Jordan Peterson: Imitation Of The Divine | Full Address and Q&A | Oxford Union

[Music] so [Applause] well that's better than protesters with a garage i'll tell you yeah be good if that was funny um so i picked a provocative title i suppose what in the world could imitation of the divine ideal possibly mean well the first thing you might ask yourself is what would the alternative be that's worth thinking about and i suppose you might ask yourself what divine might mean or what ideal might mean all of that and also what imitation might mean i came about the ideas that i'm going to relate to you by a variety of roots conducting investigations in a variety of disciplines scientific disciplines to the degree i was capable of doing that and inquiries into literary reality because literature has its reality i mean not only its existence as literature which is obviously real but in what it portrays which is very interesting because we all know that literary portrayals are fictional and we all know that fiction isn't true but we all know that literature is true and deep literature is particularly true and so that's seems to pose somewhat of a problem i came to the ideas that i'm discussing too because i noted the emergence of a problem across multiple disciplines and it's a very serious problem in fact i would say it's a problem so serious that it took three and a half billion years of evolution to solve um and that would be the problem of perception you know the world is given to us in our perceptions and we confuse the world that we perceive with the actual world and we have to because we're stuck with our limited and ignorant perceptions and so it's necessarily the case that we bump up hard against the underlying reality that those perceptions are trying to represent i read a paper in the mit handbook of cognitive science a while back it wasn't the first place i'd encountered this idea but it was stated pretty briefly and so it's a good way of laying out the problem the problem is really one of interpretation and it bedeviled our artificial intelligence researchers who were attempting to produce functional robots that could operate in real world environments and you'll note we have none of those yet although we are getting much closer um it be deviled cognitive scientists and and psychophysiologists who are trying to understand visual perception which turns out to be complicated beyond comprehension i mean we devote about half our brain it's really more than that to just seeing and it's interesting to contemplate why that might be if the world in some sense is given and composed of self-evidently apprehensible objects which it's not at all and the problem also emerged in literary criticism and interestingly enough its emergence there sparked i would say the culture war that we're all engaged in at the moment and so this is not a trivial problem and the mit researchers that i described medin and aguilar said it is possible to categorize a finite number of objects in an infinite number of ways and you think that doesn't sound like too serious a problem but it's actually a really serious problem because it means that any snapshot of reality let's say any visual snapshot of reality certainly any conceptual snapshot of reality like a book is subject to an unending number of potential interpretations and we could perhaps quibble about whether that's actually infinite but i don't think that's really matters there's all sorts of mathematical discussions about the true nature of infinity and that's not the point the point is there are lots of them way more than you could ever sort through and so how how do you do it and how do you do it in such a ma in a manner that really makes it simple in some sense because there's the step and there it is and i walk down it and no problem except like i said took three and a half billion years to evolve the platform that made that perception possible and so if it took god himself you know three and a half billion years to manage it then it's a rather difficult problem to solve so i started studying cybernetics neuropsychology animal behaviorism literary theory psychoanalytic theory existential philosophy biblical studies physics to a limited degree evolutionary biology evolutionary psychology measurement theory construct validation theory all these different diverse domains of inquiry trying to triangulate this problem although more than triangulate because i was using more than one reference point it's a good methodological it's a good method by which to proceed if you can find an answer that manifests itself in multiple historically detached disciplines simultaneously it's some evidence that that idea is valid you do that with your senses you have five senses if all five senses which are quite qualitatively distinct point to the same thing then you can be reasonably but not certainly sure that it's there by reasonably but not certainly i mean if that was all there was to specifying the objects of perception properly we wouldn't have to talk to each other and find out what other people think but we do because even with that quintangulation let's say we still orient ourselves unreliably in the world what i found and i suppose this came out of my studies of cybernetics and the the the analysis of how animals particularly rats form memories and how they orient themselves in a in a in a maze in a spatial environment across time which is what we do the world's amazing we orient ourselves through it and it's very germane to this and uh an analysis of narrative at the same time and i realized that the rat researchers who were talking about how animals navigate through a maze and the cybernetic engineers who were building machines that could move like anti-missile missile systems which can track a goal and then orient towards it and self-correct quasi-intelligent systems they're all really pointing to the same underlying solution to the problem of perception and it was a solution that required embodiment so that