all those things you say well that's not real it's like don't listen to the semantic chatterbox so much right there's levels of you that are far wiser than that and you can watch what happens to you instead of noticing what you think you know and that's another thing i always did with my clients especially if they're depressed it's like well let's watch you for a week and see just let's see when you're not so depressed what are you doing when you're not so depressed now for some people who had an endogenous depression they were just depressed all the time and sometimes an antidepressant was a good solution to that but for people who were situationally depressed which is equally common let's say there'd be quite a bit of variation in their mood and say well it turns out that i'm not so depressed when i'm with so so and so it's like okay well why and more importantly how can we do more of that and when were you more depressed well when i'm alone in my room you know brooding okay well how about not how about you spend 10 percent less time this week alone in your room like we'll introduce uh 10 let's say so you're wait for 16 hours so that's an hour now we'd probably go for 5 half an hour that's a hell of an improvement over 20 weeks right because that would be 100 less time doing counter productive brooding it's like well maybe you could go for a five minute walk every day this week and or maybe a two minute walk you know or maybe you go in the living room instead of your bedroom if you can't manage the walk and and so you can that's part of that collaborative empiricism too right let's find out when your life isn't announcing itself to you as meaningless and no one virtually no one feels the absence of meaning all the time you know even nihilistic punk rockers like going to the local bar and smashing into each other in the mosh pit so i know that's a dated reference but you get what i mean so okay um a lot of very eager hands and we're going to person in the blue headband there hello so you talked about about um how your view on relationships has changed and since you talked at the union three years ago how have your other opinions changed and why well one thing that's changed most of this is a deepening i would say rather than a transformation of beliefs but it's a deepening in the specification of things that i more dimly apprehended before one of the things i've really learned more explicitly i would say in the last six months is to not win i knew this already like in my clinical practice i never i tried my best not to be right you know so for example as a clinician you can dispense advice and so it'd be quite easy especially if i wasn't suffering at that time while practicing as a clinician and the person was i think well you know i've got my life together pretty well and i'll just tell you what you should do and sometimes people would ask for that right but it's not that helpful because well what the hell do you know about what they should do you know you can introduce topics of conversation like well most people have friends and you don't seem to have any and you know maybe you have a reason for that and maybe it's a you know fundamentally valid reason and that's not where your interests are oriented maybe you're particularly introverted which doesn't mean you don't need friends but that's way different than saying well here's what you should do and the problem with here's what you should do is first of all as the psychoanalysts knew you just set up resistances in people and the reason so they won't do it even if they want your advice and often they'll do the opposite just out of spite and probably they should because they're basically saying up yours it's like this is my life man not yours and the other problem with advice is well let's say you go you take my advice and then you go do something good it's like well whose victory is that is it yours or mine so did i just steal your victory well that's not so good and so i learned that pretty thoroughly as a clinician not to do that and hopefully as a husband and father also not to do that but in my talks with people like sam harris i was more instrumental than i should have been there were points i was trying to make you know when i was trying to be right and you know there's there's times for that and there's partisan situations where only one side can win and another side has to lose an election is like that but i've really learned i i hope that in the last six or seven months to not do that not to do that and so the last conversation i had with sam harris which was two weeks ago which will be released in the relatively short order was by far the best conversation we ever had and all i did was ask him questions and that wasn't manipulative it wasn't like well i'm gonna you know and no one has here in the audience has done this yet but lots of times people ask me questions they're not questions they're disguised criticisms or they're statements of belief or they're an observation that perhaps if my christian beliefs for example were more fully differentiated i accepted christ as my savior that that would be a good thing that comes up quite often and they're not questions like a question is a question is something you want the answer to like actually you you know you want to know what the person thinks and so all i did was ask harris questions and i learned all sorts of things about the way he thought that i didn't know and about commonalities in our approach to problems that i didn't understand and the conversation was much more enjoyable i mean the give and take of our previously more tendentious conversations had and what would you say there was an element of sort of combative enjoyment to them so they weren't nothing and they were reasonably successful as public spectacles and i suppose as philosophical investigations but this was way better way better and i understood what motivated sam way more than i did before and and i've been doing a lot of i hope political peacemaking between democrats and republicans in the u.s because that better happen and you know i've i've managed on the moderate democrat side to convince convince to learn along with a variety of moderate democrats that even when dealing with their you know the people across the aisle