Jordan Peterson: Crucial relationship guidance

the first thing you want to ask your partner or your family is well how would we like to have a meal you want wretched nasty food that someone just threw together and it's burnt and we're gonna fight about it all the time and it's really erratic and it's not predictable and and the person who's making it is unhappy and the kitchen is a disaster afterwards and everybody's angry about that so that's like one solution do you want that and if they all are sensible enough to say no then then you can say to them okay well what's the alternative and then you can think well we could imagine what the alternative would be and then we can work on laying out the micro processes that would lead to that outcome and we can practice them over time and we can assume that if we don't get it right in three months that doesn't mean it's hopeless and so when Freud let me give you an example I was reading a Gartland study the other day on marital stability Gottman has done some really good analysis of couple's behavior and he has set up a lab that's basically a bed and breakfast and he brings couples in there for a weekend and he wires them up physiologically and monitors their reactivity and so what he's he can predict whether a couples going to divorce with 95 94 percent accuracy it's like impressive so what is he found he's found two categories of he's identified two phenomena that are very much worth knowing the first is that the couples who are going to get divorced they come into the bed-and-breakfast and they speak with each other quite calmly but it's more walking on eggs call and while they're speaking with each other calmly their physiology is like they're very aroused and so they're sort of aroused like someone who's facing a predator so you might think of an unhappy couple as predator and prey to each other and so the words are there mostly to stop predatory activity not to actually communicate anything it's just to keep the surface calm so then you might think well what's under the surface and what's under the surface so Freud would say it's what's under the surface is unconscious and but you can say well what's under the surface is one of these hierarchies that's all banged up and twisted and and and not in reasonable shape and so people don't want to open the door to that so but they do this is a Freudian slip so let's say this is goes to the second part of Gardens observations so the woman goes over to the window and she says oh look there's a cardinal outside you know Cardinals that bright red bird they're kind of cool-looking you know it's kind of a trivial thing in some sense but by the same token it's like it's a little positive thing and you know 20 of them in a day is good thing okay so then the partner the husband in this example has a two by two May tricks of choices one is who the hell cares about your stupid burg okay so that's one the second one is then you go over and look at the bird right and then the third one is you don't make the contempt noise but you act it out and the fourth one is you go over there like a civilized human being and you know and that you're interacting with someone that you care for and you take a look at the damn bird and you're happy about it and and that's as truthful and real as you can manage okay so the option that's a Freudian slip right because what it says there's a whole monster underneath that and the monster is all the disorganization in this entire structure it's like the might be we have been tormenting each other about various things for the last ten years and none of them are resolved and I'm not very happy about you for so many reasons I can't even remember all of them and I can't enumerate them right now because that would take forever and maybe we would have a huge fight but by the same token I'm not going to come over there and make you happy with your stupid bird so what the good couples do the couples that you know stay together is they respond to each other's bids he calls them bids and so if one person wants to share some little trivial daily positive thing with the other the other you know isn't carrying around a bloody cartload of resentment and is able to respond to that in a positive way and that way the general interactions between the couples stay positive but that's also because they've worked this out now you know it's got to be because they work it out because the couples who are physiologically reactive to each other they're communicating but there's all sorts of horror underneath the surface and we're trying to figure out well what is it that's underneath the surface what's the structure of the unconscious well that's the structure of the unconscious and it's either well structured and functional and mutually agreed upon and as explicit as possible or it's this constantly and then when the couples fight about it because they're not very sophisticated and they're not very awake and they're not very aware and they don't know how to do micro analysis and they're tired and unhappy they don't say I would rather that you use cloth napkins when we have a formal dinner than paper napkins they say you do a bad job of entertaining well that's not helpful right it's like you're wiping out the person that bad job of entertaining would be probably about at the level of family care in the hierarchy and so what you're doing is you're hitting them in a place that if they listen to you would knock out maybe 10% of their entire be behavioral and perceptual structure it's like you really want to do that to someone you only want to do that to someone under extreme conditions right extreme conditions and that would be something like maybe a warning to a child who's gone astray very badly but you know has the skill so you'd say well the kind of mistakes that you're making are sufficiently catastrophic so that your life is going to go off course you know and then you might have a conversation with them about often for kids for guide for people that say are between 15 and 25 I know they're not kids really but my kids are that age part of that might be what the hell are you gonna do for a career right and if that's unspecified the person's just all over the place so okay so so here's some slides that represent that right so you see the progression of that and if you're if things are operating at the top of the hierarchy that what that means is you've mastered all the subsidiary elements and you've built them it's not only from the bottom up but because the the levels crosstalk right you know so you can use and that's the next thing we're going to talk about because you're not just a behavioral creature you're not just an animal like a chimp you're capable there's there's things you can do that animals can't do and what that is is that not only can you act things out in a manner that through action will organize your hierarchy because that's what animals do but you can also represent that hierarchy you can think about the hierarchy you can articulate the hierarchy and you can play with it abstractly and that's what you're doing when you're engaging in philosophy and that's also what you're doing when you're negotiating and that's a really good thing because it means that you can not only conceptualize changes and then implement them and and you can conceptualize a broad range of potent potential changes and improvements and you can implement them and you can observe what happens but you can also communicate that to all sorts of other people so it's a great thing to be able to do the problem with it is obviously that because you can abstractly represent and question you can also knock the hell out of your belief in the top elements of the hierarchy it's like well what does it mean to be a good person anyways you know or why should I be a good person or is there any is there any utility or meaning and being a good person or is there even any is it even reasonable to say that there's such a thing is a good person it's like I think all of those questions in some sense are ill posed and the reason I think that is because they're at the wrong level of resolution you know you don't throw the damn baby out with the bathwater so to speak so if you're gonna critique something don't start don't start at the highest level of abstraction and I think that's a big part of what's wrong with what people are taught in universities today because you're often taught to criticize systems at the highest level of abstraction it's like well there's something wrong with capitalism it's like really really you're gonna do something about that are you and it's gonna work better in your lifetime that's going to happen it's like no it's not going to happen you know if you stick a stick in a functioning machine even if you think the machine it's all ratalie and it's like pulling people's arms in and it's caught all sorts of catastrophic problems you come along and like hit it with a stick it's like it's not gonna run better it's the wrong level of analysis and just because you have a stick and you can see that the machine doesn't work very well doesn't mean that you're very bright it's like obviously it doesn't work very well you know it's like that's not the issue the issue is could you improve it without making it worse

Channel: Essential Truth

Views: 397,205

Rating: 4.9169202 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan B Peterson, Jordan Peterson, Essential truth, bite-sized philosophy, philosphyinsights, psyche matters, manofallcreation, TheArchangel911, dose of truth, clash of ideas, PowerfulJRE, JRE clips, mulliganbrothers, bearing, Red Pill, Independent Man, Jocko Podcast, H3 Podcast, Ideacity, Ramble, Intense 5, Rebel Wisdom, MagiCal HD, Evan Carmichael, StevenCrowder, relationship advice, advice for men, John Gottman, resolving conflich, divorce, conflict in marriage

Id: G-FxUhbJ-Ow

Length: 10min 14sec (614 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 08 2018