was very interesting and that really became obvious i would say among robotics types by the early 1990s with rodney brooks at mit who invented the roomba by the way which i know it's just a vacuum cleaner but well actually it's not because it doesn't fall downstairs and that's pretty good for our vacuum cleaner he was the first one of the first robotics engineers who really proposed that there was no solution to the problem of perception without embodiment and that's quite the claim you know it's really quite the claim and it's it's partly because to understand something is actually to map it onto your body literally and so that sense of understanding we have when we say that we understand which is a weird weird phrase weird word to use to indicate deep comprehension to understand you know it means that we can we can use that to govern our perceptions and we can use it to structure our actions and so we feel we have a grip on it then we have a grip on the world we understand it and we have pragmatic problems to solve in the world constantly because we're alive and so having a grip on things getting a grip which is what you tell people when they get upset right get a grip it's like why grip well that's why you know that's quite the remarkable thing that we all have at the end of our arms and it's it's deeply associated with the structure of our intelligence i mean the fact that we can speak is a consequence at least in part of the development of the left hemisphere systems that were specialized for fine motor action in hand movement and so that's why there's also so many sign languages and i suppose to some degree why i talk with my hands like a good italian and i'm not italian so the basic cybernetic frame was something like starting point goal self-correcting process that's it but i realized maybe maybe that the semantic description of that structure was a story there's a story when you tell a story you have to say well i was here and then you have to say i was going somewhere a little kid might tell you about their first day going to kindergarten it's not much of a story although it's pretty big deal for the little kid you know while i was at home with mom and then i you know i took her hand and we walked to the kindergarten and i was afraid and and but i was excited and you know i go out there and i had a pretty good day and you give him a pat on the head and you think that's pretty good story for a little kid he might tell a slightly different story you know i might say i was walking to kindergarten and i was kind of scared but i was excited i had my mom's hand and then all of a sudden this big dog jumped at me at the fence and like really scared me you know a little kid will get emotional if he recounts something like that and then he'll say we might say one of two things he might say i got so afraid i had to take mom's hand and she was upset too and she was crying and we had to go home and then he doesn't go to school for the week and then when he goes to school he has a panic attack and then his mother martyrs herself so that he can have a panic attack for a tremendous long period of time and then you know it's just a complete bloody mess and that's an eatable narrative by the way or maybe the other story would be you know i i was scared of the dog it dog's a pretty big thing for a kid and it is a wolf after all so you know that's not nothing but uh i took my mom's hand and you know she gave me a pat and she said you think you can do this and i think you can and and so i got myself together and went to kindergarten that's a better story hey that one that's a better story it's more interesting story and it's interesting because it's a meta story the story of just quitting from point a to b that's that's a good story you want to hear about that you want people to tell you how they get from point a to point b all the time because then well you know where point a is and that's useful and you know where a good point b might be and believe me man you want to know that more than anything else like here's an example you know our eyes where our eyes are quite a lot unlike the eyes of our closest primate relatives in that there's a very very clear distinction between the white and the iris and the reason for that is all of our ancestors who had eyes that you couldn't easily see detect and infer the direction of either got killed or didn't mate that's it and you might say well why do we care it's because well when you look at someone you look at their eyes why because you want to see where they direct their attention why because you want to see what they value why because you want to know what to value that's a pretty inexpensive way of doing it and it's this is such it's such deep so deeply rooted in us that social psychologists perhaps this was an experiment that replicated although probably not would run experiments where one of them would stand on a corner just look up and then wait and if it was a busy corner soon someone else would stop by them and look up then there were two people looking up and well what two people were looking up there got to be a reason for that they're expending extraordinary expensive cognitive resources looking and maybe they had to figure out where to look you don't have to you just have to look where they look and so we're looking where other people look all the time and so we want to infer the value structure that directs attention and we do that through imitation and we have a powerful instinct to imitate and so that's part of this title right imitation of the divine ideal what should we be lifting up our eyes to well that is exactly the question man that is exactly the question so to make a machine that can operate something like a living organism engages in goal directive behavior it has to operate within this roughly cybernetic frame the neuropsychologists found out that that's how our emotions work at about the same time this was being worked out by the cybernetic theorists norbert weiner