that winning is not a good strategy or maybe it's better than losing let's say it's not an optimal strategy right that's a better way of thinking about it there are and if you're trying to win a conversation that might be better than losing you know but it's not as good as mutual self-ele mutual elevation in the progression of the discourse that's way better that's a real victory and so i hope that i've learned that you know more deeply and that i can take that to heart more deeply and then i can govern my actions i have conversations that are very tense with people well i always have and that certainly hasn't stopped and i have to tread very carefully and any instrumentalism on my part you know because one of the things you want to do when you win is dominate in some sense right and that's a cheap victory i would say it's better than losing perhaps you know because sometimes you can retreat and let the other person have the floor let's say but it's not the optimal solution not at all and man you just you just have no idea how far you can get with people if if what you do is ask them questions because you're interested in what they think and so damn useful for them because then in the discourse they reveal elements of themselves that they really didn't know and what's also interesting i've seen people do this i had a striking example of that within my own family where one of my family members was had a grudge against another and uh we waited it out instead of confronting it directly and the person with the grudge laid out why they had the grudge and it was so it was a character description of the person they were angry with and it was it was so unlike the person that well the person who had the grudge was revealing the story they realized that this was some fantasy they had concocted like 15 years previously and pretty much abandoned it right after the utterance and so that happens frequently you know if you really disagree with someone first of all that's interesting because you're wrong and stupid and if they really disagree with you they might know something that you really need to know right rather than talking to someone that already agrees with you i mean that's hard because there's still points of conflict but it's worth digging for that if you can find it and then there's also the possibility that many of the differences are purely misunderstandings that's very frequently the case and then there's also the possibility that well the person engages in this dialogue well first of all they're happy about you because you're listening and people love that man they love that more than you listen to people you really listen to them instead of thinking about what you're going to say next or trying to win you'll have so many people around you so soon that you won't even be able to stand it so that's really something man to do that and so that's a pathway to peace that listening that's for sure and it's a path pathway to wisdom because if you listen to people then they tell you all sorts of things you don't know and that's true of people no matter their position in society man i mean you and that's another thing i learned in my clinical practice if i was bored by my client i was doing it wrong because if i really listened to them they were not boring man they were so damn interesting you could hardly even stand to be in the same room so and i think that's true and you know that's true you know you break through that facade the persona because you're having a genuine interaction and it becomes as richly meaningful as listening to a symphony or something like that and you remember that you know when you feel that there's soul to soul contact in that and there is and that that's what that's what brings peace to the world that's what revitalizes everyone right and so so i hope i learned that more deeply and we'll see we'll see should we go um go to um someone who's waving their fingers right at the back over there yes that person okay um so um what do you think uh you would like to be remembered for like you're living sorry sorry all right like the things you've done positively or your other ventures like you know your books uh your clinical practice et cetera encouraging people that's all really is that something should we go back [Applause] dr peterson thank you for coming um my question is related to your previous statements uh on how to bring in a sense more unity in a very divided world i'm wondering what are the things that you look forward to with hope that could bring togetherness well that ties into this issue of encouragement you know i mean when i wrote my first book i wrote it over about a i guess i started really in 1984 and i finished it in 1999 so 15 years and i wrote pretty much three hours a day every day and i thought about what was in that book manically i would say hypomanically anyways for at least 12 of those years so i was just thinking about it all the time well not all the time i was doing some research in other areas at the time but that all tied into it so pretty much all the time and i was obsessed with the auschwitz phenomenon i would say is obsessed with atrocity but more but psychologically right not economically not sociologically none of that i thought trusty auschwitz guard committing atrocity there's one famous story that i came across i think it was in man's search for meaning frankl but it might not have been so you know the people who came to the concentration camps who were transported they were transported in cattle cars essentially and many of them in the winter froze to death if they were on the outside of the cattle car and or were suffocated in the middle and so and you know they were separated from their families and there were people of different nationalities and different language families all crammed together so they're as alienated and broken as people could possibly be and you'd think that'd be enough really wouldn't ya but no you you come to the camp and the people in the cars would cheer if they came to a camp that had no chimney and so that shows you what joy is like under those conditions so one of the tricks that used to the guards used to play in auschwitz was they get these people after this brutal transport to pick up like a hundred pound sack of wet