got there sooner because i think he wrote in the 30s and he was the first person to outline the cybernetics scheme but jeffrey gray applied that scheme to the analysis of emotions in a book in 1982 called the neuropsychology of anxiety which is really a book how about about how we handle entropy and that's a big deal man that's like the big deal and gray pointed out this is very biological viewpoint too by the way that our emotions themselves operate from within this cybernetic slash narrative framework and so for example and this this happens it isn't object perception evaluation emotional response it's like the emotional response is part of the perception the eyes map right onto the emotional systems they map onto all sorts of direct motor output systems and there's no way of distinguishing motor action from perception there's no pure sensation without motor action if your eyes ever stop moving completely for even i think it's a tenth of a second because they're shaking back and forth all the time involuntarily you immediately go blind because the cells exhaust themselves so there's no perception without action which is very interesting so that means there's no perception in the absence of motivation which is also extremely interesting if you start to think that through so if you're moving towards a goal and you see an obstacle that produces negative emotion and if you're moving towards a goal and you see a clear pathway or some things that will facilitate your movement forward you feel positive emotion so that's pretty cool because you can map on the approach avoidance structure of all animal movement onto the emotional system in relationship to the pursuit of a goal it's a really interesting way of understanding emotions i mean there are diverse positive emotions you know flavors and they're diverse negative emotions flavors again but they're all rooted in these fundamental underlying systems negative and positive emotion which by the way your variability in the sensitivity to those emotions also constitutes the two cardinal elements of your first two most cardinal elements of your personality structure there's five of those but that's two extraversion positive emotion neuroticism negative emotion and people vary in their sensitivity to the sight of obstacles or the joy they take in the sight of facilitators or clear pathways and so i read a paper yesterday showing that if you show people a picture of a hill before you give them a sugar drink they think the hill is less steep than they think it is after you give them the sugar drink so it's direct mapping of metabolic capacity onto a walking up place which is what a hill is because you think a hill is an object and you infer the walking up place but it isn't the hill is a walking up place and you infer the object and so and so the claim i'm making the fundamental claim is that the framework within which our perceptions themselves are structured so you could say the raw sense data of the empiricist which does not exist because there is no raw sense data first and second if there was there would be so much of it that we wouldn't know what to do with it anyways and so that doesn't solve the problem all of that's interpreted from within a narrative framework and that means from within a framework of value and so why would i say value well if you want to go from point a to b why did the chicken cross the road because it thought the other side of the road was better unless it's a daft chicken and that's a possibility because it's chicken after all or they're smarter than you think they are but why do you go somewhere that you're not because it's better than where you are unless you're aiming down and then maybe you want to go somewhere worse and you want to take people with you but other than that generally speaking you're aiming up well it might be a micro up you know but it's not usually that's the thing so here's a way of understanding the narrative schema that we lay on the world so the first is there's a point a and a point b and the narrative is a description of the starting point and the end point in the process to get there and then a better narrative is metanarrative is a description of the process that occurs when that structure decomposes because it's no longer valid a failure a descent into something like chaos as a consequence and then the reconstitution of a new narrative and that's paradise the fall paradise that's a very basic narrative and it's that's the thing to imitate not just the narrative the process by which narratives are generated and repaired okay so now let's let's see if we can make that concrete a little more concrete imagine you're you're writing a paper well let's take that apart you know let's let's be precise about this as much as we can let's say you're typing first okay so what does it mean that you're typing well you're thinking hypothetically although i've read essays that would indicate otherwise but hypothetically so what are you doing well you're moving your fingers right so so this writing is dependent on embodiment and it was really hard to generate these figures fingers right so there's that whole evolutionary process we were talking about lurking at the bottom of this and you've practiced typing let's say you're an expert typist and that means you've built little automated machines in the back generally of your left hemisphere that took a lot of mass practice so that you could create these automatized motor output structures that you could disinhibit while you're thinking because that's what you're doing you're not exactly activating these motor movements you're preparing them for release and then d and then disinhibiting it and then they run ballistically which means they run deterministically at that level and so at the micro level what you're doing isn't thinking at the micro level what you're doing are disinhibiting motor output systems okay but then on top of that you say well there's an overlay of abstract cognition you're typing what are you typing letter yes a word yes and you type the letter in relationship to the word you're typing a phrase right you're thinking about a phrase but not just a phrase a sentence but not just a sentence a paragraph the sequencing of the sentence within that paragraph the paragraphs within the context of an essay and maybe if you're writing a book then the essay in relationship to the book you're doing that all of that at once and so that that's a series of nested narratives so a cybernetic motor schema at the bottom and then narratives because i could say well why are you typing the letter to type the word why are you typing the lord to type the phrase to type the sentence to type the paragraph to complete the sequencing of paragraphs to write the chapter to write the book why are you writing the book well let's say you're a scientific researcher you're writing a book about animal cognition why are you doing that well maybe you're a professor researcher scientist teacher why are you doing that well maybe you're a good citizen you know maybe you want to mentor people maybe you want to make maybe you want to make the world a better place well why are you doing that because you're imitating a divine ideal what do i mean by divine well i mean supraordinate or deep you can look at it either way well why divine because that's how you experience it it's not a proposition you know what you might say well what does that have to do with divine the divine well have it your way use whatever word you want deep profound superordinate so it doesn't matter it's all in the same semantic space i think divine is more accurate partly because for us to conceptualize that supraordinate narrative we've relied on religious imagination fundamentally because we had to use our religious imagination for centuries before we could specify the nature of this superordinate narrative container precisely enough to start to propositionalize it now and so when you go into a byzantine cathedral let's say and you look up at the dome the byzantine cathedral is a cross right that's not an accident the cross in some sense is the specification through architectural symbolism the dramatic architectural symbolism to place you at the point of maximal suffering or is it something else well we'll go with that and people put a lot of work into these buildings you know this was no trivial enterprise and then you look up and there's a great dome on the sky and then you see the image of the divine word embodied against the sky that's an indication of the superordinate narrative then you think well what does that mean practically well that's a good question you might also ask yourself what is the dissolution of that mean and what does the what does antipathy towards that mean those are all useful questions i came across many of these ideas because i was trying to understand the action of individual concentration camp guards in auschwitz and i was trying to understand what i would have to be like to do that and that isn't something people usually do because they assume if they were nazi germany they'd be like you know schindler it's like no schindler was like schindler there's like one of him that isn't what you would have been like in all likelihood you would have been willfully blind or participating and you think not me and all that means is if you think that then definitely you so so then you can imagine i have this cottage in northern ontario and we're fortunate it's dark there and so you can go down to the dock at night and in the clear sky you can see the vast array of the infinite heavens arrayed above you you know and it's something that people who live in cities really don't get to experience anymore they don't experience the sunset which we also go out on our boat and watch pretty much every day and that puts you in in touch with what inspires awe when that's not a propositional experience that's a pre-propositional experience and it's it's a deep biological experience it's it's embedded in the prey response to a predator in part you know because if you if you feel awe sometimes you can feel that with music a lot of people are high in openness to experience will feel that quite frequently under the effect of aesthetic experiences interestingly enough their hair stands on end that's pilo erection that's what a cat does when it's frightened by a dog like the little boy at the beginning of the story you know the cat puffs up to look big to be like medic hats so it can contend with it can contend with dogs or at least it could look like it might and so when when it sees a dog the sight of the dog calls the best fourth out of the cat well that's what happens when you look at the night sky you know it calls to you right dr dawkins sent me a paper last week in preparation for a discussion that we're going to have tomorrow and it was a very interesting paper and i think i read it about 25 years ago and he said any functioning animal has to be a microcosm a model of the environment within within which it finds itself well that's true of us and so when you look at the night sky and that sense of awe grips you and calls something out of you right to respond to your encounter with the infant even your encounter with mortality your encounter with finitude and limitation all of that in relationship to the infinite that sense of awe is also the calling forth of something out of you that can respond to the challenge of that infinite well that's the microcosm within no it's a reflection of the structure of the cosmos itself that's the divine ideal and we either imitate that or we fail to imitate that or we pursue the opposite path those are the options you know and it's given our technological power and our capacity for wholesale atrocity it's time we woke up and realized it thank you very much thank you dr peterson for your very thought-provoking opening remark as we agreed we'll try to get many questioning as possible as the limited time would allow but i thought i'll take