salt and carry it from one side of the compound to the other and back and compound that's not like an area this size those places were small cities they had 50 000 people in some of the camps so it was a walk across town after you'd been separated from your family and just about froze to death and were three quarters dead and had everything stripped away it's like just who the hell did you have to be to then subject that person to work for no other reason than to prolong their suffering right because solzhenitsyn said you know when he was in the camps that at least if he was laying bricks in a wall or a bricklayer was doing so at least he had the satisfaction of building something right there was something there was some tiny iota of meaning in the work something redemptive in that a crumb that you could that you could feast on in the midst of your starvation but whoever came up with this particular torment figured out how to make work itself counterproductive right work itself nothing but a means to more suffering and remember the joke on the outside of the auschwitz camp are bite mech free that's my german is terrible work will set you free someone made a joke about that i wanted to think about it just exactly what would you have to be like to make that joke and part of the reason i wanted to figure that out is because i'm a human being and a human being made that joke and a human being forced that punishment onto someone who was already suffering and i wanted to figure out what you would have to be like what i would have to be like to do that i thought if i could figure that out then i could figure out what the opposite of that was right because maybe such things should be brought to a halt that's what we were supposed to remember from the concentration camps which we're continually reminded never to forget as well you do not remember what you cannot understand and so we think well you know evil people did this and hey man fair enough you know but don't be so sure that those people aren't you and so that's a horrible thing to contemplate but a necessary thing to contemplate and i would say also that if you don't contemplate it you end up placing that great evil somewhere else right in some other person in some other race in some other political party that's going somewhere and if it's not part of your own heart and the fight isn't there well you're gonna have the fight somewhere so i thought about that for a long time and then what i concluded was that the way out of that is to make better people at the individual level it's a psychological issue fundamentally not a sociological issue not an economic issue certainly not an economic issue not a political issue it is all those things to some degree not fundamentally there's no political reason to have some suffering person under your dominion carry a sack of wet salt that weighs a hundred pounds from one side of a compound to another no no that's you man corrupt right to hell and so you know you think that's pretty terrible but and it is pretty terrible but there is one advantage to specifying evil in a very distinctive and precise manner is that when you specify something that precisely you also specify its opposite right so if there's evil of that depth then well they're at least in principle might be the opposite of that which would be the force that might resist it and so while i was looking into the heart of darkness let's say the light started to shine through and you know that start partly when i started to understand it was a little bit before that that you should not lie that's a big mistake you think you first of all i'll tell you one thing that i never saw any of my clinical clients ever get away with anything ever you know we'd track their misery back to its origination point and sometimes it was a mistake on their part often in a moral error which they knew was a moral error when they were committing it but may have forgotten about afterwards so it became unconscious in some sense or habitual or it was a moral air that someone else that they were beholden to a lie on the part of their mother father someone they were tangled up with someone malevolent but yeah the pigeons come home to roost man and how could it be otherwise you really think you really think you have the capacity to bend the structure of reality without it eventually snapping back and hitting you in the face like how arrogant can you possibly be to think that and so well i came to believe that truth in particular spoken truth but not only spoken truth was the antidote to that to that evil and to that suffering really like really truly the antidote to that it's more complex than that but that's something and i also came to believe that each of us have far more under our dominion in terms of the destiny of the world let's say than we would ever even care to dare to dread let's say you know i don't know how it works but each of us you know we make decisions between heaven and hell all the time with every decision in fact with every decision that's a decision up or down and in some manner the whole collective enterprise is guided by those individual decisions and it's not washed away in the in the mix you know it's not it's somehow not just your trivial action in the sea of seven billion random actions we're networked and and our our actions echo and what we do or don't do or what we do deceitfully has ramifications far beyond what we can immediately see or often are willing to immediately see it's like you know the one more the only more frightening realization than nothing you do matters is the realization that everything you do matters it's like you want to pick a existential terror you think meaninglessness is terrifying you try its opposite and you see how terrifying that is but it's a terror it's a holy terror right it's a terror that sustains and the nobles and every single person knows that that is true knows that you're fleeing from your destiny by avoidance of the necessity you're the necessary responsibility that your conscience calls you towards everyone knows that you know and we toy with it because we can and we try to avoid it because we test we're immature and we're bitter often and it's not surprising because people suffer dreadfully and it's very difficult to suffer