the chair's privilege to kick-start our conversation uh do you ever feel some of your useful insightful observation thinking and work have been obscured by the more controversial part of your work no i don't think they've been obscured by the controversial part of my work i think they've been obscured by controversy about what my work hypothetically might be but i don't think that's a consequence of me being controversial i'm not certainly don't aim at being controversial people take umbrage at some things i say so for example if i say some of the differences in temperament between men and women appear to be biologically rooted and one of the sources of evidence for that is that in more egalitarian countries they get these those differences get larger rather than smaller while people hop up and down and have a fit about that but that's not my problem it's not because it's controversial well how is that controversial our men and women are not exactly the same i mean first of all on average and you may have noticed this women are slightly shorter than men well is that controversial well if that's a social construct well it's not funny it's not funny it's that's sexual dimorphism and there's implications for sexual dimorphism so for example among sexually dimorphic mammals the larger of the genders the sexes and i think there is a use for the word gender by the way which we could get to if someone would like to ask that question no i'm serious about that um generally speaking the larger of the two sexes is more aggressive well that's also the case with human beings well and if you don't like that well why would you like that doesn't matter still the case and you might say well if we made everyone if we transformed our society along more egalitarian grounds that difference in aggression would go away it's like no it wouldn't it gets bigger and so and then you might say well that's weak science and then i would say well compared to what because compared to almost all social science that ev has ever been published by anyone anywhere it's not weak science compared to your hypothetical utopian perfect science then it might be weak but go ahead man publish some papers so now what what the obscure obscure let's say the cloud surrounding my work i suppose is generally generated by people who've never listened to anything i said you know now and then i read something that's been written about me and i think i don't know who in the world they're talking about who has those beliefs but it's not me you know the people are fighting with a figment of their imagination and i've seen unbelievable manifestations of that like it's got to it's got absolutely preposterous i mean i don't know how many of you know this but this is the most preposterous thing that ever happened to me i think and that's a long list of things let me tell you in may april of this year a leftist intellectual in the united states who also happens to write comic books for marvel um well i like marvel comic books by the way and i like the mythology in the marvel movies uh the comic book publishing end of marvel has got a little woke recently but they'll be punished by the market for that so it won't last long um tanahisi coates parroted me parodied me in a captain marvel comic as red skull who's like the magical satanic figure at the basis of the nazi universe in the marvel fantasy cosmos i found out that on twitter someone sent me a picture i thought they must have this has to absolutely this has to be photoshopped but no it's like i don't know who i am man but i tell you i'm not red skull the magical super nazi [Music] that's hopefully excellent also to start us off hopefully i can find you a audience knowledgeable enough that i studied your work and they can ask you some constructive questions here today um i see a question from there if you wait for the microphone to reach you and stand up ask your question please good evening dr peterson it's brilliant to have you here in the oxford union tonight um my question for you is about given the popularity of your biblical series and your lectures on youtube would you foresee a possible increase in religiosity amongst people in the future or do you think we've moved on from that and going forward science will be the main i believe the word dogma as we move forward well the first thing i would say about that is um all the great scientists that i've known are thoroughly possessed by the spirit of truth and i'll give you a micro example of that in the social sciences so most social scientists particularly psychologists and so these would be research oriented scientists um who are dealing with data and who have to use statistical techniques now you know when you first encounter statistics you thought you sort of think about it as a magic device to extract truth from data and it's not it's more like a surgical tool you know you you you ha you some scientists will take their data and then they'll farm it out to someone to analyze this it's like just find the truth you know in this in this and that never works or rarely because that isn't how the statistical analysis of data works partly because every data set is subject to a multiplicity of interpretations and so when you're doing statistical analysis you're doing it's a constant sequence of micro battles with temptation and you think about it so for example if you're a master student in the psych program you might have spent a year and a half doing your finishing your study especially if you have to get it through a intransigent and bureaucrat-ridden ethics clearance committee and so and then if you don't find something of note well this is worse at the phd level it's like you don't graduate and so the temptation to perform your statistical operations in at least a willfully blind manner is extremely powerful and that's part of the reason why there's a replication crisis in social science i mean it's not the only reason part of the reason is that you know it's really actually difficult to discover something and so and the the fact that so much of the scientific literature especially in the social sciences is they are written it's like well what do you expect like if if 30 of published papers are actually true given the volume of scientific publication man we are cruising along at such a rate we can barely stand it so i think 30 hit rate's pretty damn good myself but you know most people aren't as cynical as me but maybe um so you know you say well is the scientific enterprise going to win out over the religious enterprise no because all of those decisions about how to handle your data those are religious decisions it's like are you going to let your venal ambition and your malevolent competition and your desire to dominate be the determining factor in your application of statistical processes or are you going to be imbued with the spirit of truth and then i would say that's a benevolent spirit in the scientific enterprise when it's conducted ethically because the reason scientists are doing what they're doing if they're genuine scientists and then i would say which means they're religious scientists even if they don't know it is because they want things to be better not worse and so it's not possible for science in some deep sense to triumph over religion unless you define religion a priori as the foolish belief in outdated propositional quasi-scientific hypotheses in which case well we will move beyond that hopefully but that's not it doesn't wrestle with the fundamental issue as far as i'm concerned the fundamental issue seems to be that we cannot frame our perceptions outside of narrative structure and there are no narrative structures without value and a hierarchy of value even determining an ethical hierarchy of value is and that's an ethical enterprise it's mediated by consciousness and something has to be at the top and you might say well why does something have to be at the top well something has to unite the ethical structure and you might say well why and the answer to that is well because otherwise you're confused and you might say well who cares if you're confused and the answer is you do and then the question might be why do you care because it makes you anxious because that's what anxiety indexes and you might say well why is that a problem and the answer is well it's psychophysiologically costly and if you're anxious long enough not only will you be miserable you'll die sooner and we don't have to pursue it any farther than that because well for obvious reasons you know these things are tied to the body they're tied to the real world and you pay a price for internal ethical disunity and no one likes that and partly that's because if you're not unified in your orientation you don't know what to do and you might say well that's not a problem just do nothing it's like well no because you can't and second it's very disorienting and in the most fundamental sense not to know what to do you know if you meet someone and you don't know what to do around them is that that's not nothing that's extremely uncomfortable this is partly why people don't like to have their beliefs challenged you know if you challenge a belief successfully especially a deep belief and we can define deep a deep belief is a belief upon many upon which many other beliefs depend so if you're in a marriage for example generally the belief in your partner's fidelity is an a prior axam of axiom of all the memory structures hopes and dreams that you have riding on the marriage and so if you have evidence that your partner is it has engaged in infidelity especially in the past let's say when you thought that you were the one so to speak then that's going to disrupt you at a deep and profound level i would say at a religious level but i would also say that's the definition of religious deep and profound now what that has to do specifically with the propositional statement god exists that is a whole different issue and i think in some sense it's beside the point you know i mean we're so propositional in our thinking that we tend to think that the only form of experience is propositional and the only what would you call it valid statements or proposition when we think about it but we don't act that way i mean how many of you don't go see movies like i'm curious how many of you don't go see that you don't have to go to the theater this includes watching them on television or on your computer is there anybody here who hasn't watched a movie this week okay well fair enough how many have watched the movie this week all right all right you know that's false that's all fiction you know just in case you didn't know it's like well what the hell are you doing then well you can't propositionalize it because you don't know what you're doing but that doesn't matter you don't care and if someone comes along and says you know that's fictional you think shut up you know i'm watching the movie right but that is what you think you don't think well isn't it absurd that i'm sitting here watching this fictional myth what in the world am i doing you think i'm really enjoying this movie and isn't it something that you enjoy it what the what in the world does that mean well you don't think that's the action of an instinct that enjoyment of narrative i mean if you want to teach a child something what do you use you're going to read them the periodic table the elements you know some children not many you can get away with that they're very thing-oriented children right they have a brain that's sort of wired up for that sort of thing but most of them it's like they're not going to listen they're not going to remember they're not going to attend but man if you tell them a story even if you tell them a story about the person who invented the or discovered the periodic table of the elements if it's a well-spun story they will listen to that and they will remember that and so we basically communicate and the fact that we communicated narratives well shouldn't that be