dreadfully without becoming bitter but it doesn't help and all it does is make suffering worse and and spreads it and if the suffering is morally objectionable spreading it it's hardly going to rectify that and so yeah i'm i'm optimistic about about our possibilities because i think we can do anything we set our minds to and so hopefully we'll set our minds to the proper things and every single one of you have to make that decision and one of the things i've really been struck by i talked with andy no two weeks ago i'd spoken to some moderate democrats about antifa and they said antifa is a loser it's an illusion it doesn't exist and i thought that's pretty interesting because you think these right-wing conspiratorial groups exist then when i talk to the republicans they're pretty damn sure antifa exists and that the right-wing conspiratorial groups don't the language is precisely parallel across the aisles so interesting but i talked to andy no i said these moderate democrats they told me antifa's illusory it said well you've had more interactions with antifa than anyone on the planet he's beat three quarters to death twice and sustained brain damage that took him a year to recover and still went back out to cover the riots you know he had to move away from the united states because he had too many death threats it's like you know one death threat that's enough when you start to aggregate them that's rough i said well how many antifa cells do you think there are 20 well how many committed antifa types do you think there are and i don't think they're necessarily left-wing radicals by the way i think they're people who love mayhem and they so discord and they have a quasi-fascist paramilitary structure so that's kind of weirdly right wing and to put that in the context of some political debate it's inappropriate because they're people who want everything to burn so they can dance in the ashes and so they're they're well we'll leave it at that so there's 800 of them out of 300 million that's like zero right well so the the moderate democrats can say well it's an illusion well god it's only 800 people in a city of thousand four hundred and twenty thousands let's say that would be one person so it's statistically negligible but unfortunately it's not because man you can cause a lot of trouble if you want to you know and so we're always in this situation and i think it's even more precarious now where what you do really matters you think about how much technological power each one of you wields and that's just going to scale exponentially as we become more able to manipulate everything around us and what that means is the the cumulative consequences of our individual inadequacies are going to be the biggest threat that that is posed to us in the future and so better people that's the that's the way forward and i think that that's not only possible but let's say necessary desirable good beautiful everything positive there's everything positive in that so we have already um overrun slightly so what i'd like is one more question does anyone have anything that can be answered briefly um okay a lot of very committed people who are going with things you said i had an upstairs bias a downstairs bias should we go upstairs somewhere we'll go there that bloke there yes okay yes i might coming there we go and whatever you have said has had a very positive impact in my life so my question to you is what's your one most important advice to someone who's going to be a parent soon [Applause] well the first thing i would say about that is that you have the opportunity in front of you to have the best relationship with anybody you've ever had in your life you know if you do that right that's what you can have now when you have to kind of scour yourself for resentments that's that's the first thing little house cleaning is in order you know because a baby's a lot of responsibility and you got to talk over with your wife who does what and when and why and that's hard right to make peace in the household like that especially in an age where the gender war rages let's say and so you want to decide if that's what you want you know you want to compete with your kid you want to quell his ambition or her ambition when it manifests itself in a positive way because you're jealous about that purity because you can certainly do that nietzsche said you know we're best punished for our virtues so you can just wait around till your child does something delightful and good and toss a little punishment in there and that'll bring that to the end very very quickly you know you can make a dog starve to death by hitting him on the nose with the newspaper when he approaches his food dish it doesn't take much you have to do that 20 times and the dog will starve to death so here's some advice if you want to make your life miserable so so i would say you know you we want to decide if you want the best relationship you ever had in your life and if you do then the next thing i would say is cooperate with your wife and negotiate and don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them because if you dislike them you can bloody well be sure other people will and you can guide them you know and part of that's that acceptance maternal love that sort of encompasses everything some of that's the discriminating encouragement that fosters further growth and you want a balance of that in your household and then you can have love and joy and play you know and that's little walled garden that's paradise where people play forever happily so aim up tell the truth negotiate with your wife shed your resentment and love and encourage your children [Applause] i think we could let this event run on for about another 12 hours with the number of questions we have coming um but alas there are things to do um thank you ever so much dr peterson for coming and speaking with us today it's been a pleasure thank you very much you

Channel: Cambridge Union

Views: 1,139,946

Keywords: Cambridge Union, Cambridge University, Speech, Jordan Peterson, psychologist, YouTube personality, University of Toronto, Controversial, Small Talk, Free Speech, Talk, Jordan, Peterson

Id: miFwrdtTGqY

Length: 75min 7sec (4507 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 27 2021