just some evidence that we think in narratives what do you think it's just enjoyment i mean some i've read some rationalist thinkers who you know they push all the arts the humanities all of that the religion all of that into as kind of a spandrel category and say well that's just a byproduct of the cognitive operations that actually have something like functional utility it's like no that's just no sorry that's just not the case it's it's it's not a sufficient analysis so great let's move on to the next question um i recognize the member in the suit on the front row that yeah it's an honor to be in the same room with you you are a remarkable man thank you pardon me in advance i feel as though this might be a bit of a messy question um i'll try my best to simplify it i'm getting the impression that the majority of philosophy and morality is based on a desire to survive i'm going to conform my behavior lest i get kicked off the planet excommunicated and i'm wondering if trying to imitate this divine ideal is more than just selfish instinct and survival masqueraded by goodwill and i suppose that's sort of linked to the rest of my question which is that's a good question yeah oh yeah yeah that's a fine question absolutely well the notion that our morality is linked to our desire to survive is i'm perfectly fine with that the devil's in the details to some degree i mean one of the fields of endeavor that i've been particularly struck by is uh the work of people like franz dewall and france the wall has written a serious and also jacques pancep hell i'll tell you something cool about rats some of you i like to do that some of you have probably heard this before but this affective neuroscientist named jacques pancep he studied rats for a long time and he's a very sophisticated researcher and i think he was one of the greatest neuroscientists who lived in the last 50 years i i don't think there's really any question of that he might have been one of the top three might have been he'd be in the top three be a tight race up at the top three he did this great experiment it was so smart so juvenile rats like to play and they like to wrestle they like to engage in rough and tumble play and you might say well how do you know a rat likes to do something it's like or you're anthropomorphizing and the first thing i would say to that is you should anthropomorphize unless there's evidence to the contrary because we share biological platform with rats and they're a lot like us and a rat is a lot more like you than your stupid model of a human being is like a human being so you try building a rat it's hard so anyways you can tell rats want to play because if you put them in a little arena where they can rough and tumble play and wrestle and then you bring them there the next time and you make them work to open the door to play they'll work and so that's how we know you like something you'll work for it you know so you can apply that to rats and they'll work hard for it and rats deprived of play their prefrontal cortexes don't mature and they they're kind of hyperactive which might tell us something about boys in school but we won't go into that if you take a rat of the same age as another rat and you put them in a play area but the other rat has a 10 weight advantage the big rat will pin the little rat and they actually pin each other pretty much like dogs do when they're wrestling well they don't pin quite as much but humans certainly do it and pin means dominate dominance or that's one interpretation you only make that interpretation if you think that the hierarchies that rats live in are dominance hierarchies predicated on the expression of power and we all kind of think that because we use the term dominance hierarchy but you know that's a political term as well as a scientific term and it's predicated on the notion that the fundamental basis of hierarchical structure among mammals and other complex organisms is power and that's wrong and it's not just wrong it's it's corrosively wrong it's misleadingly wrong it's like it's seriously and not acceptably wrong anyways you pair the rats once and you think hey big rat wins over little rat establishes dominance that's the basis of the relationship but the thing about rats is like people they don't just play once because they live in social groups that are reciprocal they play repeatedly and pancept being a very smart researcher realized this so he paired rats to play the same rats over multiple occasions and the first thing he observed was the second time the rats got together the little rat had to invite the big rat to play you know when rats do the same sort of thing that dogs do when they want to play and and that that play behavior is so cross species common that all of you know when your dog wants to play you know you can you can take your dog and whack him like that if you do it right and he goes and tries to bite you but not really right he plays and his tail's wagging and and when dogs are playing it kind of looks like dominance behavior like it does among boys because boys really like to rough and double play by the way although girls like it too but not as much you can distinguish the play behavior from aggression and if you can't that means you never had any friends i mean no i mean that that's that i mean that that's what it means it means that's what it means because part of being able to have friends is be to be able to identify aggression versus play and and part of playing is to pretend to be aggressive quite aggressively but still be playing right it's there's a tremendous social skill in that anyways the little rat has to ask the big rat to play which i imagine is somewhat you know humiliating for the little rat but he's the little rat so tough luck for him and the big rat can dane to play and then they play and then you can observe how they play over repeated bouts if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win at least 30 percent of the time even though he could win 100 of the time the little rat will no longer invite him to play and you think yeah it's like no not yeah like the emergence of morality in rats through play that's a big discovery man that's a big discovery and that's there's that reciprocity a that that exists within the rat hierarchy and stable hierarchies in complex mammals are not predicated on power so france the wall has shown quite clearly that you know that so chimps have a pretty rough hierarchy and it's pretty male dominated now barnables are quite different we won't talk about them because it's not germane to this particular point but you might think you know the biggest chimpanzee with the biggest teeth he's the tyrant he's the winner and that happens sometimes there are tyrannical chimpanzee societies but what dewalt has shown quite clearly is that i don't care how big and tough you are if you don't play fair two guys ninety percent your size can get together one day when you're not feeling so well and tear you into bits and that's exactly what happens among the chimps so tyranny you know that can be a route to dominance it can even be a route to sexual access because it is the case among chimpanzees that males who are higher in the power hierarchy are more likely to father offspring not because the female chimps choose them because female chimps aren't choosy unlike human females it's a profound difference between the two species but because the big that more uh superordinate male chimps chase the subordinates away so but dewalt has shown quite clearly that the males who manage to occupy positions of authority and competence longest in chimpanzee hierarchies are intensely reciprocal with the other males more so than the other chimps in the hierarchy they do a lot of mutual grooming and are preferentially attentive to the females and their infants and so even among chimps and chimps can be damn brutal right jane goodall discovered i think it was 1975 another landmark in in late 20th century scientists at science that and this was a real blow to to the social construction constructionist utopians juvenile chimps patrol the borders of their territory and if they come across chimps from other troops and outnumber them they will tear them into bits and chimps are unbelievably strong and it's unbelievably brutal and so good all basically discovered that chimps have the human equi or the the equivalent of human tribal warfare and that's quite frightening if if you're sensible because you know you might be the kind of optimist who thinks that human conflict is caused by capitalism or some bloody daft notion like that and that wouldn't that be lovely because then it would be you could just get rid of it by getting rid of capitalism which you wouldn't be able to do anyways but you know what i mean it's but if it's i mean we split from chimps about seven million years ago and if the problem of intergroup aggression is that deep it's a terrible problem well the arbitrary expression of power is not the principle upon which functional long long-lasting human societies are predicated i'll give you another example i talked to david buss and robert trivers within the last month great evolutionary biologist great evolutionary psychologist trivers told me he looked at a new paper on psychopaths he's very interested in psychopaths because one of the problems human societies have is how do you keep the really malevolent types under control now women solve that problem in part by being unfortunately predisposed by their nature we might say to want men who are somewhat aggressive because you need someone around who's a little monstrous to keep the real monsters away and so women have this tough choice to make with men because they need someone who's strong enough to be protective let's say in an intimidating manner when the circumstances warranted but also simultaneously productive kind and generous enough to share and those two things are somewhat anti-pathetical and you see that that's variation in the personality dimension agreeableness so really disagreeable people they're they're kind of self-centered harsh and blunt but really agreeable people they're complete bloody pushovers and so agreeable people are nice and kind and empathetic and all of that and that might those might be wonderful traits particularly if you're taking care of defenseless infants but they lay you open to predation by machiavellian psychopaths and so it's very hard for us to figure out how to thread the needle say so that we can be simultaneously kind enough to be kind to infants and you know tough enough to to regulate our societies but psychopaths never exceed five percent of any population there's good cross-cultural studies if the frequency falls to one percent people get complacent and then they can thrive and if it rises to five percent everybody wakes up and thinks well we better keep the machiavellians at bay because otherwise everything's going to go to hell and so the the the general stable point for psychopathy seems to be three percent and so if our societies were nothing but power mad oppressive hierarchies it's like well first of all the psychopaths would dominate and they don't and second of all they'd be like 97 percent of the population not three so you know i'm i'm very unimpressed with the proposition that will to power is the mechanism that solves the problem of perception no will to power corrupts the structures that we use to orient ourselves continually and we have to be alert and awake to that in ourselves and in other people all the time but saying that is something completely different than saying the basic mechanism is dominance it's like that's a confession not an observation so [Music] thank you for your excellent answer i'm afraid that's all we've got time for today please all join me to thank you mcgill dr jordan peterson [Applause] you

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Length: 57min 33sec (3453 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 06 2022